[Photo credit: "covering the eyes" by Secret Seasons, on Flickr]

Here’s a harsh reality you must face when you’re thinking about the design of your website: nobody likes to look at computer screens.

Yes, we all do it all the time, but that doesn’t change our physiology. Most people suffer from screen fatigue simply because monitors flicker and render an image that’s grainer than print. Think about how many times you’ve gotten a headache from spending too long looking at a computer screen or blinked your dry, irritated and watery eyes. Happens to me almost every day. That’s why I sit by the window; frequent eye breaks.

That’s also why we can’t help scanning websites. Our eyes seek out big fonts, bullet points and images to help us make quick identifications rather than focus on tiny text. It means that sometimes we frequently don’t take in enough information to get the full picture – we just glean what we can quickly.

Good web designers will think about these usability issues when designing a site. Make sure you think about what you need to do to present your site so it’s easiest for people to read.

One of the mistakes web designers often make, especially those that come from a print background, is assuming visitors are coming to a site only through the homepage. It makes sense with a brochure or booklet: you first read the cover and then flip through the pages. You really only need the title on the cover.

But this makes no sense on a website. People are going to be visiting your site from any page they find. For instance, if they’re looking for your organization’s mailing address, they’re going to search for “Your Org mailing address” and probably be taken directly to your contact page.

The biggest mistake you can make is to skip branding on internal pages. Make sure that your logo, address and other important information is just as visible from internal pages as they are from the homepage.

A house may be well-built, but the kitchen looks outdated, it’ll be hard to sell. Websites are the same way, which is why after you’ve cleaned up your links and website copy, you should think about cleaning up your design as part of your spring cleaning ritual. (We’ve been talking about spring cleaning your website all week – click here to see all the articles in the series.)

As you live with your website, you’ll make changes and upgrades to suit your organization’s goals. But those changes, made iteratively over time, don’t always synch up with the overall look of the thing. That’s why it’s important to step back a few times a year to make sure your site looks like a cohesive piece and still looks up to date.

For example, you might have added a picture here or an icon there to help address a need, but it might not fit overall. Or, you might have jumped on the bandwagon of a design trend that doesn’t hold up any more. I believe the Web 2.0 glassy effect is going to look as outdated as avocado-colored refrigerators in the near future.

It’s always a good idea to get an outside opinion on how your site looks and what can be done to improve it, but here’s a little checklist you can run through to see how messy it’s become over time:

• Does your website fit the monitor? Many websites built a few years ago were built with smaller monitors in mind. As a result, when seen on today’s big monitors, they look either like tiny postage stamps in the middle of the screen, or they expand where there’s a wide open space in the middle. Make sure your sites fit modern monitors.
• Do you have unified icons? You might be grabbing a graphic here to illustrate your e-mail and a graphic there to highlight your Facebook account. But do they match? Look for an icon set that matches to give your site a unified look.
• Does your site match your branding? Your organization might have had the website designed two years ago, but only last month revamped all the print material. Make sure that you’re presenting the same branding everywhere, from your site to your print collateral to your Twitter account. If your other properties have been updated, it’s time to tweak your site to match.
• Are you using CSS? If not, you should be. Cascading Style Sheets are the practical way to control the display of your website instead of using old-school HTML tags. Once you create a CSS, you need only make one tweak to change all the font around your entire website, for instance.
• Do you have an Under Construction image anywhere? For heaven’s sake, if you do, get rid of it.

Make sure to read the other articles in our series on spring cleaning your website. Make sure you don’t miss anything by subscribing to the RSS news feed. Not sure what an RSS feed is? Click here.

At home, the flower beds are clean, the trees are pruned and the windows are sparklingly clear. I, probably like most of you, have been doing spring cleaning, and working my way down a list of home maintenance and improvement tasks. It’s satisfying to check those items off and look at the polished result.

