by Jayne Cravens
via coyotecommunications.com & coyoteboard.com (same web site)

Web Site Re-Design Suggestions for
Nonprofits, NGOs,
Small Government Agencies &
other mission-based initiatives

Revised with new information as of February 17, 2020

When is it time to consider a complete redesign your web site?

When your web site is three years old or older.
When you decide to make a commitment to digital inclusion and to having a fully accessible web site.
When feedback about your website is overwhelmingly negative (not just a board member saying he finds it boring - stats that show people aren't finding the pages you want them to visit most, complaints from several people, etc.).
When you want substantial improvements or changes: for your site to be mobile ready, you want the site presented in more than one language, you want to add substantially more information, your organization has changed its focus, when your agency gets a new logo, when you want your site to be fully accessible for people with disabilities (that includes senior users), etc.

Some things to keep in mind about web site redesign:

Have you had a focus group look at your current site and give you feedback on it? For instance, you could gather a group of friends of your volunteers in your conference room, having them bring their laptops, and ask them to do things like, "Find our mission statement" or "look for information on how to volunteer with us." Also ask them to READ the content and give you feedback on it - why would, or wouldn't they, sign up to volunteer with your? Or donate to your organization?
Ask the person who answers your organization's phone most why people call. Are people calling to find out information that should be easy to find on the web site? Is it easy to find on the web site?

You don't need a professional consultant to do those two things - someone among your employees or your volunteers could do those two key steps. You could also recruit a volunteer specifically to do these tasks - staff may feel more comfortable being brutally honest to someone who is from outside the organization.

You need to look at your top five to 10 most-visited pages on your current web site and if most visitors to those pages come from other pages on your site or if other sites link to some of those pages directly. If you have a really popular page on your site that other organizations link to directly, rather than your home page, consider that changing the URLs of such a page could greatly and negatively affect your visitor numbers. That's another thing to keep in mind about a web site redesign: changing the URLs - the web site addresses - of certain pages can confuse users and break links to those pages from other sites.

Fundamentals for Your Web Site Redesign

As I say elsewhere, I feel strongly about certain fundamentals regarding web site design:

The reaction from a first-time visitor shouldn't be "Wow, look at the design!" but rather, "Wow, I immediately found exactly the information I was looking for!" or "Wow, this organization does great work!" Don't bury web page content under oh-so-many graphics and animated features and a video that starts playing as soon as I go to your page. The most important thing to remember when designing your Web site is what your audiences want out of the site. If a Web site wins design awards, but your customers don't use it, it's "virtually" worthless to users. Most users will visit your Web site to find information, not graphics; information should drive the design of your Web site.

The answers to your organization's FAQs should be immediately, obviously easy to find.
Make sure it's obvious WHERE your organization is. There are organizations with your same name - a visitor needs to know which one you are, the one across town or the one across the country?
Make sure the name of your organization appears in the TEXT of your web site, not just within a graphics file - and on many pages, not just the "about us" page. This greatly increases the possibility of your site being found when someone types your organization's name into a search engine - also known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Some people will do a search for a particular topic on a search engine and come directly to a page within your web site, bypassing your homepage. Therefore, it is important that each page has the name of your organization on it, somewhere (many organizations have a footer on every page with the full name of the organization), so a visitor knows who is publishing the info. This is also helpful if someone prints out one of your web pages - so that the name of your organization is there, just it would be on a printed page.
Make sure the keywords and phrases you want people to use to find your web site via a search engine appear in the TEXT of your web site, not just within a logo. That includes the full name of your web site. That helps people searching within your website, helps improve SEO, and helps a sight-impaired user navigating the page.
If your organization is focused on helping the homeless in a certain town and state, the word homeless and homelessness, as well as the name of that town and state, need to be in the text of your key web site pages. The word volunteer needs to be on your web site as well, on a page that says these words. Again, this greatly increases the possibility of your site being found when someone types certain keywords into a search engine and helps someone who might come to your page directly, bypassing your home page.
Each web site page you want to show up in search engine results should contain the primary keyword someone might search for in that title's page title. If you have a page of tips on kitchen composting for apartment dwellers, that is exactly what your title on the page should say, not: "Tips on ways to be greener." Your "Tips" phrase can appear on the page, of course. This not only helps with SEO but also helps users with sight impairments.
Each page should also include a single and relevant H1 Title that includes the primary key word you would want someone to use to find that resource via a search online. That primary keyword should also feature in the first paragraph of your content underneath the H1 title. This helps greatly with SEO.

I've read that 2% of a web site's content should contain the organization's primary and secondary keyword - homelessness, youth, arts, domestic violence, etc., for the site to rank highly in web searches. My advice: think of your home page and each page your home page links to as primary web site landing pages, pages that should stand-alone: someone could see JUST that page and know who your organization is and its primary focus, without having to look at any other page. Using synonyms of your desired keyword within your content as well also increases SEO.

The World Wide Web shouldn't be the World Wide Wait. Your web pages should load quickly for everyone, not just those with lightening-fast broadband. The more large graphics you have on a page, the more slowly it loads.

A professional designer may develop your site, but someone in-house or a volunteer should be able to make regular changes to the site without needing assistance of the designer. The designer should create pages that allow these changes to happen easily.

Learning what makes a good web site often involves learning what makes a rotten web site. See websitesthatsuck.com to learn more.

