When people at an organization start sharing information about their website, they’re generally surprised at how much their ideas differ. That’s one of the key reasons you need to assemble a reliable website committee to guide your organization through the process of building or redesigning your website. These people can help you decide who your audience is, clarify the purpose of your site and determine how it meshes with your organization’s mission.

Put together a group of people that represent different parts of your organization. Maybe this is the executive director, volunteer coordinator and office manager, along with whoever is part of your communications committee. Don’t have a communications committee? Get one.

Having a Web dream team helps you gather feedback in an organized way, without everybody’s opinion overwhelming you. But remember that it’s imperative for successful projects to have one person who can give the nod on development, and then have one person who can give the nod on an ongoing basis. Make sure you appoint a leader to your dream team who is a master of organizing and moving things forward.

Volunteers are great members of your dream team. Frequently, your supporters know how to do more than you think. I guarantee you have marketing, communication or technology specialists who are fans of what you do. Recruit them to help.

All (successful) development projects work with a team of people who are able to work together on a single goal. They’re the keepers of the project and can steer it in the right way, so borrow from what works.

In preparing for an upcoming presentation on how to create functional websites, and it’s got me thinking about all the dysfunctional sites I’ve seen recently. There’s no single feature that makes a website completely unusable, but there definitely are trends.

Below, divided into three categories, are the chief gaffes you should follow if you really feel like creating a website that doesn’t work.

Market Positioning

Build your website without thinking what you want. “Yes, we need a website!” is a lousy reason for a website, yet it’s the one too many people follow. First, make a list of all your organization’s goals, and then think about how technology might help you meet those goals. Then from that you can start to think about shaping your website around your needs.

Don’t think about who’s looking at the site. If your audience is made of 50-year-old women from the Midwest, why would you create a zippy website built to attract college students? If those people are interested in volunteering, why would you load the homepage with information on grants, staff bios and news releases? Think about what the people coming to your website want or need to see, and then give it to them.

Design

Use lots of clipart. Ooph. Steer clear of crummy clipart. Go for real pictures, even freebie stock photography, rather than goofy cartoon drawings. Check out the Creative Commons images on Flickr or Stock.xchng for good resources.

Include pictures of empty rooms. What’s welcoming about an echo-y chamber? Put some people in there!

Use flashy splash pages. They look like ads and have the same effect. People click off splash screens and never get to the meat inside. It’s like going around with two hats on. The top one doesn’t matter and makes people think you’re nuts.

Use a microscopic font. You know how on TV ads, they put all the stuff they don’t really want you to read, but are required by law to display, in teeny text at the bottom of the screen? It’s because no one can see it, and they ignore it even if they can. Small font does the same thing to your website, but the whole website.

Honestly, tell me how readable this is.

Usability

Shroud donation processes in mystery. Heavens, if people want to give you money, make it easy for them. Here, take this big bright Donate Now! button and put it on your homepage. (Right-click and choose Save As.) A gift from Talance to you.

Glom onto every widget you can find. A real danger with the proliferation of widgets and plug-ins and add-ons is that you have a website that looks like a carnival. All flash, no focus. Choose wisely with anything you add onto your site, and make sure it follows your directive of achieving your goals.

Add 50 items – or even 10 – to your menus. People’s eyes cross when they see more than seven items in a menu, so stick with that magic number.

Put the most important info at the very bottom of the page. People look at the top left of web pages to pick up the most important information. If there’s something you really want people to read, put it up there and not down below.

As time passes and your goals and objectives evolve, so should your website copy. If you’ve been following our series on spring cleaning your website, including putting together a clean team and purging dead links (click here to see all the articles in the series), you’ll be in the perfect place to start focusing on the words and structure that you use to communicate with your audience.

While keeping up on your website copy isn’t as fluid an activity as is purging your dead links, you still need to make sure your site is connecting to people appropriately and that you’re broadcasting the right message. Always watch your analytics to make sure you’re receiving the responses you expect. Otherwise, it’s time to make some changes.

The process of cleaning up your copy should be an abbreviated version of the one you followed when you began to write copy for your website. Here’s how you should start from scratch:

1. Come up with a website architecture, or wireframe, that outlines every page of your site. That way you know what you need to provide copy for.
2. Scope out the key concepts you want to convey for each page, usually three to five bullets for each page.
3. Round up your research and source material to support your key concepts.
4. Identify the appropriate tone for your website - chummy or serious?

