Friendly Web Tools Blog

There are billions of fonts out there, which makes it darned difficult to identify one by sight. That’s doubly difficult if someone presents you with a graphic of a font. You can’t exactly look that one up in the font drop-down menu in Word.

Instead, you plug it into What the Font?! In their words, “Upload a scanned image of the font and instantly find the closest matches in our database.”

And it works amazingly well for identifying a mysterious typeface.

It’s a good probability that at least one in 20 people can’t see everything on your website. That’s because a higher number of people than you probably expected are color blind in some way. Some statistics I’ve seen say that as many as 18 percent of people have some kind of visual limitation.

Around 90 percent of the people I tell this fact to are shocked - the rest know it because they’re used to not seeing everything on a website. But what if they’re missing something terribly important, like a news alert or a call for contributions or all your website navigation?

I love the Colorblind Web Page Filter because it makes it easy to see what your website might look like through a color-deficient eyes, those that can’t see red/green or blue/yellow.

For some help choosing the right high-contrast colors for your site, try the Color Laboratory. It’s handy because it “allows you to select colors and see how they appear next to one another, and in various foreground/background combinations. It also allows you to see those colors as they might appear to color-blind users.”

Makes the incredibly important job of picking the right colors easier.

During yesterday’s e-seminar Help! No One’s Using Our site (which we’re offering again, because some people who couldn’t make it asked for an encore performance), the topic of killer church websites came up.

I like to recommend church websites to nonprofits or for-profits, because some of these sites are masters of community building. Think about it: the Christian church was built on and survives on reaching large numbers of people, many of them new, and creating a community around them. They see the web as a ministry tool, and some of them have done wonderful jobs with their websites. A great lesson for any site looking to create community.

Here’s a list of my four favorites. Seen any others that you love? Tell me about them in the comments.

Mars Hill Church
http://marshillchurch.org/
A model of clean navigation. I especially love the “I am new here” button on the top left. What a great way to draw new people in - so much more engaging than “About Us.”

Revolution Church
http://www.kcrevolution.org/
If they sold websites in Urban Outfitters, they’d be stocking Revolution Church. Just beautiful, and excellent use of social media.

Fellowship Church
http://www.fellowshipchurch.com/
An enormous church that addresses a big congregation well. Very easy to see where the closest sermons are. And they’ve done a great job with new ways to address pastor Ed Young.

Saddleback Church
http://saddleback.com/
You’ve heard about this, because it’s where Barak Obama gave a speech. But it’s a nice website that gives a lot of information in an engaging way. I like the FAQ-style menu on the homepage.

Good website navigation is so intuitive you never even think about it. Bad navigation you certainly notice, because it makes you work hard to get where you want to go. The trouble is, intuitive design takes careful thought. You’ve really got to predict your site’s visitors’ movements, and be ready for any effort they’ll make.

Not all website designers do, of course. Many - quite innocently, I must add - think not a bit about how people use websites. They don’t read reports, they don’t think critically about what confuses them whey they visit sites or they get a little too creative in their efforts.

I’ll be addressing usability in an upcoming e-seminar (there’s still time to register if you hurry - click here to do so) , but I wanted to share some common mistakes, in no particular order, in case you feel like frustrating your site visitors and driving traffic away:

1. Use inconsistent navigation. Vary it from page to page. Sometimes put it on the top, sometimes put it on the side, and forget to add menu items here and there.
2. Get cutesy with navigation. Rather than saying “Home,” “About Us” and “Services,” say “The Homestead,” “Meet the Gang” and “What Makes Us Tick.” It also helps if your audience is mostly English-speaking and you write your navigation in a foreign language with foreign characters - like Hebrew (you know who you are …).
3. Don’t add a home link and assume everyone knows to click your logo to go back to the homepage.
4. Put your navigation links in alphabetical order or order or length - anything but order of importance.
5. Make pages open in new windows, thereby risking pop-up blocking software won’t allow that page to open and disabling your site visitor’s back button.
6. Forget sub-navigation - put every single link on every single page.
7. Put navigation at the bottom of the page or somewhere else “below the fold.”
8. Give users multiple choices to perform one action. For instance, if you’re selling something, list three different places they can buy it.
9. Use too many menus. At least three. In different places. With redundant choices.
10. Don’t even use navigation - just put some links around the page.

A sadly underfunded client of mine who can’t get money for a full-blown version of Photoshop told me about Adobe Photoshop Express.

Express is the latest of of SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings. SaaS boils down to online versions of the kinds of software you’re used to buying as a package you install on your computer. Like, say, Photoshop. But instead of paying $700 for the mega version, you pay nothing for this online version.

And what a lovely, free, online version it is. It’s smooth, easy and intuitive. Plus, it works with a host of other services, such as Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa.

Makes photo editing on a budget a pleasure.

Watch out Picnik!

My friend Aaron Spiegel from the Alban Institutes’s Center for Congregations dug up an interesting commentary on the sins of church websites, “10 Easy Ways to Keep Me from Visiting Your Church Because I Visited Your Website,” which he sites here.

The original post was written several years ago, and while some church websites have redeemed themselves, I’ve seen many, many synagogue sites that need serious overhauls. Same goes for any nonprofit.

The important thing to keep in mind is that people make judgments about your organization based on your website. Calendars are extremely useful tools, for instance, but I’d rather see no calendar at all than one that’s outdated by a year. Ignoring your site is worse than having no site at all.

I admit to an obsession: I must know where you’ve been clicking when you go to the Talance.com website. And an excellent service I found today is only fueling my need.

CrazyEgg is a tool that lets you see in different graphical formats where people are clicking on your website, or what are known as hotspots. This isn’t to say the most popular pages, but where people are clicking once they arrive at a particular page.

This is very revealing information. It’ll tell you, for instance the most commonly accessed areas of your site, so you can put premium information there. It also tells you if there’s a disparity between where you’re thinking people are clicking and where they actually are.

And I love that it tells you graphically, for instance in heatmaps:

Or with confetti:

What I like most about CrazyEgg is that it’s free. At least a stripped-down version is. If you want heavy coverage for a big site, you can sign up for a monthly plan.

At first glance, you may think kuler from Adobe Labs is little more than online paint chips. But imagine paint chips in dazzling combinations that have been rated for effectiveness and beauty by a network of people. It’s an excellent tool for choosing colors for web and print projects, and an interesting community to become involved in.

I haven’t tested it, but WebAssist has a plug-in that lets you use kuler with Dreamweaver for on-the-fly color combos.