If there’s one takeaway from 2011, it’s that the economy is haywire and technology is evolving faster than an oiled bullet. In that kind of nutty atmosphere, it can be a challenge to predict what will happen to web-based technology in the coming months.

What does 2012 hold for nonprofit websites?

We do see a few trends emerging for the next year, however. Here are our predictions for 2012 web trends. Take note for when you next talk to your web design firm about and also pay attention to so you can to succeed in your NGO or company.

1. More design for mobile devices.

Look around you. What’s in the hands of the people surrounding you, including your own? An iPad or iPhone? Nook? Kindle? Tablet? Blackberry? Everybody’s using some kind of handheld device. While corporate websites have been mobile-compliant for years, nonprofits will finally start to catch up. Want to peer into the future of mobile design? Read Mobile Web Design Trends and Best Practices.

2. App-lification of websites.

All those people with mobile devices are getting used to responsive design that they can manipulate with their fingers. Move over “point and click,” and make way for “touch and swipe.” People are beginning to expect interactive design with websites, so expect to see websites look and behave more like they came from the app store.

3. Websites focused on user experience.

Since people are spending so much time with their heads bowed over their handheld devices, they also expect to understand what to do with an app without having to guess. This means websites will be built with careful attention to user experience design (UX), in other words, built with humans in mind. Nonprofit leaders might finally understand that the less people have to think about a website, the more likely they’ll donate, sign petitions, volunteer or otherwise participate. Finally!

4. Less Flash.

We’ve long believed Flash to be big and clunky plug-in, with way too many distracting splash screens and blank spaces on the iPad. There are other technologies out there that make web movies and play on a host of devices, so expect to see more of these letters in the alphabet soup: AJAX, CSS3 and HTML 5.

5. Move to online donations.

Smart charities are already asking for money online with little more than a click. Many smaller nonprofits have been slow to relinquish check-cashing for ecommerce web design. We see some of that fear waning, and expect more nonprofits that don’t allow online donations to begin earning some electronic cash.

What do you think will be trending in 2012? Give your vote for one of these five in the comments below or tell us what you think we’ll see in the future.

The last couple weeks of the year is usually down time in most offices, distracted by holiday parties and run on skeleton crews. We have a productive idea for making the most out of these last nine days of 2011: do a little something to improve your search engine results. We wouldn’t dream of taking you from those festive glasses of bubbly, so we’ve come up with a task-a-day SEO checklist that won’t overwhelm you but that will leave your website performing better in the new year.

SEO Tweaks

1. Know and use heading tags.

These are widely misused but can help visitors as well as search engines navigate your site. The W3C says, "A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces." This Improve the Web article has a great break-down of how you might use the H1 tag, suitable for people who are less than acquainted with HTML mumbo jumbo.

2. Swap out your outdated bold tags.

Search engines like Google scan through the text on your page for keywords – the words that best represent what the page is about. One of the things they look for is words in bold, assuming that you bold things that are important.  Bolds should use <strong> tags, not outdated bold <b> tags. The Spunky Jones SEO Blog has a nice description of why strong is better than bold for SEO.

3. Submit your site to some directories.

Don’t assume everybody knows your site is there already. Submit it to directories that address what you do. Library Spot has links to some of the most popular nonprofit directories. Don’t forget to look for directories in other countries.

4. Bookmark it.

You might already Tweet the heck out of your site’s articles or pages, but don’t forget other social bookmarking sites. Search Engine Journal has a wicked long list of 125 social bookmarking sites.

5. Add a sitemap.

Search engines use sitemaps to quickly find each page on your site. Add one. If you have a big site, make sure it’s automatically updated.

6. Beef up your content.

Search engines like meaty text. Make sure your site has an adequate amount of text instead of a few floating headlines. If your pages should be longer, go ahead and beef them up. Just make sure to optimize for easy reading.

7. Plan your blog.

The best way to keep the search engines (and people) coming back is to blog. If you don’t have one yet, take a couple hours and plan out some ideas for a new blog you can launch in 2012. If you do have one, still sit down and plan out some ideas for 2012. You’ll appreciate being organized.

8. Update your content.

Everybody – humans and search engines alike – hate old content. Conduct a search-and-destroy mission on old dates and duplicate junk on your site. Our Definitive Website Pre-Launch Checklist is a handy tool for systematically updating.

