The digital presence of your nonprofit organization revolves around your website, making it a vital cornerstone. As the gateway to your organization, your website holds immense power to create a lasting first impression that can positively impact donor retention, volunteer recruitment, and the expansion of your outreach efforts.
Website Design Best Practices That You Must Know in 2023
Developing a nonprofit website can feel overwhelming, with a plethora of decisions to make. You may find yourself grappling with various questions, such as determining which information to prioritize, organizing data effectively, increasing traffic to critical pages, and more.
However, rather than allowing these inquiries to intimidate you, it is critical to comprehend that crafting a convincing story about your nonprofit is essential for attracting and engaging potential donors and volunteers. This will aid you in effectively communicating with your target audience, in tern driving traffic to your website.
Below, we’ll walk you through the 5 web design best practices to improve the brand visibility of your nonprofit organization’s website in 2023.
1. Choose a Top-rated Content Management System (CMS)
A widespread assumption is that you need to spend a great deal of money to design a website. This is far from the truth. Since, if you are a nonprofit organization with limited resources or budget, you will need a content management system (CMS), or website builder, that is efficient and capable of expediting your overall website designing process.
With a CMS, managing digital content is simple because of the user-friendly interface. The CMS will handle the menial work so you do not have to waste time writing complex & time-consuming code for your website.
Although there are numerous generic CMS systems available, it is important to choose a nonprofit-specific CMS for the success of your website. By assisting you in effectively communicating your mission and generating donations, your nonprofit CMS platform will have crucial capabilities for organizing fundraisers, events, campaigns, etc. that can streamline your nonprofit’s operations.
2. Brand your NonProfit Website Consistently
When a visitor lands on your nonprofit website, you only have a few seconds to make a positive first impression. Thus, it is crucial that your website not only be visually appealing but also informative. To achieve this, consider personalizing your website instead of using a generic template that has been utilized on countless other sites.
Your nonprofit’s website is one of the key components of your outreach strategy, and it is essential to design it with a cohesive aesthetic that aligns with your brand message. Consistency in style, tone, and structure across all pages will enable users to anticipate your organization’s offerings accurately. Moreover, an aesthetically pleasing and unified website bolsters your nonprofit’s credibility.
Creating a captivating logo is an essential first step in establishing your website’s branding. To create an instantly recognizable logo, opt for a balance of simplicity and sophistication, using colors that stand out. Place your logo prominently on your website, allowing visitors to easily identify your organization and link to other pages, such as your donation page.
Finally, incorporating high-quality images and videos is a crucial element in capturing the interest of your website visitors. These multimedia components enable visitors to gain a better understanding of your organization’s real-world impact. By showcasing your nonprofit’s work, you can transform infrequent website visitors into consistent donors, making this branding strategy even more valuable.
3. Add Accessibility Features to your Nonprofit Website
Ensuring that your nonprofit’s website is accessible to all visitors is crucial in avoiding unintentional exclusion of potential donors and narrowing your audience. In addition, websites that comply with accessibility standards often receive higher rankings in search engine results. To create a positive user experience, consider incorporating the following accessibility features:
Accessibility Widget: With the aid of an accessibility widget, the user can easily modify your website content to suit their needs. For example, they can quickly change the font style, highlight links, increase or decrease the font size, etc.
Legible Font: If your website’s text is either too large or small, or if it has a complex style, visitors may become easily distracted. To ensure a positive reading experience, it is crucial to present your content in an easy-to-read and understandable format.
4. Boost the Speed of your Nonprofit Website
In the modern era, nonprofit websites are expected to be dynamic, informative, and fast, as visitors are unlikely to remain on a slow-loading website for more than a few seconds. With access to an endless array of websites, visitors will quickly move on to another site that delivers results more quickly if your website fails to provide immediate information.
A few actionable tips to improve your site speed include:
Optimizing Images: Websites’ image download times are frequently the longest. By downsizing and compressing your photos and using next-generation file types like WebP or AVIF, you can speed up your page loading time.
Keeping Plugins and Javascript to a Minimum: Plugins, Javascript, and other code additions can provide your website with exciting new functionalities. However, it is crucial to only utilize essential components, as an excessive amount can decrease your website’s speed.
5. Share your Nonprofit Organization’s Story with your Audience
When creating a website for a nonprofit organization, it is crucial to recognize that it is more than just a platform for online donations. Instead, it is a powerful tool that can be used to establish an emotional connection with both current and prospective supporters. Through effective storytelling, your nonprofit can expand its audience, converting casual website visitors into loyal supporters and volunteers.
You can bring your nonprofit’s story to life by:
Creating an “About” Page that provides a thorough overview of your organization, including its core mission, the work it has accomplished so far, and any other information that is valuable for visitors who want to learn more about your nonprofit organization.
