Planning your charity’s new website should be a structured task. You need to think about who your audience is, what images to use, the look and style, what content you’ll be publishing, and your hosting requirements; and you should consider all these points before commissioning a web designer. Sounds daunting? Not if you use this worksheet to help you plan your organisation’s website (PDF, 80kb).
One of the questions on the worksheet is about which websites you like and which you loathe. Your answers can really help the web designer establish your tastes and produce something you’ll not be horrified by!
Ideally, one person alone won’t make all the decisions. Consider using the worksheet in one of the following ways:
- You could convene a full staff meeting to discuss the points in the worksheet. If so, try not to get dragged into long and circular discussions about specific points. Keep the discussion flowing and try to cover all the questions; if necessary split the discussion across one or more meetings. Be aware that not everyone in your organisation will be comfortable discussing technical subjects so keep the jargon to a minimum. If you don’t feel confident leading the discussion is there a local circuit rider or consultant you could invite in to host it for you?
- You could delegate several staff to form a small website sub-group. This is more likely to result in a focused discussion and quicker decisions but you might overlook some of the needs of your organisation. So once you’ve made your decisions, write a project brief and ask your other colleagues to comment on it.
What should you do when you’ve answered the questions in the worksheet? The next step is to write a project brief – a couple of pages should suffice for a small charity – and you’ll find guidance on the ICT Hub Knowledgebase and TechSoup websites.
If I’ve missed out anything important please let me know by leaving a comment below and I’ll revise the worksheet. If you use it and find it useful, please let me know. Feel free to customise it for your own needs but if you republish it elsewhere please credit me as the author.
No related posts.
Hello
I thought the idea of the PDF planner was a great idea, but for some reason I can’t seem to download it. I have Adobe Reader and don’t usually have a problem. Am I doing anything wrong?
thanks!
Louise
on April 24th, 2008
No, my fault, I moved my blog and didn’t move this file with it – will upload it asap!
admin
on May 2nd, 2008