9. Don’t lose yourself in your quest to be Number One.

Listen, everyone wants to be number one. While it helps to be the first listing in Google, but it’s not worth obsessing over. No matter what certain SEO charlatans promise, it’s impossible to guarantee being listed number one. Just concentrate on building a useful site that works well, and more people will use it.

Free SEO Analysis Contest

Contest time

Improve your search engine readiness with a free SEO analysis – a $600 value. If you win our drawing for a free analysis, we’ll comb through your site to tell you where you can improve your site for better performance on search engines.

How can you be entered to win? Just use the comments below to tell us about the next step you’re going to take to improve your search engine rankings (it’s OK to use one of the tips above – that’s why we wrote them!), and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win.

Deadline for entries is Jan. 23, 2012. We’ll pick one winner at random from all entries on Jan. 24, 2012 and will notify the winner via e-mail. You must leave your name and a correct e-mail address to qualify.

Guest post by: Robin Neidorf

Win Teach Beyond Your Reach!

If you’re asking yourself, “Is running a distance learning program for me?” then read on. Use the following as a checklist while you’re evaluating online education tools. It’s an excerpt from the book Teach Beyond Your Reach by Robin Neidorf. The e-learning guide takes a practical, curriculum-focused approach to setting up and running successful online classes. The guide for new and experienced distance educators allows them to develop and deliver quality e-learning courses and training sessions.

Do:

Ask informed questions.

Demo a tool before you commit to using it.

Try freeware or open-source tools.

Go for low tech whenever possible.

Ask potential students for their input.

Network with other instructors; ask them what they use; compare notes, success stories, and battle scars.

Keep up with changing technology; treat yourself to an occasional seminar or conference.

Stay open, creative, and flexible about your teaching.

Assume that you will find the right solution (although it may not be the one you thought you’d find).

Don’t:

Use technology for its own sake; it must enhance the learning and instructing experience or it will be merely distracting (at best) or a barrier (at worst).

Change your requirements, objectives, or audiences without keeping your partners (especially your technology partners) informed.

Assume everything will work as promised; test and retest (preferably with members of the learner population) before the course begins.

Ignore the unwillingness of your students to use a tool; sometimes they’re not just ready and you may need to take smaller incremental steps than you’d like.

Let failure or challenges discourage you from believing in the possibilities of distance education.

“Get married” to a particular tool or solution; it might not be all things to all situations.

Use the tool as a substitute for good course design and delivery.

Migrate content from one tool to another in a cut-and-paste approach.

BY ROBIN NEIDORF

Robin Neidorf is the author of Teach Beyond Your Reach: An Instructor’s Guide to Developing and Running Successful Distance Learning Classes, Workshops, Training Sessions and More (Information Today, Inc., 2006), soon to be published in an updated second edition. She has taught communications and writing through the University of Phoenix Online and has co-taught creative writing online through the University of Gävle in Sweden.  As a consultant, she has helped organizations develop and implement successful distance learning and self-paced tutorial programs. Robin holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Teach Beyond Your Reach Free Book Contest

Contest time

[Update! Congratulations to David, who won the drawing for Teach Beyond Your Reach by Robin Neidorf. This contest may be over, but you're still welcome to keep sending ideas for picking a learning management system or exercise ideas.]

You could win a free copy of Teach Beyond Your Reach as part of Talance’s Customer Appreciation Month, courtesy of e-learning pro and author Robin Neidorf. How can you be entered to win? Just add your favorite training exercise, lesson idea or experience to the comments below, and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win.

Deadline for entries is Jan. 16, 2012. We’ll pick one winner at random from all entries on Jan. 17, 2012 and will notify the winner via e-mail. You must leave your name and a correct e-mail address to qualify.

Here’s a little secret many people don’t know about building projects for the web. You don’t have to do everything from scratch. There are so many tools out there that do the tricky stuff for you, that you really don’t have to be an HTML wiz to have a polished looking website.

Here are some excellent tools to help you fake web excellence:

Table Builders

Tables are the nemesis of many well-meaning web worker. They can be tricky to build from scratch, but no need with these.

