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

[Welcome to the Talance Friendly E-mail Newsletter. This is text of the issue our e-mail subscribers just received. Sign up on the lower right-hand side of the Talance homepage.]

Hi, Friends!

The world, as they say, is atwitter about Twitter. It’s amazing, considering that last November, when we surveyed Massachusetts non-profits to see how they were using social media, no one even knew what a microblog was! Now everybody is Twittering.

That’s why we’re presenting the Talance community a 30-minute free webinar on Does Twitter Matter for Non-Profits?, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 from 2-2:30pm Eastern, presented by Talance’s own Monique Cuvelier. Learn how you can make sense of this madly growing tool and how it applies to you.

We’re keeping the presentation short – so you still have time to eat lunch – but we’ll stick around for 20 minutes for a Q&A session and also be scheduling free follow-up web strategy consultations for anyone who wants them.

»Register for this free webinar now!

Talance offers a new security service to evaluate and fix security vulnerabilities in client websites. The Talance Security Update Service (TSUS) monitors the Drupal community for discovery of any threats so you don’t have to. We help protect your website, web information and users against the latest security threats by delivering immediate and ongoing updates for various vulnerabilities as soon as they’re discovered.

One year of unlimited monitoring is available for only $49. If you’re interested in this package and having Talance monitor and update your website, please contact us.

»Contact us to sign up now!

Are you one of our many clients who are ramping up their social media strategy but haven’t yet integrated it into your website? If so, you’ll love this.

We’re offering a stylish and effective collection of social media links and icons to keep your constituency plugged into your ongoing social media marketing efforts. This little upgrade is fast and effective.

»Contact us to put this on your site now!

Want to pick up quick tips and resources on technology and web strategy for your non-profit?

»Follow us on Twitter.

The most popular recent posts on Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog. Make sure you’re reading http://talance.com/blog and sign up for the news feed.

Spring Clean Your Website – Part 1
Three things to prep for your week of good housekeeping.

Spring Clean Your Website – Dead Links (Part 2)
Find and remove your dead links.

Spring Clean Your Website Copy (Part 3)
As time passes and your goals and objectives evolve, so should your website copy.

Spring Clean Your Website: Refresh the Design (Part 4)
Make sure your site looks like a cohesive piece and still looks up to date.

Five Great Takeaways from Church Websites
Tweaks that can make your church or synagogue site better.

Killer Church Websites
Websites that engage and create community

Working Your Out-of-Office Reply While You’re Away
Get a little fancy with this message and do a bit of promotion while you’re at it.

Need Some Help?

Talance has helped clients launch scores of projects, ranging from websites to online newsletters to CRM projects. Please click here to schedule a time to talk about your next project or to request a proposal.

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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 GetClicky.com 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.

Backups are the buzzkill of most people who work on computers. Being organized is often tedious. But spending a few minutes on a regular basis making sure that the information on your computer is safely stored somewhere else for emergency retrieval is time well spent.

SimpleTech Signature Mini makes the job a little less tedious, because this external backup device was designed by Italian sports car designers. It’s also very handy, because it’s about the size of a deck of cards, and you can bring it with you wherever you travel.

This one includes local and online backup and comes with Fabrik Local Backup software, so you can schedule automatic backups from your computer relatively easily and store around 2 GB – quite a lot – of your important information. Not all backup drives do this.

It’s also worth noting that you can use this cute thing not just for backing up documents, but you can have a handy place to put your photos, songs, or anything else you might want to bring along for a lecture or meeting presentation.

Think about using an external tool for backing up your important data. Check out this post I wrote earlier on handy tools for saving your data from yourself.

Some scary news: US border control now has the authority to swipe your laptop, cell phone or other electronic device. Bad news no matter which way you look at it, but you could be utterly lost if you’re traveling and US agents decide to retain your laptop indefinitely.

My best advice is to travel with a stripped-down piece of equipment that contains only contact names and travel details and download information from an online storage space when you arrive at your destination.

But you might also give a shot at TrueCrypt, free open-source software that locks down the information on your laptop so that only you can get at it. Not only does TrueCrypt encrypt your files, but it hides them so snoops don’t even know they exist, a practice called steganography.

It’s worth learning a bit about how this works if you travel and can’t live without your laptop. Of course, border control can still take your iPod, so there’s a good reason to travel with a cheapy MP3/4 player.

It’s no ordinary occasion that Microsoft, Sun and Cisco engage in a project together. But this is no ordinary occasion. Hackers have discovered a potentially very dangerous ways to take people to different websites even when they think they’ve typed in the right address. For instance, you may type www.cnn.com into your webpage, but you may be redirected to a fake site that can steal your identity or money in a technique called spoofing. The BBC reported the story; an excerpt:

The flaw, discovered by accident, would allow criminals to redirect users to fake webpages, even if they typed the correct address into a browser.

Internet giants such as Microsoft are now distributing the security patch.

Security expert Dan Kaminsky said that the case was unprecedented, but added: “People should be concerned but they should not be panicking.”

Here’s a bulletin from Microsoft that details the patch and security threat. Not a bad idea to install that one.

It’s not a question of if it will happen, but when. For me, I lost all my data about two weeks ago when my hard drive melted down. I very nearly lost it all, and had to rebuild quite a bit of data. Thankfully, I have a network of little safety devices that cover up my natural human stupidity. Here are three friendly tools within the grasp of any small business or nonprofit, which will help avert disaster:

1. Mozy (http://mozy.com/). Fast and easy automatic online backup. There’s a limited free plan for individuals (great for e-mail), a cheap $5 plan for piles of space.
2. Red Drive (http://www.jscape.com/reddrive/index.html). Directly access your Web files through Red Drive. It lets you bypass confusing FTP programs and let you treat an off-site storage place like any old drive.
3. Any freemail account (such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail). Automatically cc your free webmail account on any outgoing message, and you’ll have a low-tech duplicate backup.