Updating Website Features in Bite-Size Chunks

Too often, nonprofits think about the functionality on their website as something that’s built in a big redesign project. They then leave it alone for years, or even until something breaks. This “big bang” approach has a lot of downsides, though.

The opposite approach, called “incremental improvements”, allows a thoughtful ongoing process. You can make define small, bite-sized updates to your site, taking account feedback and new information, and roll out new features perhaps every few months. And you don’t have to wait until your next big redesign to start — you can begin now.
  

Why You Should Consider Incremental Improvements

There’s a number of benefits.

• Predictable Costs: Big redesigns can be hard to budget for. With smaller, ongoing updates, you can spread out your expenses, making them more predictable and easier to manage.

• Ongoing Learning: You can get a lot of feedback from website– from website metrics to tiny user tests to research.When you make small changes over time, you can tweak your site based on what you're learning.

• Ability to React to Changes: Your organization and visitors have changing needs. Regular updates mean your website can keep up with what’s needed over time. 

Making the Shift

It’s quite doable to move your organization into a incremental improvement mentality. You’ll likely want to define a project with hours and a budget for it, but the project will be much smaller than a full redesign. Here’s one way to go about it.

• Build a List of Potential Updates: Start by gathering possible updates. You can chat with your team, stakeholders, or do user research. Keep this list somewhere easy to access and update, like a project management tool or spreadsheet. This list is frequently called a “backlog” - it’s just the list of things that might be desirable to do at some point. 

• Prioritize Your Updates: Once you have your list, figure out what's most important. Think through both what will provide the most value to site visitors and what will help get buy-in from your organization for the incremental improvements approach. Prioritize by voting or in a workshop. Or in a complex stakeholder environment, see my case study on doing prioritization via card sorting. 

• Find a Developer: As per the next section, you’ll want to a partner to help you with your ongoing enhancements.

• Define your first round of updates: Work with your developer to define the highest bang-for-the-buck updates to start with. In addition to your the first set of features, Your developer will likely want to review your site and make some technical updates so it’s easier to maintain. It’s often easier to define what’s in and out of any particular update in an Incremental Improvements approach, as 

• Don’t forget to test: As you make the functional updates to your site, test to make sure that everything still works. It can be very helpful to define some key scenarios that echo what a visitor would do on the site, and run those for each round of updates (this is called “regression testing”). If there’s a lot of things you want to test each time, your website developer may even be able to automate this testing.

• Launch and Plan for the Next: Make your updates a habit by scheduling out when they’ll occur. Perhaps they’re quarterly, every other month, or even monthly. 
  

Finding the Right Developer

You’ll need a contractor or a firm who is eager to work with you on these kinds of incremental projects. There’s two primary options.

• Hire a Website Contractor: If most of your updates are fairly tactical, a contractor with expertise in your content management system might be a straightforward and cost-effective way to handle your updates. Individual web contractors will typically be better at the technical side of the work than things like graphic design or defining complex requirements, and you’ll be dependent on that single person, but they could be considerably less expensive than a firm. 

• Work with a Web Development Firm: More and more companies are eager to work with nonprofits on this kind of ongoing website work. Many offer packages that include helping you to analyze metrics and other feedback to suggest useful updates, and then can provide professionals with many different skill sets to do the work. However, they’ll likely be considerably more expensive than a contractor.  
  

Wrapping It Up

Shifting to an incremental enhancement approach isn’t trivial, but it can be well worth the effort. Instead of large, infrequently redesigns that are hard to budget for and eventually go out of date, periodic updates allow you to have a predictable way to keep up with the needs of your users and organization.