Ten Ways To Make Your Nonprofit Website Simply Awesome

Despite the proliferation of social media, your website is still your primary identity online. It may not be the place where you engage with constituents and supporters, but it is the place they’lll go to when they want more from the relationship.

For example, fans of the Humane Society of the US enraged over this picture will want to donate, sign a petition, or join an e-mail list on their website.

Your Website Is A Fishing Hook

From a pure conversion perspective, your website is nothing more than fishing gear. Your bait is what attracts visitors, your hook is your compelling content, and your net is your email, volunteer and donation forms.

10 Ways To Improve Your Nonprofit Website

To improve your site’s ability to attract and convert email subscribers, volunteers and donors, make sure your site has these 10 “must haves”:

1. Professional Design – The last thing you want is visitors wondering when your site was built. If their first impression was with you on Twitter, remember that a bad second impression can call a good first impression into question.

2. Intuitive Navigation – The purpose of your navigation menu is help visitors find what they want as quickly as possible. You do this by really understanding what’s on your visitors mind as they visit each page in your website.

If you try to achieve this by including every single webpage on your site in the navigation menu, you’ll end up making their experience worse than before.

To improve your site’s navbars, try the three-second test described on this page.

3. Fewer Choices – This idea is similar to optimizing your navigation menu, but it has to do with calls to action. The more choices you present to a user  (like the Facebook page, join the e-mail list, sign the petition, donate), the longer it will take the user to make a decision. And the longer they take to make a decision, the higher the chances that they won’t do anything at all.

4. Good Redirects – It’s inevitable that someone will click on a bad link to your website. When they do, you want to make sure that their experience is painless and even positive. This way, they’ll be more likely to stick around despite the unexpected speed bump.

 

5. Consistent Page Layouts – If your website’s sidebars bounce back and forth from left to right as a visitor clicks through your site, you’re increasing the likelihood that they’ll leave. Same goes for where images are placed on pages, font type and sizes, page widths, and site colors. Consistency in all of these items leads to a better brand experience, and higher conversions on your site.

6. Pictures of People – It’s common knowledge that images of people prompt emotional responses more then text does. On your homepage and key action pages make sure you have a picture of a person looking directly at the user.

7. Mobile Versions – Your website needs to adapt its design to iPads, iPhones, Androids and other devices. This is easy if you’re using WordPress for your website, due to the huge selection of mobile-friendly themes and plug-ins.

8. Answers to Common Questions – Your website needs to answer the most common questions about your cause and organization. Who are you? Why is your organization important? How can people help?

Again, make sure you present emotional content and not just text to answer these questions.

9. Strong SEO – One of the quickest ways to increase visitors to your website is to optimize your pages based on search keywords. Search engines look mostly at the title and description tags of each page as well as the image tags related to those pages.

10. Sharable Content – Many nonprofits I’ve worked with have been able to triple their website traffic simply by implementing a blogging strategy.

The increased traffic happens as a result of blog posts shared on social media sites, and higher prevalence in search results. Again, if you’re using WordPress for your website you can easily publish blog posts, and add social sharing buttons to those articles (Facebook, twitter, interest, Buffer, LinkedIn).

Seven Weeks To A Better Website

For the next seven weeks, I’ll be publishing the following articles (one each week):

1. How To Create Clear Objectives For Your Website
2. How To Create Useful Website User Personas
3. Five Ways To Make Your Website Content More Remarkable
4. 15 Ways To Optimize Your Website’s Landing Pages
5. Five Ways To Improve Your Website’s SEO
6. How To Make Your Website More Social
7. Seven Key Web Stats You Should Always Be Tracking

If you subscribe, at the end of the seven weeks you’ll get all of these articles in one eBook that you can reference over and over again, and share with your colleagues.

If you don’t subscribe yet, you can do it now (If Facebook logs you in, all you have to do is click “Register”):