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.
Where to start
The first step in thinking through a new or refreshed website is to think about what you already have.
Where are you starting from?
If you’re starting from scratch, then the most important part will be working out what your users need, which we’ll talk you through in the next section. However, you should also consider:
- Domain name – this will be your website’s address and you’ll probably have to buy it. You will need to check what’s available, and make sure it reflects the name of your organisation. If possible, keep it simple. Charity websites often end in .org.uk or, in Scotland, .scot
- Any social media channels – are you using anything at the moment? What kind of things are you posting there and how often?
If you’re updating an existing website, you should think about what’s currently working well and what isn’t. You could think about:
- Is your website salvageable, or would it be better to start from scratch?
- Is your domain name working? Is it relevant to your cause and similar to your organisation’s name?
- Do you have all the required access to be able to edit the website, especially if it was set up by someone who has moved on?
- Do you have access to statistics about use of your website, e.g. through Google analytics (GA4)?
- Does your site work on mobiles and tablets, and is it accessible?
Content audit
If you think there is content worth keeping on your website, you could try carrying out a content audit. To do this, you can spend a period of time looking through everything that’s currently on your website. You should make an assessment of how relevant and correct information is, and decide what might need to be done, e.g. keep, update or remove (a red/ amber/ green system works well too).
What skills do you have and need?
There are digital, coding and design skills needed to do the behind-the-scenes work to build a website. You should be able to quite quickly assess whether you have a role like this within your organisations. But there are other skills that you'll need for a website design project too:
- Curiosity and empathy for users, their needs and context
- A passion for quality content and for communicating well with external audiences
- Planning – ability to break a big project down into logical chunks
- Willingness to research and learn some technical concepts and terminology, so that you can make clear requests of technical partners
- Reflective and influential – able to bring internal stakeholders along as you ensure that your site meets user needs rather than internal agendas
Do you definitely need a website?
A good website will enable you to reach people, provide them with information and help them do stuff 24/7, wherever they are based, at scale and cheaply. It's where people will go to find out more about your organisation. This could include people who need the services or advice you are providing, funders or people who want to volunteer or work for you.
A good website will ensure that people visiting from search and social media quickly get to what they need. Now that digital has become more of a default, organisations without a decent digital presence are at real danger of falling behind the curve.
A poorly-performing or out of date website might mean that site visitors can’t access the content they need at all. Or they might get the wrong impression about your work because they are not seeing your latest information.
Our work to help organisations grow their digital capacity is supported by:
