What to prepare when your board asks for a new website
The board said “new website” and the job landed on your desk. What to write down before your first call with a studio, from who the site is for to who holds the logins.
November 12, 2026Last updated November 12, 2026
It happens under “other business,” usually after the budget. A board member says the website looks dated. Another says their niece could redo it over a weekend. Someone asks whether we could “just make it look like the big national groups.” The meeting ends with a decision to look into it, and the looking-into lands on your desk.
That first conversation with a studio goes much better when you walk in with a few things already written down. None of them take long, and none of them require a decision about design. Together they fit on one page, and that page will save you weeks.
Name the people the site has to work for
Skip “the community.” Name actual people: a parent looking for program dates on a phone, a funder checking your work before a site visit, a volunteer trying to sign up. When everyone agrees on who the site is for, half the arguments about colors and photos settle themselves.
Be specific about how they arrive. The parent is probably standing in a school parking lot with one bar of signal. For many people the phone is the whole internet: Pew Research Center found that 16% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users, with no home broadband. The same survey puts the share at 29% for adults in households earning under $30,000, so if your programs serve families on tight budgets, assume many of them will only ever see your site on a phone.
Write down three or four of these people, each in a sentence. Who they are, what they came to do, and what device they’re probably holding. Studios will design for whoever you put on that list, so it’s worth getting right.
Write down what goes wrong today
Ask staff what they’re tired of. The answers are usually specific and a little funny: the donate page that only works on a laptop, the events page nobody can edit, the staff list that still includes someone who left in 2021. That list is worth more to a studio than any mood board.
You don’t need a survey. Fifteen minutes with each person who touches the site is plenty. Ask what they tried to do on the website last month and couldn’t, what questions people call or email about that the site should answer, and what they quietly avoid sending people to.
Then ask the front desk, because the front desk knows everything. In one composite version of this we hear often, the receptionist keeps a sticky note with the program’s current address, because the site still lists the old one and she reads it out on the phone several times a week. If the same few questions come in by phone every week, those questions belong near the top of your new homepage.
Note what’s worth keeping
Redesigns have a way of throwing out the good parts with the dated ones. Before anyone talks about a fresh start, find out what the current site does well.
If you have analytics, look at which pages people actually visit and how they arrive. Often a handful of pages carry most of the traffic, and one of them is something nobody would have guessed, like an old blog post about a program that still gets steady searches. Those pages need to survive the move, at the same addresses or with careful redirects. We explain why in what happens when a redesign loses its Google traffic.
While you’re at it, open the site on your own phone and try to do the three things your people from section one came to do. Google looks at the same version you’re holding: it says it uses “the mobile version of a site’s content” for indexing and ranking. If the phone version is the weak one, that belongs on your list. What your website looks like on a phone has a short checklist for this.
Find out who holds the keys
Before anyone designs anything, someone needs access to the domain, the hosting and the current site. In a surprising number of organizations, that access belongs to a former staff member’s personal email.
Make a short list of every account the website depends on and who can log in to each. The usual suspects are the domain registrar, the hosting company, the website platform, the donation tool, the email newsletter and Google Business Profile. If a name on that list belongs to someone who left, start tracking them down now, politely, while they still remember the password. Finding out now saves weeks later. We wrote about it in who owns your website.
Decide who decides
A committee can give feedback. It can’t approve a homepage. Agree before you start on one or two people who sign off at each stage, and on how the board hears about progress.
Most stalled website projects we’ve seen are sitting in someone’s inbox, waiting for the fourth person on the thread to reply. A simple rule helps: feedback is welcome for a week, then the named approver decides. The board gets a short update at each regular meeting and one look at the design before it’s final. Write the rule down and share it with the board before the first design review.
Bring a budget range, even a rough one
You don’t need a final number. A range lets a studio tell you on the first call what’s realistic, instead of three weeks later. If you’re not sure where to start, what a website costs lays out the usual ranges.
Remember to budget for the year after launch as well. Hosting, updates, small fixes and the occasional new page all cost something, and a site with no money set aside for them starts looking dated sooner than anyone expects.
Answer the questions from the meeting
The comments from “other business” will come back, so it helps to have calm answers ready.
The niece is a real option for some organizations, and a kind offer. The question to bring back is what happens in year two, when she’s busy and the donate button breaks. If the plan depends on one volunteer, it should include a way to hand the site over. We’ve seen what happens when the volunteer moves away.
The big national groups are a useful reference, as long as everyone remembers they have whole departments behind those sites. Ask the board member which part they liked. Usually it’s something specific and achievable, like a clear donate button or real photos of real people, and that’s worth writing down.
“Looks dated” is worth a follow-up question too. Dated to whom, and doing what? If the answer is “the funder we’re meeting next month,” you’ve found a deadline and an audience to add to your page.
Put it all on a single sheet
Once you’ve done the asking, the page you bring to the first call can be short. It covers these points, in plain sentences:
- The three or four people the site is for, and what each one came to do.
- What goes wrong today, in staff’s own words.
- The pages and features worth keeping.
- Every login the site depends on, and who holds it.
- Who approves the work, and how the board stays informed.
- A budget range, including the year after launch.
If the board later asks for a formal request for proposals, this page becomes most of it. How to write a website RFP that good studios answer picks up from there.
With that page in hand, your first studio call can be about your organization instead of about logistics. If you’d like that call to be with us, book a 30-minute call and bring the page along.