Here’s the abbreviated version of the process you should follow when you’re cleaning up your content:

1. Review your site structure. Do you have all the pages you need? The link-checking process you went through earlier should have identified gaps and unnecessary pages.
2. Evaluate your message. Does the copy on those pages still match up with your key concepts? Do those key concepts still reflect your organization?
3. Incorporate updates. Do you have additional research and source material to boost your copy? Look for new case studies, testimonials or tools, like social media widgets like a Twitter feed or most recent blog entries.
4. Watch your tone. Does the copy’s tone still match your organization’s personality? You might find the tone too academic, or too punchy when you first wrote it, and it doesn’t accurately represent your mission.
5. Finally, fix problems. This is possibly the most important step, and it’s a great chance to address any communications problems you’re having. For instance, your front desk might be fielding calls about directions or e-mailing forms that you can easily transfer to your site. Seek out potential communications bottlenecks, such as poor search engine results, i.e., SEO issues, that you can address with better copy.

Check back tomorrow to pick up the next article 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.

This week I’m writing about how you can clean up your website for spring (click here to see all spring cleaning stories), and one of the most important tasks you can do is sweep out the dust bunnies. In digital terms, that means find and remove your dead links.

Nothing kills the success of a website faster than the reek of links that lead only to Page Not Found errors. Whether the link goes to somewhere in your site or to someone else’s site, it only takes one before a website visitor assumes the website is untended and inaccurate and never comes again.

That’s why cleaning up these pages should be an ongoing task – always stay vigilant against dead spaces on a daily basis or on an as-it-happens basis. You should still do a careful analysis at least twice a year to identify pages you may have missed or locate pages that are not technically dead, but that are no longer accurate. Those you can tag for a content cleanup as the next step of your spring cleaning.

Here’s how to go through your link check:

1. Get Clicking. If your site is small, just a few pages, then you can simply systematically go to every page and click on every link. This method is a great opportunity to evaluate where those links go and make sure they’re still appropriate.

2. Use a link-checking service. You can use these as an online service, or you can download software that does this for you. Here’s a website with several options. This method is most useful when you have many pages or links to many other websites and it’s impractical to check every single page on your own. These services will not evaluate your content, however, so you may have to check most pages at some point to make sure your copy is still up to date.

3. Move to a content management system. A content management system won’t save you from dead links, but it will make the job of maintenance easier. With a CMS as your platform, you can do things like set up a cron job, which can automatically seek out internal dead links. And you have power to create an alias, so you can easily redirect links to new pages or new content.

4. Set up a Report a Dead Link page where your website visitors and staff can do the reporting for you. You can include a form in the website footer that people can use to notify you of a dead link. Or if your site contains many links, create a button next to each one that leads to the link-reporting page (see what we did on the www.jesnapdc.org website for an example).

5. Rewrite your Page Not Found page. No matter how vigilant you are at keeping your links up to date, they’ll still change. You might move a page, delete a page or someone else’s website might go down at any time. So make sure that when someone clicks an inactive link within your site, they come to a friendly message directing them to your search tool or your homepage.

Make sure you perform a link-check for all your web presences, from your website to your blog to your Facebook page - anywhere you have links. Of all spring cleaning tasks, this one has the biggest payoff, and skipping it can be the most detrimental.

Check back tomorrow to pick up the next article 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.

Many people start a web project by deciding they need a website. OK, good start, but that’s not where the project should end. Unfortunately, often it does, without any real thought given to what the website should do, what it should be used for and who should use it.

So the next step in starting a web project is to ask some questions, and who better to ask than the people who currently visit your website? Set up a questionnaire survey to find out what your audience thinks is most important. Take their comments into consideration for your needs assessment process (which I talked about here).

What those survey questions will be largely depend on your own organization’s directives. But a question like this might help you get started. I find Likkert-type questions to be the most useful in gauging opinion.

Please rate the value of each of these features, with 1 being extremely important and 4 being extremely unimportant.

- Ability to log on to access premium material
- A blog
- Video clips that demonstrate how we work

Make sure to leave a comments space so people can add features they think might be valuable. This is also a good time to evaluate some of your current processes, like asking people how long it took them to receive feedback or how easy it is to make a donation or pay for an item.

There are plenty of free survey tools out there you can use to collect responses, and just include a link to your survey online. But also send your survey out to your mailing list and include a line about it at the foot of outgoing e-mails or inserts in your paper newsletter.

Remember to not only use this exercise as building a route to a website that better serves your audiences, but add another survey in six months to make sure you’re meeting your users’ needs.

