Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Determining Which Features Your Site Can Support

You probably have a basic Web site now. Its pages might explain your organization's mission, highlight a few of your annual fundraising events (along with some fuzzy photos), and list the names of your board of directors and officers. Then again, you might have developed a more detailed site structure and haven't yet implemented any type of online fundraising tools to go along with it.

Regardless, the first step in this process of adding money generators is to conduct a detailed analysis of all aspects of your technology, support resources, and site framework. Your primary objective is to realize current capabilities and address possible limitations.

If you have already implemented or designed a general technology plan, you can pull from it much of the information you need in this analysis. On the other hand, if you don't have this type of plan, the information you collect in this analysis can be transitioned into that document.

For this purpose, we recommend taking an inventory, of sorts. Break down your situational analysis into eight function areas. Figure 2-1 is an overview of these areas of interest.

Figure 2-1: Analyze your organization's eight function areas

Testing your backbone (connections)

Begin your technology analysis ...