When I first started paying careful attention to the people who visit my website, I was surprised at how many went to our contact page. Sure, some people would send messages or look up a phone number, but not everybody.

Many people look at your contact page so they can learn something about you. They want to know where you are, who works at your organization, what you look like and different ways to get in touch with you (such as Twitter or Facebook).

Take a few minutes today to check out your contact page and see if it says everything it should. Also check out this earlier post on where to put links to your contact info.

[The following is reprinted from the technology issue of Torah at the Center, and educational publication from Union for Reform Judaism. Read the whole technology issue by clicking here.]

By Monique Cuvelier, Usability Consultant and CEO, Talance.com, Burlington, MA

The last thing you want a student to do in an online course is to think. That sounds wildly counterintuitive, considering most instructors want students to have thinking caps strapped tightly on and cranked to maximum when they sit down to learn. However, if students are thinking too hard about what to do with online course software, they’re not going to be engaged in the course materials – and that’s the reason you want them there in the first place.

The benefits of e-learning programs are clear. They’re convenient, bring students together who live in different places and can be adapted to address the various needs of students. But many organizations focus too closely on the benefits and not enough on usability, the ease in which students can navigate a course and accomplish learning goals.

The trouble is that creating good usability should look natural and easy, but it’s incredibly hard. What seems the natural way to work in an online arena is not natural; it takes planning and design. In the six years that I’ve been making online learning environments more intuitive for students and teachers at my company Talance.com, I’ve seen students drop out of courses, give up on their favorite topics and turn their ire to their hapless instructors all because they were confused and frustrated by the technology.

Below are a few rules you can think about when evaluating online courseware or creating a simple online learning environment from scratch.

Familiar Workflows

Students should move naturally from one task to the next. Tasks should guide the students to the right information at the right time. For instance, you may want the student to work through the course this way: log in, read any pertinent announcements, review reading material, discuss a project in the bulletin boards, submit a writing assignment. In this case, make sure the announcement appears on the course homepage and that instructions for the writing assignment are at the end of the reading material. Include enough shortcuts that students can navigate easily from one task to the next.

Free-Flowing Communication

Students should have open channels of communication with you (the teacher) and other learners, whether the course is synchronous or asynchronous. Add options for navigation. Icons on the homepage that take you to different sections of the course are OK – as long as you’re on the homepage. Use tabs at the top of the screen to create quick access to frequently used sections of the course, because they can be seen from any page. Course participants should find it easy to send course e-mail, and they should know at a glance if they have new messages. They should know where to find help, through an FAQ or an e-mail form where they can submit technical support issues.

Flexible Enough to Foster Creativity

Multiple-choice questions may be fine in some circumstances but are too rigid on their own to address all learning styles and encourage creativity in an online course. Present several ways for students to learn and interact, such as real-time chat rooms with whiteboards, and essay-type questions in tests. Allow students to upload Microsoft Word documents, which let them work in their familiar computer environments rather than typing responses into text forms.

Hebrew-Language Support

Think about how your software handles Hebrew, if you require it for your class. Support for Hebrew is often not included in the first release of software packages. Can you render characters in Unicode or graphically? Discussion boards in particular may have difficulty rendering Hebrew characters, especially along with English. Can you allow students to attach Word documents that are formatted for Hebrew?

Just the Essentials

One hazard of working with an online course is there is no page limit. Avoid information glut by presenting students with just the information they need. Create places for secondary information elsewhere in the course for those who want to learn more.

Following these principles is only the first step to creating a more usable online course. Make better usability an ongoing effort by constantly noting problems students have, asking for feedback and making adjustments. Eventually, you’ll find the more you think about how students learn in an online environment, the less your students will have to.

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 Clicky 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.

Usability is one of my favorite subjects, because it’s so often ignored yet it’s so utterly necessary to the success of any online project. If someone doesn’t understand how to use your website, what use is it? Your web projects have got to be easy, easy, easy for visitors to use.

You should be thinking about user-friendly design from day one, but you should also be continually refining what you’ve got. There are numerous online tools out there you can use to help you evaluate the usability success of your web projects, but here are five I recommend for learning more about how people use your site. You can also check out previous postings on usability.

1. SUS – A quick and dirty usability scale (Word doc). One of the best ways of finding out how people feel about your web project is to simply ask them. This template from the Usability.gov website is a great place to start when thinking about questions. You can either distribute this document or turn to a tool like SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang to ask for feedback on your site.
2. Color Contrast Analyzer Juicy Studio. Many more people than you probably think have trouble picking up all colors, maybe as many as one in 10. Make sure your design has high contrast colors – no black on blue or yellow on white. Try a tool like Color Contrast Analyzer Color Analysis to choose the right colors for your web site.
3. AnyBrowser.com. We all become used to looking at websites on our own computer screens, but they’re not all set at the same resolution. It’s a good idea to test your site on various browser sizes so you can see how it shows up for others. This site helps you do it easily.
4. BrowserCam. This tool lets you see what your site looks like if you’re viewing it from a Mac, PC, Blackberry or any number of other operating systems or browsers like IE or Firefox. Extremely useful to view your site through this before you launch.
5. StomperNet Scrutinizer. Organizations with big bucks have the money to spend on eye tracking programs, where they actually record where people look on a webpage and are able to figure out what people are seeing or aren’t seeing. StomperScrutinizer is the poor man’s alternative, which is a browser that tracks the mouse and forces the eye to look at the location of the mouse.

