Web Design Poll: What Frustrates You The Most About Donor Websites?

I’m conducting a poll of sorts here. I am  asking what kinds of frustrations you have had with websites of donor organizations, domestic and international. I encourage you to post a comment below about this (especially if you work in a country or an organization with very slow internet).

For instance:

• Having to click a lot of links just to find the grant information (assuming you can even find it).
• Too many high resolution pictures, slowing down your download.
• Taking forever to determine whether or not an organization is still working in your particular country.

Like, let’s say you are sitting in the middle of Ukraine in 2004, like I was, and you are trying to find a grant for the local NGO you are working with. But, that NGO has a terribly slow internet connection, meaning that every time you have to click a link, it takes minutes (rather than seconds) to load that next page. And every new page just takes you deeper into a maze in which it is unclear whether you are actually going in the right direction. Is the information you want going to be there? If so, will it be current? Will you be able to tell if it is current? Answering these questions takes you 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour if your email service is sporadic.

Now, how are you supposed to access this donor’s support again? And how is this NGO going to help your community that is desperate for donor assistance?

So, please feel free to comment with some of your frustrations, experiences, and examples. Feel free to write just a few words, or tell your story of frustration and get it off your chest. (I mean, seriously, have you ever tried to get frustration-free information from the United Nations website? Exactly.)

I think it would be very helpful to collect all of these thoughts, see what is driving the aid recipient community crazy about the way donors build their websites. Maybe if we team up, we can get the ones in need of improvement to improve their websites.

Photo 1:  Courtesy of ardenswayoflife.
Photo 2:  Courtesy of Lisa Brewster.

Web Design By Donor Organizations For Low Bandwidth

There is an issue in the donor world that really bugs me. It has bugged me since 2004, when I was sitting in a small NGO in Ukraine that had a poor internet connection, and I found myself really struggling to find grant information that could help these people-this was largely attributable to web design that, instead of making it easy to find information, actually made it harder.

This issue bugged me enough that I finally finally did something about it. I was in Anne Nelson’s New Media and Development Communication course at SIPA, and capitalized on the opportunity to research this issue, put together a lot of my own thinking and experiences to create a list of recommendations and “how-tos”, and publish “Web Design By Donor Organizations For Low Bandwidth” on our wiki detailing a wide range of projects/findings/conclusions on real world new media and development projects.

I am certainly not alone in this frustration. In fact, I was talking to a fellow media developer who had a similar story. “I remember waiting many many minutes in ethiopia for silly pages to load that were just too heavy and finallly giving up,” he said.