If you’ve never seen the words “how to” followed by “design by committee” without words like “throw yourself out a window because you were involved in this horror show known as” in between, you may be shocked to read on. You may be one of those people who’s been trapped on a committee and all its egomaniacs, petty arguments and grudging concessions and know what a mess committees can make of things like web projects. Wikipedia puts it this way:

“The defining characteristics of ‘design by committee’ are needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision.”

That pretty much sums it up.

But as much as people hate to have web projects designed or decided by committee, it still happens. All the time. Like at almost every company we work with. So, as much as it pains me to write this article, I’ll do it anyway knowing that if a committee is going to be involved in a web project, it should at least be run the best way possible.

Don’t design by committee

I know what I just said, but if you can find a way of disbanding the committee, do it. Have one capable, knowledgeable person in charge, and other parties involved weigh in at appropriate times. Note I said “weigh in” and “appropriate.” Not make the final call, unless those parties are uniquely qualified to do so.

I once worked on a website project for teens. The COO – in other words, the 50-something-year-old who was in charge of writing contracts and making sure the organization was following its overall strategic objective – decided that keys were a better teen image than whatever shape the designer came up with. I suppose the reasoning was something like most people get a driver’s license when they’re teens. That means they can drive cars. You start cars with keys. So the final design had keys all over it, which looked weird and spoke to no one.

Opinions are valuable, but they’re just opinions. Let the experts make the final call.

If there’s no escape, organize responsibilities

If a committee is unavoidable, assign separate responsibilities rather than giving everyone a share in every single responsibility. The trouble is taste is inherently subjective. Some will agree, but many will have different opinions. Giving everyone a chance to weigh in on everything goes exactly nowhere. Or worse, it leads to compromise. (”I hate the blue.” “Well, I hate the red.” “Then let’s just choose green. At least nobody hates it.”)

Yet, if you give each person on the team his or her own role and responsibility, they can feel as protective about the thing they’re in charge of as they like. Plus, it helps eliminate indecision and might actually move a project along faster.

Foster collaboration rather than compromise

Sometimes nixing the “I don’t like” and the “that’s ugly” kind of comments can make a difference. When reviewing a design or idea, ask instead, “What works and what doesn’t? Why?” Instead of making or responding to visceral comments, ask, “What can we tell the designer that will address our concerns?” Reasoning and thinking together can help you arrive at rational decisions that leave everyone feeling included.

Speak for your audience, not yourself

The bane of committees is the egomaniac who feels their preference must be reflected in the design. If you’re the rational person on the team, you may understandably feel irritated. Remember, preferences are natural. The person you are and the position you have will influence your taste. You can’t help it if your gut is telling you that you like something or that you don’t. It’s what guts do.

Understand this reaction, and make every effort to direct the conversation to the people who really matter: your audience members. Ideally, this will take the form of user testing. Even informal user testing, where you send the idea to a handful of your audience members and ask for their feedback.

If you can’t do a simple audience survey for some reason, at least put yourself in their shoes. If you were your main demographic, would you respond to these colors? If you were of a certain age and background, would you respond to that style of writing? Do the people who use your site use products whose designs are similar to what you’re considering?

Despite your best intentions, you may very well be pulled into a committee or form one. As long as you make sure you’re asking the right questions, and everyone can come to a sensible decision.

Zen Garden by euart, on Flickr

It’s 9 a.m., Monday morning. The phone is already ringing as you download the dozen or more e-mail messages that came in over the weekend. Someone pops their head into your office and tells you that the main printer has gone down and no one is there to fix it. Can you? This is especially troubling, especially because a major grant report is due by noon.

A typical day for countless strapped non-profit managers who are forced to do too much with too little. It’s how most of our clients are, so I understand how challenging it can be to take on a new web development project. We guide our clients through the process, but it still takes collaboration and planning from everyone. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

The trick with any big project, is to divide the greater goal (building a website) into more manageable bits. I once read that the great cellist Yoyo Ma’s father told him to “couper la difficulté en quatre” (divide the difficult part into four pieces) when working on a difficult piece of music. That simple formula helps with almost anything that makes your heart palpitate.

