Myself and some of my friends felt it lengthy of last post - will try to be brief in this:
The most important page in the website is the home page. It's like entering a restaurant or house or an office - first view or impression is the best..Even though flash websites or flash introduction is catchy - would advice to avoid it. People don't have patience to watch your beautiful flash sites. If you are still want to use - at least have Skip Intro button placed.
Some of the tips for home page before you design one (either by in-house designer or your advertising agency or others):
Read this http://www.optimizeandprophesize.com/jonathan_mendezs_blog/2007/02/7_rules_for_lan.html
1. Have your organisation Logo displayed prominently and linked to your home page.Tell briefly not more than 5-6 lines about your organisation. If you can't say - then have 5-6 lines and put more link and take them to another page. Make sure that your organisation branding is consistent for both offline and online world.
2. Some things people look for on the Home page of NGO's :
a.What is the problem/issue?
b.How are you addressing it?
c.Success stories (audio/visual will be better) and then call to action button like donate/shop/volunteer button
d.Trust that my resources (money/time) will be used effectively- Annual Reports with Financials, How much of per rupee goes into addressing the problem
2. Don't clutter home page. Make sure that home pages changes (content or images or what's new) at least once in 10 days at least!
3. Have quick links or jump start. Also have Site map displayed with links. Have always links (breadcrumb)/navigation on all inside pages
4. Search button preferably on the right top or middle (people who wants to look for specific information will search). Don't buy or write codes for these. Use Google custom search for free. Put few lines of code given by google on your pages.
5.Make sure that your home page is loaded within 10 seconds. One of the psychology of people who visits websites - which i want you to remember - is time. As it's an age of instant gratification and if they don't find in an minute or two - people will close and move of out your home page. Then you will be wondering like what one of our friends said 'They are coming to the bar and not drinking!'
6. Have contact us probably on top right and have the address, phone number, email id. Don't put forms to fill it up - it kills the user. Put a generic email id which may be spammed (you can also put email id as image to avoid spamming of email id), but users can't click the email id link and write. Make sure that email box is opened daily and checked for follow-up.
7. Use words in key-words or content which are understandable by common people who visit your website and not development or ngo jargon (people still call charity not a rights based advocacy organisation)!
8. Make sure that each page has Page Header on top of the browser. Very important for both search engines and for search within the site.
9. All Images have proper names and tags and are also relevant. Make sure that images and not cut into 2 half and in-between inserting text is a bad idea. When downloading a page - you get bottom image and text and then the top image.
10.Have what's new or latest updates..
We will look at Donate/Shop page another time in this blog..
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