 Auditing your website's design, content, and forms. This module is made available to you through a joint initiative between the Legal Services National Technology Assistance Project, the Legal Services Corporation, and Idealware under a Creative Commons by-license. The content, appearance, and navigation of your website can tell visitors a lot about your organization, not just your mission and the programs and services you provide, but also about your culture, tone, and outlook. What does your current website tell people about you? For most organizations, the home page will be the most important page of their website. It's the first page that new visitors will see, and the page most constituents will return to. It's important that your website makes a good first impression, and you only have one opportunity to do so, the home page. Your home page must accomplish a number of goals. It needs to establish trust and credibility, reinforce your organization's brand, give users the ability to find what they're looking for, and expose visitors to the other important features of the site, all without being cluttered or disorganized. That's a lot to ask of a single page, achieving it all requires a tricky balance. As we talked about in Module 2, if you don't prioritize and everyone in the organization throws a whole bunch of things at the home page, the result is ineffective and confusing. Your visitors shouldn't have to think about what to focus on. Your home page should tell them what's important. You're always going to need to have text on your home page, but you should balance that with photos, images, or other visual content that appeals to your visitors. A good home page should feature a few key things like news stories, recent articles, or upcoming events that give a taste of what can be found on the rest of your site. It should also be designed so out-of-date material will disappear automatically, or can be easily removed by a staff member. Take a close look at your current home page. Is the content organized clearly? Are they presented in priority order? Are those priorities your current priorities? Look at the design and layout of the page. It should look clean and focused. If it's not, what changes would you need to make improvements? What should you take away from your home page? What should you add? Do you need to redesign your home page completely, or only make some tweaks? In some cases, launching a home page redesign can make a big impact on your site without a lot of effort. The overall graphic design of your site also plays an important role. Graphic design can influence what people think about your organization. Take a look at your home page again with an eye to the design. Would visitors to your site say it looks professional? Does the design reflect your up-to-date logo and color scheme? Does the site accurately reflect your organization's mission and brand? To audit your site's graphic design, ask yourself the following questions. Is the font easy to read? Is the general typography pleasing to the eye? On your core pages, is it clear what are the most important elements on the page? Is your content formatted in a consistent way? Are your heading sizes, fonts, colors, and other design elements formatted the same throughout the page? All of these things can help your content shine. With the growing rate of web consumption on smartphones and tablets, remember to consider the user experience of your website on devices other than computers. What does your site look like on your phone? Generally speaking, mobile means smaller screen sizes and touchscreen navigation. Not all site elements from a website set up for a desktop computer will necessarily work properly on mobile, including animation or complicated navigation menus. There are a couple ways to make your website accessible to mobile users. One is to design and build a separate, mobile-friendly version of your main website. The other is to build a single site using responsive design. The Pine Tree Legal Assistance Group used to present mobile visitors with a pared down version of their main site as shown here. But now they have a responsive site that looks like this. What is responsive design? It's an approach to designing and coding the graphic elements of a website so each page will automatically resize itself or reorder the content to fit each visitor's display. More and more, responsive design is the preferred method. But it typically means starting from scratch, as it's not easy to adapt existing sites. If your current site meets all of your needs other than mobile users, or you don't have the budget available for a total redesign right now, it could be worth creating a separate, mobile-friendly site. At least as a stopgap measure. If you need to refresh your graphic design, should you use a template or should you go with a custom design? Templates usually are available in conjunction with a content management system. These templates shown here, for example, come loaded with navigation styles and spaces for calls to action. Should you use a template or shouldn't you? If you want a design that looks professional and credible but won't necessarily turn any heads, you can choose to go with a template. The disadvantage to using a template though is that people who know websites may recognize that you've used one, especially if the template you've chosen is a particularly popular one. After reviewing your site, if you determine that your graphic design is off track, consider hiring a designer. Whether relying on the graphic designer to customize a template or design from scratch, quality graphic design is a great asset for your website. And what about your website content? It's critical to audit whether or not your current content meets your goals or your audience's needs. A website should be a living document reflecting current information, but how do you keep up with it all? It's hard to say much at a high level about best practices for the information that you include on your website. After all, that's the heart of what you do, and it's going to change a lot from organization to organization. But make sure to include it in your audit. What information is there? What would you add? What might you not need? And don't forget to communicate about your organization as well as providing information to help folks with their legal needs. New content is great. Not only do updates to your site make you seem active, frequent updates can improve your ranking in search engines. But it's also important to consider the staff time that will take you to keep your site updated. If you decide you're going to have a tip of the week on your homepage, will you realistically be able to keep up with that every week? Make sure you define this stuff. How often is each piece of content supposed to be reviewed, updated, and who's in charge of that? Consider creating a schedule for updating content on your site in a shared calendar. For example, you may want to review all your legal information once a year on a rotating basis. If visitors come across outdated information on your site, it will hurt your credibility. What it comes down to is this. Keep your organization's goals in mind when reviewing any aspect of your site and ask yourself if your site's content supports those goals. More great resources are almost always good for your users and goals if it's practical to provide them. It's much better to design a site that requires less maintenance than it is to fall behind in maintaining something that requires it. Taking the time to think about design considerations for forms and other functionality on your site will go a long way toward making these elements more functional for your users. When designing a form, you want to make sure you use the right form elements for the job. Each type of question or element conveys an underlying meaning to the user. Think about what you know from forms just from filling them out yourself. No buttons tend to mean select one, while a list of checkboxes would say select some or all. If you give people checkboxes but only let them select one response, they might get confused. It's also important to think about the length of each form field. What's the character limit? You might not need or want people to fit an essay into a form, but do make sure that there's enough space for their email address. When designing a web form, shorter is better. Ask yourself, do I really need all this information? For example, when would you ever need to know someone's fax number? And make sure to think critically about the way you phrase the questions. Will users be able to quickly understand what you're asking for? Keep in mind that what looks like a simple question to you might actually be time-consuming to answer. Will people know the answer off the top of their heads, or will they need to look it up? And of course, be sure to test your questions to ensure that your form actually works the way it's supposed to. In addition, try to give your fields obvious names, like phone number instead of number where we can reach you. Not only will this help people figure out what they need to type, it will also help the autofill functionality of their browser fill in the fields for them. If any fields are required in order to complete the form, make sure that they are clearly noted and that any error message shows the mistake. An online intake module allows people seeking legal help to submit an application through your website. It lets the applicant do the data entry, saving your staff time and allowing them to process more applications. Some online intake modules are complex and gather a lot of information, while others just provide a form that asks potential clients a number of questions. The same best practices for creating web forms also apply to online intake. To recap, keep these questions in mind when auditing your website. What tweaks could you make to improve your homepage? Are there any more substantial improvements that would make a big difference? Does your graphic design say what you want it to say? If your current graphic design isn't working for you, would you be able to use a template or do you need to hire a graphic designer? Is the content on your site the right content? How much time can you devote to updating it on an ongoing basis? What does that mean for the content you want to add? Are you using the right forms for the information you need? What kind of online intake is right for your organization? How much information do you want to collect? These resources can help provide more background and best practices for your own website.