Spring Clean Your Website
What do you think of when I say that your website is a living, breathing thing? It might not be truly alive, but those clusters of pixels amass into a flexible and ever-changing representation of your brand. Your design choices, messaging, and branding all combine to create an experience that can encourage your ideal supporters to get involved in your planet-saving mission. It’s a digital home for your organization. That’s why we must treat our websites with the utmost care.
I like to believe that your website is a garden open for visitors. What we want to ensure is that some of them sit down and stay awhile. They could even become a regular! It’s key you convert these curious wanderers into your number one fans.
Your garden might be a bit messy after a rough winter, and that’s okay. It’s just a sign that it’s time for a bit of spring cleaning before you open our doors again to the public!
Breathe some new life into your website with these tips below. I’ll be using the metaphor of the garden throughout this essay to give you an idea of just how similar botanical oases are to our digital ones. Always remember that your website is a flexible space that can be changed any time. They are fun and expressive places to get creative with representing your brand. As long as you ensure things are navigable, accessible, and clear, you can create a web experience that gets your target audience off their computers and out saving the earth!
Before the Makeover: Clean Up Your Website
Before making any design changes, your website might be in need of a tidy. Like a garden lying dormant in winter, there’s probably some old weeds and nutrient-starved soil ready to be cleared out. Here are some ways you can get organized before changing up your look.
Delete old unused pages: get those weeds and dead leaves out of there by combing through any disabled or outdated pages. This will clear things up in the back end and make it easier to decide what website content matters to you the most.
Fix your navigation: if your navigation bar looks like a mess of tangled leaves, it’s time to clean it up. Make sure your navigation items are only the most important pages. Think about what information users would need to access the most. For example, you want your “About”, “Donate”, “Contact”, and “Shop” pages easily found. It’s just like removing old signage or plant stakes that no longer make sense in the garden.
Replace outdated content or images: Maybe you’ve decided not to grow zucchini or strawberries this year. It’s time to remove them from your garden plan! If you have images of team members who no longer work with you, content about a fundraiser from 2017, or a shop item that sold out long ago, remove this content from your website.
Remove messy or inconsistent branding: If one of your pages features your old logo or is a different color from the rest, make sure you update it with your current branding.
Planning Your New Website
Now that you’ve cleaned out the old, you’re ready for the new! You’ve made space for your new garden. Next comes the planning. We wouldn’t have a visitor-worthy oasis unless we thoughtfully planned out our design beforehand! Here’s what you can do:
Analyze your most visited pages: Check and see your most popular and visited plants (aka pages) by taking a look at your site analytics. This will tell you what is most engaging to visitors. Analyzing this information will allow you to prioritize your most important pages, ensuring you keep them highly visible in your redesign.
Create a new wireframe: Wireframes are the blueprints of our website.They don’t feature any design yet, but are perfect for outlining the organization of the navigation and pages. You’ll include a rough idea of each page’s content and Call-to-Action statements. You can write it out on paper, use a slide, or if you want to get more advanced, set up in Figma or Adobe. This will ensure your garden is easily navigable by visitors! Don’t let it be a maze!
Get design inspiration: gather the seeds of inspiration for your design by looking at other similar websites in your niche, or websites you love in general! Think about the colors, fonts, and images you want to be using. What would resonate most with your ideal audience?
The Design Phase
You’ve done all your planning, and it’s time to dig your hands into the dirt and create your garden!
Design your pages: select the fonts and colors that align best with your brand and go to town with the layout design. Think about what looks visually appealing and is most intuitive for visitors as they scroll. In the garden, you’d want to plant complementary flowers and veggies together. Use image frames, fonts, pictures, buttons, and paragraph styles that all match. These all combine to create a harmonious layout.
Remember headers: these are the signposts in your garden. Make sure they feature the most important information and signal to visitors what each written section is about. They also factor into your site’s SEO, so make them as descriptive as possible.
Get creative: Have a little fun with your design. You want it to be engaging for visitors, so make sure you’re creating a page that you would want to spend time on. Think of it like compost, adding just a little extra nourishment to your plants.
Connect to important third-party integrations: Connecting your website to cross-pollinators like Google Search Console for site indexing, your CRM (Hubspot, Zeffy, Salesforce), email marketing (Flodesk, Mailchimp), social media accounts, and payment processing will ensure you’ve solidified every tool into one place! These are the bees and butterflies that will help bring more traffic to your garden.
Make regular updates: keep watering your garden! Add new events or products when they’re available. Change any outdated information, add new pages as you see fit. You’re well on your way to having a thriving plant paradise!
Open for Visitors!
Your garden is ready for visitors! Ensure you make it as easy as possible to locate your website with a little help from SEO. There is usually a native tool for this inside your website platform, like Squarespace’s SEO tools. And make your garden as accessible as possible for all to visit! Consider integrating Userway, which has many accessibility features for your website. Add descriptions to all of your photos so they can be registered by screen readers.
Sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor! You’ve created something truly wonderful! And if you need a little support from a fellow digital landscaper, I’d love to help.
Thanks for reading!
Sarah
