1. Know Your Website Purpose
This is probably the most important step. Everything else leads back to your website’s purpose and goals. Your website goals could include anything from converting visitors to members, informing existing members of latest news, building your email newsletter, building awareness, and collecting donations.
2. Make it Easy to Use
Everyone appreciates a website that is easy to use. The layout design should be consistent throughout the site, the menu should be easy to use, the text easy to read, and links easy to identify.
3. How to Get Involved
Let visitors know how they can become involved. Donating money is one way, but you should also suggest other ways they can get involved.
4. Accept Donations / Subscriptions
You should have a donation or subscriptions button that is obvious and easy to find. Accepting online credit card donations is easier than you may think. Including a funding goal is also a good idea. This let’s members and visitors feel part of achieving a common goal.
5. Keep in Touch
Allow your visitors to easily stay in touch with what you are doing. Provide an email newsletter sign up box, and have links to your Twitter and Facebook pages.
6. Use Video
Video is the way of the future. It doesn’t need to be fancy, most digital cameras can now take video. As well as using the video clip on your own website, upload it to YouTube and other video sharing sites to gain leverage.
7. Contact Information
Make it easy for visitors to find your contact details. Don’t just have a contact page, but also include your contact details in a side-block or in your site’s footer.
8. Ongoing Maintenance
Use a Content Management System (CMS), so you can edit your website yourself. This will allow you to keep your website up-to-date and relevant. One such CMS framework is Joomla. This framework is extremely powerful and can be easily extended to grow as your website does.
9. Write for Search
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing only read text. They read all the text on your website, so give some thought to write the words that people are searching for. And, were you are using images, ensure you have included alternative text tags (Alt Tags) to allow the search engines to understand your content better.
10. Measure the Results
Use Google Analytics to track how visitors find your website, and what they are looking at. Otherwise it’s difficult to measure how well your website is achieving its goals.
