Is your nonprofit planning to upgrade your website in 2010 such as migrating it to a content management system or a new one - but don't want to change a thing about it otherwise? In an uncertain economy I can see where nonprofits are coming from. They feel the need to maker publishing easier and get more staff involved in producing content. Both of these things are great goals, but if you're doing just that then you're missing a huge opportunity.
Most CMSs have lots of great functionality you can use to add features to your website or make it easier to manage. It's important that you work with your developer or consulting firm from the very begining of your planning process to make sure you're adapting the site to your advantage.
For instance, say you have a section for press releases and each release has a specific format. Currently you probably dump a lot of content onto a new page and then go through and laboriously format it to look like the rest. Then you go back and update the page that lists all your releases. In most CMSs you can set up an input form that breaks up each press release into distinct parts, each part becomes a separate field in the input form. You just pop content into each field hit save and the whole thing is formatted for you. No muss, no fuss - and that listing page is updated automatically. This is just a simple example, but it can be expanded to handle far more complicated pieces of content. You may pay a few extra dollars in development to get things like this set up, but you'll save lots of staff time down the road - and that time equals money.
While a full-scale redesign may not be necessary or practical, a redevelopment is a great opportunity to at least make a few changes to your site's user interface. A new CMS may mean new features you can take advantage of to enhance the user experience, rotating tabs on the homepage, slideshows, etc. Also, all those niggling little formatting things that have been bugging you for months? Take care of them now. Your developer is going to have to create a theme or templates to integrate the site look and feel into the CMS anyway, so it's cheaper to make tweaks now rather than later.
Finally, any redevelopment project is a great time to review and edit your site's content. At some point you or your development partners are going to have to move the content into the new CMS, so take the time to review and cut the flab from your site. You may have pages that have become completely outdated, why pay to have those moved? Either take the time to update them or archive them away. Also even relatively fresh content can also be improved by a fresh look. And don't forget SEO. Work with your developer and your content to ensure that you're maximizing your content for search engines both through back-end coding and through good writing.
While many of these things can be done down the road after a migration, it typically proves to be more costly and complicated. It's better to tackle these all at once, even if it means taking investing a little more money in the short-term. In the long-term you'll end up saving money, work more efficiently and have a better website sooner.
*Jared Seltzer is the Founding Partner of Rad Campaign, an online communications firm that provides web design, web development, online strategy, online marketing and fundraising, and social media training for nonprofits and political campaigns.
You should follow Frogloop on Twitter.
COMMENTS