Have you ever wondered about the key ingredients for a strong nonprofit homepage? Whether you’re just getting started, or you’re considering making some improvements, we’ve come up with a list of six homepage must-haves for your nonprofit organization.
Prominent Call to Action Buttons
Your call-to-action buttons will revolve around your website goals. So before doing anything else, create a short list of things you want your visitors to do when they arrive at your homepage. Do you want them to give? A donate button should always be prominent if you allow for online giving. Do you want them to watch a video you created about how they can volunteer? Do you want them to sign up for an upcoming event? Once you have a short list of the key things you want your visitors to do, you’ll need to create a few graphics/buttons that are both eye-catching and intuitive, to take users directly to the related pages on your site.
Crisp Images
Using high quality, crisp images needs to be a priority on your nonprofit homepage. While site visitors may overlook the effort that went into getting the perfect image to display your brand, they will definitely notice an image that is disproportionately stretched, pixelated, or out of focus. An out of focus image may not cost you a site visitor, but it will certainly distract them. A strong image, on the other hand, will draw them in, giving them a reason to learn more about your mission.
Intuitive Navigation
While this one may seem a little obvious, the importance of intuitive navigation cannot be understated. Users need to know how to quickly find the information they’re looking for, without having to search for it. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the average attention span of a human being, which used to be 12 seconds in the year 2000, is now only 8.25 seconds. This statistic would indicate that if it takes more than eight seconds to find what they’re looking for, a visitor may leave your site altogether.
Opt-In Form
An opt-in form doesn’t need to be long. In fact, the main items you need to collect are a name and email address. If a visitor wants to learn more about what you do, don’t make it difficult for them to sign up for updates by using a lengthy form. Instead, let them simply enter their name and email address to start receiving your email communications with the click of a button. As you provide them with content over time, the relationship has potential to grow. However, if you overwhelm them with a lengthy signup form, they may not bother taking the time to fill it out, and you’ll lose an opportunity to connect with a potential supporter.
Responsive Design
If you’ve visited the ServanTek blog at any point in the past year, you’ve probably read about the critical nature of responsive design. If your homepage is not easily accessible and navigable on a mobile device, you will lose potential site visitors. In fact, as of this past May, Google noted that more Google searches are conducted from a mobile device than from a desktop computer in the U.S., as well as in 9 other countries around the world. This means that mobile design is no longer a secondary concern, but a primary consideration in homepage design. We need to cater our homepage designs to a variety of devices if we want to effectively communicate with today’s web audience.
Fast Load Time
A final homepage must-have is a fast load time. As previously stated, our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. And with high speed internet access freely available in many places, users have become accustomed to quick access to websites. If your site visitors have to wait for your homepage to load, they’re going to assume something is wrong with the site, and move on to something else. Try Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to check your homepage load time, and find suggestions regarding how to speed it up.
How does your homepage measure up? Let us know in the comments below.