Like any website, the appearance of your EngagementHQ site is essential. The first impression new users have of your site will impact their opinions of your organization and the engagement site.
When designing content, you need to consider the following impacts your site may have:
Structure: Your site needs a clear and straightforward structure so users can find information and navigate your engagements.
Appearance: An inviting, well-designed site that looks great can go a long way toward encouraging users to stay on the site.
Access: Users must be able to access your information and content. This can refer to being able to find these aspects on your site and creating an accessible site for people using assistive technology.
Authenticity: Including branding and clear information on your site can help you build trust in your new engagement site.
The following tips can help you build a site users trust and revisit.
Clean Design
Clean design can mean different things to different people, but the basic tenet is to only use elements that are essential to your site. There’s no need to clutter your homepage and projects with sections and widgets just because they’re available; everything you add to your site should provide information or facilitate engagement.
We recommend planning your content first or developing project templates to keep your design consistent. Using share draft features before you publish will also be useful for seeking another opinion.
Simple Content
Packing your project descriptions with every detailed nuance of the engagement may be tempting, particularly with complex consultations like long-term plans, policies, and legislative changes. All that information is important, but your readers are unlikely to read it all or take in much information.
Use text on your projects to:
Explain project information in brief
Grab attention and direct your community to act
Link to detailed documents, external pages, or news articles
Instead of dense paragraphs, use bullet lists to condense your content, and write using simple and easily digestible language. For longer descriptions, use subheadings in the correct heading hierarchy.
If you do need to include extensive information, you can use the document library widget to include PDF documents, videos to explain complex content, or use the FAQs widget to display anticipated questions and answers. The Newsfeed tool can also help provide lengthy project updates, news, or events.
Useful Images
Like text, sections, and widgets, images should always add something to your site pages. Some images may be decorative (like homepage tile images or project banners), but you should still select images that make sense for the page.
Many internet users can detect a stock image, and although this isn’t a problem if the images are related to the content, they can appear staged and artificial. Use images featuring places or people within the community or activities and facilities related to the consultation where possible. It’s also advisable to ensure that your images represent the diversity of your community.
This aims to appear authentic and personable and create a sense of community by using places and faces people can recognize and identify with.
With all images, there are three rules you must follow:
You must always have permission to use and publish the images. If you crowd-source images from community members, they must provide permission for their image to be published online.
Informative, functional, and complex images must have alt text.
Avoid using images with text in them, but if you do, use the alt text to explain the text.
Site Structure
Your content could be amazing, and it wouldn’t matter if users can’t navigate your site to find it. An engagement website with an incoherent structure can result in low engagement rates and a frustrated community.
When mapping your site structure, you should consider whether you’ll have central pages for news and updates, hubs, about information, and current and past consultations. You can use these elements to help you:
The site header: The header should contain your main navigational links to pages such as your About page, essential hubs, and project listing pages. You can also add child page links to have multi-level navigation; for example, you could have an All Projects page and create navigation links below it to current projects and past projects.
Your homepage sections: The sections of your homepage can be customized to include whichever navigational links you need. Popular sections include links to current projects, the registration link, a featured section for a hub, or a section for updated or concluded projects.
The site footer: Your site’s footer includes links to essential pages like policies, social media, and a site map. These pages should be accessible from your site at all times.
Create Branding
A dedicated engagement brand for your organization can help with cohesiveness and framing community engagement activities as a vital component of your operations. Your branding should be uniform across your pages and interactions between your team and the community.
Here are some ideas:
Use logos, colors, and fonts that mirror your corporate website.
Introduce an image overlay for homepage tile images.
Create project templates for your staff to copy when creating new projects.
If using hubs, create a recognizable sub-brand.
Copyright Material
While this is not necessarily an aesthetic concern, you must still be aware of it when designing and creating your content.
You are responsible for ensuring that you have consent from the copyright owner to publish all text, images, videos, maps, documents, or interactive content. The EngagementHQ platform does not check if the content is protected by copyright or if you have consent before allowing publication. You need either the rights to the content or permission to use it from the owner.
This applies to:
All content published on your homepage, static pages, or project pages.
All content published within tools or widgets.
All content uploaded and published by participants, including images, texts, public submissions, and comments. For example, you should only publish a Stories submission if you are sure that the participant who submitted it is the copyright owner of the text and images they uploaded.