Saturday, October 31, 2015

Working on a new website?

I spent time with a wonderful charity in Europe who told me they were 'redoing their website'.  I hear that a lot these days, and for good reason; many are pretty bad.

But they also told me that they had close to a thousand different pages.

It turns out that Google Analytics informed them 99% of all visitors went to just one of the most popular dozen pages.

What was most visited page?

Home page was first. 
Then jobs. 

Those two accounted for 80% of traffic!  Have a look at yours and I bet it is similar.

Imagine how much work went into the 900+ pages that no one visited. 

All that work and effort, meetings, politics, copywriting, images, updating, coding, testing, link fixing.  For no reason...

If you are developing a new website, it is almost certainly cross organisational.  Lots of people involved. Fundraisers, communications people, service providers and board members (!) may want a piece of your digital real estate.

So here is what I think they should be asked.

Tell me:
   What you want on the web
   Why would someone want to view your page?
   What are people asked to do when they get there?
   What is your measure of success?
   How will you drive people there?
   How long do you want it to stay there and how will you expire it?

Without a good answer to all those questions... Nope. Sorry. No real estate for you.

Simple, but effective.


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