At work, I’m also doing spring cleaning, and I hope some of you are too. I like to take some time every six months or so (call the second session fall clean-up) to tidy up some of the messiness that has worked its way into our website over the winter months. It’s also a good time to stand back and make some critical decisions about the functionality of your website and evaluate the direction you’re headed. Websites should never sit stagnant, and putting some time on the calendar at least twice a year to evaluate your strategy should be a given.

This week, we’ll guide you through a clean-up and revitalizing process that you can follow on your own website. Today we’ve got three things you can do to prep for your week of good housekeeping.

Put together a clean team. You’re about to do a major clean-up and make some big decisions. It’s not something one person should do alone, so put together a task force. If you are an army of one, just make sure to pace yourself. Here’s a good model for putting together a team:

• You should have someone at a high level who can either make these decisions or who has the power to put them on the schedule for evaluation.
• Also appoint someone to act as project manager. The person to put together a schedule, arrange meeting times and generally make sure everyone is moving along.
• Finally, have one or more people to do the busy work: someone to update copy, remove dead links, make little changes. Volunteers can be a big help here.

Dedicate half an hour every day. Consistency is the key to spring cleaning – not killing yourself with work. Just set aside half an hour or an hour every day for a week to evaluate what needs to be done. Your task may take longer than half an hour, but you’ll be able to budget how much time you’ll need to do it in half an hour.

Set up a place to submit comments/ideas. While you’re cleaning up the website you have, you’re going to have ideas about the website you wish you had. Establish a place for you and your team to submit ideas or discoveries so you can decide if you want to add new functionality to your website. Check out this earlier post Make a Better Website with a User Survey for ideas of how to collect ideas and responses.

Good luck setting up today. Tune in tomorrow for the next step in your polished-up website, and click here to see all stories about spring cleaning.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has a great article about what prevents people from giving online (Confusing Web Sites Discourage Donors From Online Giving). What does it come down to? Bad design.

Nielsen Norman Group, which conducted the research and wrote it into this report. A summary of the biggest problems, which I can testify are the same problems we fix too:

• Poor presentation of the charity’s mission
• No information on how contributions are spent
• Poor page design and unclear content makes it hard to find how to donate

Most of those issues are text related, so make your changes right now.

If you’re anything like me, Fridays, especially rainy ones, are big days to look around other people’s blogs. I use it as a time to keep an eye on the industry, see what kinds of thoughts are out there and spend some thoughtful time learning. Not that I’m avoiding work or anything …

In a spirit of sharing, I’d like to present some of my most frequently visited tech-oriented blogs so you too can have something to do before 5 p.m. comes.

Enjoy:

Religious Blogs

Church Marketing Sucks: A good all-around marketing blog, but especially useful for congregations.

Center for Congregations: These guys are based in Indianapolis but do a lot of good work that congregations anywhere could learn from.

CO-STAR blog: A client of ours that explores synagogue life. The staff posts info on spirituality, collaboration and sometimes technology.

Web Design & Development Blogs

Smashing Magazine: I can’t get enough of this excellent resource for design. So, so many good ideas in here.

Read/Write Web: “Web Technology news, reviews and analysis.” Lots of non-profit worthy stuff on here too.

Productivity Blogs

Lifehacker: One of my favorite sources for useful tools and tips with an especially technical angle, but not completely.

Unclutterer: A blog about getting organized that’s useful for anything from the filing cabinet to the sock drawer.

Never one to shy from a bit of self promotion, I wanted to share this list of 100 (Non-Design) Blogs that Every Web Designer Should Read. Friendly Web Tools makes the cut!

But I also wanted to mention it, because this is a tidy list of what really are some of the most useful blogs out there to do with the Web, even if you’re a web design newbie. Nice collection!

Also, check out my post on the blogs I visit most often.

This Halloween I might dress as the economy. I can’t think of any scarier. You’re right to be scared too, especially if you’re a nonprofit and beholden to funders, because you’ve got to make the case why you need a good website.

Hold on. Reality check: you aren’t thinking of cutting funding for your own website, are you? That would be a grave mistake. Websites are not only the public face of your organization, but the best tool you have to information and create a community on a budget.

