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NPA Launches New Site NPAdvisors helps nonprofits build better websites and fundraise online with the foundational belief that your website should reflect your mission and cater to your audience. Well, we've taken a dose of our own medicine. NPA has launched a new site using some of our own methodology. We'll tell you how we did it and then let you be the judge. First, we evaluated the mission of NPA. We are a consulting agency, but that was not apparent on our site - a visitor to the NPA site would not know what services we offer. We also know that the most important contribution we make to the industry is this email newsletter - "e-fund News." We assessed our overall strategic plan and determined how the internet could help us achieve these goals. We created an internet strategic plan with specific measurable goals and guidelines for content addition. Now, the focus of the site is to showcase "e-fund News" and its weekly content. The current "e-fund News" article will be the homepage content. Our challenge was to create a site that clearly defined who we are and gave our visitors easy access to all the e-Fund articles. Next, we audited the site. We found that there were things we liked and things we didn't. The original NPA site was launched in 2001 when all we knew is that we were convinced that online fundraising would work. The site was simple, following the Nielsen-Norman standards of usability. Over the ensuing years, hundreds of articles have been added. The site had become difficult to navigate. We performed an analysis of the content and reviewed site statistics, finding that our content groupings and navigation needed to be updated and kept in step with industry maturity. Our audience has become more sophisticated and is likely to have high-speed internet access, so we added just a few graphic elements. We also reviewed our content management system and found that it could accommodate the changes we wanted to make. We created a new site architecture, made the appropriate database changes and wrote the new content. Finally, we implemented the changes and along the way dealt with some of the very issues that we help our clients navigate. We had to continually remember who the audience was, not allowing our personal preferences to get in the way. We had to be sure to use terms that our audience uses, rather than what we are comfortable with. We had to keep referencing the strategic plans – it's easy to get diverted and forget the original reason for the redesign. So, take a look and tell us what you think. If you'd like a similar review of your site, let us know. February 2005 | |
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