Every website is built from three layers that most visitors never think about – and every institutional leader should understand.
The first is content: what the site says, what it contains, and how information is organized.
The second is presentation: how the site looks, how it is styled, and how it communicates visually.
The third is behavior: how the site responds, what it remembers, and how visitors interact with it.
These three layers always exist on every website. What varies is whether they work together in service of the visitor – or whether they each do their own thing, creating an experience that is technically functional but confusing in practice.
For a museum, a nonprofit, or a healthcare organization, the visitor arriving at your website is rarely there to browse. They are there with a specific purpose: to evaluate your credibility before a grant decision, to confirm a program detail before referring someone, to research your organization privately before agreeing to a board conversation.
That visitor does not experience your website as three separate layers. They experience it as a single, unified impression.
If the content is clear but the navigation is confusing, the impression is confusion.
If the design is polished but the information is buried, the impression is frustration.
If the site loads beautifully on a desktop but breaks on a phone, the impression is that the organization is not paying attention.
User experience is the discipline of making those three layers work together so that the impression a visitor forms is the one you intend.
Good UX is not a design style or a visual trend. It is a structural discipline – and it starts with understanding who your visitors are and what they need to accomplish before a single page is designed.
An institutional website that works well for a funder evaluating your programs is not automatically the same site that works well for a community member finding your events or a prospective staff member researching your culture.
Each visitor arrives with different questions, different levels of familiarity, and a different threshold for what feels credible.
The organizations whose websites consistently earn trust are the ones that built their sites around specific visitors and specific goals – not around what the organization wanted to say, but around what each visitor needed to understand.
Most institutional websites have reasonable content, acceptable design, and functional behavior – each layer doing its job in isolation. What they lack is coherence: the sense that every element of the site is working toward the same outcome for the same visitor.
That gap rarely announces itself. It shows up as a funder who visited the site but did not follow up.
A board candidate who seemed interested but never reached out.
A community partner who mentioned they could not find what they were looking for.
These are not marketing problems. They are UX problems – and they are worth addressing before investing further in content volume, design updates, or SEO.
No. Design is one layer of UX – it shapes how a site looks and communicates visually. UX encompasses all three layers of a website: the content structure, the visual presentation, and the behavioral interactions. A site can be beautifully designed and still have poor UX if visitors cannot navigate it, find what they need, or feel confident in what they read.
The clearest signal is when visitors who should convert do not. If funders visit but do not follow up, if prospective partners mention difficulty finding information, or if staff report that visitors frequently ask questions your website should already answer – those are UX problems, not content gaps. The issue is usually structural: the site is organized around the organization’s internal logic rather than the visitor’s actual path.
Not always. Some UX problems are structural and require rebuilding to resolve properly. Others are fixable through content reorganization, navigation adjustments, or clearer calls to action. The Executive Website Clarity Assessment was designed for exactly this question – to give organizations an honest read on whether their current site has fixable problems or foundational ones, before committing to a rebuild.
Frances Naty Go is the founder of Goldlilys Media, where she helps mission-driven organizations turn their websites into clear, durable systems that support meaningful work over time. She works with museums, nonprofits, health and wellness brands, higher education, life sciences, travel organizations, and expert-led businesses.
With a background in Computer Science from UC San Diego, Frances brings a thoughtful, strategic approach to building digital experiences that educate, orient, and build trust, without unnecessary complexity.
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