by Laura Ludka
October 05, 2022
Your association’s website is, in many ways, an exact representation of your organization. It is often the hub for all essential functions of an association including becoming a member, registering for an event, keeping up with association news, downloading resources, and more.
So… has your website’s navigation changed as your organization has evolved?
The navigation bar or menu on your website is the map a visitor uses to find what they need. If you updated your office map as you expanded your organization, it’s time to do the same on your website.
Here are a few helpful questions to consider or pose to your team.
- Does the top level of our navigation represent the essential focus areas of our mission?
Over time, it’s easy to keep adding top level navigation items to your site as a new program starts, another one ends, until one day you realize it’s hard for even staff to find what they need.
Take a step back, go back to your mission and compare it to the navigation. If you were visiting your website for the first time, would you know what services your organization provides? What opportunities?
- Does our navigation help drive traffic to our top revenue drivers?
Are visitors to your website able to navigate to a top-performing product, membership offering, or event in a single click? If not, it’s time to reorganize.
Visitors who are new to your organization or just browsing may not know that your popular webinars can only be found on the Events Calendar, or a much-loved resource for young professionals is buried on a page you can only get to via the About Us page.
Help them (and your organization) out by raising the most popular and revenue-driving webpages to the top.
- Does our navigation speak our staff’s language or our member’s language?
Given staff are often the ones making updates to websites, it’s easy to use the vernacular most comfortable to the internal team. But it can cause a lot of confusion among members if it’s not how they or their industry would explain it.
For example, while staff may refer to something as the “FY22 XYZ External Budget Audit v4” a more appropriate label for it to be found by members might be “2022 Financial Documents.”
It may be helpful to even bring in a trusted volunteer board member to walk through the site and see if they can find various items without your assistance. This will be a helpful exercise to gauge if your navigation labels make sense to everyone or just to staff.
The time you invest in actively auditing your association’s website navigation bar will translate into a better end-user experience for your members as well as staff.
Laura Ludka is in Corporate Marketing at Smithbucklin.