The Sausage Making of a Website: Considerations for Upgrading

Have you ever heard the expression “watching the sausage get made”? You usually don’t get to see sausage being made, you just buy it or eat it. We, at BackOffice Thinking, are making some sausage (our own website) right now. So, we thought we’d give you a peek into how it’s made.

The good news is that we do websites all the time. Making the tech decisions up front and designing a website is a pretty easy lift for us. We are used to walking side-by-side with nonprofits through each step. It’s a little strange to be walking our own team through it, but we are excited to get our new website up and running. Some of us can be a bit impatient (there is always someone on any team who is chomping at the bit to have it done) – but we all know that it takes time to do it right.

Nonprofits come to us to help think through the process, the wants, needs and all the things in between. We know how to do it all and we still had to walk through our own systematic process to make it happen. Here is a behind the scenes look at how the discovery and design parts of the process went for us. Just for fun, we thought you might want a sneak peek at the new website along the way. Maybe it will spark some ideas for upgrading your website.

Why are we upgrading?
There are many reasons to upgrade a website. For us, there were several considerations:

• Look & Feel – Just as we talk with our nonprofits about keeping their website living up to the expectations of their constituents, we need to do the same. Our clients expect our website to look and feel updated. It is time to get a more modern website that visually shows who we are, such as this replacement for bullet points.

• Style Refresh – We are updating our logo and refreshed some of our other font/color stylings. So, we needed a website to match. We create style guides for our clients to help create consistency across the organization. Sometimes the website is last to rebrand and sometimes it’s first. For us, the website will show the style refresh first and the style guide is ready. Here is our new logo which goes well with our heading style. You can see our current logo at the top of this page.

• Technology – We evaluate our clients’ current technology and help decide what will be the best solution moving forward. In our case, we currently use Drupal 7, which is approaching end-of-life, so we knew it would be a good time to make a change. Many of our Drupal 7 clients have chosen to do a website refresh and upgrade to Drupal 9, and others have opted to make the move to WordPress. (WordPress ended up being the right choice for us, but we’ll always be big Drupal fans!).

What do we want?
This is the dreaming part of getting a new website. We took a look at what we have and what we want.

• Flow – We say it all the time around here: An engaging website drives constituents to take action. The same is true for our website. The flow of our website is engaging, but we know it would drive more action if we updated the flow to help our visitors find exactly what they need quickly. This requires a revamp of the navigation, messaging and functionality of the website. Here is our new, easy, navigation with extended menus when you hover over the headings. You can compare it to the navigation at the top of this page.

• Messaging Match – The way we talk about what we do and who we are doesn’t match the navigation and flow of the website as much as it used to. Organizations and companies change, mature, and need a website that reflects that growth. It’s our turn to make sure those who visit our website know they are in the right place.
• Growth – Whenever we take on a project, we look at how the technology will need to grow with the organization over time. We are a growing company, stepping up our marketing/sales efforts and expanding our areas of expertise. We are due for some updated integrations, clearing of tools we don’t use anymore, and an introduction of new tools that will expand with us as we continue to grow.

Who will be working with this new website?
Then we asked what we needed for the BackOffice Team to be comfortable using the technology.

• Ease of Use – While we are generally pretty techie around here, we are like most of the nonprofits who come to us, in that we don’t want to work any harder than we have to! We wanted a solution that would be easy for our staff to use and update, including folks who aren’t expert coders.
• Management – It’s important to have a System Administrator to manage the back end as well, but we want to make sure our developers’ time is primarily spent working with our wonderful nonprofit clients. We needed something that would pretty much manage itself so we could have one of our non-developer team members handle most things that need attention.

Now, the decisions are made and the website is in development. In fact, we are almost at the testing phase of our process, so stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to launch.

If you have been considering redoing your website, let’s talk! Email your support address or contact us.