Web projects naturally break into smaller phases, so it’s relatively easy to focus on what’s important right now versus what needs to happen by launch. Forget about launch. At the beginning, think about general goals, then fill in the gaps.

To take Mr. Ma’s advice literally, here’s how you can think of a web development project in four easy-to-manage phases:

1. Research
2. Design
3. Development
4. Maintenance

When you’re in the Research phase, the other three phases shouldn’t even be registering yet. Instead, break Research into four smaller tasks that you can focus on sequentially, such as:

1. Deciding who your ideal website audience is
2. Asking representatives from that audience for their website wish-list ideas
3. Asking your staff what their wish list is
4. Deciding who will be part of your website team (internally and externally)

If any of those seem like too much work, divide them into four tasks. Keep going granular until you feel like you can check off each item amongst the rest of the responsibilities you have each day. Websites are vitally important, but so is running your organization.

Focus on only what you need to when you need to, and you’ll see that you can accomplish more than seemed possible in the beginning.

One of the first questions we ask during the kickoff of a new project is, “Who’s taking ownership of this project?” It’s incredible how many times that answer is, “Nobody.”

Unless you plan to let your website turn into a ghost town, put somebody in charge. Appointing no one as the website manager will have one of two outcomes: no one will do anything and your site will rot, or someone will do everything, but you’ll never respect or realize the amount of work they do.

Being a website manager is a big job. Bigger than you may realize. This is often the go-to person for all questions and updates for the website. If anyone wants something done, it falls to them. And the job doesn’t end. When the web development project is over, you take over updates and maintenance.

OK, now I’ve convinced you that you need to appoint someone as the website manager, and that their job is an important one. But who to appoint? Look for someone who …

Knows a little (not not necessarily a lot) about how web pages are built

Contrary to popular belief, whoever manages your website does no need to be a techno-wiz. If you need any heavy lifting done, it’s usually easier and cheaper to ask your web development company to help out. Of course, providing you have a good relationship with them. The majority of updates to your site will be tweaks here and there, which are mostly text changes. It is helpful if your web manager knows what a P-tag is and has monkeyed around with a content management system or two.

Is wildly organized

To work well with a computer, it helps to think a little like a computer. I’m still talking carbon-based life form, but that life form should be very organized. This person should be keep schedules and be good at documenting methods for updates and changes. They should have systems for organizing copy and pictures. They should remember passwords. They should be good at follow-through.

Is a good promoter

Your manager extraordinaire should also be savvy about promotion. Even if you have a marketing person on staff, your manager should know something about how to submit your website to search engines or repost blog entries. It’s helpful if they’re familiar with Facebook or Twitter, because they can help broadcast your message to a wider public. They can also be looking at new ways to promote your mission beyond what you might think up.

A good web manager can pay for themselves several times over. You’ll be glad you started taking this position seriously.

How many times have you sat down in a hairdresser’s chair and said, “Surprise me”? Not often, I’ll bet. All but the most adventurous (or foolhardy) have at least a minor plan when they have their hair cut.

Now, why would you subject your website to the same risky random results? Any time you’re planning to launch a new website or overhaul your existing one, have a plan. In the biz, we call this a project brief.

There’s no real right or wrong way to write a brief, as long as you capture information and make it easy to deliver information to a web developer. One risk is to make the brief too, well, brief. Err on the side of too much information, and then you can edit down what’s superfluous with a web professional.

There are a few items that you should always include in a project brief, however. Here are a few:

Budget

Some organizations are understandably cagey with this information, but know what you have to spend and what’s reasonable for the site you want. Make sure to share this information with your developer, at least a general ballpark. A budget of $1000 will get you a very different website from one that costs $10,000. Tip: No website is free. Even the free ones.

Deadlines

If you absolutely must launch a website in time for a big event, to fulfill a grant requirement or for some other reason, note it down. Look a year into the future and plan for any deadlines, vacations or other scheduling requirements that might affect development.