The sorry truth about your carefully crafted website copy is that people aren’t really reading it. People scan web pages very quickly, and they only pick up bits of information from a few key places, namely top left.

For you, it means you should think like a resume writer when you go to put words on your site:

• Use bullet points. Like the ones here. Isn’t it easier to scan?
• Use bold to set off paragraphs and sentences. Again, it snags your eye as you scan downward.
• Use information-carrying words at the beginning of paragraphs

Overall, emphasize quality over quantity. As beautiful as the writing is, most people simply don’t read it.

I found a great thought on one of my favorite websites Useit.com the other day, and a powerful argument for having your own name for your blog.

Jacob Nielsen says:

Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Letting somebody else own your name means that they own your destiny on the Internet. They can degrade the service quality as much as they want. They can increase the price as much as they want. They can add atop your content as many pop-ups, blinking banners, or other user-repelling advertising techniques as they want. They can promote your competitor’s offers on your pages. Yes, you can walk, but at the cost of your loyal readers, links you’ve attracted from other sites, and your search engine ranking.

Sure, WordPress and the ilk are free, but you can have your own domain name for just a few bucks more – I’ve seen for less than $10 per year. Make the investment up front, and own your blog yourself.

It’s a good probability that at least one in 20 people can’t see everything on your website. That’s because a higher number of people than you probably expected are color blind in some way. Some statistics I’ve seen say that as many as 18 percent of people have some kind of visual limitation.

Around 90 percent of the people I tell this fact to are shocked – the rest know it because they’re used to not seeing everything on a website. But what if they’re missing something terribly important, like a news alert or a call for contributions or all your website navigation?

I love the Colorblind Web Page Filter because it makes it easy to see what your website might look like through a color-deficient eyes, those that can’t see red/green or blue/yellow.

For some help choosing the right high-contrast colors for your site, try the Color Laboratory. It’s handy because it “allows you to select colors and see how they appear next to one another, and in various foreground/background combinations. It also allows you to see those colors as they might appear to color-blind users.”

Makes the incredibly important job of picking the right colors easier.

One surprising fact about our own research into how people use websites is that they use the “contact us” page a lot. They glean a lot of information from it. They go there to see where you’re located, to find directions, to meet the people who work for your organization.

What a pity that so many websites hide their contact information, especially if it’s the kind of organization with a real-world address that people might actually be visiting.

So before you do another thing today, go to your own website and challenge yourself to find your contact information. Ask yourself:

1. Is it on every page?
2. Are directions easy to find?
3. If it’s in the footer, does it make sense to move it up to the top of the page?
4. Does it include your mailing address or just a link to your e-mail address?

If the answer to any of these is no, you know what to do next.

There could be a million reasons people aren’t using your site – maybe it’s summer vacation time, maybe there’s something going on in the news that’s diverting their attention, maybe you don’t even have a site yet – but I think there are three main barriers that keep people from visiting a site.

Here are those top three reasons and what you can do to remedy them.

The Problem: You don’t know your site visitors.

Which is to say, you either haven’t found your target audience, or if you have, you haven’t reflected that on your website.

The Solution: Find your target audience/market.

This Target Market Worksheet (in PDF format) from Entrepreneur is a valuable exercise for any nonprofit.

The Problem: You don’t understand your site visitors.

A big part of making sure people are using your site is understanding what they do when they get there. If you pay attention with some analytics tools, you can learn a lot about where people are going or not going when they hit your web address.

The Solution: Get hold of some analytics tools and start using them.

Some of my favorites:

ClickTale

Clicky

Crazy Egg

The Problem: Your site visitors don’t know or understand you.

Sometimes it’s as simple as they can’t find your website. Or maybe when they get to your site, they can’t figure out what to do there.

The Solution: Start promoting your website (a topic I visit often in this blog), and start to apply some usability techniques.

Learn more at this webinar.

Good website navigation is so intuitive you never even think about it. Bad navigation you certainly notice, because it makes you work hard to get where you want to go. The trouble is, intuitive design takes careful thought. You’ve really got to predict your site’s visitors’ movements, and be ready for any effort they’ll make.

Not all website designers do, of course. Many – quite innocently, I must add – think not a bit about how people use websites. They don’t read reports, they don’t think critically about what confuses them whey they visit sites or they get a little too creative in their efforts.

I’ll be addressing usability in an upcoming e-seminar (there’s still time to register if you hurry – click here to do so) , but I wanted to share some common mistakes, in no particular order, in case you feel like frustrating your site visitors and driving traffic away:

1. Use inconsistent navigation. Vary it from page to page. Sometimes put it on the top, sometimes put it on the side, and forget to add menu items here and there.
2. Get cutesy with navigation. Rather than saying “Home,” “About Us” and “Services,” say “The Homestead,” “Meet the Gang” and “What Makes Us Tick.” It also helps if your audience is mostly English-speaking and you write your navigation in a foreign language with foreign characters – like Hebrew (you know who you are …).
3. Don’t add a home link and assume everyone knows to click your logo to go back to the homepage.
4. Put your navigation links in alphabetical order or order or length – anything but order of importance.
5. Make pages open in new windows, thereby risking pop-up blocking software won’t allow that page to open and disabling your site visitor’s back button.
6. Forget sub-navigation – put every single link on every single page.
7. Put navigation at the bottom of the page or somewhere else “below the fold.”
8. Give users multiple choices to perform one action. For instance, if you’re selling something, list three different places they can buy it.
9. Use too many menus. At least three. In different places. With redundant choices.
10. Don’t even use navigation – just put some links around the page.