The Nonprofit Website Insider

Key questions to ask yourself before adding website features. Plus: Understanding technical debt, hidden costs of new elements, and a webinar for defining your website vision

Dear website champions,

It's exciting to get a shiny new feature or article up on your website. It’s much more fun than fixing small issues or updating old information! 

But that doesn’t make it more important. In fact, those less glamorous updates might be even more crucial than the flashy new additions. Remember, every new feature is like adopting a digital pet - cute, but needy! Each new element adds complexity you’ll need to support. Every article eventually needs updating or removal. New navigation items can overwhelm your menu, and new features will need debugging as you make further changes. Without a strategy, you’ll end up with a digital petting zoo—one that’s hard to navigate, doesn’t support your goals, and will require a full-time zookeeper to wrangle later.

How do you avoid this? If you’re adding something, ask yourself:

• Does this fix a problem for your visitors? If so, proceed! Those are top priority.

• Is this more valuable than updating old content? If you’re posting articles weekly but never removing anything, it likely makes more sense to post less often and spend some time updating or taking old articles down. Quality over quantity!

• Does this support your key goals? Are you hoping it will increase or decrease something meaningful to your organization?

• Does this support one of your audience's goals? Will it provide them something they legitimately want? (A quick set of user research might be useful to understand your audience better if you’re unsure.)

• Does this clearly move your website forward in an incremental way? Your goal should always be to move towards an overall vision in bite-size chunks.

If you answered no to most of the above, is it really worth your time now and the time to support it down the road? Your future self (and your visitors) will thank you!

By the way, if you're not sure how to define your overall website vision based on your goals and your audiences' goals, I'm doing a webinar this Wednesday that might be of interest to you. See below for more!

Keep calm and update strategically,

Laura

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Dive Deeper

How to explain technical debt in plain English | The Enterprisers Project

The concept of what happens when you add more and more things without considering the cost of supporting old things is something that developers call "technical debt". This is a really useful concept—it doesn't have to be just "technical"; you could easily have "content debt" as well.

The hidden cost of features | Unrealist Technologies

"A few hours to code" can mean years of maintenance.  This is a great overview of all the ways that time adds up on those "little features", both before and after they're actually launched.

RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers | Intercom

Okay, it's not *super* simple, but this framework gives a way to prioritize a list of feature requests which takes into account that fancy things aren't usually the best way to go. This type of sort-of-quantitative method can be a secret weapon for explaining to stakeholders why their "great idea" might not be so great after all.