Agency Website Design: Part II

Emerging Issues: Website Design

In our last issue we addressed three issues agencies should consider when developing a social services website: agency and service information, resources, and accessibility. In this issue we will address issues related to the design process itself, personalizing an agency website, and crafting an electronic privacy policy.

Webpages are different from print media in countless ways. When developing your agency website you are not just producing an electronic version of your agency's brochure. Brochures contain less information and need revising only every few years. Websites require ongoing development and maintenance. The costs involved for developing and maintaining the agency's web presence will need to be written into the annual budget. Nothing discourages visitors faster than a website with obsolete information.

It is crucial for agencies to actively control the design process and contents that go into the website. Do not attempt to hand over the whole project to the technical experts. Techies generally know little about social service agencies or social work practice. Before contacting the techies, invest time in generating support for the agency website from the Board of Directors, the staff, volunteers, and client groups. Soliciting input from throughout the agency will produce a much better website in the end.

Practice Tips:
Basic Design
Convene a web advisory group composed of all the agency's constituency groups. Have this advisory group begin its work by deciding on the overall mission and listing goals for the agency website. Then have the Board of Directors endorse this mission and the goals. Next, examine the list and, goal by goal, identify the audiences most likely to be interested in each one. For example, a section describing available services might have two audiences: consumers interested in what is available and professionals making referrals. When you clearly identify the audiences for each goal plus their needs, you have a beginning idea about how large the website will need to be and how broad in scope.

Next, create a list of mutually exclusive objectives for each goal and its audiences (e.g. recruit volunteers, educate the public about domestic violence). Each objective then becomes a webpage or a small cluster of webpages. Create a simple title for each webpage and decide upon its text, graphics, internal, and external links. Your advisory group can then present this initial plan for additional feedback from the various constituency groups.

Only after this initial development work is complete should your agency engage the technical expertise needed to craft each page and put it online. In consultation with the techies and perhaps an artistic designer, decide on an overall visual and textual theme for the website and stick to this theme throughout the design and construction process. The theme should complement the goals for the website and the agency as a whole. When considering theme, it is important to focus on what is unique about the agency. The nature of your audience is going to determine the actual look for each page. Get input again from all constituencies when the techies produce the first prototypes. Everyone should be pleased with the look and feel of the agency's home page. If the homepage fails to please an agency constituency, negotiate a change. Do not plan on building in another "look" later on down the line. Now is the time to decide and you should plan on living with how the website will look for some time to come.

Personalization:
You will want to present your agency as warm and inviting. You will want to use your agency website to reach out to prospective clients, donors, volunteers, and employees. This can be done by personalizing your website with information about your administrators, professional and support staff, volunteers, and even clients. Providing the names, educational backgrounds, credentials, experience, publications, and professional associations along with pictures can bring your agency webpage to life. This is the opportunity to brag about your staff's accomplishments and community activities. Using your website to honor and thank volunteers and donors gives website visitors a feel for your agency's work and philosophy. Of course, always avoid posting personal information about any employees or volunteers.

List the current members of the agency's governing board and its committees. List who the officers are and their terms of service, including expiration dates. Provide institutional affiliations and even links if available. Information on your board composition identifies your agency as a nonprofit and lets visitors know your agency is governed by a board comprised of local citizens. Foundations often check on agency organization and credibility by surfing applicants' websites for just this type of evidence.

You will want your website to be at least minimally interactive. Include email links that provide the agency with feedback on the website itself. Viewers often spot errors, make suggestions on the website's design, or suggest additional information for inclusion. This feedback can lead to ongoing improvement in the design of the website. Email capabilities also make it easy for potential clients, donors, and volunteers to email inquiries about your agency. Decide who in the agency will read and be responsible for responding and use their email address. A generic email address is fine as long as it will ultimately result in feedback being received and processed.

Another means of personalizing your website is to post client success stories. These may be stories that clients have agreed to post anonymously, or a compilation of client stories disguised yet representative of the types of clients and services provided by the agency. Just be certain to inform the reader if you have abstracted or compiled stories in any way. Personalizing your agency's work can offer hope to prospective clients and give donors, and volunteers a much better picture of what your agency actually does than dry text.

Privacy Policy:
You will need to formulate an agency policy statement regarding online privacy before your agency unveils its website. Once created, this privacy policy needs to be posted on your website and accessible from the homepage. If you will be using an Internet Service Provider to host your website, you will also need to scrutinize the ISP's privacy policy. Decide on how, where and for how long information about website visitors will be stored. If the ISP's privacy policy does not match your agency's needs, negotiate until it does. Your privacy policy should inform visitors that your agency is committed to maintaining the privacy of its online visitors. Tell visitors upfront that you will not rent, sell, trade, lease, or transfer any personal information about them collected at your site to any third party without a court mandate and the approval of your Board of Directors. If your website is hosted by an ISP tell your visitor the name, URL, address, and phone number of the provider and the nature of your privacy agreement with them. Decide if you want to maintain and analyze server logs as part of operating your website. (These are computer-generated records of who visits your website. They can be very extensive.) If you are going to use them to improve your website, you need to tell visitors that this is the case. It is not necessary for logs to contain personally identifiable information. We strongly recommend against using "magic cookies", programs that actively profile individual visitor behaviors. Inform visitors about whether or not cookies are used. If you are going to create lists of email addresses for future announcements and newsletters, let visitors know you will not add their names to your lists unless they specifically instruct you to do so, and that you will not disclose your email lists to a third party unless legally required to do so.

Since some visitors will be contacting your agency electronically via your agency website, you will need to inform clients that you store copies of their electronic messages, their email addresses, and your agency's electronic responses. Your board and staff should decide how long to store such messages for archival purposes. Lastly, your agency will need to think through the disclaimers it will want to post on its website. For example, information posted on the agency website about a problem is not intended to replace professional consultation or service. Let visitors know this upfront. In cyberspace you cannot promise that a visitor's confidentiality will never be compromised. Even with your agency taking every possible precaution, hackers can potentially invade your agency and violate visitor privacy. You need to state this upfront in your privacy statement. This is in keeping with the NASW Code of Ethics' approach to informed consent. Tell website visitors and those that electronically contact your agency that there is always some risk in their doing so, just as someone can directly observe them walking into the agency from the parking lot, overhear their conversations, or tap their telephone calls.

Websites to Visit:
Rebecca Sager Ashery's Website http://www.drashery.com/socialwork/index.htm
Excellent website specifically focusing on social work web design.

TechSoup http://www.techsoup.org
Many specific resources for website development for nonprofit organizations.

Jakob Nielsen's Website http://www.useit.com
Extensive articles on website design from a world leader in the industry.

Web Marketing Today http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/checklist.htm
Plan on marketing before you unveil your website!

Tech News http://www.uwnyc.org/640/tncurrent.html
Newsletter published bimonthly for human service agencies and other interested organizations by United Way of New York City.

Developer.com http://softwaredev.earthweb.com
Very helpful for finding out what your techie is really talking about!