Expertise

Why spend money getting a company like Baigent to develop your website? Surely it’s not that hard? If your organisation is considering a DIY approach to its website you might find the following a useful guide:

1. Start by appointing an unflappable project manager to keep things on track, on time and on budget. Diplomacy skills are a must, as they’ll be managing the competing demands of your fundraising, marketing, HR and IT departments.

2. Do some research. Check out what other charities are doing on their websites and what they have planned for them for the next few years. This process might yield some good ideas worth incorporating into your own plans.

3. The next step is to develop a website strategy capable of delivering all that your various audiences will want to do online. It’s most cost-effective to take a long-term view and, to maximise its success, identify exactly how the site will fit into your organisation’s marketing strategy. It’s important to look at practical details too – how best to use it for fundraising, for example.

4. Get someone with top-notch creative skills to design a site that looks good, is easy to use, works on IE7, Netscape, Firefox, Safari – and meets all accessibility guidelines. Once they’ve created a great looking site, run it by your colleagues. Take on board their feedback and revise as necessary (as any good designer will tell you, managing creative conflict is integral to the process).

5. Next, you’ll need a team of skilled developers to translate the approved design into lines of code (and if they can also supply you with a bunch of computers to test it on, that’d be great). You might also want their input on building your Content Management System. This is vital to enable you and your colleagues to update content and interaction, thereby keeping your site fresh and your visitors interested. Make sure it can cope with video and podcasts too so you're Web 2.0 enabled.

6. By this point, you’ll almost be ready to launch! But your site is a precious asset so make sure it’s protected from hackers and viruses (‘biometric security’ will become your catchphrase) and runs 24/7. For this you’ll require a rack full of secure servers, firewalls, load-balancers and back-ups too.

7. Congratulations, your site is live. Now turn your attention to training your staff in how it and the CMS works. This is actually easier than it sounds, but it does depend on having a really user-friendly, intuitive CMS. It’s also advisable to update your servers and website each week to keep up to date with security patches etc.

8. Finally, to keep things running smoothly we’d advise you to make sure you’ve got easy access to engineers. It will also be helpful to have someone in charge of monitoring the site and responding to queries too.

9. One final thing to bear in mind is that websites are constantly evolving so even when you’ve done all the above you won’t actually have finished – but then, that’s what makes it so exciting.

It’s true, almost anyone can build a website these days. But a professional, user-friendly, cost-effective, hard-working, safe and secure site? That calls for real expertise across many disciplines - and Baigent have all that you need.