Your profile

Put into a paragraph what you are and what your organization does. This will help you focus your needs with the website, and it will help any developer better understand how you work. It’s also useful if you include ways you differ from others in your industry.

It goes without saying to leave out the jargon, right?

Demographics

Next, provide a profile of the people who you serve. These are the people who visit your website – or who you wish would visit your website. Note their age, location, gender, website connection speed – whatever you can do flesh out who will be using your website. People who fit the 60-80 age range use websites differently than those in the 15-25 age range.

Sites you like, and a few you don’t

Start a list of the websites you’ve seen that you really like. Maybe you like the color palette or layout or some kind of functionality. Any time you see a site, add it to your bookmarks so you can pass this information on.

Similarly, make a list of the sites you don’t like. This can give a web developer valuable insight into your preferences as well.

Your primary tasks

List how you’ll be using the site on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. This can help you budget your own time when it comes to managing the website, and it also helps prioritize the information on your website.

Your visitors’ primary tasks

What things do you want your visitors to do when they come to your website? Put yourself into your audience’s shoes, and make a prioritized list of the things you want them to do when they’re at your site. This might be registering to volunteer, donating money, picking up event information. It can be helpful to ask your audience what they’d like to do at your website.

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Anybody who’s ever built a new kitchen knows that just because you hire someone to lay the granite counter tops doesn’t mean your job’s over. It’s true with websites, too. You have to be organized, communicate preferences and prepare to work with the completed project.

When Talance takes on a web project, we’re there to apply our expertise, but our clients are key participants. It might be tempting to think, “I’m no Web developer. I’ll leave it to the pros.” But if you’re not involved in the development of your site, you’ll never have what you really need. You’re the expert on both your organization and your audience.

Good Web companies will hold your hand through the process and guide you through decisions. Here the some steps you can follow on your own when you’re starting a new web project. Follow the hyperlinks to learn more about each step in the process from our blog.

Perform a needs assessment.

Survey your staff, leadership and audience to find out what they need a website to do. Ask them what works with the current site and what doesn’t. Also look at any analytics software you have on your current site (if you have any) to evaluate your site’s performance.

Write a clear, detailed Request for Proposal (RFP).

Take the information you’ve gathered from your stakeholders and put it into an RFP. This will help you organize your thoughts and help a web developer better target their proposal.

Assemble a dream team.

These are the people within your organization that have oversight of the web project as it unfolds. It’s a smart idea to appoint one person who is the main interface between the developer and your internal team.

Get ready for content.

Your web developers may be in charge of populating your website with text and graphics, but you might choose to do this internally. Start planning early so your website’s launch isn’t delayed while you wait for people to turn in their copy.

Test and revise.

The moment your website is launched is not the moment it’s complete. It just means you need to see how your decisions and design fit your needs. Make notes of potential improvements or changes, and put those on the calendar. It’s a good idea to plan new website releases every 3-6 months, rather than release small updates here and there as they come up. This 4-part article tells you how to reevaluate all aspects of your website.

June Birthday Goodie

This month, as part of Talance’s year-long 10th anniversary celebration, we’re giving out free $150 gift cards. Really! Use yours to update an existing Talance website or toward a new one.

>> Request your FREE gift card now!

One of the smallest things that can go wrong with your website can damage it the most. Link rot – dead hyperlinks – are just as nasty as the name suggests. When you leave your website unattended, the inevitable happens. References to other websites become invalid. You move or delete pages. Someone changes the name of a file, and any links there break.

It’s easy to see how link rot happens, but you might be surprised to learn how adversely it can affect your site. When website visitors encounter a dead link, the overwhelming tendency is to leave the site altogether. Granted, a dead link on a deep internal page is less detrimental than one on your homepage, but still. One false click, and you’ve lost a potential doner, volunteer, customer or fan.

Luckily, there are some common-sense precautions you can take to minimize this risk.

Run link reports.

If you have an analytics program (which you should – read what we’ve written about analytics) that you’re consulting regularly, you’ll see a report of dead links visitors are encountering. If you don’t have an analytics program, you can at least run your website through a link checker. How? Type “link checker” into Google, and you’ll be spoiled with free choices.

