When potential members and donors visit your website, they expect to find it easy to use. Kim Krause Berg from the Cre8pc Blog has a great article about website usability (making your site easy for your visitors), which is well worth reading.

Here are Kim's ten tips (this is only a summary, read the post in detail here):

1. There is not enough persuasive or value oriented information to convince visitors to stay on the page.

2. Don’t place 100 links to the inside pages from your homepage.

3. Quit talking about yourself so often.

4. Feedback and email newsletter forms are some of the funniest things I’ve witnessed on the web.

5. If your navigation only goes forward, you didn’t learn to dance properly.

6. Application functionality. If you only knew what exists out there in web site land.

7. Mystery links confound visitors. Non-descriptive labels force us to guess where we will end up.

8. Related to this are Absolute Shock Links. These are navigation links that take you to PDF files without any warning.

9. If you want to capture someone’s attention, do it above the page fold. Large monitors didn’t signal the end of browser laziness.

10. If you have a FAQ, there had better be a good reason for making your visitors go to a page that displays a long list of questions and answers. They want you to answer the question when they have the question.

How can I attract and retain more visitors?

Besides Kim’s post above (which I recommend that you read in detail), here are a few good resources from our blog to check out:

• Transforming Your Web Visitors into Eager Donors and Volunteers provides tips to foster a sense of community with your target audience, and then call them to action.
• Branding Your Non-Profit Site on the Web presents techniques to help make sure that your message ‘sticks’ with your online audience.
• Designing Your Non-profit Web site offers a few rules that will make your non-profit come off looking professional, serious and ready to meet the needs of your users.
• Developing Effective Content for the Web has ideas to attract visitors, and keep them returning to your Web site on a regular basis.
• Marketing Practices for Non-Profit Organizations provides tips on attracting visitors, and turning these visitors from first-time donors to loyal/regular donors.