Most NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) don’t understand these important aspects of a successful website. Even many governmental organizations (GOs) could improve their sites by following these tips. Implement these 17 tips and in half a year the organization will have many more visitors and they will be much happier to come back to your organization’s website.
Help your NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) to improve their website and online presence and success. Also many governmental organizations (GOs) could improve their sites by following these tips.
1. Everything should be viewed and evaluated with the eyes of the visitor: "What’s in for me" as the main benchmark for a successful website. That is pertaining to the copy and to the content what ever they are directed to members or non-members: "You will here find ...." is a better and more inviting statement at the home page, than: "We are the main organisation of ......"
2. Most visitors on the Internet are searching for information, so please provide them with that. Se more Marketing Tools here
3. Concentrate content on themes, because that will give you an easier way to the attractive top search positions at the main search engines and to be included in some directories, (Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Open Directory, AltaVista etc.). Site-Build-It is probably the best approach to fulfil that requirement, but see also point number 20.
4. Make navigation easy and transparent on all pages.
5. Have a search facility, best on all pages. www.FreeFind.com offers a free and useful service. I use it on a number of websites, for example about photos: azfotos.com .
In addition to the search facility for the visitor it gives you a record of what people have actually been searching for.
In that way you can prioritise the stuff available for people on your website when you revise your pages. Google is also offering a search box, but only with the pages they have indexed, and you cannot get any record of the searches.
6. Try to organise the content of your website quite "flat", meaning the visitor does not have to dig too deep into your website to find what he/she is searching after. Most visitors will at best not go further deep than to the 3rd level. This is the same with "spidering" bots of search engines.
7. Have your contact information visible on your home page (first page), including address, phone, fax, email, may be even postal giro, bank account etc. - All to make it more easy for people to find the kind of information they need about your organisation. Avoid to write the email address, use a script to hide it from email harvesters and spammers.
8. Make it easy for visitors to find information on people, their phone numbers and email address and keep them updated. Do the same for departments of the organisation.
9. Keep each resource in only one place and make many links to them around on other pages..
10. Make it visible when you have provided new material at the website.
11. Make your website SIMPLE and quick loading. Avoid heavy graphics, flash movies etc. They will not help your visitors, but only help them click away. If you use graphics, you have to optimise them for the smallest amount of file size. GifBot, http://www.netmechanic.com/GIFBot/optimize-graphic.htm , can do it free and online. Else use one of the picture editing programmes available with the function like ‘publish picture on the web’.
12. Keep your web copy short e.g. use a new paragraph for every 4th line. Make bullet points.
13. Manage to have at least your entrance page with a simple domain name, like www.iucn.org or www.ensi.org or www.nature.org
14. It is not enough to have a good virtual address by having an intuitive domain name on the internet. You also have to be registered properly in search engines and directories. The best way is to have other important sites to link to your site. In some months your site will be picked up by the spiders of search engines. For the directories it is best to do it manually, start with dmoz.org and yahoo.com
15. Make it easy for people to link to you. Provide them with a variety of text links, banners and logos and with simple instructions concerning the html code.
16. Encourage visitors to bookmark your site.
17. Exchange links with other relevant organisations. Include your important key words in your link text you ask them to use.
18. Encourage members of your organization to write about the site of the organization in the social networking sites like LinkedIN.com , Facebook and MySpace.com and ask them to make links to specific web pages they like and with relevant keywords in the link text.
19. Add a blog to the site of your organization. It could be on the main page or it could be as just one of the menu lines. Wordpress.com is offering the best overall platform and it easy to work with – and it is f*ree.
20. The whole site of your organization could be build on the Wordpress platform including so-called static web pages and the dynamic blog pages getting the best out of both worlds, and still – Wordpress is f*ree and also you can find hundreds of free Wordpress themes that is the word for the design and look of a Wordpress website.
Implement these 20 tips and in half a year you will have many more visitors and they will be much more happy to come back to your organization’s website.
Implement these 17 tips and in half a year you will have many more visitors and they will be much more happy to come back to your organization’s website. You can keep updated with this f*ree subscription to the author’s ezine about marketing and the use of photos at http://www.StockPhotoNews.com
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