The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations is the membership organisation for Scotland's charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises. Charity registered in Scotland SC003558. Registered office Mansfield Traquair Centre, 15 Mansfield Place, Edinburgh EH3 6BB.
Project outlines for different size websites
In this section, we're giving you an outline of different kinds of website projects, and what a website project for these sizes of projects might look like. We hope this gives you a better idea of the scale of the project needed for the kind of website you might like to produce.
| A basic ‘brochure’ website – just the info | A ‘medium’ site – one or two key tasks | A more complex site – covering lots of different user needs |
| This is the most basic kind of website. It’s typically a single-page site that gives people basic information about your organisation. For example, you might feature your address, opening hours, and ways of getting in contact. Funders sometimes want to see an ‘official’ organisational website rather than a social media profile, and a brochure site can help with this. It’s also useful to have a simple website that you can update quickly and easily. There are off-the-shelf tools to make sites like this, and you should be able to get it done in less than a day, even with minimal technical knowledge. | One level up from the basic brochure site, where users can perform one or two basic tasks, or where you can share a bit more information. For example, you might include a list of upcoming events with booking links, or a page with a list of recent blog posts and updates on a campaign or activity. Or you might have a very basic booking form where users can sign up for an event or activity with your organisation. This kind of site can also be built with simple off-the-shelf tools. Putting it together and making the integrations work might take a day or two. Someone willing to learn some basic technical skills could do this without too much outside help. | A bigger organisation might need a site that can handle multiple, complex user needs. For example, a secure and branded donation form for individual supporters, an archive of blog posts, a resource library, an upcoming events page, and in-depth organisational information for funders, job applicants and other stakeholders. If your website build involves a lot of work on design and/or content, it may become a bigger project where you need outside expertise and support. This kind of project could take weeks or months, and along with significant technical expertise, you’d need a good amount of internal capacity to manage the project well. |
How much will it cost?
How much?
Website development costs vary, so it’s not possible to give a precise figure. But the three examples above (Basic, Medium and Advanced) step up in orders of magnitude:
- A basic single-page site is achievable for low hundreds of pounds
- A medium-level site with one or two specific features should be one or two thousand pounds at most
- More advanced sites, with multiple content types and more complex features, are likely to run to the high thousands
You’ll find it easier to manage and control costs if you have more internal expertise and capacity.
How to do it - key steps
- List all of the key information you need on your website. What are the top questions people ask about your organisation and your work?
- Sort out the technical elements: you can use a web hosting company to handle domain registration, storage and hosting for your website, along with services like email addresses and security certificates.
- Choose a simple tool such as Carrd, Wix or Squarespace to build your site. Many web hosting companies have built-in tools which work well for simple sites.
- Ensure that any website layout or design you choose is mobile-friendly and fully responsive. This will mean that your content is easy to read on any device, and it will help with your performance on Google search.
- Make a secure connection: Set up SSL encryption, by adding an SSL certificate. SSL encrypted sites have a web address that starts with ‘https://’ and users will see a padlock icon in their browser. This means that users can connect securely to your website, and they won’t get warnings about their connection being unsafe.
- Contact details: make your main contact email match your website address. Most web hosting companies will have services to help you manage email mailboxes linked to your web domain.
- Publish your site – you're done!
- Make a list of the core information you need to show on your site, and the (one or two) core tasks you want users to be able to complete.
- If you have some existing content, you will want to complete a content audit or card-sort exercise to check that you have stuctured your site in a logical way that is easy for users to follow.
- The key steps around domain registration, making page design mobile-friendly and adding SSL encryption all apply here too.
- For a slightly more advanced site, you should work through your key tasks (2 or 3 at most) in more detail, to ensure that you give users a really good experience. For example, as a venue for hire, you might use an embedded calendar to clearly show upcoming availability, a booking form to take key details, then follow up with a clear email response so that prospective bookers know what will happen next. Or if you’re an organisation providing information and support on a health topic, you’d have a clearly structured set of pages covering the issues in depth, and perhaps a well-organised list of further resources and external contacts.
- Even with a bigger site, it’s still worth working out what your key user tasks are. If people could only do one or two things with your website, what would those things be?
- On more complex sites, there is a real risk that site navigation and page structure gets driven by internal priorities and preferences, rather than real user needs. If you can stay true to real user needs (give the people what they want!) your site will be much more effective. Two questions can help here:
- What would people like to know about (or do) when they first connect with us, or when they first engage with our core issues?
- How can we make it easier for them to do that?
- The key steps around domain registration, making page design mobile-friendly and adding SSL encryption all apply here too.
- Your main challenge with a bigger site is about ensuring that it is well structured and users can easily find their way around. You can use resources like insights from Google Analytics, a card sort exercise and user research to help with this.
- Many organisations with more complex sites face the Too Much Information problem – you’ve been building up expertise and evidence for years, and it all feels important. But you need to be really ruthless and focused, to make sure your key content is not swamped. Websites for large national charities such as the RNID and Mind have worked hard to make their latest campaigns sit front and centre, with key help topics also accessible too. There is lots of other information too, but it is further down the page or in a secondary position on the site navigation to avoid overwhelm.
Project timeline
In general, you should spend a fair amount of time on research and discovery – taking time to test any assumptions and ensuring that you have and agreeing a coherent rationale for features on your new site. Skipping ahead too quickly can mean that you end up wasting time and money on ‘solutions’ which don’t address real needs.
With a smaller project like a brochure website you can go from planning to publishing fairly quickly. But with a bigger project, you might want to split the work into four stages:
The user research phase, where you work out what your key users really need, and test any assumptions you have about the best way of meeting these needs. Only move on from Discovery when you’re happy that you have a clear picture of user needs.
(Note: timings given in links here are for larger, public sector-scale projects. A voluntary sector website would typically take a shorter period of time to complete).
You generate a low-fi prototype for internal testing. This won’t have any polished design or final content, but it will give you a tangible ‘Thing’ to test internally. This prototype might be narrow – it might not cover every feature. But if you’re testing assumptions around a particular user task (eg making a donation) it should be complete so you can test the whole process from end to end. Testing a prototype ‘thing’ rather than discussing a list of features can help you keep the process focussed on meeting user needs.
You’ve built your product into a fairly final draft, now it’s ready to test with some external users. With a website build, you’d expect your design and most of your content to be complete at this stage. You might test on a private link with a selected group of users (handy if you are looking for detailed feedback). Or you might redirect your main site to a ‘beta’ page so that anyone can experience the new site, with an option to return to the previous site if they run into difficulties. If you’re migrating a lot of content from an old site, now is the time to do it.
You’ve taken on board the feedback from the previous stages, and your site is formally launched. You can now publicise this web address on your social media channels and turn off any redirects to your old site. You should still be ready to look out for insights and feedback and make any incremental improvements.
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