- Let everyone on your staff and board give feedback on your design, and apply everyone’s preferences.
- Put someone in charge who doesn’t care about the website.
- Replace pages or menu items with PDFs.
- Make your mission statement about six paragraphs long and put it front and center of the homepage.
- Hide the donation forms. It also helps to make it really hard to use.
- Don’t apply any kind of strategy to the site. Just throw it up and assume you’ll get support.
- Make sure you don’t look “too polished,” because no one will give you money unless the site looks like it was built on a shoestring.
- Assume no one looks at your site.
- Put up a bunch of unrelated pages with an unclear and incoherent message.
- Design for your board members (or yourself) rather than your audience.
- Leave development to a volunteer.
- Leave design to a volunteer.
- Play hot potato with updating website pages. The biggest sucker is in charge of keeping it current.
- Forget about your other communications efforts. Never cross reference them. Never meet with the people in charge of putting them together.
- Make your decision on a web developer based on cost alone, assuming you don’t always get what you pay for.
Monique Cuvelier spends her days at Talance sorting through the muck and creating fabulous non-profit websites. Contact her for advice on how.