We all have those boxes gathering dust in the corners of our basement (except for the few, innately organized folks among us).
The boxes that we promise ourselves we’ll deal with—throw away, donate, SOMETHING. Yeah, let’s keep those where they’re at for the moment and concentrate on a similar predicament we find ourselves in: wondering what to do with the unvisited, dusty webpages piling up in the recesses of our website.
Imagine for a moment, a clean and clutter-free nonprofit website. No hoarding allowed. No storage unit needed. No extra content shoved into a closet. Remember, sweeping those pages under the rug won’t do anyone any good—they can still be found.
After all, your website is your nonprofit’s online home, and because of the power of the internet, the door is always open for visitors. Make your house feel like a home, or in this case, a home page.
Big or small, your site should present the best side of your organization to reach visitors interested in supporting your mission through funding or volunteering.
You want visitors to find you and stay awhile, right? If your nonprofit website design is clean, easy to navigate and has good use of white space, compelling images and organized content, you can rest assured you’ve done a good job, which will go a long way in pleasing search engines. And, more importantly, pleasing your guests.
Maintaining a website shouldn’t be like the rush to clean when your mother-in-law is coming to dinner; there are simple, ongoing tasks you can add to your regular duties to make your website welcoming and ready for company every day of the week.
- Vacuum: Remove outdated content crumbs and look for places where you can link to related areas of your website. You want your visitors to stay for a while and get around quickly and easily.
- Organize for mobile: Be sure the mobile version of your website is tidy. After all, you only have 2.3 seconds to impress your guests, and a responsive website will keep them there longer.
- Check room by room: Sweep through your website page by page and look for areas where you can add images, videos, bullet points, better descriptive content and potentially additional pages. Keep in mind that you want to turn each page into a functional and purposeful space.
- Stay modern and updated: Throw out those outdated images and please say goodbye to the dancing baby, guestbook and the hit counter that plagued websites in the mid-90s. Your website may not be the right place for nostalgia.
- Dust off those links: If it’s broken, fix it. A simple link update or fresh image upload may be all you need to do. Bottom line, it’s important to test your links to make sure they are fully functional.
- Throw out the trash or recycle: If you have the sudden urge to purge certain pages, simply deleting and trashing outdated pages is just one option. You can also recycle those pages by redirecting them to the home page or the most relevant page you want visitors to view.
Now, grab your broom and dust pan and comb through your website to find those little things to get rid of, move or simply modernize.
Still feel like hiring someone to do your so-called dirty work? Have no fear, Firespring is here to review your website to determine where and how it can be a more functional virtual living space. You can always request a demo to see how upgrading to Firespring’s nonprofit website platform would work for you. We will make your site a clean and clutter-free nonprofit website.
