It’s the New Year and all of us are bubbling over with resolutions. So many of us resolve to exercise more, be kinder, spend more time with family, and so on. What about our websites? Shouldn’t we have resolutions for making our websites, email, and social media accounts better?
I am a big fan of Dan Pink, author of the best-selling books Drive, When, The Power of Regret, and so many others. He also has a video podcast that he calls the Pinkcast. Each podcast is only 2-3 minutes long and they’re full of amazing insights and advice. In this Pinkcast, he talks about how to make New Year’s resolutions like a pro. The process includes making a list of your regrets, picking the one thing that bugs you the most, and then focusing on just that in the new year.
What Are Your Website Regrets?
Getting back to your website, what are your regrets about your website from the last year? Here is what I hear from clients. They wish:
- They blogged more often
- They had better visuals on their website
- They had cleaned up their website by deleting the old stuff and making sure what was left was current and fresh
- Their website was better optimized for mobile
- They had a better handle on their website analytics and what it means for their organization
- Their content was better optimized for Google
- Their site search was better
- Their website did a better job of storytelling
- Their join or registration process was easier
- Their website templates were more flexible
This is a pretty long list of regrets. Each of the items above is important and worth focusing on. BUT if you focus on all of them, it will be sometime before you see progress. AND not making any progress on your goals and resolutions early in the year could set you up for another year of regrets. So how and where do you start?
Pick 1 or 2 Regrets to Focus on in 2024
Start by picking just one of your regrets, or maybe even 2, and turn them into goals. Which one is most important that if addressed, would yield the most benefit for your organization?
The key here is making specific enough goals that you end up with an action plan and a timeline.
For example, if one of your goals is to make your organization’s join process better, your action plan might have these steps:
- Look at Google Analytics to see what kind of traffic the join page gets and where people abandon.
- Meet with your membership database and marketing team to map the member join process and map the journey. Where are the friction points?
- Ask your web team, AMS team or website vendor for suggestions for making the journey better.
- Resolve to have something, anything done, by the first quarter of 2024.
- Monitor the results weekly.
- Repeat until the next set of improvements will bring in only marginal benefits.
If your goal is to clean up the dead and outdated content on your website, your action plan might look like this:
- Ask your web manager or web vendor to create an updated inventory of all of the content on your website.
- Look at your Google Analytics to see where traffic is going and where it’s not going.
- Do some searches on your site. Is old content dominating the results?
- Resolve to make some decisions about 5 types of content, eg., news, blogs, annual meeting information, etc. A decision could be: Delete all but the last three years of news, or delete all but the last two years of annual meeting information (except session handouts, which will live in a separate database).
- Set aside 1 hour per week to do this work. If you set aside too much, it will become onerous. If you allocate less time, you won’t make enough progress.
- Distribute the work to a team of staff and monitor your work and results monthly, including whether and how traffic and site search are improving.
Once you’ve got one one of your regrets tackled (at least for now), tackle the next one. And so and so forth.
Of course, your organization could opt for a total website redesign, which would presumably help you tackle a whole lot of regrets, challenges, and issues. Barring that, however, focusing on one thing at a time will give you the mental energy to actually make a difference on that item that’s been bugging you.
What are your biggest website regrets from last year? What “regrets” are you planning on tackling first this year? Leave a comment and let us know!
Need some help planning, strategizing, and/or getting the right technology in place to reach your goals and clear your year of regrets? That’s our expertise! We’d love to partner with you to help your organization thrive this year – in the digital space and beyond. Get in touch and we’ll schedule a time to tackle those “regrets” together!
