If you are like most nonprofit organizations, you have a ton going on in your community and you have a lot to say about all of it. If you’ve been around more than two weeks, you probably also have a lot of evidence of the good work you’ve already done. And of course, you are supposed to put all of that up on your website. If you have important stuff on your website, it ends up in the main nav. And when that gets full, you have tons and tons of dropdowns.

Now, things have changed in the way we think about what a website should look like and how it should be navigated. In the past, the wisdom was “keep your clicks to three or less” for any action you want performed on your website. If site visitors can’t get there in three clicks, they won’t do it.

But the result of that kind of thinking was to stuff the main navigation and have tons of drop down menus to fill the gaps. Create as direct a line as possible to the desired goal.

You may or may not be aware of that thinking, but you have certainly seen it in action. You may have even inherited a website that was born from that principle.

But there's a problem with that kind of thinking. For one, it turns out not to be true. And it creates a deeper problem. When site visitors are confronted with too many choices, they experience decision paralysis. That is, when given too many options, they choose nothing. It feels helpful to show people all the possibilities upfront, but really what they want is a curated experience.

These days, web designers try to keep the main navigation to five items max. Fewer if you can get away with it, and do away with the drop down nav entirely.

Most nonprofits have a very difficult time doing that. There’s just too much going on, your organization is too complex there’s too many different audiences and too much to share. So nonprofit websites get a bit of a pass, but not too much. The goal should still be simplicity and minimalism when it comes to your navigation. If nav items can be combined, do it. If nav items can be eliminated, do it.

We have yet to design a website navigation that can’t be tamed into simplicity. If it happens it happens, we aren’t ideologues. But every labyrinthine, over-the-top navigation that we’ve been handed, so far, has submitted to the “five or under '' rule with some careful editing and consideration.

Here are some of the ways we’ve handled that:

Take “home” out of your main navigation. Your logo should link back to “home” and the back button will work just as well. Easy fix.

Combine any nav items you can. Eliminate anything you can. Chanel a bit of Marie Kondo. If it doesn't "spark joy" (or serve the primary purpose of your website), ditch it.

Create icons to navigate to subpages. For example, instead of creating a dropdown menu under "Services" that lists all your services, just include one link to your Services page, and let site visitors navigate to specific services from there, that's if it is even necessary to maintain a separate page for each service. Ideally, you probably want people contacting you directly to find out more about your offerings than doing all their own research online.

Remove social links from the main navigation. Now you want social, but you want your site visitors to go to social first. If they are already on your website, even better! You don’t want to drive people from your website to your social media and then out again into the mysterious void of inattentive scrolling never to return. You want to pull people in from social to your website. It’s okay to link social in your footer, because people headed there are looking specifically for your social links, probably because they want to like and follow you. That’s cool! But if you offer it up first thing, you’re just losing people who might have otherwise stuck around for the ride. Don’t offer too many exits right off the bat. Assume people want to get as close to your organization as they can and your job is to help them do that. Your job is not to help them keep their distance, they can do that on their own if they so desire.

Replace those social media links with a button. That button should be the whole point of coming to your website. Think, if there was one thing I want people to do once they are on the site, one thing that would make that visit a success, what would it be?

People read websites in an “F” pattern, so the elements that you place in the top corners of your site are very likely to get read. Save those sections for the most important information. Your logo, your mission statement, and your call to action: Donate, Connect, Volunteer. Things like that. Make that action as easy and as intuitive as it can possibly be.

Keep what really matters to the people who matter to your organization, and ditch the noise that’s getting in the way!

Most of the nonprofit websites I work with start out with way too much content.

Of course they do. You do so much good work and you want people to know about it. You want the people who participated to know that their efforts were appreciated. And you want donors to know what you are capable of doing.

But presenting too much information up front is probably hurting your cause. Here’s how.

It hides the real value of what you do. Website users tend to want to do very little “work” to find the information they’re looking for. It is our job as web designers to make sure their is a clear path for them.