Adding impactful images of volunteers at work, programs you organized, etc. to make your site visitors see the impact your nonprofit organization has and why it’s a great cause to support.
Creating a “Testimonials” page that features quotes from people your organization has served. This increases donors’ trust in your nonprofit and motivates them to contribute to your cause.
Ready to Boost Your Digital Presence Through Web Design Best Practices in 2023?
Applying these web design best practices to your nonprofit’s website can streamline communication with your target audience. By utilizing these practices, your website can effectively grab the attention of your intended audience, motivating them to donate to your cause.
Looking for Expert Assistance?
Hyperlink Media is a team of Web design experts who will assist you in designing a new website for your nonprofit organization. With the best web design practices, we can empower your organization to develop lasting relationships with supporters to advance your mission online.
The core of your construction company’s online presence is its website. Naturally, when potential customers want to learn more about your construction company and the services it provides, they start by visiting your website. Visitors will evaluate your business based on your website and web presence including if the website looks normal to the regular eye. A lack of website maintenance can lead to a host of issues and problems associated with your website.
This can be segmented into security upgrades, revised or updated content, optimization, and visitor satisfaction. These services are essential for attracting and keeping consumers because they boost your construction website’s SEO and Google rankings.
While most business owners are aware of how important having a website is, they frequently just create their business website, launch it, and then forget about it, paying no attention to maintenance and upkeep. Similar to just about any device, your general contractor website needs maintenance to function properly and to prevent loss of traffic, conversions, and, worst of all, business estimates or quotations.
Creating an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly, platform-responsive website is an essential step for letting the market know about your construction business. However, ongoing maintenance is crucial if you want to boost the visibility of your construction company’s website.
3 Reasons Why You Should Consider Web Maintenance for Your Construction Company
Website maintenance is the process of frequently monitoring the website of your construction business for problems and inaccuracies, to keep it relevant and updated. Making sure that your construction website functions flawlessly across all platforms, devices, and browsers is the fundamental goal of website maintenance.
You should perform periodic website audits and timely upgrades to keep your construction website operational at all times.
Below are three major reasons why website maintenance is important for your construction company.
1. Increase Security and Protection
Never undervalue its importance or believe that your construction website is immune to cyberattacks. In reality, the necessity of website maintenance is primarily due to security concerns.
These statistics demonstrate that hackers are constantly looking for websites with security flaws or vulnerabilities that they may attack. The most common method they use to access a website is to take advantage of security flaws in out-of-date software, plugins, and themes.
Keeping your construction business website up-to-date and clear of any potential security risks is always a good idea. The procedure for backing up your company’s website is yet another crucial component of security. Statistics indicate that approximately 68% of websites lack a data recovery strategy. However, when you employ website maintenance services, you’ll have a backup plan in place already. So, if your company’s website is hacked or unexpectedly goes down, your web support and maintenance team can easily and quickly get it back to normal.
2. Enhanced Website User Experience
What would be your reaction if you came across a slow-loading website, having several broken links and unwanted pop-up ads? Severe Disappointment, right? You’d undoubtedly want to leave the website instantly!
Now, envision a beautiful site with a conversion-focused layout, and consumer-oriented and informative content. Additionally, it is easy to navigate. What would be your reaction this time? – you’ll want to learn more about the company by exploring the website further, won’t you? Well, that’s what your general contractor website design should strive for – a pleasant user experience.
An efficient website maintenance strategy increases construction lead generation and conversion rates. Customers are motivated to engage with a business whose website significantly influences their decisions. It implies that you should adopt efficient web maintenance practices to enhance the user experience on the website of your construction company.
You should ensure that all the links on your construction website are active, the content is relevant for your target audience, the loading speed is fast, and your website is mobile-optimized. The correct contact details and address of your construction company must also be updated on your website because inaccurate information portrays your company poorly, resulting in a negative experience.
3. Construction Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Customers aren’t the only ones who access your construction company’s website; other technology like crawlers also do so. Google effectively performs an analysis of your construction website via bots that search for specific data to determine the value of your site. This is accomplished by assessing the website layout, keyword optimization, categorization, and, of course, errors or inaccuracies in your construction website.
For instance, your website’s SEO ranking would suffer greatly if duplicate content or broken links are detected during crawling. This could make it difficult for your customers to discover your website on search engines. Therefore, SEO is more than just a buzzword; it is a crucial component that ensures that your company’s website continues to appear at the top of Google search results.
You must keep your construction website up-to-date if you want it to appear on the first page of the search engine results. This includes routinely monitoring your website for broken links, updating informational and interesting content, ensuring that all pages are loading properly, evaluating your website’s responsiveness to mobile devices, etc.
