A website rebuild is a major investment for any charity. It’s not just about creating something that looks great—it’s about ensuring your new website delivers real value to your organisation and the people you serve. At William Joseph, we’ve worked with many UK charities on website projects and have seen what can make a rebuild succeed—or stumble.

In this guide, we share practical advice to help you make the most of your website project. Whether you’re in the middle of a rebuild or just starting to think about one, this article will give you actionable steps to improve your outcomes and ensure your website works hard for your charity.

1. Make the most of the chance to speak to your audiences

User research shouldn’t be seen as a tick-box exercise for the website discovery phase, it should be a formative process that helps your organisation to understand how your core audiences experience your organisation and, importantly, determine what they need from you .

To make the most of what may be a rare opportunity to hear from your audiences, we recommend:

• A mix of people who are known to you and “cold” audiences of people who you are trying to target with your services, fundraising, brand or campaigns.

• Ensuring that the audiences that you are testing with are diverse - including and not limited to socio-economic, race, ability and disability, neurotypical and neurodivergence, gender and sex, age, education, geographical location and technology use.

• Use a specialist recruitment partner to support with both of the above and to further remove any unconscious bias that you, your teams and senior stakeholders will be inadvertently bringing to the project.

• Attend the user testing sessions and encourage others to do the same. This has had transformative impact for the organisations we work with; enabling them to hear directly from their primary audiences on their motivations for engaging with website content and what holds them back from completing the action that the organisation wants to see.

2. Getting your people familiar with your content (and how it comes to be on your website)

We recommend a consistent, always-on approach to content auditing but understand that in some organisations, the momentum of a website project is needed for stakeholder engagement in this process.

Start your content audit process early (as early as possible!) to get people thinking about:

• Top performing content

• Journeys in and out of this content

• Content that gets little engagement (or even zero views - it happens!)

• How website content is briefed and the process from start to finish

• The audiences that engage with your current content

• Any gaps that you think you may have with your current content

• Content that does or doesn’t feel like your authentic tone of voice or brand

The discovery phase will dig into these questions and many more, unearthing your core content needs based on your audience needs, expectations and contexts.

We recommend you get a headstart on this and start to dive into your data to deeply understand where people are going to on your website - and where people think they go, but they are not.

Ideally you should be running a parallel content audit process alongside the website project that continues long after the discovery phase has completed and beyond launch too. Embedding a strategic approach to content takes time - and often an attitudinal shift.

This is also the right time to think about content post-launch. Communities of Practice are a practical, collaborative way to retain the momentum after website launch and continue to use the audience insight and learnings to shape content design going forward.

3. Clear your diary - and your head!

Some of the most successful website projects are ones where we can truly collaborate with people, which we know takes considerable time and energy for our clients.

Making big decisions on your primary audiences, the core content that they need and the process for getting there is a hugely rewarding process, especially when you know that this will be game-changing for them and your organisation.

To do this, the internal project team will need to be able to deeply understand the discovery insights. This can be a long and multi-layered process, which we have seen often involving different internal teams and stakeholder groups. In some cases, the discovery insight will chime with what you already understand about your audiences and content, and in other situations, there may be new perspectives to take into account.

We often use agile ways of working to gradually shape the final product, using learnings from the discovery process that we share as we go through the process. Your internal project team should have time blocked in their diaries to read through the research, ask your agency questions and take the answers - and more questions - to wider internal stakeholder groups and teams.

Not only does this approach make for a better final digital product, but it also builds stakeholder engagement and buy-in from the start. This process works best, when you can empower someone (or a bunch of people) to act as product owner for the website - they need the time and space to do that effectively.

4. Embrace everyone wanting a piece of the project

Your organisation will be interested in your website project. Regardless of an organisations’ digital maturity, we have seen from our work in-house and our projects with clients that website projects garner huge attention internally. Whilst this could seem frustrating - particularly if you are trying to get people to engage with other elements of digital - it’s important to build empathy for the reasons why:

• the website is seen as the organisation’s ‘shop window’

• website rebuilds are major organisational projects only happening every few years and so everyone wants to get it right this time

• having a new website (and perhaps a new content strategy) will affect many of your colleagues’ daily workflows and experiences, at least a little

• it’s one of the most visible expressions of your brand and tone of voice

• making decisions about website priorities, and about the right language to talk about those priorities, can feel like making decisions about whose work or ideas are more important than others (It isn’t. But it’s understandable that it might feel that way)

• the budget is often higher than typical digital projects and so requires additional governance.

We recommend getting ahead of all of this and proactively involving your organisation in the website project from the start to build excitement and engagement:

• Define the level of engagement you expect and create groups for this- for example, your core project team that will be involved day-to-day will have a different expectation and need for information than the senior stakeholder group that are interested in risk, budget and strategy.

• Create a Teams or Slack channel for the project for the immediate project group, and then perhaps another for the wider governance/steering group

• If there is an insight coming through discovery that will garner a lot of attention - for example, a new key audience group or some insight on a content gap - we recommend not sitting on this until the end of discovery! Share this with your internal teams and senior stakeholders as part of your ongoing project engagement. Projects like these run the most smoothly when no one is surprised and instead everyone feels like they are part of the process.

5. Use the project to build interest in wider digital strategy and transformation

Many organisations spend months (or years!) working on their transformation programme, negotiating budgets, meeting technology providers and navigating different approaches to reaching their organisational goals through digital. When you finally get the go ahead for a website project, it’s easy to focus on the delivery of that purely but we also recommend keeping the focus on your wider transformation roadmap.

The website project will suddenly give your transformation programme tangibility and we recommend leaning into that:

• Try out new ways of working - for example - product methodology, sprints or daily stand-ups and learn how your organisation responds to these, taking on board feedback to make people feel more comfortable about these new processes.

• Use opportunities where you’re engaging with senior stakeholders to also ask them about their wider ambitions and challenges with your current digital strategy and approach.

• Work in the open - showing progress with discovery or product build and inviting questions and feedback as you go. We’ve found that engaging stakeholders in this way elicits very different feedback and perspectives to formal presentations.

• Show people how the website project links back to your transformation roadmap and, ultimately, organisational goals. This process should not only be done once at the beginning; we recommend continuing to remind your stakeholders throughout the project.