Your New Web Site 2 – Planning and Research

By Greg Hluska

A strong web presence can be very beneficial for a non-profit organization. A good web campaign can increase awareness and attract volunteers/money.  This ten part series is designed to help non-profit organizations take the plunge, get their first web site online and attract visitors.

My last article was an introduction for non-profits that are thinking about building a web site – it talked about some of the things non-profits can gain from going online and about some of the tactics a non-profit can use to achieve those goals. Then, it delved into a discussion on why planning is very important.  This article is going to continue that theme with a more in depth discussion of planning.

Here is the first step in building a web site.  Answer these questions:

1. Do you have enough money to hire someone to develop the site or will this be ‘do it yourself’?
2. What is your budget for the site (including hosting)?
3. Why do you want to build a web site?
4. What do you hope to gain from your web site?
5. How many people do you want to visit your web site in a month?
6. What do you want on your web site?  Do you want a blog?  A static information page?  A forum where your users can talk?  An events calendar?
7. How will you keep the content in #5 fresh enough to meet the performance goals in #4?

These questions are important because they will help you focus on your goals for your site and how you will design the content to achieve those goals.  It also gets you thinking about some of the specific tactics you will adopt to put that content online.

Once you have an idea where you are going (and how you will get there), it is time to focus upon how people will find your site.  Does your non-profit have a recognizable brand name that people will search for?  Or, do you want people to find your site by searching for an issue you are involved in?

These questions are important because they will get you thinking about your ‘domain’ name.  What is a domain name?  Consider our site – our domain name is reginastreets.ca.  We chose that one because it is the name of our non-profit magazine.  That magazine will be our primary way of promoting this site (and this site exists to promote the magazine, but that is a different story).  Since our site and magazine are so closely linked, we felt it was important to make our domain the name of our site.

Now, let’s say that our name wasn’t such a big part of our strategy.  Let’s say that we wanted to inform people about a particular cause.  If that were the case, it would make much more sense to find a domain that was related to that particular cause.  For example, if we were focused upon protecting widgets, a good domain name might be protectwidgets.com, or preserve-widgets.ca.

This article has accomplished a few things.  You know what you want to call your site and you have a good idea of what you want to put on your site.  You have also written down some numbers that will be very important later on.  First, you wrote down your total budget.  And second, you wrote down how many visitors you want to get in a month.