6 Keys for Nonprofit Website Design, Part 2

"Your website is your face. It's as important as your brick-and-mortar store looking good," Rugg adds.

6. Focus on your online presence to drive traffic to your website
Donors no longer use the Internet simply to check out a website and make donations. They go to the Web for so many other reasons. Between social networks, games, meetings, shopping, gathering information, etc., it's more important than ever that nonprofits have a multichannel online presence to create awareness and drive donors to their websites.

"People are starting to be involved with your online presence beyond just your website. It's going to be more and more important to have an online presence in all those ways people engage online: website, Facebook, Twitter, etc.," Rugg says. "There's so many ways to get people involved. You can do things like Meetup.com to schedule events. There's so many ways to allow people who are already involved with your organization to spread the word on their own.

"Driving donors to your website off of those other areas of the Web is important too, whether it's through social media, word-of-mouth, search engine optimization, whatever you can actually do to get people there," Rugg adds. "A website is like a hotel in a desert — you have to find a way to get people there; otherwise they're not going to see it."

Moving forward, your focus has to be on your online presence as opposed to just your website, Elliston agrees. There are so many creative ways online to raise funds. It starts with the proper website design and continues by building an engaging, wide-ranging online presence.