It transfers the overwhelm of running a busy nonprofit to your audience. Whatever is going on behind the scenes, you want the experience of interacting with you to be uplifting.

It puts the pressure on your audience to parse the information. It’s like saying “I don’t have time to figure this out, you do it.” Whether you particularly want that job or not, it is your responsibility to help your audience understand what you do, understand its impact, so that hopefully, they’ll want to support it and you can keep doing it.

That means leaving a lot of stuff out. If it isn’t directly helping your cause, it is hurting. In the end, it is way better to have your audience assume you are doing all sorts of cool stuff that they don’t know about, than to provide direct evidence that your organization is a disaster on wheels, rampaging through the streets without direction.

Aim for clarity above all. This is what we do. This is the impact we have. Here’s how you participate. Here’s how you can make a donation. If it isn’t crystal clear, leave it out.

Nonprofits face a particular challenge on the first page of their website. Your organization is so many things to so many people. How do you capture that in a clear way, in just one or two sentences without leaving anyone out, or sounding really weird?

It’s not easy. But there are some tricks you should know to make it feel easier.

The biggest mistakes nonprofits make when writing their websites.

The single biggest mistake I see over and over again when auditing nonprofit websites is this: not having a clear statement about what they do and who they serve right at the top of the site.

There are a lot of understandable reasons why this happens so often.

Nonprofits speak to a lot of different audiences. There is the community that is most impacted by their services, the people who are likely to volunteer time or work with the nonprofit, and then there are of course the donors, big donors and little donors. These are all distinct audiences with distinct needs and languages and interests. How do you talk to them all at once?

When you start hitting walls or aren’t seeing the results you were expecting in your business, a perspective shift can be just what’s needed.

One of the biggest breakthroughs I have had in business came from a meditation I learned from Bari Tessler. If you don’t know Bari Tessler, she is a very smart person behind the book The Art of Money. I took her year-long course a few years back and it flat out changed my life. She breaks down in a really clear, easy to manage way, that most of our problems with money are not lack of skills, they’re emotional. Once you’ve got the emotional part on vibe, the skills are relatively easy. Like, budgeting isn’t hard. Forgiving yourself for spending five dollars on a coffee that you then knocked over without drinking, that’s hard.

The About page is a huge missed opportunity on most websites. It seems so straightforward. This is the part where I talk about me right? Well, this might sound weird, but… Your About page is Not About You. Nope. Not really. 

Everybody knows you need a website, but… Why actually? What is it there to do? Chances are, if you don’t know the answer to that question, your website isn’t doing anything. Every page on your site has a purpose and none more important than you homepage.

Your homepage is almost certainly the most important page on your site, and in many cases, it's the only page you need. In fact there is a growing trend of making the homepage the entire website.

Seriously, what the frickin’ frick is a brand voice and how do you make one? 

Do you have to invent a character? Like that Geico lizard? Why can’t you just say stuff? Or write stuff? Why do you need to use a voice?

We are so psyched to show you what we’ve been working on. Projects big and small, for therapists, coaches, startups, and more.

When people ask me what platform they should use for their website, 90% of the time I tell them, “Just go with Squarespace and save yourself the headache.” 

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Jumping into building a website is intimidating. There is so much to know and often you just want to hand it over to an expert to take care of it so you won't have to think about it anymore. It can be especially intimidating if you don't feel you know enough about the process to appear competent. What if my web developer thinks I'm an idiot?

It may come as a surprise that as a web designer, I don't consider the web designer to be the most important component in the web design process. For sure web designers are important. A good one can do wonders and a bad one can mess up the entire project. But there are some other folks who you should become aquainted with if you want to knock this project out of the park.

But the best reason to have a high quality website is that you are not like every other therapist. There are people who you are uniquely qualified to serve. Your web presence is the best chance you have to put a flag out for those people. And, you will waste less time serving people who are not suited to you, and you to them.