Assessment: Find Your Focus

Take the same care with assessment for a website as you would for a patient. Select the members of your web team as early as possible and include those who will be building and maintaining the site for you.

Think about what you want your website to accomplish. Do you want to tell consumers about your organization? Provide health information? Serve as a hub from which users can access many sites? Internet “traffic” doubles every 90 days. Thousands of users, including nurses, desperately seek valuable information by clicking through thousands of websites. Click! “Is this what I need?” they ask. Click! “That’s boring, I’m moving on.” Click! “Ah, just what I’m looking for!” — that’s the reaction you want.

Align the website with your organization’s mission. At Nursing Spectrum we promote the recognition and support of the nursing community, and our recruitment and career management services form the foundation of our business. “Based on our mission,” says Patti Rager, RN, MBA, president and publisher of Nursing Spectrum, “it made sense to extend our services to a website that focused on RN careers.”

Test drive, but don’t be driven by, the competition. Look at websites offering similar content to what you plan, but be critical. What does the site offer that is helpful? What could you do better? Is the site easy to navigate? Bookmark these sites, but check back frequently as you develop your site and after your launch because sites are always evolving. We found that although many sites had job listings, few had a concentrated number of RN job listings. That led us to create the largest RN job search database online.

Ask potential users what they would like. At our various career events we asked RNs what they would like in a career-focused website. Their answers helped us build our content.

By the time you finish with your assessment, you should be able to sum up your website in a single statement. For example: Nursing Spectrum Career Fitness^SM Online: America’s #1 Career Site for RNs by RNs.

Plan: Everything Takes Longer Than You Think

Once you decide the focus of your site, it’s time to plan how you are going to get it up and running. Plan the time it will take for each task, such as writing content, designing the site, and loading the content on the site. As is the case with most projects, build in extra time; some obstacle is always waiting around the corner.

Joseph Filakovsky, RN, MSN, APRN, CS, helped create and is editor of Pulse, the website for the Council on Cardiovascular Nursing, a council of the American Heart Association (AHA). Asked what would he have done differently, he responded, “I think I would allow a more generous timetable for planning and implementing the project. We had imposed what, at the time, appeared to be a fairly loose schedule but had not counted on the inevitable delays, negotiations, and the like that are incumbent with any project done for a large, international organization [such as AHA].”

For an in-depth discussion of planning a website, visit Planning a Website at www.nursingspectrum.com, in the Managing Your Career section of Career Management.

Implement: Pilot and Market Your Site

You may find it easy to navigate around your site, but remember, you probably have skills that the “usual” web user does not have.

Pilot your site. Create a “beta,” or test, site, where selected members of your target audience, as well as your team members, can log on and check it out. Make changes based on their feedback.

Market your site. If it’s a site for an organization, write an article about it in the newsletter. If your site is intended for a broader audience, consider a news release (don’t forget online distribution). We distributed a news release to nursing organizations in the US. You might also want to consider a brochure or flyer. Distribute the information at meetings where your target audience gathers.

Evaluate: What’s Working and What’s Not?

Give your site constant care. Visit it every day, read comments from users, talk with your target audience about the site, and take every opportunity to remind people about the site.

Make changes. Websites are works in progress. The site you see today may look nothing like the site you see next year – and that’s okay. The advantage of the Internet is that you can make changes quickly in reaction to what readers need and want. Filakovsky, for example, considers feedback from a variety of sources, including general visitors to the website, members, and council committees when making changes.

Above all, enjoy creating your website! We had one user say “It took only three hours from the time [my position] was eliminated to the time I secured an interview through your website. I had an interview the next day...and accepted the job.” That kind of feedback makes everything worthwhile.

Cynthia Saver, RN, MS, is corporate editorial and production director for Nursing Spectrum.