Quackit HTML Table Generator

TableGen

Code-Generator.net HTML Table Generator

Color Palettes

Color theory is a practice that people spend years perfecting. But you can fake it pretty well with these tools that help you choose complimentary colors.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Schemer Online

Elvan Online

Image Generators

A few well-placed images can help bring your site to life. These three tools help you manage and create pictures to illustrate your pages.

PicMarkr lets you to add custom watermark to your images.

Digital Post It Note Generator

Create A Graph

Ready to jump into Drupal 7

That’s just what we’ve been saying since Drupal 7 debuted in January 2011. True, it’s a robust and powerful system with excellent accessibility, and we’re using it for a few of our clients now, but not everybody.

Why not jump in? First of all, it’s not quite ready for everyone. Contributors to Drupal 7 are still busy finding and patching bugs and upgrading the features from earlier versions so they work on this new version.

Secondly, it can be a heavy expense. Upgrading from an earlier version of Drupal isn’t simply downloading a patch and refreshing your screen. It’s a whole new website. Any new website takes time to build, not even including moving over all the content (words and images) and testing. Time and complexity equal money, and an organization needs to have a strong case for upgrading before making that decision.

One exception is if you’re using a very old version of Drupal, such as version 5 or earlier. The Drupal community stopped supporting and patching version 5 last year, so they’re vulnerable to security breaches and should be updated as soon as possible.

Our advice? Absolutely pull on your swimsuit, but check with your developer (or just contact us) before plunging into an upgrade.

Some people think having accessible websites is like having a swimming pool. Nice to have, but too expensive and too much upkeep. Unlike a swimming pool, however, an accessible website means that anyone can view it whatever their limitation, ranging from a physical limitation like limited or no eyesight, to having a handheld device with small display.

John Rochford, Director of Technology at New England INDEX a project of UMass Medical School, is one of those people who takes accessibility seriously and makes websites better for everyone. Talance has been working with Rochford and his team on the online training component for an initiative called Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH). It’s a major undertaking that aims to streamline and coordinate how healthcare providers work with each other and patients.

Monique Cuvelier, Talance’s CEO, asked Rochford about his work in accessibility, his biggest headaches and his proudest moment.

Monique Cuvelier: I think a lot of people who care about accessibility have a compelling reason to do so. What’s the driving force behind your involvement in accessibility?

John Rochford: The driving force for me is the result of the combination and the evolution of two of my passions. One is for computer technology. The other is for helping people with intellectual disabilities. My professional career started in the mid-1980s with a succession of jobs serving people with intellectual disabilities. During that time, people shunned computer geeks like me. Yet the people I served embraced me. That they are such an open, friendly, and accepting people has always been heartwarming to me.

In the early 1990s, I sought a graduate degree at The Shriver Center for research, training and service related to intellectual disabilities. It has a project, New England INDEX, which provides free information about programs and services for people with disabilities residing in Massachusetts. All of the software INDEX designed at the time for that purpose was as accessible to people with disabilities as we could make it.

I started to extend our software to the web in the mid-1990s. Since then, I have designing websites as accessible as technology and funding have allowed, and as best as my developing expertise could make them.

MC: What does a typical accessibility test or process look like for you?

JR: We start by building accessible web applications. This makes it much less costly to fix accessibility issues, and much easier to test for related deficiencies. We use automated testing software to check for problems across a website. We have also used assistive technology products in our testing. A good example is that we make sure all our web sites are compatible with screen reader software for people who are blind. Most importantly, we have people with disabilities test our web sites.

MC: What kind of digital media are ignored the most with accessibility?

JR: All digital media (e.g., videos, music, etc.) are natively inaccessible. Only a tiny percentage of websites are helpful to people with disabilities by incorporating accessible media players and/or by providing alternative, accessible content. An accessible media player, for example, provides controls (e.g., play, pause) that work with screen readers so people who are blind can use them. Such controls are also good for people with physical disabilities who may not be able to use a mouse.

The National Center for Accessible Media is a good resource about accessible digital media. For many years, we have used on our websites its ccPlayer, an accessible media player, and its captioning services for our video content.

MC: What’s the single biggest rule people should follow to make pages accessible?

JR: Make sure people with disabilities test a website and every version of it.

MC: What’s your biggest accessibility headache?

