New NetSquared.org Home Page Strong Model of Easy to Use Design for Diverse Audiences

Take a look at the new NetSquared home page for a useful model of user-friendly site design.

As I stress repeatedly in my writing and training about writing for the Web, effective communications is all about making it easy for the user. This holds for offline communications too, but most important online with trillions of choices available to online readers at the click of a button.

One vital way to make it easy for your users is ensuring they quickly find what they need online. For  organizations reaching multiple audiences on multiple programs and goals, this is a real challenge. One approach I've seen is providing pathways for various user groups by job title/position. That might seem like a natural but research has found that people don't self-identify primarily as a "fundraiser" or "policymaker."

Instead, online readers come to a site to focus on what they want to do there -- register for a conference, absorb some information, or share a comment. NetSquared does a beautiful job of inviting site visitors to step into clear action paths (join, build, share) that make sense for one-time visitors and return audiences who want to pursue various modes of involvement over the course of multiple visits.

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Comments

[Bob Roth]

I would agree that some improvements were made to the site... such as the layout and use of redundant navigation. But, at the same time, I would criticize the use of a very difficult to read font in the images and an over-abundance of copy prevalent throughout the site.

I'm not too familiar with this company and it wasn't obvious what it is that they could do for me in the first minute that I spent perusing their site.

The site answers "What?" and "Why?" over and over and over and over, but before I found the answer to "How?" I'd lost interest.