Prepare to scroll.
We ventured a tad from our usual client base to create this new website for Hootville neighbour and fellow dog lover Dr Anne Hartican.
Dr Hartican specialises in workplace culture, leadership and injecting humanity into organisations.
If you have a workplace issue perhaps you’ll scroll down and complete the People and Culture Map.
Is your website incontinent?
Not an everyday question yet a worthy one for any CEO who considers herself worthy of the acronym.
An incontinent website is one that leaks. The chief concern of online marketers is whether their website leaks money but websites can leak all manner of other things: bookings, support, donations, job applications, media coverage, membership renewals, corporate partnerships.
Anytime your website has the chance but fails to deliver these to you it is leaking. Chances are your website is downright incontinent. Let me explain it in human terms.
This guy is leaking your sales. And doesn’t even care.
Let’s say you employed a receptionist. Let’s say that that receptionist let phone calls go unanswered, greeted incomers with indifference, pointed people in the wrong direction and displayed no passion about your organisation. She’s a leak.
Let’s say you employed a lead salesperson (left). Let’s say that your lead salesperson held no knowledge of your products, knew nothing of how your product bested the opposition product and regularly wandered off in the middle of a transaction to check his Tindr account. He’s a leak.
As CEO you’d recognise that these people were not fulfilling their jobs and were indeed costing you money. (They’d also be costing you reputation and future business.) Action would be taken so your organisation could flourish. Well it’s the same with your website. Right now, it’s likely to be leaking money and donations, volunteers, job applicants, partnerships, bequests and clients. As CEO you need to stop this.
Last week Brett trained 15 or so communications people from various aged care service providers, some of them well-known, others small. One thing they all had in common was the need for their website to perform exquisitely for people considering placing themselves or their loved one at their nursing homes. This is a clear and reasonable objective.
Is this enough to persuade them?
Yet few of the websites featured well produced videos of the facilities, the staff or happy residents. It was possible for browsers – likely to be highly motivated and hungry for advice – to come to a website and be seduced by nothing more than a still image and some plain text. This is unlikely to satisfy a ‘shopper’ at a time when he is desperate for information and reassurance. This is utterly insufficient for somebody making a life-changing decision.
Every time someone comes to such a website and leaves without so much as making an enquiry, leave alone a purchase, the website has leaked money. The CEO must mandate action.
This site is leaking students, money and reputation.
We recently looked at the course information page of an RTO (left). Entire diploma courses were described with 50 or so words of text with no information about course structure, costs or future career options. We ‘met’ none of the lecturers or current students. We did not see the facilities or get a sense of the philosophy of the institution.
In a hyper-competitive world of vocational education it is unlikely that a prospective student will take it upon herself to call up the RTO and request more information. (Perhaps a nice brochure.) Instead she will do what we all do – Google away and find someone better. Once again we have a website leaking money and students and opportunity.
Every CEO – corporate, nonprofit or government – aims to measure the performance of her organisation through data analysis and reporting. While it is possible to measure customer satisfaction and the quantity of incoming telephone calls it is impossible to measure the money, bookings, support, donations, applications and partnerships that your current website is costing you. But we can guess…
Stop right now and take 10 minutes to assess your website. Write down five of your important, distinct audiences then visit your website and see how well these audiences people are catered for.
Can they find a part of your website that is designed especially for then? Does it have enough information to satisfy their curiosity? Does it answer the frequently asked questions regarding costs, structures, waiting times, quality of your service?
Do you try to seduce people with only words and still images or are there videos, eBooks and webinars? Do you charm and empathise? Do you illuminate and simplify?
Place yourselves in the audiences’ shoes and Google what they might Google – will they find you at all? Why haven’t you done this before?
You shouldn’t even need these!
There are dozens of other ways your website is leaking. Whether it be potential email subscribers, media coverage, renewals, donors, volunteers or staff every leak is costly and makes your job more difficult. The right communications person recognises this and is willing to call a halt to proceedings and ask the question: “Are we doing enough to turn browsers into buyers or are we leaking?” That question applies no matter what you’re selling.
Websites are not brochures on the Internet nor are they tools at your disposal. They are 24-hours-a-day employees and they need to work for you as only they can – endlessly, at virtually no cost and in more roles than any human could ever fulfil. It’s time to performance manage your website and deal with its current incontinence.