Design your site with a variety of people in mind: people using a beautiful, new Macintosh and people using old IBM clones running an outdated web browser. People with lightening-fast Internet access and people with something that is as slow as a dial up. People using an iPhone and people using an Android. All of those people should be able to read your website. That means embracing universal design for every or most pages and either making every page mobile-ready or creating a duplicate mobile-ready site. That means making your web site accessible for people with disabilities, including people using assistive technologies. It means I don't have to have two hands to make a choice on a menu. It means if I'm blind user and my technology is reading your website to me, it makes sense (which also means, if I'm a sighted user and driving in my car and asking my in-the-car virtual assistant to find something on your website, I can). These recommendations from the State of Illinois can help.

Break up text into small paragraphs whenever possible, and break up massive amounts of information into separate pages, as appropriate; for instance, break up your newsletter into one web page per story, rather than putting them all into one big file. But don't make all information a slide show: I don't want to have to click through pages, and wait for new graphics to download, just to finish reading something on your web site of a few paragraphs. You absolutely can have detailed, long-reads on your web site, but they shouldn't be primary landing pages of your web site. Note: a study from Backlinko.com showed that longer form content ranked stronger in SEO than short content!

Surprise: most people do not want to read your newsletter in PDF unless it is super short - one, maybe two pages. Any content in a PDF should also be on separate HTML pages so that they are easier to read, searchable and findable. Yes, there are ways to make PDFs accessible for people with disabilities, but it's labor intensive and beyond the expertise of most folks.

Avoid using large or gratuitous graphics that don't add to the content of the page, or take a long time to download for someone with slow Internet access. Graphics should enhance the information on the site - there should be a reason for every graphic, every photo, every video.

Images should include Alt text in the markup/code; complex images should have more extensive descriptions near the image (a caption or descriptive summaries). Otherwise, you deny information to a visitor using a screen reader. But Alt text needs to actually describe the photo: woman smiling at camera, group of people jumping all at once, man sitting at a computer, etc., not just the name of the person in the photo.

Do not rely on color as a navigational tool or as the sole way to differentiate items. This makes choices inaccessible for someone who has sight impairments regarding color (color blindness). Also, be conscious of color-contrast - I am not considered a person with a disability, but I can't easily read dark gray text on a light gray background.

Users not using a mouse - who are using keyboards - should be able to navigate your web site. Users should be able to navigate the site just tabbing through and hitting "return." Pages should be tagged in the background coding to worked with voice-control systems as well. All of this functionality is easy to design for if you do it from the get-go - it's VERY hard to do AFTER you have already designed a website. Insist on this being done by whomever is designing your website and remember that you can recruit volunteers with this skill, or willing to acquire this skill.

Provide transcripts for podcasts and videos. Volunteers can help you do this. YouTube automatically transcribes your videos - you just need to go in and fix what their system thinks you've said. I taught myself to do this in about 30 minutes. I've also uploaded podcasts to YouTube, made the viewing private, let YouTube transcribe it, then I've edited that automatically-generated script while listening to the audio - ta da, transcript of my podcast.

If you have a video on your site, you should provide closed captioning. YouTube automatically does this for your videos - you just need to go in and fix what their system thinks you've said. I taught myself to do this in about 30 minutes.

Doing all of the above - and insisting any web designer, even volunteers, do the above - will make your web site easier to find, easier to navigate by a larger number of people, encourage return visitors, and make your site more accessible to a variety of users, including people with sight-impairments (either completely blind and using a screen reader or partially blind and using a screen magnifier), hearing-impairments, mobility issues and cognitive issues. And as I've noted several times, it will also greatly improve your web site's SEO.

Other Considerations

Old versions of your web site will be available at The Internet Wayback Machine / archive.org. You will be able to achieve at least one iteration of your web site from each year that it's been available on this resource. This is very helpful in retrieving information someone deletes off of the current web site and you realize, in fact, you shouldn't have done that. It also helps you create a record of your organization's history. Do NOT let any web designer put coding into your pages so that they will NOT be archived by this resource!

Be careful in using platforms like WordPress, Wix, Weebly or other drag-and-drop web development platforms - the templates they provide are NOT made to meet accessibility guidelines. If you are going to use such a platform, use it only for your first, initial, basic website, and have a plan (and budget accordingly) to replace that initial, basic website entirely with a more robust and more accessible site.

Remember: the Web is a primary resource regarding education, employment, access to information about government (including benefits), commerce, health care and more, and to not make your web site accessible is to say to people with disabilities: we don't want you to use this site. Access to information and communications technologies, including the Web, is now a basic human right. Also, accessible design improves overall user experience and satisfaction. It is most efficient and effective to incorporate accessibility from the very beginning of projects, so you don’t need go back and to re-do work.

For guidelines on accessible web design, see:

How to Meet WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) - A Quick Reference)

Web Accessibility Tutorials

Wix checklist for improving a site's accessibility

Also see Web Design Guidelines for Low Bandwidth. This resource is from Aptivate, an NGO providing IT services for international development.

This is a for-profit company, Codecademy, and it offers some free HTML and CSS lessons that are simple to follow and highly useful for anyone looking to slightly edit or personalize an existing web site.

Completely new to code? HTML Cheatsheet is a great, VERY basic resource, and HTML Dog is a helpful, more advanced reference site regarding coding (I use them frequently).

Volunteers Can Help!

A web site should be designed with accessibility from the get-go. It's much harder to take an existing web site and make it accessible than to redesign it from scratch with accessibility built in. That said, if you have an existing web site that you want to make accessible, volunteers can help, via a web accessibility fix-a-thon. How to organize such a group volunteering event is detailed here.

Regarding content on your site, also see:

Use Your Web Site to Show Your Accountability

The Demise of a Terrific Web Site.

Trust or Bust: Communicating Trustworthiness in Web Design, a March 7, 1999 column from Jakob Nielsen that is still valid.

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