A publisher asked me the other day for advice on how to pare down the number of programs, software and tools his company uses. He is using a graphics program, a workflow program, a listserv and websites – that’s just what I know about. There’s probably more, including programs that handle subscriber databases, mailing lists, invoicing, purchasing and heaven knows what else. He’s desperately looking for a way to streamline the number of programs he has to deal with in a day.

It’s a problem that we’re seeing more and more often with our clients: there are so many free and useful tools out there that it’s easy to be sold on every one of them. Before you know it, you’ve got a million little programs with a million different users and one big mess.

Three things you can do to streamline your system:

Get yourself a CMS. A content management system (go, Drupal!) is the first step anybody should take when trying to figure out how to streamline. Imagine building a house out of Legos, but without the flat foundation piece to stick the bricks to. I always try to tell people to stop thinking of CMSs as websites and to start thinking of them as company platforms. It’s the thing you build from.

Get a whiteboard and markers to sketch out a production flow. And then reproduce that flow in your CMS. CMSs are master of ushering content where it needs to be, that’s why they’re called content management systems. These things are made for you to move pages from writer to editor to publisher in a regulated way. Once you figure out how your content should travel, you can come up with a production/editorial flow and permission settings that can bypass any outside software that does this. This also goes for CRM systems, where you might be tracking how people donate or subscribe or attend events. It should all fold into the CMS.

Ditch the listserv/newsletter service. Look at getting a newsletter plug-in for your site. That way you can build up a web archive of content, do some site-specific branding on your missives and eliminate one tool from the arsenal. The newsletter tool we use lets you do unlimited newsletters with unlimited issues, so you can have a quarterly update, a weekly blast and a monthly newsletter and they can all look different or the same. It also synchs up your site visitors with subscriptions, which is useful. (If you want to see it in action, sign up for the Talance newsletter, and you can see flexible it is.)

Lemme know how your streamlining goes. Use the comments form below to ask questions and report back.

Small businesses and nonprofits are in the unusual position of being executive staff, mail room clerk and chief technologist all at the same time. Everyone can lick an envelope, but not everyone feels comfortable taking the role of CTO with no tech background. Yet that’s just what happens when you embark on a website project. Here are a few things you can do make sure the development of your website goes smoothly.

1. Decide what you need. This is a good time to start polling the people you work with, because people at your organization may have different ideas about how the site should work than you do. Start with a needs assessment, and put all the feedback and ideas into a big list.
2. Prioritize. The needs assessment will help you compile a wish list of what you want on your website, but now prioritize. If you don’t define scope, your project could go on forever and cost more than you have. Divide your list into three sections: Must Have, Will Need, Nice to Have. Be prepared to take out a clean sheet of paper for any additional items you think of during the project. We advise our clients to set aside an additional 15% of the budget for these unforeseen issues. Anything else you can get to these items during round two. Six months from launch is a good time to think of scheduling this round two.
3. Appoint a traffic cop. During your project development, you need someone to be the central command between your organization and the development team. This traffic cop doesn’t need to know about technology, but they should be organized, good at delivering information and have the ability to call the shots when needed.
4. Create a feedback forum for employees. It’s nice to have a web form or survey somewhere where people can drop comments and ideas during development and beyond. Websites should always be in motion, so use feedback as way to make sure your site does what you want it to as your organization evolves.

I recently had to coordinate a series of meetings among a large group of people who live far away. You can probably imagine how frustrating that was.

Enter my new friend Doodle, which lets you create a poll, forward the link to the poll to the participants and let them vote on their choice. It might be anything from what day of the week works best for a meeting, to choose the turkey or veggie sandwich for lunch.

Volunteers are a gift to a nonprofit website. The problem is, well, they’re volunteers. You’re counting on them to help out, but you’ve got respect their time and other limitations. A salary is a powerful incentive you can’t use with a volunteer.

It’s a chronic limitation for synagogue websites. The webmaster for a New York-based synagogue was talking about this with me the other day. She said, “One of the biggest challenges, of course, is that the site is managed on a fully volunteer basis and there is only so much time I can devote to it.”

We effectively face the same challenge with Talance’s company website – we squeeze in enhancements between other client projects. But knowing that anyone who comes to our website forms judgments on the quality of work we do based on what they see there, we also know it’s vitally important to keep performing upgrades.

My solution is to set up what equates to a project management checklist with a priority number next to each task and put it in a central location. Whenever a team member (including myself) has a bit of free time, we just pick something off the list and do it. It seems easier to attack in bite-sized bits, and things do eventually get done.

We have our own project management software we use, but you might look at Google Calendars and Docs & Spreadsheets for hosting a centrally accessible spreadsheet you can use for a tasklist. I think simpler is always better when it comes to tracking a project.