A long time ago we created and edited the website for Mental Illness Fellowship Victoria. One day Gareth who then worked for us (now happily shivering in Canada) realised the website was leaking not money but volunteers.
A simple leak-stopping device.
People who were inspired to donate their time to the organisation after office hours were told on the website to call the next day. Gareth suspected that many good intentions failed to rise with the sun the next day so he created a simple web form allowing people to express their interest when they felt the inspiration.
In a month we had over 140 completed email forms; a total which dwarfed the number of phone calls the volunteer coordinator usually received in three months. Plugging leaks isn’t always so easy nor are the results always so dramatic but there is no excuse to not identify what your current website and online communications are costing you.
How many high quality job applicants are failing to submit their CVs because the employment section of your website fails to sell them on the idea of working for you above the competition? When we created the website for Inner South Community Health we were pleased that the client took the opportunity to promote its values, its benefits and supports for employees along with testimonials as a way to make sure people were encouraged to spend the time to apply online. Leak plugged.
The Internet isn’t just a phase we’re going through.
To dramatically improve your online communications book a place at Hootville’s online savvy workshop book your own anywhere anytime. Every day you don’t is another lost opportunity.
Many feel this Facebooker’s pain.
We recently saw a Facebook post in which a clutch of nonprofit communications professionals commiserated with each other over a shared experience: developing a website.
“Honestly,” some may ask. “There are a million websites. How tough could developing a site be?”
Let me put it into perspective. Have you given birth? To sextuplets? Have you climbed Mt Everest? On horseback? That’s the level of challenge we’re talking about.
But why, in a world with so many websites and so much advice is it so often so painful? We think the blame lies evenly between web developers and their clients.
Too many web developers promise too much and neglect to explain the mountain of work a website build entails for both parties in a bid to get the business. Then they try to minimise the development hours to maximise profits. Many developers don’t care about your search engine results or the user experience as they are long gone by then. They simply try to build a website that looks good, meets the brief, has some functions and doesn’t fall over. Few are great communicators. Fewer still come to the project from a marketing perspective.
The clients on the other hand are obsessed with cost, glacially slow to make decisions, start from a position of blissful ignorance and lack a clear vision of what they want.
One’s quite enough thankyou.
Thus, in our longest ever blog post we present to you our advice on how to make your website development (relatively) painless and result in a site worth visiting. Please note – building a website is still on par with giving birth to a solitary child or climbing Mt Everest on foot. Everything here is based on our experience building sites for clients in the real world, for real money, with real deadlines.
Set your sites high: your website should be your best performing employee. Don’t even bother to develop a new website if it’s not going to be a dramatic improvement on your existing website.
Your next website should: take donations, payments, bookings, memberships and queries. It should act as a tour guide, giving visitors thorough tours of your facilities programs, staff and clients.
Your website should act like a spruiker drawing people to you via great search engine optimisation that lands you on the first page of Google. Suddenly strangers are calling.
Your website’s resources should act not just as a library or archive but be an instant demonstration of your authority and expertise. Get blogging.
A comprehensive media page with media contacts, spokesperson bios, media releases, key policies and platforms, imagery and video will help your website act as a publicist.
Many nonprofits struggle to recruit well. How well do you present your work culture to prospective employees on the employment section of your website? Are all the jobs listed and described? Are your benefits, policies and procedures there? Will I see testimonials – preferably on video – from happy existing staff members? Can I apply effectively online? Get this right and suddenly your website is an HR assistant.
When you build a website that is more than just a brochure on the World Wide Web it extracts more value from the time and effort you’re about to invest. It also justifies a greater investment in the first place. You will never hire an employee that can do as much for you. And your website does it for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the next five to 10 years. Keep that in mind as you hold your breath to assess the developer’s quote.
Consider a suite of websites. Rather than creating one website that captures everything you do consider creating a series of sites, allowing you to group and highlight one aspect of your business at a time. This is particularly important if you have a complex offering to the world. Some clients we had offered everything from child care to aged care, ESL classes to STD testing.
Like humans, Google would like to understand exactly what your site is all about and that’s difficult if your site contains everything from the 2005 annual report to the results of the recent car raffle. Spin off some big campaigns or services.