Attracting the right traffic to your construction website is the key to your company’s website success. As a result, updating your construction company’s website and making sure that all necessary optimizations are in effect will help it rank higher in search engine results, drive more visitors, and improve conversion rates.
Are you ready to employ Website Maintenance Services for your Construction Company?
Updating the website for your construction business may not be at the forefront of your list of priorities. However, the success of your construction business is directly linked to website maintenance.
The secret to establishing a good online reputation is website maintenance. Regular maintenance of your construction website will keep it operating at top efficiency, reduce or eliminate potential security vulnerabilities, and will ensure that your visitors get all the information they need.
Regular website maintenance is a service that provides the greatest possible user experience. It ensures that your construction website attracts fewer undesirable visitors such as hackers and more desirable traffic in the form of quality customers, high search rankings, and enhanced performance.
Need expert assistance?
Connect with the digital experts of Hyperlinks Media to schedule a FREE consultation to help you maximize the potential of your construction website.
As you’ve decided to build a website and have settled on WordPress as the best software to use for it. You must choose where your site will be hosted before you can even begin to think about what your content will be, how your website will look, or when you’ll be ready to launch it.
There are numerous things to take into consideration while hosting a WordPress website. First of all, you must realize that not all hosting providers or services are built the same way, and the best option will differ for every WordPress content creator. Furthermore, inadequate web hosting can harm your SEO strategy, which can result in poor site loading times, site crashes, security vulnerabilities, and other long-term negative repercussions that will cost you money, time, and resources.
It can be difficult to choose a web hosting provider. You could become overwhelmed and wonder what to look for when every business out there promises endless resources or round-the-clock support.
Given a large number of web hosting companies available, it may be useful to focus just on the most crucial factors when you are refining your search. With that in mind, let’s look at five important things to take into consideration when selecting a web hosting provider that will position your company for online success.
Five factors to take into consideration when choosing a WordPress web host
1. Customer Support Options
Before choosing your web host, you must consider several important factors, including customer support. You must select a WordPress hosting provider that prioritizes customer support, making itself accessible 24/7, and providing prompt resolutions to problems. Working with a host that provides this level of customer service will allow you to relax knowing that whenever you run into a problem that you are unable to fix on your own, assistance will always be available.
While many businesses promise to offer 24/7, high-quality service, it may take them hours or even days to respond to you. Searching for any online customer evaluations or testimonials is a fantastic technique to identify web providers who are likely to keep their promises. You can use this information to assess whether or not a service provider is reliable by looking at the kinds of interactions that actual clients have had with them.
Additionally, it’s preferable to choose a service provider that offers a diverse range of support options, like email, chat, landlines, etc., so you can utilize whichever one is most practical for you at a particular time.
2. Price Ranges and Hosting Plans
When picking a web host, the majority of individuals put the price as their priority. But remember that choosing a cheap solution isn’t always the wisest move, especially not in the long run. A lot of variables, including the quality of service affect the price of web hosting.
While you shouldn’t search for incredibly cheap solutions, you should ensure that you are not overpaying as well. This can be done by comparing several hosting providers’ levels of service against one another’s prices. It’s also essential to see if a host offers room to expand and scale your hosting plan. Your needs change as your company expands, so it’s a smart idea to plan and see if you have the option of upgrading your hosting package.
Additionally, as WordPress is our main focus, you should look for a hosting company that offers WordPress-specific hosting. These hosts will have WordPress running at its best and offer you necessary features like one-click installation, automatic updates, quicker loading times, etc.
Hackers are continually coming up with new ways to use websites to install malware codes to steal their data. Therefore, when selecting a hosting service, security strength is unquestionably something you should consider. Protecting your website from cyber threats is the responsibility of your WordPress hosting provider.
Your WordPress hosting providers must take all appropriate precautions to safeguard your data from unauthorized access, data destruction, or data tampering. The web host provider must use the most advanced cybersecurity measures, such as:
Daily automated backups
Free SSL Certificate
DDoS Protection
Daily system-wide malware scans
Free malware removal from the site
Option to deploy two-factor authentication
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection
4. Prioritize Speed and Reliability
You might lose tens of thousands of dollars in sales with just one downtime incident. Therefore, network uptime and stability are too crucial to overlook. Furthermore, a crucial aspect of your user experience is how quickly a website loads. Your pages need to load incredibly quickly, ideally in just a few seconds. A lot of visitors will depart if the wait time is longer. According to statistics, 40% of users will leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Thus, long loading times result in lost opportunities and lost money.
Therefore, the servers of your web hosting provider must be as reliable as possible, regardless of the level of efficiency, security, and customer support they can deliver.