JR: My most significant challenge is convincing people to make their websites accessible. I find it appalling that I have to work to convince the staff of organizations, which serve people with disabilities, to make their sites accessible. What people do not realize is that an accessible website is easier to use for everyone, which is always good for business.

MC: What was your proudest moment in accessibility?

JR: It occurred early in my career after I installed speech recognition software for a young woman. I was showing her how to use it instead of a keyboard and a mouse, which she could not use. She cried as she told me it was the first time she would be able to write a letter to her mother. I consider that achievement of hers to be the special one.

We’re not naming names, but we hear a lot of crazy requests when it comes to building websites. The worst are those that utterly disregard what the poor visitors have to contend with when they look at the site. Read these quotes, and do exactly the opposite.

[This appeared in our December newsletter. Wanna subscribe?]

Top 10 Most Ridiculous Web Design Requests of 2010

1. Can you please make that tab say [insert any 10 or more words here]?
2. We need this website built yesterday.
3. Can you create sub-sub-sub menus?
4. Put everything on the homepage so no one has to search for anything.
5. Half of our committee hates green, the other half hates blue, so just make it gray.
6. I know we’re ready to launch, but the CEO doesn’t think the site is “user friendly.” He’d like you to rebuild it so it looks like this [insert here schematic created solely from the rectangle tool on PowerPoint].
7. Can you make all the menu items open in a new window?
8. Can you make us #1 on Google?
9. Make the logo 200% bigger.
10. Can you copy this other site? We want ours to look exactly the same.

The most surprising thing about the iPad is how quickly and seamlessly it has nestled into the working and daily life of so many people. Gartner reported that Apple will sell 19.5 million units by the end of 2010 – way more, way faster than the iPhone.

Even if you’re not thinking about creating an iPad app for your non-profit (it’s not a bad idea, by the way), you minimally should be thinking about how your website looks on an iPad. A good chunk of your supporters may already be looking you up from their tablet, but according to the report from Gartner, the market is going to blossom with media tablets: 54.8 million units in 2011, up 181 percent from 2010. That means your constituency is likely to be moving to a handheld unit.

You should know minimally that if you’re using Flash, it’s not showing up at all on an iPad. But how about the rest of your site? How many of you have thought about how your site looks and performs on an iPad? Weigh in on our poll, and then check back in coming weeks as we report on our findings and give you tips on how to make your web project perfect on the most popular viewing devices.

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]

Stuff goes on at your organization, and you need to tell people about it. That’s frequently the level of consideration people give their website calendar. That’s selling yourself short. Calendar tools, especially those that work on content management systems like Drupal, are full of features that can help you engage more people at your site and your events.

1. Automatically publish and expire events.

Sometimes you want to add events that don’t show up until they’re relevant. Maybe there’s a special launch you don’t want anyone to know about until a particular date, but you don’t want to have to remember to add it later. By scheduling your event to appear on a certain date, you don’t have to. You can also similarly set events to expire.

2. Subscribe to new events via RSS feeds.

If you have an RSS-using audience, they can subscribe to your calendar’s automatic RSS feed to find out what’s happening as soon as you add it.

3. Feature special events on your homepage.

Some events are really special, and you want them to show up on a particular page of your website, such as the homepage. You can have a Featured check box that lets you highlight events without having to redundantly enter them in two places.

4. Export events in iCalendar format.

ICalendar format allows you to share event information and display events in different programs, such as Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. You can have a tool that lets people automatically convert your website’s events in iCal format so they can easily add it to their personal calendars.

5. Add a date-picker to the homepage.

Rather than a plain link that says Calendar, add a little date-picker that lets people choose a date in the month and see what’s happening then.

6. Highlight what’s happening this hour, this day or this week.

Websites can look much more active if you can see what’s going on in the immediate future. Your website can automatically create lists to show what’s happening in set timeframes.

7. Set regular events to recur.

If you have a training session that happens every Tuesday of every month, you can add it once and have it appear on every Tuesday thereafter.

8. Create event categories.

Some of your events may appeal only to staff members, some may relate to holidays. You can create categories on each of your events to create classifications that show events that match only those categories.

9. RSVP.

If you have an event coming up that you need people to RSVP to, you can do it directly from your calendar.

10. Sign-up.

Similarly, you might need people to register for an event. Why not include the sign-up form directly in the event itself?