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Websites on a Shoestring 1 Guidelines for Successful Sites
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View More Articles There’s a lot more "Technology on a Shoestring" articles!
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Introduction Building a great website doesn't have to be any more expensive than building a bad one. In most cases, website quality does not depend nearly so much on the technical complexity as on the strength of the information, the layout of the site, and how well it all supports your goals and your visitors' needs. But weighing all these factors is not easy. In this article, we suggest ten guidelines that cover the key considerations for an information rich nonprofit site. These guidelines can help nonprofits to evaluate their existing website or think through a new one. While a number of these guidelines apply to just about any about any website, the list will be less comprehensive for online applications where visitors are doing a lot more than just reading - such as online donor databases or ecommerce systems. 1. Tailor site content and functionality to visitor's needs Above all, your website needs to meet the needs of those who will visit your site. The majority of visitors' needs are likely to be basic - to find contact information for your organization or to answer a specific question, for instance. Ensure you facilitate quick lookup for those who know exactly what they are seeking. But you may have the opportunity to provide detailed information or functionality to help visitors with deeper concerns - perhaps information about living with AIDS, or a calculator to help prevent debt, or a database of arts funding opportunities. Before investing your time and money, ensure all resources will address actual real world problems, and will provide information that your visitors actually need. Keep in mind that different types of visitors may have different needs, and prioritize accordingly. For instance, board members may want quite different things than the press, and novice users may want handholding that would irritate an advanced user. How do you know what your visitors need? There's no better way than to ask them. Call three to four people who might use your site and ask them how they currently get information about your topic, what information they need in order to take the actions you would like them to take, and try to understand what their priorities are. 2. Make desired actions prominent and easy If you want your users to take a particular action, display an obvious call to action and make the action itself as easy as possible. It sounds straightforward enough, but in practice this can be deceptively complicated. To start, you need to define what actions you would like your visitors to take. Would you like them to donate? Sign up for your newsletter? Sign a petition? Visit you in person? Volunteer? Brainstorming and prioritizing with a group can be an effective way to nail down these goals. Once you have defined your goals, ensure your site includes content and functionality to make the actions as easy as possible for your visitors. Want people to donate? Include information about how you use the money and where to send a check, and consider functionality to allow online donations. Want them to sign up for your newsletter? Don't ask for twenty different pieces of personal information - just ask for information critical to adding them to the list. Finally, place prominent and descriptive links to your content or functionality on key pages related to the action (simply placing it everywhere increases the chances that your visitors will tune it out). The top of the content area is generally regarded as the most prominent area on a page - things at the very top or in the navigation may be ignored as advertising, while information that the visitor needs to scroll down to see may simply never be viewed. 3. Use the homepage to orient your visitors Visits typically arrive on your site with some very basic questions: Am I on the right site? Can I get what I want here? Quickly answering these questions for them will go a long way towards keeping visitors on your site and giving them a good impression. While the homepage is certainly a good place for the calls to action mentioned above, make sure your homepage also conveys the scope of what the user can do on the site and what their navigation options are. If the site is marketing your organization, ensure your homepage clearly summarizes what your organization does. 4. Ensure text is accurate and current Nothing is more important than the quality of the information on your site. Ultimately, the most beautiful and technologically advanced site is worthless if the information it contains is hopelessly out of date. Write your content carefully to start with, and plan how you will update that content over time. Who will update it? What tools will they need? How much time will it take? If you don't have the resources to update your site frequently, make sure that you don’t include information that will rapidly become out of date. 5. Write text to be concise and scannable for your visitors Writing for the web is somewhat different than writing for offline media - in large part because few visitors actually read all the text on a page. Instead, the vast majority of visitors only scan pages. This makes it critical that the text be concise and provides headings, bullet point lists, and topic sentences to allow someone to find information quickly. Make sure your text is understandable to your audience - consider reading level and avoid technical language, jargon, and abbreviations that might not be familiar to your visitors. If you have a resource that you would like people to read carefully (like this article!) or to use as reference (such as a calendar of events), ensure it can be easily printed. Many web pages are too wide to print on a standard piece of paper. It's common to provide a "print friendly version" of specific pages, which provides a version of the page scaled for printing. 