Netroots Nation #NN10: How to Plan for Your Website Redesign

How to Plan for Your Website Redesign Julie Blitzer, Erin Hofteig & Paula Brantner Netroots Nation Thursday, July 22, 2010

Who are we?
Julie Blitzer
Strategist
Advomatic
Paula Brantner Executive Director Workplace Fairness Erin Hofteig Founding Partner Middle Coast

What are we going to discuss?
Internal planning & research, budgeting
Content Management Systems (CMSes): what, why and how to choose? Open source or not?
Customer/Constituent Relationship Management (CRM)
Request for Proposals (RFP)
Selecting a vendor
What to expect from your vendor
Case Study: Workplace Fairness

“ We want a new website!”
The Board, Executive Director or Editor-in-Chief asks for a new site. Now what??
Answer: Plan, plan, plan!
http://xkcd.com/148/

Planning, Part 1: Logistics
What technology capacity (skill and time) do you have inside your organization?
What is your budget for the project?
What can you get with $1,000, $10,000, $50,000 or $100,000?
How soon do you want your site to launch? (Note: “ASAP” is not the right answer to this question.)

Planning, Part 2: Your Organization
What are your organization’s stated mission and goals?
What is your organization’s character?
What portion of your members are online?
How big is your email list currently?

Planning, Part 3: Target Audiences
Who are you trying to reach?
Potential donors, Readers or Activists
How do you want to engage your users?
What parts of the site do you actually want them to go to?
Think about demographics:
Age, Location, Familiarity with technology, Knowledge of your brand or organization

Planning, Part 4: Basic Goals
What are you trying to accomplish?
Nonprofit/Advocacy Websites 1.0
“Brochure” sites
Bad designs
Nonprofit/Advocacy Websites 2.0
Action tools (e.g., “Write your representative”)
Social media integration
Community functionality

Planning, Part 5: Internal Feedback
Talk to your staff. What do they need? How do they use the site? How would they like to use the site? What would their ideal website provide? Relevant staff members may be in communications, development and political departments.

Planning, Part 6: User Experience (UX)
Don’t skip it! (What if I can’t afford it?)
UX documentation:
User research: Personas, interviews, competitive analysis, etc.
Site map
Wireframes
User Workflows
Content inventory
User permissions

Sample Site Map: Advomatic.com

Sample Wireframe: New Leaders Council

Planning, Part 7: CMS & CRM
What’s a CMS?
Why you need a CMS
Open source vs. proprietary (Don’t go custom!)
Popular open source options: Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress
http://www.idealware.org/ comparing_os_cms/

Planning, Part 7: CMS & CRM
What’s a CRM?
Sample features
Popular CRMs: CiviCRM, DIA/Salsa, Convio, Kintera, Salesforce

Site Audit, Part 1
Why should you audit your current site if you are going to replace it anyway?
What are the goals? What’s the audience?
What works? (“Name a few things that you love about the website, things that have been working.”)
What doesn’t? (“Name a few things that have been problems.”)
What tools are you missing?
What tools are unnecessary or outdated?
Look at your metrics. Very useful: Heat map of home page in Google Analytics.

Site Audit, Part 2
On your new site, what do you want (functionality, features, design)?
Do you want a rebranding process? Or do you want to stick with the logo and/or colors you have and redo the rest around it?
What do you not have that you want? Why do you want it?
If you have separate sites or blogs, what are your thoughts on keeping them separate or integrating them?
Priority for each of these items?

