Adopting a best-practice web development approach

Mark McGrath, Social Change Online's Labour Sector Consultant, presents an 8-step approach to best-practice web development for unions.

Whilst it's tempting to just dive in and develop a website with the latest and greatest technology, unions would benefit more if they first concentrate on adopting a best practice approach when embarking upon a web strategy.

If you want a quality web presence then there are 8 steps I think you need to follow:

To fulfill all of these basic steps is a lot of work, but this shouldn't be any surprise to anyone who has worked in communications...you get out of it what you put in. And if you want a good website there's no escape: you are going to have to put in: people, time and money.

Some more detail on these steps...

1. Commit to specific objectives

It's amazing how many organisations proceed with a web development project and don't bother to write down what they want to achieve out of it. If you take the time to list in order what you really want to achieve with a new site then this can inform all your other decisions that follow during the development project.

Performance Benchmarks

Plus, committing to specific objectives will enable you to set performance benchmarks for your site. You can then use these performance benchmarks when evaluating your site in preparation for redevelopment (what is known as metrics testing). Here are some examples of objective and possible performance benchmarks:

2. Conduct a user needs analysis

"90% of web sites have very poor usability. Since most other sites are bad, you can attract loads of users if your site is easy to use and satisfies real user needs.

- World-renowned web usability expert Jakob Nielsen, author of "Designing Web Usability".

Insiders don't always know what outsiders think

Organisation insiders don't necessarily always know outsiders want. Quite often the people running organisations assume that their user's needs are the same as their own needs for a website. Quite often this isn't the case, the everyday user tends to have a different agenda to the people running an organisation.

Test your users to find out what they think

There's only one-way to make sure that your users get what they want: ask them. Testing ideas on your target audience is the best investment you can make to ensure that what you will build will work with your audience.

User needs analysis can significantly reduce your risk when developing a website by identifying ill-conceived or unwanted functionality, thereby reducing the need for major rework later in the development process.

3. Use a social marketing approach to determine the content mix

A social marketing approach identifies the barriers that stop people from changing their behaviour towards your desired outcomes (e.g. joining a union). Once these barriers are identified content can be targeted at overcoming these barriers, enabling behaviour change to then occur.

The 7 Doors Approach

Social Change Media, a sister company to Social Change Online, and a company I'm now a Director of, developed a "7 Doors" approach to social marketing (this approach was developed by SCM Campaign Director Les Robinson). The "7 Doors" are what your marketing has to get people through to achieve social change.

This approach can be applied to union campaigns in general and their website content in particular. Below is a quick example of how the Seven Doors approach could be applied to the issue of people joining unions.

4. Test and refine design

The best content is useless if you can't find it. Design must be intuitive: it must comprehend the way users think so that they can quickly find what they want. Menu items and content on the home page should give users an easy to read preview of what's available in the site.

Road test your design with the people that matter: your users

The best way to ensure that your design works is to road test it in a user group session. This will allow you to find out what works and what doesn't, so that you can keep the good bits and refine the bad bits.

5. Use a content management solution

If you haven't got a content management system (CMS) to run your website then chances are you struggle to get critical content up on your site when it's needed most, or you are paying too much for content publishing.

A CMS is a software package embedded into a website that enables non-technical people to publish web content using a simple copy-paste-click process into a series of content entry forms.

Breaking the publishing bottleneck

CMS's help break the web publishing bottleneck because it opens up the field of web publishing to anyone in your organisation that has content worth publishing. This means that more people can publish more content more quickly to your site using a CMS.

Save time & money

The time difference in publishing an article online between a CMS -enabled site and one that requires hand-coding of HTML and manual upload of pages to the web server can easily be 15 minutes. Now do the math's...at only four articles a week this works out to be a saving of 52 hours, or about 7 working days a year. Most unions would publish more than this number of articles a week if they had a CMS.

Share the workload

A good CMS will have workflow management tools: allowing high-level administrators to determine who gets access to the CMS and approve published content before it goes live to the web. This gives web administrators the ability to farm out the publishing work without losing control.

6. Write content in web-friendly format

Research shows that web users prefer to scan text rather than read it, they also prefer text to be short and to the point, and dislike obvious sales material.

Jakob Nielsen, the web usability expert, has the following tips on how to write content for the web:

• Cut your words by 50%
• Use meaningful sub-headings that give users a preview of content
• Stick to one idea per paragraph
• Use objective language
• Use the inverted pyramid technique: conclusion first - detail later
• Highlight keywords
• Use bullet points (well at least I'm getting this one right)

7. Evaluate site performance

No one ever gets it 100% right the first go. So that's why it's important to review your web work, research the alternatives and use this to inform your next stage of redevelopment.

To stand still on the web is death. Successful websites aren't static: the organisations that own them are constantly analysing what works and what doesn't and then embarking on the next stages of development to improve their website's performance.

Anlayse your web performance

If you've committed to objectives and set your performance benchmarks around these objectives then you can be in a position to measure your site's performance. This will involve some research, like analysing site statistics and form transaction log files, but it will be worth it.

A good way to make sure you've got some critical data on what your users think about your site is to publish a website usability survey form on your site. The LHMU has a good example of a website usability survey form.

But just don't analyse these performance benchmarks: go out talk to your audience and ask them how they feel about your site. Putting together and running a focus group on your website's performance shouldn't be too hard for a union. If you like you can then call in an expert from an agency to facilitate the group.

8. Redevelop your site

Once you have completed your site evaluation process it should be clear what areas of your site that you need to address in redevelopment. At this stage is best to employ a professional solution designer from a web development agency to ensure you get the right technical solution deployed, as the areas to redevelop will inevitably involve site functionality, not just content.

This article is an extract from a paper that was orginally presented by Mark McGrath at the ACTU's Union Media & Communications Conference held on 22&23 April 2004.

Mark McGrath is the Labour Sector Consultant for Social Change Online and a Director of Social Change Media.