Here are three necessary skills when it comes to putting together a great website:
Understanding how to use strategic messaging on your website to make an impression on visitors and drive behavior
Putting together stunning visuals that feel original, inspired, and in-line with the message of the brand
Knowing the coding languages and bells-and-whistles that make things run well on the back-end
It can be really, really hard to finding somebody who has all three skills. I’ll admit that I only really have the first two. In order to help Plant With Purpose have the best website possible, I found it essential to team up with more skilled developers who could bring a level of expertise that I lacked.
What I did want to make sure to have a hand in were the aesthetics of the site, and the way it communicated our message to all those who came to visit. I worked to design a site that matched user behaviors, led to the behaviors we wanted to see more of, and that reflected well on the organization.
Our site was originally built by Petrit and Korab Rudi, and maintained by Sagetree in Chula Vista, California. In order to communicate our needs to our developers, I used Photoshop to design mockups of the website we wanted. This gave us a stronger sense of what we wanted, and our developers a clearer sense of what we were working towards.
We wanted a donate page focused on tree-planting efforts, along with a donate page focused on carbon offsetting and a more general-purpose donate page.
One of our main goals was to produce one of the most easy-to-use donation platforms possible. We tried to eliminate the amount of clicks needed to make a donation down to three while providing an engaging donation experience and maximum donor security.
Our site was also designed to effectively show the impact of our international work through data and gathered statistics. We aimed for back-end systems that allowed data to make a smoother transition from field surveys to the screen.
