Reviews

Website review - Asthma UK

IT | 1 Dec 2008

Asthma UK – www.asthma.org.uk

The Asthma UK website is a fairly standard no-nonsense design with a crisp clean feel. When arriving on a website for the first time, visitors want a navigation scheme that’s easy to figure out. Fortunately the Asthma UK site has a consistent navigation with things where people would expect to find them. The only minor thing missing is breadcrumbs.

Many users don’t know how to enlarge the text size on a website using their browser controls. So Asthma UK’s visible small, medium and large text resizer is a helpful addition also found increasingly on other websites.

The content is well written for web users, with good use of headings (important for search engine optimisation and accessibility), short succinct copy and plenty of bullet points. However, people still print out long articles to read off-line. So the site would benefit from providing printer-friendly pages which automatically remove all superfluous items such as right-hand related links to just print the article (you can use cascading style sheets to do this).

One of the main purposes of most not-for-profit websites is to secure donations and this key metric is usually vital to a site’s success. Yet, the donate feature on the Asthma UK site is hard to find. It’s not very visible on the homepage and is hidden two layers deep in the navigation. This is missing a trick and conversion rates are probably lower than they ought to be. Don’t make it hard for people to give you money! What Asthma UK does well however, is when making a donation it asks your relationship to asthma (I have asthma, my child has asthma, I’m a healthcare professional, etc). Why is this so important? It segments donors, which means Asthma UK can avoid the insensitive situation of making a new request for money from someone who’s become ill with the condition.

7/10

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