To RFP or Not to RFP?
Pros:
Documented process to show your higher-ups at work
Easy to get 50+ responses (good and bad)
Forces you to write out your requirements
Cons:
Cheapest option may not be best option
Vendors make pricing assumptions too early
Impersonal
Asking vendors to price undefined scope
Eliminates vendors who don’t respond to RFP’s

RFP vs. RFQ
RFP: Request for Proposals
Focuses on client’s requirements
RFQ: Request for Qualifications
Focuses on vendor’s experience

How to Pick a Vendor w/out RFP
Choose 5 or 6 peer-recommended vendors
Get to know the vendor
Release an RFQ, do discovery first
Look for a vendor who works with similar organizations in size, budget, requirements
Ask for references
Are you a match?
Go with your gut: if you are nervous, the vendor is probably the wrong choice

If you do write an RFP…
Be specific! Include documentation from your internal research, your site audit, and feedback you’ve received
Don’t leave anything out: List budget and time constraints
Include clear feature descriptions

If you do write an RFP (cont.)
Organizational background
Scope of this project
List your goals
Specify your target audiences.
Results of internal feedback and site audit.
Identify key features and functionality
Contract requirements
Budget & Timeline

Explaining Features & Functionality
Helpful: "We need a calendar that will appear on one page and can have private events as well as public events, with registration restricted to current members, and that provides reports of event registrations.”
Not as Helpful: "We need a Google Calendar," or "We need a widget from example.com .”
What do you think should go on each page?
Include a rough site map if you can.

Selecting a Vendor
Follow-up phone calls or meetings are common practice.
Consider budget AND experience.
Avoid: Developers without experience in your selected CMS/CRM, retainer contracts for a single project, flat rate billing that doesn’t get specific about the services provided.
Be sure to contact references and ask a lot of questions.

Red Flags
Changes made to live (not private) site.
Lack of transparency about day-to-day progress, billing, experience
Limited communication & missed deadlines
Bills with unexpected charges.
Vendor should warn you when you suggest features that are outside of the agreed scope.
Limited or no quality assurance, browser compliance or user testing prior to launch.

What Your Vendor Expects From You
Be prepared to provide pictures, content, and technical information to your developer:
Hosting (DNS Info)
Text for issues/about/action pages as well as forms
Pictures
Account info for Social Networking sites
Facebook/Twitter/Flicker/You Tube etc.
Quick response time on questions. Slowness will delay your site launch.

Surviving the Website Redesign Process Perspectives of an Accidental Techie Paula Brantner Executive Director, Workplace Fairness

Paula’s Background
Employment lawyer, not trained in technology
Started building Workplace Fairness website in 2001, before many current tools available
Survived two major redesigns:
2004-05 to build custom CMS to manage content
2008-09 to improve design, make more user friendly
Learned what I needed at conferences & trainings like this one.

It turned out all right…
www.workplacefairness.org : (website)
two-time Webby nominee (2007 for Best Employment Site; 2009 for Best Law Site)
PC Magazine’s Top 100 Sites You Can’t Live Without
500,000 unique visitors per year
www.todaysworkplace.org : (blog)
One of the very first nonprofit org blogs (Jan 2003)
Forbes.com Best of the Web Career Blogs

Important Lessons I’ve Learned
1. You don’t need a huge budget or a big-name web firm.
Never spent over $25,000 a year, even when redesigning (just web development, no strategy)
Don’t have dedicated in-house staff, never had more than 4 staff members total
You probably haven’t heard of my web firm (Midwest New Media, based in Cincinnati…although you should have!)

You do need to know WHY you’re redesigning your site.
What is the most important thing you want to accomplish?
What is the most significant failure/deficiency of your current site?
Who will be happiest when your redesign is complete?

3. This must be the most important project for someone: make it someone’s priority.
Program Staff: Web project probably isn’t as important as the substance of your work.
Communications: Trying to integrate web work with other organizational communications.
In-House Web Staff: Working on daily content and strategy, hard to focus on long-term project
Outside Consultants: Juggling w/ other clients

3. This must be the most important project for someone: make it someone’s priority. ( continued )
Program Staff: make it be part of deliverables
Communications: offload some other tasks to someone else, outside consultant
In-House Web Staff: Block out time; interns to do some routine tasks
Outside Consultants: financial incentives for meeting deadlines

3. This must be the most important project for someone: make it someone’s priority. ( continued )
Person in charge: project manager (whether it’s in the job description or not)
Problem-solver
Decision-maker
Stakeholder herder
Consensus-builder
Deadline dominatrix

4. You MUST know your audience better than anyone else.
Your site probably has multiple audiences, but who is the most important one?
Who is it today? Who isn’t there, despite your best efforts? How might it change in the next 3-5 years?
Don’t let web firm guide this: you must do the work to find out if you don’t already know: surveys, user testing, analytics.

