Is Your Website Lost In The Crowd?

August 29, 2008      Admin

Roger sent me this press release the other day, with the short message … "Talk about competition!"

The release notes that there are now over 7 million organizations with websites using the .ORG domain (ranking 3rd behind .COM and .NET). This number has been growing at the rate of 20% per year over the past five years.

Public Interest Registry, the outfit with stewardship over the domain, attributes the growth to interest in social networking, issue awareness, personal blogging, online political organizing and issue advocacy.

Your nonprofit website faces a lot of competition and clutter out there in the digital space. Perhaps you need to pay more attention to how compelling it is and how your target audience views and responds to it.

Here’s one set of suggestions, from web consultant Tim Ash, on how you might go about assessing the main landing pages that receive most of your traffic. Options include web analytics (in depth stats on site usage), useability reviews, focus groups and surveys, analysis of "help" calls and emails, even eye-tracking.

How much should you invest in website assessment? Hmmm. How important is it not to get lost in the crowd? How important is it, with all the resources you put into the site, to have 90%+ of most visitors leaving without a trace, or spending nanoseconds on it?

Tom