Enable automatic aliases.

Those who use our Drupal websites hardly notice when they’ve changed a link. We enable automatic aliases so that whenever a page name changes, any old links that lead there change too. Look for this feature in your own content management system. You can also create redirects that reroute old links to new pages.

Provide informative 404 pages.

You’ve seen pages with the 404 File Not Found page. If you can’t catch every dead link on your site, at least create a custom 404 page. List potential reasons the link may be dead, and help direct the user to find the page they’re seeking, such as by using a search box.

Avoid URL shorteners.  

These services that take your lengthy URL and transfer it into something shorter that looks like http://bit.ly or http://ow.ly are killer for links. They change over time and get reassigned to other users. Only think of them as a short-term fix, not a long-term solution for your website.

[Photo credit: Death Becomes Her by 19melissa68, on Flickr]

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Websites are like silverware drawers. They start out the vision of order, with special compartments for everything. Then a grapefruit spoon gets mixed in with the soup spoons. Someone tosses in a ladle because they can’t figure out where else it should go. Toast crumbs accumulate at the bottom. Before long, what was a bounty of neatness can become a chaotic mess just from day to day living.

It’s understandable, because websites are always growing and changing. Nevertheless, it helps to take a periodic assessment to figure out what should go where, and if it’s operating at optimum capacity.

Here are a few things you can check right now:

1. Is your name clearly identified on your homepage? Make sure it appears on internal pages too.
2. Are your organization’s colors consistently used? It’s a good idea to limit your colors to two.
3. Are there broken links? If so, fix them right away!

While that’s a good start, you should do a complete website assessment and do it regularly. Lucky for you, we’re here to help.

This month, as part of Talance’s year-long 10th anniversary celebration, we’re performing free website analyses to determine how you can improve the performance of your website. The analysis includes a review of design, user-friendliness, search engine visibility and how popular it is in social media. We’ll deliver you a handy report you can keep and refer to while you make updates.

>> Request your FREE website analysis now!

Wikipedia is ranked the 6th most popular in the world (fifth most popular in the US), so it might come as a surprise that it has only a staff of 10, and the rest of it’s enormous success is built on volunteers. Wikipedia is a non-profit. (Cash-strapped non-profits: think about that next time you’re wondering how you’ll get everything done on your current budget.)

Of those 10 employees, almost all of them are focused on keeping the website up and running. They manage the site, handle design, manage servers, babysit the network – generally make sure that the information goes where it needs to. The volunteers, on the other hand, feed the site, make sure the copy is correct, handle bite-sized tasks, which in the aggregate, are enough to make Wikipedia one of the biggest sites on the planet.

The important lesson here is not just that you can accomplish great things with volunteers, but that they need to be applied to the correct task. If something is as integral to your organization as your website, pay for it. You’ll free up volunteers for other tasks that meet their individual skills without weighing them down with such a complicated task as a website, but you’ll never be emotionally beholden to someone who’s donating their sweat (and possibly tears) to your site.

I’m in the middle of researching a massive project now where most people I’ve interviewed say something to this effect: “Rather than go through the hassle of updating the website, we’ve just let it go.”

What a waste! To have a website that people are actually visiting (even if there aren’t many), and that can be actually working for you is a waste of time, space and even reputation. Sure, websites take dedication and work to update, but it shouldn’t be so hard to work with that you simply let it go.

Solution: the blog.

Blogs are workhorses. Your website can be fairly static, but if you have a blog, it instantly becomes dynamic. They constantly pump new information into your site, and provide a way for you to disseminate important information to your audience. If they’re using RSS feeds, they don’t even need to remember to go to your site. Turn on comments, and you can have a discussion with the people who visit.

What to write about?

• Project updates
• New grants
• The people around your office
• Useful information for your clients
• Trends in your field

Anything that shows your funders, investors or prospects that you know what you’re doing.

If you make one addition to your website, make it a blog. And the pledge to work on it at least once a week. It’ll do wonders for making your site relevant.

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)