Rolling your own is fine, but do you really need to?
I’m a bad example :
custom-built content management system (CMS)
back-end customer relationship management (CRM).
Why? started building our own when we couldn’t afford what was out there; web developer builds exactly what we need

Rolling your own is fine, but do you really need to? ( continued )
I’m a good example :
WordPress (formerly blogger) for the blog
Democracy in Action for e-newsletter signup, advocacy tools.
Why? I knew there were tools that were more than adequate for us, wouldn’t allow my developer to tinker.

Content is king. And queen. And the whole frakkin’ royal court.
Know your audience, know what they’re there to read.
What can people find at your site that they cannot find anywhere else?
What do people expect to find at your site that’s not currently there?
Your audience probably doesn’t have your expertise
Keep things jargon-free, industry-speak free, acronym-free (my site: problem is legalese – what’s yours?)
Use friends who know nothing about topic for feedback

Content is king. And queen. And the whole frakkin’ royal court. ( continued )
Write and display your content for an internet audience.
No PDFs.
Information architecture help if you have anything beyond a basic brochure site.
Make content searchable.
Accessibility guidelines: no excuse for lack of accessibility : moral if not legal imperative, will help with SEO, mobile use, etc.

7. Having the latest bells and whistles isn’t the most important thing
Simplicity and usability are highly underrated.
Everything you add should have a function:
Is it important enough to be part of your navigation menu? The fewer choices the better
If you add Facebook and Twitter buttons, is there a staff member who will actually use Facebook and tweet on your organization’s behalf? Same with a blog: whose job is it to blog regularly?
Everyone who’s done sites for a while has made a Flash mistake: what is the next big no-no?
Midwestern cool

8. Trust your instincts: don’t let lack of expertise derail confidence in your own judgment
If you know your audience, have done content homework, and ensured everything has a purpose, then you’re an expert on your site’s audience.
Don’t pay by the hour, design process so that you must be satisfied every step of the way without taking financial hit.
Ask for multiple drafts, regular check-ins in at multiple stages so you can troubleshoot before entire project derailed.
Don’t fear saying no or starting over if you have to.

9. Document, document, document
If you left your job today, would someone else be able to complete the project?
If you changed web firms for your next redesign, how would they keep from reinventing the wheel?
Internet history is ephemeral: are you doing screen captures, saving documentation of each iteration of your site?

Redesign every day.
What dynamic content should be part of your site?
Build in last-changed date for every page: incentive to regularly review
Redesign process should include post-project testing, analytics, review timeline
What mini, low-cost project can you do in the next six months?
A website is never, ever done! Nature of the beast.
Change your copyright date – obvious, yet oft neglected.

Resources
NTEN 501 Tech Meetups & Conference: http://www.nten.org/techclub & http://www.nten.org/ntc
http://www.idealware.org/
http://www.advomatic.com/blogs/julie-blitzer/the-web-development-process-for-newbies
http://www.netsquared.org/
http://progressiveexchange.org/

Thanks! Julie Blitzer http://advomatic.com/julie @zhuli Paula Brantner http:// workplacefairness.org @pbrantner Erin Hofteig http:// middlecoastllc.com @jadesfire

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Netroots Nation #NN10: How to Plan for Your Website Redesign

by Julie Blitzer on Jul 22, 2010

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Netroots Nation #NN10: How to Plan for Your Website Redesign — Presentation Transcript