6. Invest in your visual design Visitors assess your site's and organization's credibility from your visual design more than from any other aspect of your site. This is unfortunate but true - a haphazard graphic design can cast doubt on the most thorough and carefully researched site. This isn't to say that your graphic design needs to be flashy - far from it. Unless you are specifically trying to highlight your organization's graphic design capabilities, a good design should call attention to your content, not to itself. The visual design should align with your offline materials, but its main purpose should be to clearly and consistently distinguish different elements - what is the page title? What is navigation? Where is the "For More Information" section? Successful use of font sizes and styles, colors, lines and boxes, and positioning on the page can dramatically improve your visitor's understanding and direct their attention where you want it to go. Users associate your site with the graphic design, and can easily be confused by even small changes to the layout. For all these reasons, it's worth investing up front in a solid, professional graphic design that you can rely on for years, tweaking only slightly. 7. Give your visitors control Visitors expect to be able to control what they do on your site. Forcing them to do things (like watch an introductory animation, or register before they can see any information on your site) is likely to backfire - irritating your users, prompting them to leave, and potentially making them think the worse of your organization. Instead, inform your visitors as to what the possibilities are and let them choose. What order would they like to see things in? Do they want to download the 10Mb file? Is it worth it to them to give a little personal information to see the article that sounds so intriguing? Encourage them to explore by making it difficult to make errors on your site, and easy to recover from any error they do make. 8. Don't make your visitors think about the site You certainly want your visitors to think about your cause. But don't distract them by making them puzzle out basic elements of your site like navigation, what they need to do, or what is going to happen next. A successful site should seem completely obvious (not that it's obvious to design!). The visitor should always be crystal clear as to where they are, what each element is for, and where they will go when they click something. Minimize the amount of comparing, estimating, and deciding that your visitors need to do. Think through what the visitor is likely to be doing on each page and show all the information they will need just where they will need it. If you ask the user to choose between options, ensure that that each option is clear and of real importance to the visitor. 9. Make your site consistent with other sites Your visitors have been to many other sites before, and have learned a lot (whether they realize it or not) about how websites work. Be sure you have a good reason before breaking the most established rules:
10. Ensure accessibility to the largest audience practical Your visitors access your site using many different types of browsers (Microsoft Explorer, Netscape, screen readers for the blind, search engine site crawlers), computers (Macs, PCs, cell phones), and connection speeds (slow dial-up modems, lighting fast T3 connections). Each of these methods may result in a different experience. Ideally, each site would be optimized to account for every possibility, but the inconsistency in the way HTML is displayed in different situations rarely makes this possible. At a minimum, however, think through the needs of your particular audience and prioritize accordingly. Is your audience likely to be using old browsers and computers - making it important to test the site for those configurations? How large can your page sizes be before they frustrate your audience with long downloads (20K is typical)? Is it important to accommodate wireless users - like those on PDAs and cell phones? Is it important to accommodate the blind? Is your audience likely to have the plug-ins (such as Flash, Shockwave, or Real Audio) that you are thinking of using? For More Information Project Planning on a Shoestring (www.alderconsulting.com/limited_resources.html) Alder's March 2004 Shoestring article provides a more process-focused overview of understanding your goals and target audiences User Interface Engineering Resources (www.uie.com/publications/) A number of useful articles about building visitor-friendly websites, by one of the most respected usability research organizations Web Content Strategy & Guidelines for Nonprofits (http://charitychannel.com/article_7506.shtml) A detailed overview of the issues and processes involved in creating great web content Jakob Nielson’s Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability (www.useit.com/alertbox/20020512.html) While Nielson can be too rigid in decreeing guidelines that can’t possibly fit all purposes, his set of guidelines for homepage usability is worth a read. |
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