The buds are swelling, the dust bunnies have grown – that means it’s time for spring cleaning again. Spring cleaning should transcend your house and yard, however. It should also apply to your website. Here are four helpful articles from a special series we put together on spring cleaning your website:

Spring Clean Your Website – Part 1

Spring Clean Your Website – Dead Links (Part 2)

Spring Clean Your Website Copy (Part 3)

Spring Clean Your Website: Refresh the Design (Part 4)

[Photo credit: unicorn by Totally Severe, on Flickr]

Conventional wisdom counts with building websites. Some techniques are proven and really will make your life easier and bring more traffic to your site. But there’s plenty of misinformation out there too. Watch out for these easy-to-fall-for myths.

1. Building a website is easy.

There’s “easy,” and then there’s “easy.” True, there are tools that can make managing a website easier, but that doesn’t mean going through the process of creating a site is a walk in the park. Successful sites contain heavy forethought and attention to detail, which never comes without hard work. Technical prowess aside, be prepared to sweat a little when it comes to planning and maintenance.

2. Fancier websites are better.

Everybody likes glitz, but it’s not always better. A four-page brochure can be infinitely better than a wham-bam Flash affair with movies and sophisticated animations. Before you put a bell or whistle on your site, make sure it has a good reason to be there.

3. Accessibility doesn’t matter.

It matters if you’re a potential member, volunteer or donor and can’t see the website. It matters if you’re looking at a website on your cell phone. It matters if you’re a web crawler from a search engine looking to catalog the site.

4. You can cut corners by copying the text and format of successful websites.

Plagiarism aside, you won’t gain anything by creating a copy of someone else’s site. You might find inspiration from some of their features, but successful sites should be built from the ground up. Otherwise, they won’t be unique enough to meet your goals.

5. Mission statements should be front and center.

I get the idea behind mission statements, but most of them are loaded with double-talk and jargon that mean nothing to the average website visitor. Include a link to your mission statement, if you must, but devote your website to the most important thing your visitors should be seeing.

6. The key to SEO is submitting to search engines.

You won’t see much of a bump in search engine rankings if you limit your SEO (search engine optimization) to this single move. SEO is a multi-step process that never really ends.

7. You never need to check your website in different browsers.

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut when it comes to web browsing, but IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari (and the other guys too) go through changes over time, and so does your website. It’s a good idea to periodically see how your site works (or doesn’t work) in browsers besides the one you’re used to.

8. Design is design.

The person who designed your business cards might be a web designer too, but probably not. Designers specialize in print or web, because each craft applies different principles. Designers want work, though, so some over-promise and deliver websites that don’t make sense.

9. Usability isn’t necessary.

If no one knows how to use your website, they won’t use it. ‘Nuff said.

10. I need a webmaster to update the site.

Webmasters are nice to have, because they can handle updates and field questions. But if you assign responsibility wisely and have a website that’s easy to update, a webmaster isn’t necessary.

Pick up a magazine and try to notice what you look at. Where do your eyes go? Directly to the middle of the page? The big headline on the right-hand side? What do you do when you hold the publication: flip from the back to the front like I do?

Now go to a new website you’ve never seen before, and think about where your eyes go. If you’re paying attention, you’ll discover you do not look at the same places. You’re certainly not going to the back cover first and work your way forward.

This is because websites and print publications are designed completely differently. Occasionally a client will come to us with a design that’s been created by the company that made their brochure or put together a postcard for them. Invariably, these websites don’t work. Even when they’re beautiful, print publications are simply made for a different way of reading.

So next time you pick out a Web designer, it’s OK to suggest colors and ideas and even the look and feel of a print publication, but don’t try to reproduce it online.

What we’re reading this week:

What Makes a Product Cool
People go nuts for the iPod. It’s useful to read about neuromarketing to understand better how people emotionally connect with products. How does this transfer to popular websites?

Twitalyzer – The Average Twitter User
This slideshow from the company that measures who uses your Twitter account. Good overview to the kinds of people who use Twitter.

Design Patterns
Ever wonder why things are designed the way they are? This library of conventions tells you the why behind where website widgets are placed.

Building a successful online community
One of our own mantras is to make the web a friendlier place. This article from the Creating Passionate Users blog shows you how you might build your own community through being friendly.

[Photo credit: AVP Volunteer 2 by yuan2003, on Flickr]

As any charitable organization knows, volunteers are superstars. They give love and expertise and don’t ask for a dime in return. They can be especially helpful if your organization has a website. Bearing in mind that an entire Web development project is long-term and requires dedicated knowledge and commitment that you’re better off hiring someone to do (upshot: it’s easier to fire someone whose work you’re not happy with), there are still plenty of other tasks you can assign out to people who want to help. Here are a few.

1. Social networking cheerleader
2. Add comments to blogs
3. Contribute blog entries
4. Participate in discussion on bulletin boards
5. Data entry (i.e., cutting and pasting info into a new site)
6. Website promotion
7. Adding your website to directories
8. Writing news updates about events
9. Website literacy workshops
10. Checking for dead links
11. Updating old content
12. Convert press releases for websites
13. Usability testing (i.e., make sure everything works in a logical way)
14. Bug reporting (i.e., look for and report errors or problems)
15. Identify requirements for new development
16. Browser testing
17. Taking pictures for the website
18. Formatting and uploading pictures
19. Making videos for the site
20. Uploading videos onto a service like YouTube or Vimeo, and adding them to site
21. Help manage wiki

Anything we missed? Add your ideas below.

This little gem has been hidden on the main Talance website, but we thought we’d bring it to wider attention. Use this checklist every three months or so to make sure your website is still up to date and healthy.

