The Nonprofit Website Insider

Level up your web design process for 2025, plus recordings of all this year's webinars

Hi website champions,

As you're planning your website updates for 2025, here's a quick tip that could make the whole process smoother: get to know Figma, if you haven’t yet! It’s a great tool for keeping your web design elements tidy – from sketching out diagrams and website pages to creating static graphic designs, collaborating, annotating, doing prototypes, and way more.

I don’t get anything for recommending it to you – I’m just a fan!

Nearly all the functionality is free for small teams (they make their money by providing value to bigger teams at bigger companies) and it’s quite powerful, scalable, and with a big community of people behind it. There's a bit of a learning curve, but like untangling holiday lights, it's way easier than you'd expect and totally worth the effort.

What could you use it for?

• Wireframes. When it comes to websites, the most obvious application is to use Figma to mock up what will be on new website pages, with visuals known as “wireframes”. You can pull from standard components – nav bars, headings, lists, resources cards, and tons more, including libraries created by the community – to snap together pages like Legos coming together.

• Graphic designs. The graphics tools are extensive enough that some professionals use Figma to do the final graphic designs for each page. 

• Diagrams. The same tools that make wireframes convenient, plus the granular graphic design control, make it a quick tool to create diagrams.  

• Gathering feedback. There’s built in commenting features that allow you to have a threaded conversation pretty much anywhere on any page, assign a task to someone, and then resolve it, making collaboration easy.

• Prototypes. If you’re changing your site, or building a whole new one, it’s very useful to user test a prototype before you build. Figma allows you to link together either wireframes or graphic designs of pages into prototypes, including the most absurdly complex things! Each link and button can link to different pages, drop-downs can actually drop-down, people can type in forms, and in the paid version you can even put in conditional logic depending on what the tester does.

• Team features, for the whole development process. For larger teams, Figma offers robust support for design systems, organizational libraries, and developer handoff. I’ve focused here on what individuals might use it for, but if you work with a team, that could be even more a reason to check it out.