How to plan a charity website
Planning a new charity website doesn't need to be complicated. But spending some time getting the foundations right before anyone starts designing or building can make the whole project easier — and help you end up with a website that actually works for your charity.
1. Start with your audience
Before thinking about colours, fonts or pages, think about who will actually use your website. Your audiences might include people looking for support, funders, donors, volunteers, referral organisations, professionals or potential partners. Identify the most important things each group needs to find and make those routes easy to follow.Ask yourself: Who are the most important people visiting our website? What are they looking for? What questions do they have? What action do we want them to take?
2. Be clear about what your website needs to achieve
A website should have a purpose beyond simply "having an online presence." For a charity, that might mean helping people access support, increasing donations, attracting volunteers, demonstrating impact or making it easier for professionals to refer people to your services.
3. Decide what information you actually needIt's tempting to create a long list of pages. Instead, think about what visitors need to know. A typical charity website might include: Home, About, Services or support, individual service pages, Impact or success stories, News and events, Contact, Get involved, Donate. The navigation should reflect how your visitors think about your charity, not necessarily how your organisation is structured internally.
4. Create a clear page structure
Once you've decided what information needs to be included, work out where it belongs. A sitemap gives you a simple overview of your website and shows how the pages relate to one another. Individual services can sit underneath the relevant section.
5. Plan your content before you design
Your content and your design need to work together. Before the build begins, identify: what content already exists, what needs updating, what needs writing from scratch, what images you have, what information needs checking, and who is responsible for providing and approving it.
6. Give every page a job
Every page should have a clear purpose. Ask: what does the visitor need to understand here, and what should they do next?
7. Think about functionality early
Make a list of anything your website needs to do: contact forms, newsletter sign-up, donations, event bookings, online applications, search, video, social media, maps, directories, integrations with other systems. Some functionality can affect the structure of the website and even which platform is suitable.
8. Make accessibility part of the plan
Think about accessibility from the beginning, including your content, page structure, navigation, headings, links, images, colour choices, forms and mobile experience.9. Decide who is responsible for whatBefore you start, agree: who is the main project contact, who is providing the content, who approves the pages, who supplies images and other assets, who has final sign-off, and what the deadlines are.10. Set some boundariesAgree the scope before the build begins: what is included, what isn't, what can be added later, and what the process is for requesting additional work.
The biggest planning mistake?
Trying to put everything on the website. Your website doesn't need to tell your entire organisational story, it needs to help the right people find the right information and take the right next step.
Before you start, make sure you can answer: Audience, Purpose, Structure, Content, Actions, Functionality, Accessibility, People, Scope, Deadline. That's exactly why I created Think Violet's Design Pack for Design Week: a clear, structured starting point so we arrive at the design week with the key decisions, content and information already prepared.
