June 2011
Cover Your Online Basics
"Everything we have learned about good website design is now in significant flux with the dawning of the touch-screen era," notes Nicole Williams, SPN management & technology advisor and founder of Operation Geek Farm. "However, before your organization concerns itself with touch-screen technology, a better first step is to make sure you have covered the basics well on your institute's current website. The following eight points offer a check list for website fundamentals."
Professional looking graphics. Your site should have consistent fonts, and attractive graphics, with plenty of white space so visitors feel like sticking around. Stories should be told with words and pictures. TNReport.com does an excellent job with this.
Relevant and new content. If your site has ever-changing, useful information, your visitors are more likely to return to it - often. Easy, low-cost ways to do this are to have an organization blog, or compile important information from your state, such as all government press releases, into an information center.
RSS feeds that are easy to find. Put your RSS button either high on your page or prominently at the bottom to help visitors easily subscribe to your work. Don't have RSS? It's time to contact your web vendor, or Nicole Williams at Nicole@OGFcommunity.com to evaluate what it will take to get this basic feature in place.
Text-based posts: Kill the PDF. PDF documents are pretty. They are also hard to download, crash some devices, and are impossible to read on many smaller tech devices. To stay relevant, do offer a PDF download, but also reformat organizational information in a user-friendly, text-based way.
Simple search function. Make sure your search function is as easy as Google, and one of the first three things your website visitor sees.
Connection to social networks. At a minimum, make sure your organization is represented on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Set a regular, but maintainable schedule to update these social networks, and link them to your homepage.
Donation function. Your donate button needs to be easy to use and easy to find at all times. Not sure who to use to process contributions? Look at ElectionMall or Paypal.
Contact information on the first page. How about on every page, at the bottom?