Now that we’ve got that straight, let’s look at the top 10 things your website should have so that it gives you a good return on your investment. And just hanging in there won’t cut it. People will stop visiting your site – and thinking about your organization – if they don’t see some worthwhile action happening online. This is one of those times you need to invest.

In no particular order (because they’re all important), here are 10 things your website simply must have and that will wind up saving you money.

1. Contact form. You can always post your e-mail address on your website, but be prepared to be overrun with spam. Avoid this by putting a contact form on your site to make it easy for your website visitors to reach you and to avoid spammers at the same time. You might also think of adding a Captcha to your form.

2. A place for feedback. This could be a contact form, but better yet, let your website visitors leave comments. This might be on your blog, on news postings or on articles. You can also allow ratings, which lets people cast their vote.

3. Consistent navigation. Make sure people know where to go on your site by putting your navigation in the same place everywhere.

4. Regularly updated information. Freshness keeps people coming back. At the very least, make sure you’re cycling through new content on the homepage on a weekly basis. Blogs and Twitter accounts make this an even easier way to create an online community through content.

5. Analytics. Try a tool such as Clicky or Google Analytics to find out when people are coming to your site, where they’re from and a whole load of other stuff. Analytics tools are way more powerful than a counter.

6. Donate now button. If you’re a nonprofit that accepts donations from a constituency, make it clear and easy.

7. Address front and center. A street address. With a phone number. Do it.

8. Search tool – for your site, not someone else’s. A search box will help your visitors find exactly what they need. But don’t make the mistake of putting a Google search box or a search tool from another site on yours. You just make it easier for people to leave.

9. Really good URLs. This starts with your web address (I know nonprofits are swimming in alphabet soup, but don’t make everyone else guess your acronym). Then make sure you have Clean URLs installed throughout.

10. A CMS. A content management system will make these things a bajillion times easier to do if you have a publishing system in place. Here’s how we do it.

One of the most popular posts on the Talance blog has been my list of my favorite church websites. I’d like to revisit the topic with five techniques on these killer church sites that we use in super fast and easy congregation websites.

The City Church

http://www.thecity.org/

The City Church has a nice website no matter how you cut it, but what I love is the Latest Message. It’s a frequently updated sermon you can listen to from the homepage of the website or download to listen on your iPod later.

Generation Church

http://generationchurch.org/

Officially, Generation Church is part of the aforementioned City Church, but what they’ve done is smart by not shoe-horning their entire congregation into a one-size-fits-all website. Instead, they launched the hyper-cool, widget-laden Generation Church site for their youth ministry while keeping a more conservative site as the flagship.

Houston NW Church

http://www.hnw.org

The Houston NW Church site is a little too cool for school, but I really like their “Find Life Here: What To Expect at HNW.” They’ve forsaken the About Us page and decided to instead create a kind of users’ guide for new visitors right on the homepage.

Stonebriar Community Church

http://www.stonebriar.org/

People read websites from left to right and from top to bottom. Stonebriar has learned the lesson well by putting the most important information in the top left corner of the page: Service Times and Location. No chance of getting lost or mixed up with this.

Kaleo

http://kaleohouston.com/

This website is ultra simple – it’s just a blog using a standard, open-source theme. But what’s good is that Kaleo is remembering that a website isn’t a phone directory listing; it’s a tool that you can use to connect with congregants. Pastor Bill is a great blogger and explores themes front and center with anyone who comes to visit. If only he’d turn on comments, it would be all the better.

Normally, I find “This site has moved” messages annoying. There are better ways to divert people from an old site to a new one. But I was glad to see a message on President Barak Obama’s Change.gov website. Now you can follow him on WhiteHouse.gov. Welcome back, White House website!

My favorite feature is the blog, where you can keep tabs on policy updates and calls-to-action, like the national day of service. A great site for non-profits to watch to keep up on policy changes that affect them, but also as a solid example to emulate.