 Defining your website goals. 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. These five modules are all about auditing your existing website, but auditing it to do what? For who? Before you can reasonably start to identify areas of strengths and weaknesses in your site, you need to define what you're trying to do. What are your goals, audiences, priorities? And it's important to do it as a team, to ensure that you have buy-in from all the people who need to buy-in. One of the biggest issues for many websites is that they're trying to do way too much. They're trying to reach all audiences, achieve all goals, and include everything that any staff member wants to include. That's just not possible. What you get instead is a site that's cluttered and confusing, where no one is served well. Things are on the homepage because someone internally wanted it there, and the person in charge of it has no strong reason to say no, instead of being able to weigh the request against actual goals. Instead of being all things to all people, the website becomes mostly not useful to anyone. Start by putting your goals on paper. Set up a meeting and start by brainstorming all possible goals. What do you want to increase or decrease by having a website? Do you want to have less people call you for legal advice? More people? Is raising donations a goal? Get everything out on the table. Then prioritize your goals. It's important to state and have official buy-in on what are important goals, as opposed to just nice to haves. It's important to recognize that any good website will require trade-offs. So here's an example for a fictitious legal aid organization. They're realistic about their goals. For instance, their first two goals obviously aren't to answer every question that anyone might have, but rather to help people triage their own issues, and for this organization, to decrease the volume of calls to their helpline. Their top three goals are all to provide information, but there's other things on there. For instance, in number six and number seven, to attract funding. Don't underestimate how difficult it can be to rank order your goals like this. It can be hard to get buy-in from a director of development, for instance, that there are five goals ahead of fundraising. But as an organization, you need to decide this stuff. Is it more important that your organization provides legal information or that it raises money? Maybe those are equally important, but then what about encouraging volunteers? Not everything can be a top priority. Again, you can't be all things to all people. Speaking of people, let's talk a little bit about identifying who you're trying to reach with your website and what their goals are. Reflecting on who your website is for is one of the most important tasks you will undertake. Who is coming to your site and what do they hope to do there? Put your own goals aside. The more you define about your constituents, the more you can customize your site to suit their needs. Who are your audience groups? Brainstorm from their perspective. What do they most want to know? This may not actually overlap with what you want them to know or want them to do. In many cases, your site visitors are looking for something very tactical. They want to know the hours of your helpline or what your number is or the answer to a very specific question. As you brainstorm, keep your personas in mind. It's much easier to think about what Mary might want than what general public might want. Be realistic and honest. As much as you might like them to, not that many people are showing up with a deep desire to donate to your organization. Make your personas real to the organization instead of just generic. Then use them in meetings. While working on your website, it's worthwhile to take some time to investigate your audiences. Consider doing some interviews. Try to find three to four people to roughly match each key user of your site. One interviewee could simply be nuts, but by the fourth person, you should start hearing repeated concerns and needs. Or conduct a survey. But how do you get your survey in front of your audience? You might target your audience by sending a link to the survey to your entire email news list to just some segmented groups or set it up as a link on your current site. Close friends, your email list, or even social media can provide you with opportunities for interview subjects. But keep the bias in mind. All info is good info, but remember, you haven't covered the world if you've just talked to close friends of the organization. SurveyMonkey is a very common survey tool, and it works quite well for most survey needs, short of a major research study. There's a free version with quite limited functionality, or you can pay $20 a month for everything you're likely to need. You can turn it on and off monthly, so you could simply pay $20 or $40 to conduct a survey and then turn off the paid version again. If you're asking people to answer questions about your website, you could obviously email out a link to the survey, but it can be very useful instead, or in addition, to do what's called an intercept survey on your website itself. This kind of survey will pop up either right away when someone looks at your site, or after they look at the site for a certain period of time. This will take a small amount of technical knowledge to set. It requires a piece of code on your webpage. They often include questions like, what was your purpose in looking at our site today, and were you able to find what you were looking for? Try to keep online surveys as clear and brief as possible to improve your response rate. Roughly 5 minutes to fill it out, and never more than 10, is the ideal time. Make sure your questions are clear and limited to one thing at a time. For example, do you feel our website is easy to navigate and professional looking? Should be two separate questions. Don't miss an opportunity to ask for feedback about the survey itself at the end. Once you've gathered information from surveys or interviews, what do you do with it? How do you apply what you've learned? Your survey data and interviews may deepen and enhance the audience personas you've created. Or you may learn new information about your audiences, such as, this type of person cares a lot about X, Y, and Z. And you've hopefully learned what content is most important to your audiences. You can make sure that the content items they care about are referenced on your homepage and are on your top level pages. After researching the needs of your website's visitors, your team should aim to describe the purpose of your website in a single sentence. After balancing the goals of your organization with the needs of your constituents, creating a succinct statement that summarizes your team's vision will help you evaluate or reshape your website. Once you've written your vision statement, check it against your current site. Does your homepage support the vision statement you've written? Let's look at the challenges that a homepage presents. As we said earlier, your homepage can't be all things to all people, or cater to all the things your staff think are important. During a redesign, a good website designer will either create a wireframe, blueprint, for the main pages on your site including section pages and the homepage, or a prototype of those pages. Wireframes usually use very few words. Instead, through boxes and lines, these blueprints indicate the different content areas on the page. With a prototype, a designer can mock up important pages, like the homepage, to give your team another chance to evaluate how well the page supports your organization's goals. No matter what aspect of the website you are working on, whether it's content, structure, functionality, or design, always keep your core goals in mind. Your core goals, your top two to three, should guide the way content is shaped and presented, the new functionality you add to the site, and the overall presentation. These resources can help provide more background and best practices for your own website.