Is your nonprofit ready for a website redesign? Are you the one charged with making sure the organization “gets it right this time?” Before you ask a web designer to produce that first round of homepage comps, you will need to take some initial steps to set yourself up for success. Follow these tips to get started.

Link: Five Tips to Strengthen the Design of your Nonprofit’s Website

Every website has to perform maintenance at some point or another. Whether it’s just to upgrade a portion of the site or because of some problem with the site, it’s an inevitable fact of website ownership. And in many cases, maintenance requires taking your site offline for at least a few minutes.

So what should you do if your site is going to be down for maintenance? You don’t want users coming to a 404 or other error page. And hopefully you’d like to encourage them to come back to your site sooner rather than later, right? If that’s the case, you’ll need to build a custom maintenance page. Below we present a list of best practices to building effective maintenance pages that will help keep your visitors, whether new or returning, happy.

Link: Effective Maintenance Pages: Examples and Best Practices

…if you just need a short form to collect some basic information these are a few flexible and not too difficult choices. Keep in mind that this is by no means a complete or even necessarily the best in class list. There are of course tons of form creation options out there – just google “easy forms for web site” to see what I mean. If you are looking specifically to do surveys the possibilities continue to expand.

Link: Quick and Dirty Form Builders

Chris Brogan, a wonderful and prolific writer about social media & networks, lists three things he thinks users want from websites:

1. information
2. simple
3. connection

Read his post for more on what he meant by each: What Do YOU Think People Want From Your Site