Do you have any goals for your Website for 2009?

As a new year is just around the corner, I thought it would be interesting to survey the community with the following question:

What type of goals have you set for your website for 2009?

I'm sure many of you who spend time here in the Web Building forum have come up with some ideas or projects for your site, or maybe some new ways to improve your site.  What are they?  How do you plan to achieve them?  There are no right or wrong answers here, so please feel free to share with the community.  Perhaps we can learn from and inspire each other!

Best wishes,

Yann

I want to add the capability to accept credit card donations and sell a few logo items.

Also, I need to improve it's looks, and find the cheapest way to be found by search engines.

Teri

freebirdevans:

I want to add the capability to accept credit card donations and sell a few logo items.

Also, I need to improve it's looks, and find the cheapest way to be found by search engines.

Teri

Hi Teri,

Let me direct you to some resources to get you started in the right direction.

For processing credit card donations and accepting payments for items sold on your site, there are two main things you'll need to set up to achieve these goals: a shopping cart application (to create your site's storefront) and a payment gateway/merchant processor (to securely authorize and process payment information).  Though it might come in handy in certain situations, you don't need to have specialized technical skills to set up this e-commerce functionality on your site.  Many tools exist on the market that can be used right out of the box, and there are even all-in-one solutions designed to handle every step of the process for you.

For more on this, I recommend you read this TechSoup article by Idealware:

A Few Good Online Payment Multitaskers

Now the other goal you stated as having for 2009 is to "find the cheapest way to be found by search engines".  Well, I can help you here too.

You might be familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  In a nutshell, SEO is the process of optimizing each page in your site according to a set of accepted best practices, most importantly involving the use of carefully selected keyword phrases, around which you develop relevant content specific to each page.  Good SEO will significantly boost your site's position in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and will also drive higher traffic to your site.

Standard SEO (also known as "organic" or "natural" SEO) costs you literally nothing money-wise to implement.  Anybody can do it, and it's the single most important strategy for improving traffic to your site.  Of course there are also other ways to improve your position in the search engines, but I always recommend SEO as something that should never be overlooked.

There are many free online resources that teach you how to do effective SEO including how to select appropriate keyword phrases for your site.  SEOmoz and SEOBook.com are good sites to check out.  A search in Google for "SEO tutorials" will also give you many other resources to refer to.

And we're always here to help too, at TechSoup's Web Building forum, for any questions or issues you may encounter along the path toward achieving your goals.

Good luck!

Yann

NP 300+ acre nature Park.

Somehow update our website that was designed in 1994. Hard to do when you are a staff of one and are trying to convert a database from Access to Giftworks and need to get it done before the grass greens and the grounds maintenance begins.

I am using an old copy of Dreamweaver now but am looking at possably switching to Drupel.  I only know the basics of DW enough to maintain the site so as much as a curve to learn something else.  Asusming my ISP supports Drupel.

We've just started a blog and revamped the rest of the site with some techniques to maximize our search engine traffic -- so we'll be watching our stats pages in 2009 to see how well we've done in increasing the number of visits and relevant keyword hits. We've been live for a little over a week with the new site and already seem to be seeing some results in terms of traffic. Beyond simple web traffic/rankings, we're hoping for some additional submissions from visitors through the targetted contact forms we've set up for various types of enquiries.

I'm moving a static website - www.ectopic.org.uk - to a CMS (WordPress). That's a major goal and a big project. It's also a great opportunity to do a complete visual redesign using professionally designed graphics, a project that was just too daunting when dealing with individual .htm pages. We'll also upgrade the discussion forum application and re-skin it to match the site's new look. Plus, all the content is being rewritten. A complete overhaul.

I'm doing a lot of "democratizing" this year - training staffers to do the blogging/email blasting for their own department.  We lost our Communications Lady, and aren't replacing her, so we don't have much choice, and I honestly think it's a better way to maintain our online presence.  We started Twittering a couple weeks ago - mostly just feeding our blog updates over via RSS, but it's something (same story with Facebook). 

I plan to spend some serious time on the Analytics side of things, doing a better job of tracking how all our little online pieces tie together - email blasts, blog, website, Facebook, etc. 

Also, selling products online and taking donations - especially digital/electronic products - is a big priority.  Our website developers have been attrocious, so I've got some fights to fight on that front.  The whole thing is integrated with our IMIS database, which has the potential to be awesome, but we lack the internal skill, documentation, wisdom, and quality service provider to make it awesome... at least not so far.  Cross your fingers. 

I recognize the rationale behind having a single integrated database, especially for finances... but golly, i can't help but feel our website would suck less if I could just use other online services - Eventbrite, PayPal, Democracy in Action, CiviCRM, something, instead of fighting IMIS's awkwardness.

Would like to add an online gallery to The Noyes Museum of Art website.

Thanks,

Erin

Sounds like all you guys have some nice things going with your site this year.  It's nice to see organizations like yours making an effort to keep their online presence fresh and engaging.

If there's one goal that everyone should have for their website it's this:

Keep your site's content fresh on a regular basis.

This is not so much a goal as it is a good practice that should become a habit.  It's always a good idea to make sure that the information on your site is up to date.  Daily, weekly, or at the very least monthly updates.  Don't ignore  your homepage!  I've seen many sites with an outdated homepage; don't let yours be one of them.  How can you make your homepage interesting?  There are many easy things you can do.  For example, you can use your homepage to post information about upcoming events, news items, links to press releases or interesting stories about your organization, and so on.  The important thing to be doing is to offer your readers information on your site that is both current and informative.

Another goal for your site should be to start monitoring your visitor traffic.  I know some of you are already doing this, which is great.  But many organizations have a website and no system for tracking their visitors.  That's too bad because you could be learning a lot from your visitors -- and you can use this valuable information to drive even more traffic to your site.

So if you haven't do so already, I'd make it a top priority to start tracking your visitors.  You can do this by using the free Google Analytics tool on your site.

Yann

Yann:

 I'd make it a top priority to start tracking your visitors.  You can do this by using the free Google Analytics tool on your site.

Hi Yann,

I also think that tracking web visitor traffic is important. It can give you insight and feedback on the actual use patterns of your site, and either confirm or deny your own suppositions on how people use your site. 

Recently I've been reading a discussion on some of the downsides to using Google Analytics. Because GA is free and highly visible, it is a natural one to recommend. However, the discussion impressed me with the need to offer other alternatives in addition to GA in case some of the downsides of GA were of particular importance to a nonprofit. Here are some suggestions:

List of Google Analytics Alternatives

Best wishes,

Sasha