Take a look at Designing Inward Out. It’s a website about the design of a nonprofit web site starting from the wireframes and strategy. I actually wanted to do this for my org’s redesign but Chas from Designing Inward Out did it first and far better than I could have.
What I would like Chas to show is his toolset for web information architecture design. Does he use Visio? Does he brainstorm on paper? Does he use index cards? However, he certainly he gives out enough information for people to eventually replicate his work methods for themselves. Hint, hint, I’ll be doing some of that myself.
If your organization is considering a redesign and needs to understand how much work goes into the process, please run, do not walk to Designing Inward Out. Putting my IT Director hat on, every organization needs a devoted person to their Web site. Even now, more than ten years after the Web came into our lives, there are still many nonprofit organizations out there that have more people devoted to direct marketing (snail mail) campaigns than their Web site. It’s hard to imagine that this disconnect still occurs (even at my org and I do all I can to push for a single Web content development person). I’m ready to say that a well-managed web site with devoted staff will almost always result in a positive ROI for any nonprofit willing to hire a dedicated staff person. If you’re a very small organization, formalize the Web duties to a single person but with a forward-looking plan to hiring a full-time Web content manager once you’re sure the Web site proceeds can pay for that salary.
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Excellent resource. I could spend a long time here. Now, can we find one for building a successful, high-traffic nonprofit blog? (I know, that’s weird to think of a blog diary about creating a blog. It’s either meta or stupid.)
Well, that’s the issue isn’t it? I’d love for Chas to let us keep looking at his process and let us see the before and after analytics reports.