We followed this advice at Hootville by creating standalone websites for our six training workshops. We did this to maximise the search engine optimisation for each training workshop as well to give us the opportunity to promote the hell out of one particular service at a time.
Relax – six websites does not equal six times the budget if a common structure and design is maintained.
Maximise visual appeal to win hearts, minds and wallets.
Pictures tell 1000 words: we are highly visual animals and only becoming more visually-orientated in this online world. What we are trying to say is your website has to look hot. Taylor Swift hot. One Direction hot. Dame Helen Mirren hot. George Clooney hot. Puppies playing with kittens hot.
Invest in photography that will make your website shine. You probably don’t have that on hand so you’ll have to invest in fresh photography, stock photography or a combination thereof.
It is easy to mock the stock but increasingly there are images available that look like real people in real situations. Stock photography has the advantage of allowing you to know what you’re going to get before you get it. That said, authenticity is pretty hard to beat so if you can invest in a photographer to capture your essence your website will be the beneficiary.
Similarly any great website will utilise high-quality, brief videos. Use them to provide testimonials from clients. Use them to give a tour of your school or aged care facility. Use them to allow prospective students to meet their future teachers. Video works.
Meet with prospective developers and gently quiz them.
Questions to ask your prospective website developers:
How long have you been developing websites? Call us ageist but don’t hire someone without real experience in developing websites and managing projects. Your nephew is NOT the right person for this job. Nor your niece.
Used & recommended by Hootville
Do you have a preferred content management system? We’ve blogged about this before but all our websites are developed using WordPress as the content management system (CMS). The CMS is the software that allows one to build and update one’s website. It’s the system through which you will add words, pictures, new pages, navigation. Many developers are very attached to just one content management system and we do not present ourselves as experts on all of them. We will say this however – we have never needed to do anything for any of our clients that WordPress would not accommodate. No matter what you want your site to look like, whatever you want it to do, someone working from their mother’s basement has created the technology that will work beautifully with WordPress. For every problem someone has published an answer.
WordPress is so sophisticated it is actually simple to use. We regularly meet nonprofits that use antiquated, second-rate CMSs which makes simple updates so frustrating and time-consuming that they rarely bother.
Warning: if your prospective developer says that they have their own special content management system that they and they alone have developed, pack up your possessions and back out of the room slowly. That is a deal breaker.
Page one baby. Page one.
How will you ensure that we get good search engine results? Ultimately search engine optimisation (SEO) is your responsibility but there are many things a developer can do to create a strong foundation for great Google results. This might be beyond developer’s skills or interest. It will certainly add to the time they will need to devote to your site so don’t be surprised to be presented with this is an optional extra.
What features would you recommend? As noted at the top of this (outstanding) blog post your website should be hard-working with features and functionalities to lighten the load for the humans in your organisation.
Unless you are particularly web-savvy you need a developer with ideas suggestions and the ability to communicate them.
A good developer has thoughts on what you might need. He or she should not be prescriptive but they should have ideas and recommendations. Don’t expect them to be au fait with every plug-in / app you mention – there are too many to be familiar with them all.
Something sexy seemed appropriate.
Do you provide the graphic design for websites? While you may have to supply some key aspects of your website’s aesthetic such as logos and colours, it is desirable that the developer work with a graphic designer with whom they have worked before. This makes the process smoother.
Do you provide copywriting? Usually our clients provide the words to their website. Usually these words are not optimised for websites in terms of search engine results, objectives or tone. If a developer can recommend a copywriter or editor it may lift the quality of the user experience. That said, be sure that that person is the right one for you. Unlike graphic design it is easy for you to hire your own gun copywriter and have them work with the developer.
The bone structure of a great website.
Can you help us develop the sitemap? A sitemap maps how your content / information will be categorised. It’s crucial if you want your site to be logical and predictable to visitors. Some developers are very passive and work with the sitemap provided by the client. This is unlikely to be the best possible sitemap.
As always, you want your developer to suggest improvements to your sitemap. These suggestions might be small – suggesting you create a section called Publications in which all your newsletters, annual reports, brochures will reside rather than have them scattered across the site.
The suggestion may be a smarter way to present the array of services that you offer, perhaps grouping them according to audience or geography. An experienced developer who cares about the user experience can come in very handy.
