Getting a Website - Developing Your Strategy

By Lasa Information Systems Team

Just as with any part of ICT in your organisation, your website must fit in with your organisations overall plan. This article describes how you can plan your website in line with your organisations strategy.

Most voluntary sector organisations are used to defining the goals of their organisation, and developing plans for several years into the future. Your IT strategy should fit in with these plans..Your website should fit in with the aims of your organisation. This makes it possible to define your site’s goals. For example, you might have goals like the following:

• to distribute your newsletter by e-mail to a certain number of service users
• to publish text from ten leaflets on your website
• to set up a discussion forum for use by a particular group of people – housebound disabled people, for example – and have a certain number of regular users after a year
• to send a thousand emails to the leader of the local council about a campaigning issue

Setting goals for the website will clarify the site’s intended audience. It is crucial to be clear in your mind about this when you consider the content of the site, and how the information will be presented. The site may have more than one audience – if so, decide which is the most important, and which less so, and how you can meet their needs appropriately.

One person in the organisation should have overall responsibility for the web site. This doesn't have to be a technical role, but it must be a service development one. Your web site should be integrated into the other work you do to publicise your service, provide information or market your products. If a non-technical person is in charge of the site, they may well need technical support, and you may decide that they should work as part of a team including at least one technical person. However, management must see the development of the site as a service delivery issue – and take responsibility for it from that perspective. The knowledgebase article about Staff Roles and Responsibilities gives more guidance on the different tasks associated with IT, and how to allocate them among different staff.

Whoever is responsible for the site should not develop it in isolation. They need to consult with all of the people who are involved in creating the site, responding to emails, keeping the site up-to-date and so on.  Don't forget that staff who aren't directly involved in the site might be impacted by it nonetheless - for example, helpline workers roles might be transformed because of more (or less) calls, and different ways of dealing with your client group resulting from your website.

This page is one part of a longer document about getting a website. If you want to read through the whole thing, you'll want to start with the Introduction.

If you are reading through all the parts of this document, the next part is Getting a Website - Planning Your Content