A reliable hosting provider’s servers should be guaranteed to be up at least 99.9% of the time and should not require unforeseen maintenance. The top hosting providers will also have backup network connectivity, hardware, and software to avoid any unanticipated disruptions. Additionally, you must ensure that your host utilizes a CDN with servers located in the nations that are crucial to your company’s success. Your website will load more quickly for users around the world if the provider has more server locations.
5. Compatibility With Common Plugins and Themes
Plugins are an essential component of every WordPress site since they provide additional features to WordPress. Many companies employ a select few WordPress plugins and themes to provide a distinctive user experience and to offer them an advantage over their rivals. However, your host must be highly compatible with the plug-ins and themes you already use or intend to employ on your website.
When researching potential WordPress hosting providers, ask if they are compatible with specific plugins and themes that your website employs. Each host’s sales or customer support representatives will be upfront and truthful about all plugin-related restrictions or incompatibilities. Keep in mind that this can be especially important if your website utilizes unique plugins or themes. As a result, be sure your hosting provider enables you to install and test as many plugins as you like on your website without any restrictions.
Looking for the ideal host for your WordPress website?
The process of selecting a WordPress web hosting provider may appear difficult. Fortunately, you may locate a WordPress hosting provider that precisely satisfies the needs of your company by using the aforementioned criteria to help you narrow down your options.
Feeling stuck?
Get in touch with the skilled professionals at Hyperlinks Media and schedule a free consultation right away. Our team will make sure you have everything you need to build outstanding WordPress sites that are extremely responsive and reliable.
In a digital and data driven world, it’s crucial that all websites are in compliance with the ADA. Websites that are not designed for and accessible to everyone, could result in the loss of money from future lawsuits.
Website Accessibility for Disabled Users
Many do not realize that while the American Disabilities Act (ADA), requires physical locations to have accommodations for individuals with disabilities, it also extends to the accessibility of websites.
Due to the lack of accessibility, non-compliant websites run the risk of costly lawsuits, which could result in the loss of thousands of dollars. Several businesses have faced charges for their websites lacking the appropriate accommodations such as coding, alt texts, captions and more. As a business, if your site is not within the ADA website compliance regulations, you are essentially a sitting duck, about to be hit with an enormous lawsuit.
accessiBe is completely customizable and created to easily adapt to any style of website design. With several color options, shapes and sizes, and icon suggestions, the accessiBe solutions make websites more user friendly.
accessiBe was created and developed for individuals with disabilities by individuals with disabilities. Due to the help of individuals with epilepsy, blindness, physical dysfunctions and more, accessiBe ensures that websites are not only compliant with the law, but available for all to use.
accessiBe is trusted by and protecting over 3,500 small business and industry leaders alike.
At Hyperlinks Media, we can help set up accessiBe for your website. Here are the details:
Starts at $490 annually with 7-day trial. No credit card is required.
Takes up to 48 hours from initial installation to compliance.
Accessibility statement and certification of performance.
Let’s work together to get your website ADA compliant and digitally accessible to everyone. Contact us today at 281-693-5372 or complete our request form.
A secure socket layer (SSL) certificate is a form of security for sites that collect private information for new leads and existing customers. It allows for a secure connection between the company’s server and the consumer’s device. An easy way to spot a secure site is if its URL begins with https, instead of http, but the difference is about to become much more noticeable.
In the past year, SSLs have been on the rise to being a must-have for a business website. We have known this was coming, and we walked you through an in-depth list of reasons as to why your business needs one, but things are about to heat up.
In January, Chrome began publicly “shaming” websites that served login or payment forms insecurely, and Mozilla Firefox shortly followed suit. In the current version of Chrome, http sites have no visual indicator that they are not secure upon page load. While https sites do feature a “Secure” badge next to their URL, that’s the only true differentiator between an insecure and secure site.
Here’s where it gets scary for businesses: If your site has form fields, but does not have an SSL when Google introduces Chrome 62, your site will display a “Not secure” warning to visitors. That means if you have even something as simple as a “Request a Quote” form, or a “Join Our Mailing List” form, your site will display this ostentatious warning. If you are collecting any private data whatsoever without an SSL, your website will be penalized.
Visitors to your site are not going to want to leave their personal information on your site if it is boldly labeled as “Not secure.” You don’t want to miss out on any incoming leads due to something that can easily be rectified by the Hyperlinks Media team. Don’t put your business in jeopardy!
You read that right, and you need an SSL today so that your site does not come across as not secure or unstable to your potential leads. What are you waiting for?
Hyperlinks Media is happy to get you set up with your SSL installation. It’s an effortless process that you can leave to our web development experts. We don’t want this to happen to your site!
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