Getting Started – VSNS – Web Design

How we can help? – Summary

The website design and support is completely FREE. You will need to cover hosting and domain costs.

We support you throughout the entire process of creating your site. You can share the content, including text, photos/videos, forms and newsletters via email throughout the process to ramon@voluntarysupport.org.uk.

We create a temporary test website allowing you to constantly review and provide feedback where needed. Our only limitations are some of the restrictions of the WordPress templates we use, but these are minimal.

Once you are happy with the site, we help you to purchase your own domain name, arrange hosting, WordPress CMS, SSL certificate etc (costs for everything typically start from £80-£120 per year).

We’ll migrate the test site to the new live domain and will then register the new site with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – this ensures that your site appears when people run related searches. This process can take up to 3 months to be viewable with Google search.

Finally, we share guidelines to enable you to edit and maintain the site yourself, but we remain available if further help is needed.

For a more detailed description please see below.

Previously, creating a website from scratch was an expensive and time-consuming business. Today however, there are a number of content management systems which can be used to manage the creation and modification of websites.

For beginners, we strongly suggest sticking to the WordPress CMS to build your website because it’s easy to learn and work with and flexible enough to suit nearly everyone. It’s also easy to maintain when the time comes for you to look after your own site with lots of WordPress tutorials and YouTube ‘how to guides’ available at the click of a button.

So, how do you design your own website? What do you need to know?

We’ve put together some information and links for further reading to get your website journey started:

1 – Get Web Hosting and Register a Domain Name
2 – Who is your Audience?
3 – Home Page
4 – Colours
5 – Menu Options
6 – Images
7 – Navigation
8 – WordPress Themes
9 – SEO
10 – Other Site investigation
11 – Content Writing
12 – Google Analytics

1. Get Web Hosting and Register a Domain Name

We can support you with the following and recommend purchasing a domain, hosting etc AFTER we have created your new website on a test server to your satisfaction.

In order to set up your WordPress (or any other type of website), you’re going to need two things:

- domain name – a web address like www.mynewcharity.org.uk

- web hosting – the service that stores your website and connects your site to the internet.

Owning your own domain name looks far more professional than having your site on someone else’s domain.

In order to store your images, content and website files, you need web hosting. There are a number of different hosting companies who rent space on their servers to host your website and make it visible on the internet.

We recommend for a site to be created in WordPress you need to buy hosting with WordPress package. The cost of hosting, WordPress and a domain name for a year is approximately £80-£120.

In a nutshell – without web hosting and a domain name, your website will NOT exist. We use hosting company called SiteGround but there are many others such as GoDaddy and TSOhost – ask around for recommendations. Many of the hosting sites have online tutorials.

Please make sure you purchase hosting with WordPress Content Management System (CMS) and also include Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate (makes your site secure). We can help you with this process. Prices for domain name, hosting, WordPress and SSL start from £80 per year.

https://www.website.com/beginnerguide/
webhosting/6/1/what-is-web-hosting?.ws|

2. Who is your Audience?

Before you can design a website, you must first understand your target audience who will be using it. Why do people visit your site? What are the two or three most important pieces of information they want?

You probably have several different audiences for your website. The aim is to identify those audiences who are most important and focus on them. Think about their goals:

- what information they want to find on your website

- what tasks they need to do on your website – for example, donate, sign up for an event or email list, register to volunteer, contact you. Once you’ve identified the tasks for your site put them in order of priority and you’re your design on that.

It helps if you put yourself in the users place or talk to them in person, it’s better to base design decisions on actual user insight through conversation instead of assuming you know what they want.

3. Home Page

This is the page most people see first and it should tell everyone who you are and what your charity does. The content on your homepage should capture the attention of your visitors. It needs a great image, colours, readable text and not too many menu options – research shows that you have 0.05 seconds to convince people stay on your website so get to the point!

https://weblium.com/blog/website-homepage-design-examples-2019-20-of-the-best-homepages/

4. Colours

Although there is not a hard and fast rule, the more colours you use the harder it is to have a unified design and your website will look ‘busy’.

Interior and fashion design use the 60-30-10 rule which states that three colours should be used in varying degrees (60%, 30%, 10%) to create the best visual.

The best colour scheme to use for information intensive websites is a white or light background, with bold dominant & accent colours. These colours give the site personality and focal points, while the plain background colour keeps your visitors’ focus on your content. Organisations with a logo usually use those colours as accent colours for their website design.

https://websitebuilderexpert.com/designing-websites/how-to-choose-color-for-your-website/

Your menu/navigation bar is the roadmap to your website. Menus work best when they are short and sweet. There are a few reasons for this:

- User experience – short menus are read faster and visitors are less likely to bounce to another site if they find what they want quickly.

- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – short clear menus makes it easier for search engines (google/explorer) to navigate and index your site

- Design – A short navigation bar keeps your site tidy and sharp and easy to read (especially on mobile devices)

Use short names for menus options and where possible make them calls to action (CTA) – volunteer, about, donate, support us, contact, events

https://www.jimdo.com/blog/fixing-website-navigation-bar/

6. Images/Videos

A website without pictures would be very dull. We’re a very visual race and images make a site look more human and eye catching. They also make explanations easier to understand and evoke emotions that convey much more than text can.

Avoid having too many images on one page – not only does it make the page difficult to view – it makes it slow to load – 53% of mobile site visitors would leave if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Beware of cutting and pasting images from the internet. Get them from:

- Royalty free sites such as Pixabay https://pixabay.com/ or Unsplash https://unsplash.com/

- Use your own photos and videos

- Pay for sites such as Shutterstock or Adobe

When you are starting a website get the structure right. Get some paper and make each page represent the page of your site – move them around to see how they fit together and which should be main menu pages and which should be subpages. This is called a sitemap.

Have your main menu displayed at the top of all your pages to make moving around your site easy.

Put internal links in your site so that people can go to different pages without having to return to the main menu. If you talk about volunteering in your ‘about us’ page hyperlink it to your volunteering page.

For whatever reason the donate option for charities is usually in the top right of charity sites. Since that’s where people expect to find it – put it there! Make it a different colour from your other menu options or put a box around it to make it stand out. More and more sites have linked their logos to the home page and removed the home option from the menu.

8. WordPress Themes

In a nutshell, WordPress works as the engine under your website’s hood. It allows it to run, lets you edit the content of your site, create new posts and pages, and then makes sure that your website displays correctly on all devices.

In WordPress you can choose what your website looks like by selecting a theme. A theme is a collection of templates and stylesheets used to define the appearance and display of a WordPress powered website. They can be changed, managed and published by you from your account dashboard.

More importantly for most of us, WordPress.org also has a large collection of free themes and includes a plugin architecture which allows you to add features to your site not included in the theme you’ve chosen.

WordPress Themes | WordPress.org or for a more custom themes: WordPress Themes: Full Site Editing Free | WordPress.org.

9. SEO

Search Engine Optimisation involves making certain changes to your website design and content that make your site more attractive to a search engines like google or explorer. SEO is the process of customising your site to help make sure you rank high in the search engines for relevant keywords and phrases.

Search engine crawlers survey every part of your site for keywords and other features that could push it to the top of a search result page. Meta description, the title tag, URLs, site structure and many other elements are also indexed against a search engine’s current algorithm to determine a site’s quality.

Managing all these elements manually can be time-consuming, so like many websites we use a free WordPress plugin called Yoast which allows you to do things like control titles and meta descriptions, set your targeted keywords and track how often you’re using them, manage sitemaps and improves your content readability and lots more.

Yoast SEO – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org English (UK)

10. Other Site Investigation

When you’re thinking about what your site should look like, investigate other charity sites and in particular pay attention to websites of charities that do similar work as you.

Structure, content, colours and menu options are things to note so you can integrate into your design. Identifying what you do/don’t like will also help you choose an appropriate WordPress theme.

11. Content Writing

Capturing a readers’ interests in this exploding digital universe can be immensely challenging. A study found that 55 percent of visitors spend 15 seconds or fewer on a webpage.

Good website writing is the key to beating these statistics. Well-written content that’s optimized for the web rises to the top of search results and holds readers’ attention.

There are lots of article and blogs on getting it right – here are some golden rules:

https://www.jimdo.com/blog/11-golden-rules-of-writing-website-content/

12. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It gives lots of great information about your site visitors and site performance that you’ll find useful.

Getting started with Google Analytics for WordPress requires a Gmail account, which is free. If you don’t already use Gmail, sign up for an account before you begin setting up analytics. Then, select analytics from your account’s display of available Google services.

To set up analytics tracking for the website of your choice, you’ll need to select “Website” on the setup screen and then enter its name and URL under “Property.” This tells Google Analytics what site to track. Then, click the “Get Tracking ID” button. Google will then generate a unique tracking code that you can add to your website using either a plugin or by adding the tracking id manually depending on your skill level.

https://wpforms.com/best-google-analytics-plugins-for-wordpress/