3 Tips to Make Your Nonprofit’s Website Redesign More Efficient

Keeping your nonprofit’s website fresh helps your organization stay relevant with your audiences, reinforce your brand, and communicate clearly and effectively with current and prospective donors and constituents. At the same time, website redesigns can be costly and time-intensive since they often involve a team of people that includes your own organization’s staff and a third-party website designer. 

But there are things you can do to make your website redesign or refresh more efficient — whether you’re updating your entire website or refreshing a campaign or event microsite. Here are some highly effective tips for minimizing the price tag and workload while still accomplishing what you want from your nonprofit’s website refresh.

1. Do Some Work in Advance

Before you start working with a website designer, do as much prep work as you can. Coming to initial meetings with key information will help your website redesign team get up and running faster and ultimately save time and money on the project. Here are some ideas for how to work in advance and help your project run more efficiently.

Identify Your Business Goals

Prioritize goals for the redesign based on your business needs. For example, making it easy to donate, making it easier to find resources about the organization’s cause, and highlighting constituents’ stories. Focusing on your top business needs will help your website redesign team to determine what information goes where on the website and will help your website designer make recommendations about how to organize and emphasize key information.

Review Website Analytics

Look at reports from your current website to determine which pages are most visited and how site visitors are using your website. This information helps to show your website redesign team what’s working and what’s not in terms of highlighting the information you want to highlight and helping site visitors find the information they’re seeking.

Look at Similar Websites

Create a short list of websites that you like – whether it’s the entire website or just certain elements of the site. Make notes about what you like about the websites and why. This approach will help the website design team to quickly visualize and discuss ideas for the website redesign.

Make a Site Map

Start a list of the pages on your current website, organized by their location within the website. This map will be a helpful starting point for your redesign team, and since you’re more familiar with the current website you’ll be able to create it faster than the third-party designer can.  

2. Simplify the Website Design

It can be easy to over-engineer your website design because you want to communicate so many things to site visitors. However, a complicated design and user interface makes it difficult for people to find information. It can also take longer to create/test, take longer to load in web browsers, and be more expensive to design and maintain. Here are some tips for your website redesign team.

Get Feedback

Ask for feedback about your current website from a variety of stakeholders and constituencies, including donors, volunteers, service recipients, board members and staff members. Ask them what they like and dislike about your current website design and navigation, including how easy it is to find information and take actions, such as making a donation or signing up for an event. Use their feedback to find ways to streamline your website navigation.

Use a Human-Centered Design Approach

Website visitors don’t necessarily know how your nonprofit is organized. They just want to get information or take action. So, it can be helpful to use a jobs mentality with your site redesign in which you consider which jobs or tasks, site visitors are going to your site to accomplish. These might include things such as learning how to obtain services, finding out about upcoming events, registering for an event, donating or signing up to volunteer. 

To help simplify your design, make those items as prominent as possible, and label sections and calls-to-actions with terms that correspond with what your site visitors want to accomplish.  

Streamline Online Forms

When someone goes to donate or sign up for a campaign or event, a long form can be a big turnoff. Site visitors might give up before completing a long form, and longer forms can take excessive time to process. They also take longer to build in the first place.

To make your website more efficient, be sure to ask for only the information you need to process the donation, event registration, etc. Your forms will be easier to build and maintain, your site visitors will be more likely to complete the forms, and your forms will process faster.

Think Mobile-First

With so many people using mobile devices, it’s important to design your website as mobile-first, not just mobile-friendly. That means designing it specifically to be viewed on mobile devices. This approach makes your webpages easier to navigate and interact with, as well as faster to load, on mobile devices.

3. Use Web Design Templates

Setting up and using page templates makes it much faster and easier to build new pages and update existing pages. Templates can also be designed with minimal code so that pages load more quickly. 

Many content management systems and website design tools include webpage design template capabilities. And for repeated elements throughout your website, many web design tools allow you to create a library of code-efficient, pre-tested snippets — such as buttons, image blocks and text sections — to further streamline page building.  

As you plan your nonprofit’s next website design refresh, be sure to keep efficiency in mind. Using these tips, your web redesign project will run faster and more smoothly, and you’ll end up with a website that works more efficiently for you and your constituents.

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of NonProfit PRO.