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After a summer of pollen and yard games, the house and yard is in much need of a fall clean-up. Fall clean-up is time to clear out the cobwebs and fix items that broke over the course of the season.

Web projects also collect clutter, whether it’s a website or online course. While you’re in a tidy mindset from keeping up your house, turn your attentions onto your website. Here are a few easy things you can do to tune up your web project for fall and not lose your mind.

1. Solicit comments.

Ask members of your organization and your constituency for ideas of what they think needs improvement. You might be surprised to hear what people from the outside think.

2. Put together a clean team.

Cleaning up is much easier if you do it with a task force to share the load. If you are an army of one, just make sure to pace yourself.

3. Dedicate 30 minutes a day.

It’s much less disruptive to pick away. You’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish if you do a little every day, rather than taking off two weeks for a major overhaul.

Need more tips on how to keep your web project ship shape? Look through our blog archives for hints on maintenance.

It’s the gift that keeps on giving: a new online marketing and promotion tip every week. As part of our year-long birthday festivities, we’re celebrating by giving away a new e-newsletter.

52 Web Marketing & Promotion Tips helps you energize your website with a piece of actionable advice delivered directly to your inbox every week, so you can keep your site fresh and vibrant. From writing and link building to best practices and strategy, we’ll help you reach your website goals in for the whole year.

One short and sweet tip each week, all year long. What could be easier?

Click here to subscribe before you get behind!

Take a look at A New Day, a heroic organization in Massachusetts that helps victims of sexual and relationship violence. We helped them bring a bright and hopeful face to the work they do with a new logo to match their new name (they’re formerly known as Womansplace Crisis Center). The new logo provides instant recognition to non-native English speakers and those who may be illiterate. It also communicates calm, freshness, vibrancy and empowerment.

A New Day Logo

Visit them at their website: anewdayma.org, and stay tuned, because big things are planned for this space.

Who Is A New Day?

A New Day is a free and confidential space for survivors of domestic and sexual violence and their family. They provide counseling, medical advocacy, 24-hours’ response to individuals who have been sexually assaulted (including meeting them at the hospital and staying with them through procedures), legal advocacy and prevention, working in the community to change the way they think about and respond to domestic and sexual violence in hopes to stop it at its roots. Check ‘em out. They’re worth every bit of good will they get.

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The more you know about the people who visit your website, the better. Creating a profile of the people who visit your organization site can help you make better decisions about what you can do for them.

Your website should be the central repository for this research. Here are a few tools you can add to your existing website to compile info on your users.

Feedback forms.

A simple feedback form can gather so much. Tuck these around your website soliciting comments, and you’ll start learning more about who your people are.

Surveys.

If you want serious feedback, host a survey. If you build this into your website, you can keep names, contact information and responses local to your website rather than a third-party service. You can also set it up so you receive e-mail alerts every time someone submits a response.

E-newsletters.

E-newsletters are good sources of information as well as good ways to deliver targeted information to your subscribers. Make sure you have a sign-up form on your website as well as archives.

Call (888) 810-9109 or e-mail if you want demos or pricing.

August Birthday Goodie: Free Webinar

We’re halfway through our 10th year and still celebrating. For August, we asked you what you wanted for a freebie, and you spoke. You want a crash course on how to write for the web. We’re taking registrations through August, so sign up now for this handy session on how to fine-tune your writing to appeal to online readers.

Keep, Cut or Kill: Writing for the Web is Sept. 2, 2010 at 2 p.m. Eastern.

>> Register now!

We thought next month we’d let you tell us what kind of deal you’d like to receive from Talance in celebration of our 10th year. Pick your favorite; we’ll offer the winner on August 1.

Birthday Cake Cupcake by clevercupcakes, on Flickr

Writing is hard work! Make sure your blog posts aren’t tarnished by easily avoidable mistakes. Fret no longer with our free Perfect Blogging Checklist.

>> Get a copy of our Perfect Blogging Checklist now!

Tell your friends and colleagues to get a copy, and you can be reading better blogs too.

It’s all in celebration of Talance’s 10th anniversary. Check back every month of 2010 for a new birthday goodie.

[Image: Flickr user clevercupcakes]

The Talance team will be at Drupal Design Camp Boston this weekend at MIT. We’re looking forward to sharing designing and usability ideas with others who work on Drupal. We’ll also be talking to nonprofiteers and Drupal newbies to pick up insight into how we can help you better. Stay tuned for special reporting of the event.

Give us a shout if you’re interested in meeting up!

We’re giving away $150 gift cards for new or existing websites with Talance. Use ‘em for anything, from website updates to cash off a new project. Get yours now!

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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!

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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!

[Image: Flickr user vinnie7]