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I had the privilege last fall of teaching a workshop on “Why Web Sites Fail and What To Do About It” at Nonprofit Day, an annual conference of the Support Center for Nonprofit Management [http://www.supportcenter.org/sf]. Eighty representatives of nonprofit organizations from the San Francisco Bay Area participated in a discussion of some of the more common ways that nonprofit Internet strategies go wrong.
In my capacity as author of the Nonprofit SiteAnalyzer Reports http://gilbert.org/research/site-analyzer/, I’ve had the opportunity to look at thousands of nonprofit web sites. Several important patterns have emerged for me. These are reflected in the five syndromes to which I devoted most of my workshop: the Upside Down web site, the Dead web site, the Disconnected web site, the Cool web site, and the Stingy web site.
Here are brief summaries of each syndrome:
- The Upside Down Web Site: There is good content on the site but it’s buried under an organizational chart or some other impenetrable hierarchy.
The Dead Web Site: It’s never updated. Not to be mistaken for the Dead on the Outside Web Site, which looks like it’s never updated, but is actually an Upside Down site.
The Disconnected Web Site: Where all the communication is one way and there is no way for the reader to send email or otherwise contact the site owners.
The Cool Web Site: So enamored of the technology that it is almost impossible to use, at least on a regular basis.
The Stingy Web Site: Gives away nothing of value.
What each of these syndromes has in common is a single simple problem: The tendency to focus on a web site as a product, rather than as a means of communication. Nonprofits often focus on simply having a web site, when instead they should be developing web sites and email and every other communication medium in the context of their communication goals and systems.
I described the concept of Whole Systems Internet Design to the workshop participants as one way to get around these problems. This approach is simple, but deep. It means looking at web sites and email as parts of a system. It means looking at what has been called the “Information Ecology” of an organization, mapping out who uses and produces each flow of communication and then determining how Internet technology can improve that flow.
Although I always recommend such a thorough approach to planning an Internet strategy, I realize that some organizations just aren’t there yet. So I want to give people something to do with their sites without committing immediately to a full exploration of their information ecology. Enter the Quick and Dirty Site Analysis Worksheet. You can complete it in less than an hour.
For those organizations who are ready to delve more deeply into a systems approach to Internet strategy, I offer some Recommended Reading. The books and web sites listed there will provide months of study and some very in depth tools. You may also contact me with your questions.
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