I have spent much of the past three months reworking old websites. Some have been quite old in web terms perhaps 4 years old. Because I provide you with the website, and training and anticipate you will run with this after release adding new content to the website, I am no longer involved in your day to day operations, apart from in the background.
This has revealed some interesting trends on some of the older websites. I will go over some of these below. You may find it useful to consider with your website. If you are currently in the Home-Start Rebranding Upgrade queue I will be looking for and resolving some of these things if I find them.
Getting the message across
Problem: You have a major new event or news item and you wish to expose it as much as possible. What I have noted is the same messaging, or slightly different messaging in multiple places. Which means someone had to put it there, which means you spent 2x… 3x more effort than you needed to.
Solution: I am doing this on the more recent sites, and enhancing it further. With the Divi based websites it is possible to have more than one news page. In many cases I have included filtered news pages. This means if the parent page is say volunteering, at the bottom of that page there is a section with the last three “posts” relating to Volunteering present. This part is dynamic and changes when you add something. The same news items will also be present on the News page. I have had requests to more closely control what is on the bottom of the home page. New sites have a “latest news” section at the bottom. You can add another news category called “Front Page” and set the blog section at the bottom of your home page to only display news items in the category “Front Page”. This mean more important news can feature here. It is also present on the news page which contains all news unfiltered in date order.
Why is this a good idea?
It means you only ever need to publish one news item. You control where it is visible on your site through the categories assigned to it. This means this one copy, can be seen in multiple places. So you only need to do it once.
It follows that writing the same thing twice or more, as opposed to writing it once and displaying it twice, now means you have to remember where you left things. This is how websites get out of date, and progressively more difficult to navigate.
Posts and Pages
Problem: One site I recently upgraded had lots of post or new content in pages. These pages had been assigned to the menu. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this, however it is making more work. Posts or news items are transient. They are relevant today and less relevant in say 3 months time. This is why you have a blog section in your website.
Solution: You just create a post, and publish it. It will know where it needs to go. Over time it will be buried in your site because there is new and more relevant news. You do not need to connect a post to the main menu.
Organisational Structure
When I first put your site together, it is based on a logical structure (aka menu) based on interest groups. If you look at your target markets (for charities), there will be several groups you wish to reach out to:
- Volunteers
- Clients (who may be receiving services)
- Donors and funders
There may be more than these groups, but these form the foundation for all charities. These may also be broken down further. Their significance is that they also form three of the top level menu choices. This means that someone interested in volunteering can follow a thread which is wholly related to volunteering. A potential client can look at the menu thread that just covers the services.
It is important to maintain that structure over time and not place things in different locations, or spread your content across your menu when you are growing your website.
If you are not sure, ask your colleagues the question: “If you landed on this site could you easily find “X” ?”
If the answer is no, then you need to rethink where you have placed the page in the menu. At all times, you need to aim to have a website where anyone can reach what they are interested in, within a couple of click, and preferably one click. Make it difficult, they will go somewhere else.
Need help with some of this, please use the contact us page.