Do you work alone? There are some very clever clogs out there but it would be unusual for one person working alone to develop a great website for you. He or she properly needs a team of people to deliver you a great site. That said, you need one person who can take responsibility for this long, complicated undertaking.
How long will it take? We generally take between 12 to 16 weeks to build a site. Certainly it is possible to develop a website faster but that takes a firm commitment from both client and developer. Do not think that you make yourself a more appealing client by suggesting a six or 12 month timeframe. This immediately suggests to the developer that you are not urgent or serious and creates the real likelihood that you will be placed on the back burner.
We all know that we leave things to the last minute, so by giving yourself 52 weeks to develop a website you’re really saying let’s do nothing for 40 weeks and then have a rush to the finish line. You need your new website now so get on with it.
Great trainers are hard to find.
Do you provide training so we can update our own website? A good developer should be able to provide training for your people so that you can take over the day-to-day running of your site. We go to great lengths to avoid creating dependency with our clients which is another reason we use WordPress. It is so simple clients are able to make 92% of the updates themselves and choose between us and 100,000 WordPress-savvy developers for the remaining 8%. Once again, if your developer tries to lock you in to working with them for the rest of time fake a severe illness, change your name and leave town.
We mentioned at the outset the blame for website development lies equally with client and developer so…
Here’s how to be a perfect client thus placing 100% of any blame at the foot of the developer:
Go the whole hog: have you ever eaten at a new restaurant, found the service to be perfunctory, the food mediocre, the experience unmemorable and then returned six months later to see if it had improved? Of course not. Who has time for that? It’s the same with your website – it needs to impress people from the first visit.
Many nonprofits are presenting themselves to the world with a website that is third rate. It is time for a dramatic upgrade, so do not waste your time and money by opting for a site that is somewhat better than your current site.
Don’t kid yourself and tell the developer that you want a new site with some improvements and that you’ll get around to the rest of it in a year or two. You won’t. Your visitors need your site to be fantastic now.
And yes going the whole hog creates more work, more decisions and potentially more headaches. That’s showbiz.
Develop clear briefs: some of our prospective clients come to us with nothing in writing about what they want. Others seem to have borrowed a brief from NASA. Ideally you should have a draft site map, a list of features and functionalities, some key search terms for which you would like to rank well and a short list of exemplar websites that can be used as a guide. That’s a good start.
The exemplar sites do not need to be in your sector or even in English – they just have to embody some traits that you would like to see on your site. Note – this should be beyond simple aesthetics. Perhaps they have a fantastic homepage design you want to emulate. Maybe their booking system is A+.
Explain in writing the key audiences and priorities. Eg: “we target 18-24yo school leavers looking for vocational employment. We need the site to encourage them to book a phone appointment with our sales team.” This should influence design, copy and technology choices.
Spend some money: do not in your first telephone call with the prospective developer, ask her how much it costs to develop a website. At the very least, resist this because it makes you look like a rube. It is also a very difficult question to answer as the developer has no real idea as to the scale or size of your prospective site. It also signals to the developer that you don’t give a damn about quality only budget. And while we’re talking money – and yes we are biased – your website will be the best investment you ever make in a staff member so don’t scrimp.
If you have a tiny budget – anything with only four digits – be upfront with the developer. In all likelihood he or she is self-employed and doesn’t have time to waste on proposals that will amount to nothing.
This is how you look to your developer.
Hurry up: nonprofits are notoriously slow at making decisions. They are collaborative by nature and very risk averse. Creating a website is the culmination of hundreds of decisions big and small. To run each decision – about the template, the features, the functionalities, the words, the imagery, the colours – past a dozen people at a weekly meeting is entirely unrealistic. 100% of our clients have promised us the materials we need to build their site by a certain deadline and 92% of them have failed. Another reason to hurry up? Your current site is bollocks.
Stop caring about everybody else’s opinion: decisions should be made by the smallest number of people possible, ideally people with some idea of what is possible from a website. Asking random colleagues, competitors and consumers for their opinions will simply solicit opinions – not knowledge. It won’t make your site any better. You don’t need 12 people debating whether a button should be green or blue.
Bolt on this 3rd party donation technology to your site.
