Itching for a website redesign?
Careful: It might not be a smart move. According to research from the Nielsen Norman Group — reported at Radical Redesign or Incremental Change? — radical website changes sometimes leave users (your donors) confused, unhappy, and less responsive.
Incremental improvements to your website might be a better way to go:
You may be bored with your current site, but customers likely aren’t: they usually don’t sit and stare at the site for extended periods every day. [U]sers tend to like designs that are safe and familiar.
So hold your horses.
There are some situations where a major change is necessary, according to the post. Those include:
- The gains from making incremental changes are miniscule or nonexistent
- The technology is severely outdated, making critical changes impossible
- Architecturally the site is a tangled mess
- Severely low conversion rates site-wide
- Benchmarking research reveals your site is far inferior to the competition
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com.
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