Site Content

• All links work
• All downloads work
• All forms work
• Contact information on homepage and accessible on every other page
• Addresses organization’s goals
• Has a favicon

Usability

• All images have ALT tags
• Custom 404/page not found page
• Each menu has no more than seven choices
• Home link in navigation
• User-friendly page titles

Readability

• Font size not too small
• Wide margins
• Good use of bullets, subheadings and bold
• No underlines except for hyperlinks
• High contrast text and images

Operation

• Looks OK in most common Web browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera)
• Uses limited Flash to comply with iPhone and iTouch
• Images are sized correctly (i.e., big image not squeezed into small box)
• Colors and images are consistent
• Loads quickly
• Looks OK in different screen resolutions
• Looks OK with various screen color settings
• URLs work without “www”

Security

• Pages requiring SSL access are accessible only via SSL
• No one has access to restricted areas that they shouldn’t have

[Photo credit: On writing well, by picassina, on Flickr]

My digital life has caused me to reevaluate my bookshelves, groaning with books I hardly look at. When my local library posted signs asking for donations, I decided to purge. As I was filling boxes, I found one little gem I haven’t seen in years: William Zinsser’s classic book On Writing Well.

Journalism students know this as required reading in an attempt to learn the principles of cleaning up prose for newsprint. In my years as a journalist, I found it inspiring and refreshing to dip into now and again for advice on how to de-clutter my writing and simplify my words.

As I was thumbing through my copy the other day, I realized that if I replaced “writing” with “creating websites” – especially in the first few chapters – Zinsser’s book is chock full of fantastic advice for anyone looking to plan or maintain their website, whether it be creating design elements, planning pages or writing copy.

The best sites are those that don’t make you think. They’ve been refined so much that you find just what the website owner wants you to find, and you never have to hunt. Few sites suffer from being too simple. That’s exactly what Zinsser preaches in his book.

I recommend you check out a copy of On Writing Well to learn how to write better (useful advice anyway for business documents, blog entries, e-mails and the like), but I’ve taken a few golden nuggets from Zinsser’s book and tweaked them slightly for web building. Follow this advice, and your website will serve you – and your visitors – better.

[Photo credit: Mind Map covering the issues of Owning a Cat by MyThoughtsMindMaps, on Flickr]

Think about what happened the last time you really considered what should be on your website. Ideas and thoughts probably flowed in on your stream of conscious in no particular order, but rapidly:

• “We need to update the contact information.”
• “Oh, and Chris at the front desk needs to be added to the staff page.”
• “Didn’t someone say the other day they wanted a place to put articles about us?”

That’s a good thing. When you’re starting to plan a Web site, you want to consider every little thought or suggestion that’s come at you since the last time you updated your site. Your chief job should be to get everything down so you can process the information and make reasonable decisions when it comes to organizing the information on the site.

Here at Talance HQ, the best tool we’ve found to capture these early ideas is a mind map. “A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing,” says Wikipedia.

We’re very un-technical about it too. We take a big sheet of paper, or several scraps of paper, and write down everything we think of, drawing lines to connect ideas, or grouping the scraps of paper together.

The process is pure catharsis for website planning, and remarkably effective at helping you organize what seems like idea-chaos. Plus, since it requires no technical prowess, it’s a good activity for even the most technically challenged in your organization.

Considering that about half the people on the Internet find you through some kind of search engine query, it’s vitally important that you show up everywhere you should. Such are the intricacies of search engine optimization.

Improving your SEO is an on-going task, but here are five mistakes you can make to really kill your SEO strategy.

1. Use images for headings

Some people think regular old text is too boring for headings, so they use pictures instead. A major no-no. Search engines like header tags (< h1 >, < h2 >, etc.), so use these instead of graphics. You can always change the style of them through CSS if you don’t like the way they appear.

2. Leave image tags blank

This mistake is incredibly common, but it’s also incredibly easy to fix. Whenever you have an image display on a page, make sure you fill in the so-called “alt tag.” It’s a handy place to stash keywords (search engines figure anything you illustrate is important, so they pay attention), and it helps with overall accessibility.

3. Bad spelling

Search engines are skeptical of crummy spelling. Get a dictionary.

4. Flash only

Flash is, well, flashy, but it’s not incredibly usable. It’s hard for people to navigate, and also hard for search engines to catalog. Provide an HTML alternative so make everybody happy. As an added bonus, anybody using a hand-held device (like an iPhone) will have an easier time reading your site.

5. Ugly URLs

URLs with a string of nonsensical text does nothing for your site. They’re confusing, you can never type them into an address bar and search engines hate them. Instead, make sure you’re using real English in the address. Check out this article’s address for an example.

[This little gem is the text of issue our e-mail newsletter subscribers just received. Want a slice of this foryourself? Sign up now.]

Hi, Friends.

Websites, you know, are never done. They’re as close as you can get to living and breathing for something made of lines of code stored on computers around the globe. Trends change, organizations’ missions change and outside forces change too.

One big outside force recently changed, namely Internet Explorer 8. Any time a Web browser receives a major upgrade, and people are encouraged to switch over, it means that old websites may no longer work properly. Even if you have chosen to let IE8 (which has its own host of problems) drift by without you, not all the people who are coming to your website have.

It’s important to take the time on a regular basis to make sure your website is keeping up with the technology around it. It’s a job that requires regular tending, but we’ve made it easier for you by assembling the Healthy Website Checklist you can follow.

http://talance.com/healthy-website-checklist

Bookmark it or print it out so you remember to keep making sure your website still works.

Of course, keeping websites ship-shape and Bristol fashion is one of our specialties at Talance, so give us a holler (888-810-9109 or use this form) if we can help breathe new life into your website.

Your Internet pal,

Monique

The Rachel Coalition provides services for victims of domestic violence, but its website was limited to a few informational pages and uninspiring design. Here’s how we helped.

»Read more

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