Do your own research on third-party applications and providers: this is a little technical but consider this: let’s say you drive a Honda. How nice for you. If you stop to think about it you understand that while Honda might make the panels for your car, the engine, the steering and the transmission it probably doesn’t manufacture the radio, the windscreen wipers, the tires and other lesser components that add up to your Honda. Honda executives had to choose the radio, the windscreen wipers, the tires from an array of third-party providers. As you drive to yoga in your Honda, you don’t care. It’s a Honda. It’s the same for your website.
Many third party providers can provide donation-taking technology. We love GiveNow. There are many email marketing options. We love MailChimp. You’re going to embed videos onto your new website (we hope) and we recommend using YouTube or Vimeo. These are all third-party providers.
Choose the right third-party providers and you’ll provide your visitors with a seamless experience and your website editor with high functioning mental health. Choose the wrong ones and your website will be clunky to use in a nightmare to manage. Of course your developer will make recommendations but it’s up to you to independently research every choice. There are plenty of fora and sites on which nerds gather to bitch so you shouldn’t be short on information.
Stay in touch: the erstwhile client and faithful developer should talk twice or three times a week. More than that and you will be a pain in the backside. Much less than that and you risk being lowered on the list of priorities. Note: clients understandably judge a website based solely on what they can see from the user’s perspective. That’s the tip of the iceberg and developers work very hard behind the scenes to make a website look and perform as a website should. Some aspects of web development are simple but others can take painstaking hours. Visible progress can be slow, especially at the start of the project.
Moss garden in Kyoto. Est 687. (Pre-internet.)
After launch: a new website is a bit like a well tended garden. For a while you can sit back and enjoy the view but if you don’t maintain it your oasis soon becomes a jungle. You might need to do some simple tasks such as raking leaves and watering plants but eventually you will need to prune and replant. Here endeth the metaphor. What we’re saying is you need to monitor your website’s performance, constantly add new content, kill the old, and ensure that the website is reflecting your status quo and meeting the expectations of visitors.
What your new website needs more than anything is traffic. There are two ways to do that: 1. Google and 2. email.
Of these two traffic drivers by far the more important is email. While Google will direct people to you once, email has more chance of bringing more people to your site more often for repeat visits. Whatever day you send out your email telling people that there is new and interesting content on your website will be the busiest day for your website. We promise.
To summarise:
Be ambitious for your new site – it is your window to the world. Give it the time, money and attention it needs to be a knockout.
Select your developer well. As with romantic relationships, your fate is predominantly in their hands.
Dive into the digital world. There is no shortage of advice, information and reviews out there. Become an informed client to get the best result.
Employ your website. Think carefully of the role your website fills, the tasks it can complete and the business objectives it can help you achieve.
Peruse some of the sites we have developed. If you like the look of them you know what to do. Call Brett and arrange a meeting: 0414 713 802.
Websites, SEO, social media and email marketing.
Get the skills you need to make the online world your own at our Online Savvy workshop.
And please – share this post with others if their website act needs improving.
NBN or no NBN, the internet just got bigger courtesy of Hootville which has recently developed four websites for Australian nonprofits working in community health, age services, vocational educational training (VET) and family violence.
Serious issues don't oblige creators to be boring.
First up let’s meet familyviolencehumeregion.com.au which brings together the many agencies and institutions that support people experiencing family violence in Victoria’s Hume region. (Think Shepparton, Benalla, Mansfield.)
The website aims to provide a one-stop shop for professionals or community members in need of assistance – thus the services directory. We aimed for a look that wasn’t dour or depressing – thus the colours and degree of slick. We aimed for a site that could further synchronise the sector – thus the calendar of professional training and development. We did pretty well.
Try attracting young students with an old website.
Next we head into the competitive world of VET in which Inner Melbourne VET Cluster competes. It now competes with the aid of a gorgeous new website. Let us be frank – this site is HUGE and complex – lots of different programs requiring explanation, bookings, payments and – oh – there’s a site within the site – but that’s another story.
This is one nonprofit organisation website that dramatically reduces admin time to deal with take bookings and payments. It also goes much further to persuade students, teachers, referrers and employers that IMVC is the right VET provider option.
Striking images dominate the homepage
Finally we head to the cool, gritty, diverse north of Melbourne where Merri Community Health Service lives. This is another large site for a broad-based community health service that aims to be inviting, retailesque and informative. The Merri HR team is also benefitted from a far superior online job application system.
