Strategy

Nonprofit and Small Business Websites Musts — Part 2

Continuing from last week’s “Nonprofit and Small Business Websites Musts — Part 1″, we’ll discuss the technical musts on each nonprofit and small business website. Here’s our Top 10:

1. Google Analytics — it takes about 1minute to activate the account and integrate the code. No excuse for not having done it already.
2. Search — at least from Google; however I’m beginning to think search should be available only for blogs  and not for the main site
3. Track return/registered users — at the very least Google Analytics helps with that, but there are more sophisticated ways to track return visitors and even recognize them. More on this soon..
4. Error page — be wary that you’ll have to have access to your webserver
5. Consistent Navigation Menu and design for all of your blogs, online stores, registration webforms, etc.
6. Slide-shows, pic navigation non-flash based — there are numerous jquery scripts nowadays that do a tremendous job
7. No CMS — Content Management System starts by promising so much but they are clunky, hard to maintain, and actually don’t help so much so that different people update the website. Your website pages don’t need to be updated weekly — use a blog for that!
8. Blog — you must have a blog if only for the news section and collecting user feedback
9. Your sites must be XHTML, CSS-compliant, and cross-browser tested at least for the three major browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome
10. You need an integrated, centralized online system for your contact, event, purchases, memberships, and donations info. Our SchoolDB and NonProfitDB systems help small businesses and nonprofits respectively with at least the following:
    1. A newsletter sign-up webform
    2. “Get in touch with us” webform to ask questions and become automatically part of the support system
    3. Track Return Users — coming soon
    4. Collect Feedback
    5. Receive your online store purchases
    6. receive your event registrations
    7. receive your fundraising info
    8. control all info in one place
    9. Use the systems as a mass email marketing tool
    10. Use the systems to send a personalized email that becomes part of the permanent communication history between your organization/business and your constituent/clients.

Next week we’ll wrap this series with a conclusion and some pointers of how to go about a 4-6 week redesign.

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