A useful exercise in reviewing your writing and to decide whether your website is relevant and interesting to your users is to stop and think about who your users might be.
You might have a lot of experience of dealing with your service users in the real world - from workshops, drop-ins, outreach work etc. - but are these people behaving differently online and does your website have new kinds of users you never knew about?
Personas
Personas help you to visualise an end product or service thatwill suit your users' needs by helping them achieve their goals, and help you test your own organisation's success.
Identifying a handful of personas can give you a "lowest common denominator" whose needs you need to meet, but deliver a lot more besides: a way to model your website as it will be used in the real world, by many more types of people.
You should end up with a handful of primary personas (for example, one for a service user, one for a funder, one for a volunteer) and you'll usually create different parts of the site for different primary personas. Some personas will use the same pages.
Analytics
Analytics can offer you a great insight into how people are using your website, such as:
- What websites are they coming from?
- What part of the world do they live?
- What pages do they visit?
- How long do they stay on the site?
Useful links
- How to use personas and scenarios in web design
- Understanding goals of website users
- 17 Statistics to monitor on your blog
- Google Analytics Maximised: Deeper Analysis, Higher ROI & You
- Set up a social media listening dashboard in 30 minutes or less
Next: What do you want?