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Non Profit Website Review – Consumer Directed Choices

Posted on 22nd June 2010 by Timothy Spell
By Admin |June 22nd, 2010

Each week Nonprofit CMS will be selecting 1 nonprofit website to review and audit. The audit will focus on 4 major points: Readability, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Call to action and overall website design.  
 

Consumer Directed Choices: http://www.cdchoices.org/ is a nonprofit organization interested in changing the way home care services is delivered. They are located Albany New York and appear to have around 10 – 20 employees.

 

Readability

When I land on the homepage and begin reading the text, it is unclear what this nonprofit organization actually does. The hompage contains the following text that is as close to their mission as I can find:

“to do everything we can to make paperwork and processes as easy as possible while keeping laws, regulations and bureaucracy in mind. Stepping way back from controlling consumers’ lives – we don’t operate as traditional nurses or social workers – we leave the management up to the seniors and people with disabilities who are the experts about what is right for themselves.”

The homepage needs to quickly tell users WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, HOW they help people. After navigating to the What We Do page, I was able to figure out how this nonprofit operates and helps people with disabilities.  
 

SEO

The site does not appear to be optimized for Google. The “H” tags contain no relevant keywords. The “h1” tag is the “welcome” text. The “h2” tags are the right hand sidebar headings. The title tag contains the name of the organization…which is fine (if that’s the keyword they are optimizing for).  
 

Many of the image “alt” tags contain either no text or irrelevant text. They should be changed to keywords they are optimizing for.  
 

Permalinks (SEO friendly URLs) are not present. The site appears to be built using classic ASP and not using a Content Management System (CMS). This means that the URLs of the subpages (i.e. http://www.cdchoices.org/empopps.asp) do not contain human readable URLs. This subpage should instead be named: www.cdchoices.org/Potential-Employment-for-Personal Assistants/ Switching to a CMS like WordPress will solve this issue with no extra effort. In addition, a CMS would make it easier for someone with little technical skills to maintain this website. Based on my experience, classic ASP websites are difficult to maintain long term.  
 

Sitemap: It DOES contain a sitemap, this is good.  
 

Contact us page should contain a google map. This is good for Local SEO.
Basically, there are a lot of things wrong with the SEO of the site. Consumer Directed Choices should either hire an SEO firm or begin doing some keyword research based on what their top competitors are doing.  
 

Call to Action

On the homepage, it is unclear what people should do. Should they donate? Should they call for more information? Should they just be using this site as a reference guide? The site needs a clear Call to Action to encourage visitors to do something. One thing could be adding their name to an email list for future correspondence.  
 

Overall web design

Overall you can tell the person who developed this website has some sound HTML skills, however, the site lacks a “pop” that is desperately needed. Some custom graphics or rotating images would really spruce up the homepage.  
 

My suggestion to the owner of this site would be to consider doing a complete website redesign keeping SEO as a priority. Also switching to an easy CMS would relieve headaches down the road.

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