Our Approach to Nonprofit Web Design
It’s easy to make grand statements about glossy new websites. It’s harder to actually deliver on those statements, but that’s exactly what we do for nonprofit organizations just like yours.
Our efficient and effective process, carried out by professionals who care about your organization, is the secret.
Our Nonprofit Website Process
Project Management
We pride ourselves in being friendly, productive, and efficient. Cornershop provides effective and responsive project management with a single point of contact throughout the entire project. Your dedicated Project Manager checks in with you every step of the way, meeting with you regularly, seeking your feedback, and ensuring we’re on track to launch a site you love. And we don’t just pack up once we’ve launched that new site: we stick around to help you support it going forward!
Discovery
At the start of our engagement, your Cornershop team will begin the process of getting to know your vision for the website while also taking a data-driven approach to understanding your audience and digging into the functional considerations for your site. This is the phase where we gather as much creative and technical information as possible and use that information to begin planning your new website.
Design
Using the information gathered in the Discovery phase, we’ll begin designing your website. We start by defining your new information architecture to make sure your website will be structured well and easy to navigate. From there, we look at the overall branding of the website and provide a style tile that offers a preview of a new design concept. Finally, we’ll put it all together to create wireframes and mockups that provide you with an advanced look at how great your website will look.
Development
Once we have an approved, working plan for the website we’ll get to work installing WordPress, applying the nonprofit-focused WordPress theme we’ve selected, and configuring the WordPress backend to meet your specific needs. All this work will take place on our development server at a special URL we’ll share with you; once finished, your site will be migrated to its “live” location.
Accessibility
Accessibility is important to any successful nonprofit website. We follow an accessibility checklist throughout the design and development phases to ensure your site is accessible for as many people as possible. We’ll also write code that is compliant with Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 Level AA (and even WCAG 2.1 AAA, if you have the budget), and will run the site through a compliance checker to ensure we haven’t missed anything big.
Content Migration
Over the years, you’ve probably amassed a lot of content in your CMS: blog posts, news articles, and static pages have a tendency to really pile up over time. It could take dozens of hours to manually move all that content, even if you have a small army of interns available. Instead, we’ll programmatically move that content using proven methods tailored to your specific needs. After everything is moved over, we’ll manually address formatting issues, shift things into the right places, and generally tidy the place up.
Quality Assurance
After development, we’ll run a full end-to-end test on your new site and address any problem areas this testing uncovers. Our dedicated WordPress QA expert will test your new nonprofit website thoroughly on Mac, PC, and mobile operating systems, targeting today’s most popular browsers — including the latest versions of Edge, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari — to ensure the user experience is consistent and satisfying.
SEO
What’s the point of a shiny new WordPress website if people can’t find it? It’s well-known that redesigning your site can damage your SEO results — it’s normal for sites to lose as much as 30% of organic search engine traffic as Google re-crawls pages — and it can take around 3 months to recover. We are well aware of this, and focus on a few key areas of SEO throughout our process to limit this damage and help your site recover faster, and also take it a step further by working on your content to ensure that you are appearing high in search results for your priority keywords.