This site utilises online videos which Hootville produced. The unscripted videos are far more than straight talking heads and are scattered appropriately across the site but also live together here. Could you do with some videos like this? Unlike these videos, yours need not utilise Brett’s acting skills. (Top video 1.45m in – cue Oscar buzz.)
The sector needs to recruit and retain like never before.
And then there’s this website campaigning for better aged care funding for client Leading Age Services Australia (LASA). The URL was Brett’s idea – there are three million Australians aged 65yo and older. That’s why the boost to age services is so vital. We also created an election specific tool allowing participants to email their local MPs.
All these sites are built to last – the WordPress content management system (CMS) we use means that these sites could last a decade. WordPress is most likely to be able to ‘play’ with any and all new developments. WordPress is sophisticated enough to be simple to update. We always include training in basic website maintenance. We recommend hosts but take not a penny from them. Post-launch our clients can choose between us and thousands of other WordPress-literate developers.
A bad website costs you more than you can ever calculate: staff, clients, donors, members, partners and influence. If your nonprofit website isn’t up to scratch stop wasting time wondering about how to take the first step and talk to Brett: 03 9017 1062.
The site we built for the Australian age services sector campaign. We also helped develop the campaign itself.
Nothing Hootville does is more complex than creating new websites. (See our latest collection at the end of this article.) It touches upon every aspect of an organisation, requires contributions and cooperation from every department, involves a thousand decisions by inexperts about specific, complex webby issues.
Everyone has an opinion but few people start with a clear criteria about what they want – though they know what they hate. Good outcomes are far from guaranteed.
As in marriage, satisfaction is far from guaranteed
No wonder a recent post in HubSpot blog stated that one third of 152 in-house marketers were disatisfied with their brand spanking new websites. Gosh. Websites are too expensive, too important and too resource-intensive for 33% of us to be left with a hangover.
Poster Mark Volpe provides a few ways to avoid disapointment. We’ll throw in these of our own.
1. Treat your website as an employee. Like a human employee, websites should have functions to fulfill such as taking booking and payments, promoting volunteering, automatically taking new memberships, steering email enquiries to the appropriate department, media liasion centre and so on. Suddenly your new site should be measured against much more specific criteria. Most sites don’t go far beyond providing lots of words. (More on this on Brett’s upcoming article for the Fundraising Institute of Australia magazine.)
2. Don’t consult any more broadly than required by law. It’s not politically correct but we are dead against more than two or three people throwing their two cent pieces in the spoiled broth, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor. Honestly; how many people in your organisation advise your accountant or lawyer? There are too many decisions to make (starting with choice of content management system) to explain the selection criteria to inexperts who are generally more concerned with aesthetics than functionalities. We’d like to see the CEO and senior marketing and communications people involved. That’s about it.
We built this for community health service Inner South Community Health Service
3. Use third party providers. Your developer or ISP provides a free eNewsletter function that can be a part of your new site. Great. Even greater; it’s free! Well guess what kids; it’s free for a reason: it’s bollocks. Same can go for online donation technology, publication display, polls, embedded videos, membership systems, online stores, ticket booking systems and so on. Your developer should knowingly help you browse through the options but should also listen to your opinions. Companies that specialise in providing a specific function (say MailChimp and its eNewsletter system) generally create superior products which are more regularly updated. Your website might intergrate four or five applications (or functions) provided by third parties. (Are you getting a sense of how many decisions you have to make, how many issues you have to come to grips with and why you want a small decision-making team?)
4. Don’t trust your developer. Imagine you are building your home. Would you simply say to the builder: “Build us whatever you usually build.”? Of course not. Anyone who has ever engaged a tradesman knows that unless you specify every detail you will get what suits the tradesman.
Sure the best tradies will guide you through each decision. (Of course when they do, we get impatient and complain at the size of the bill.)
Family violence alliance website by Hootville.
Most times though, you’ll get the easiest, most profitable range of options for the tradie. Web developers are no different plus usually come to your project from a technical perspective – not a marketing perspective, a communications perspective or a PR perspective.
The best outcomes come from being an informed client, willing to research, listen, evaluate and communicate.
Recent sites we’ve built:
For a regional family violence alliance.
For a community health service.
For another community health service.
For an RTO and VET provider.
For the age services sector.
For a little side business we run.
This is the sort of stuff we talk about in Online Savvy 101.