Think in journeys, not pages. A donor doesn’t arrive at your homepage and read it top to bottom. They might come from a social media post, land on a campaign page, and look for a donate button. Or they might Google your organisation name, land on your about page, and browse from there. Map the three or four most common journeys through your site and make sure each one is smooth.
Wireframe before you design. A wireframe is a simple sketch of page layout — what goes where, in what order. It’s much cheaper to move boxes on a wireframe than to redesign a finished page. Even a hand-drawn sketch on paper is better than jumping straight into visual design.
The IKO model still works. It’s a framework we developed for organising nonprofit website content into three groups: Information (about your organisation — about us, history, team, contact), Knowledge (about your cause — blog, news, resources, research), and Offer (what people can do — donate, volunteer, attend, shop). Most nonprofit sites need all three, and the navigation should make it easy to move between them.
Mobile is the baseline. More than half of website traffic comes from phones. If your site doesn’t work well on a small screen — fast loading, easy to tap, readable without zooming — you’re losing people. This isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s been the baseline expectation for years.
