Hey, I get it. You’re a dedicated board member and you are invested all the way from your hair follicles to your bunions in your nonprofit organization’s mission. You want everyone to know how awesome your nonprofit is. For whatever reason, what comes naturally is to emblazon your mission statement everywhere you can: annual reports, brochures and, in a streak of misinformed enthusiasm, your website homepage.

Oh, no. No, no. You are sorely mistaken there. Your mission statement does not belong on your homepage. I would argue that thing shouldn’t be within throwing distance of your website. Your site is not a place where you need to talk about how you’re meeting your organizational vision. In fact, the words “vision,” “mission statement” and “statement of purpose” have no business anywhere on your website.

Why? Because nobody cares. I’m not trying to be mean here, there’s just no other way to say it. I guarantee the people you’re serving care more about what you’re doing for them than looking at your gobbledygook mission statement.

I’ll tell you now that no pregnant teen, no neglected pet, no activist, congregant, health worker, educator, mentor, counselor or any other type online audience member visiting a nonprofit’s website ever needs to know the mission statement. Not one!

I’m writing to you directly, dear board member, because you’re the unseen reverser of many a good decision about website homepages. I know this because in my work at a web development firm, I lead our clients through a painstaking process of identifying the most important information for the homepage. We look for something that will keep them there longer than 10 seconds. Too often a board member steps in during final approval to insist on the mission statement going front and center. So back we step.

Listen, I’m not a board member. I don’t know what goes on behind doors when choosing a mission statement. It could be a mixed martial arts battle over which words to choose (”innovation” or “enrich”? “Potential” or “realize”?). You might have bloody lips and bruises that prove your mix of bizpeak is the best. Respect, man. That’s got to be tough.

Still, though. It doesn’t change that no one cares.

So for pity’s sake, pretty please stop insisting your mission statement appears anywhere on your website homepage.

Respectfully yours,

Frustrated web developers everywhere

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.

We spend all year coming up with advice and insight into how you can run a better website, hold a more effective online training program. Here are the top 12 most useful, entertaining and indispensable we covered over the last year.

(Make sure you don’t miss any of the good stuff coming up in 2012 – and yes, we’ve got a good year planed so far. Sign up for updates by RSS feed or by e-mail using the box to the right.)

Definitive Website Pre-Launch Checklist

Ready to launch a new site? Run through this before you flip the switch.

4 Risk Management Steps That Could Save You

Things go wrong with websites. Expect the unexpected.

Welcome to Our Website! (Except for You)

We know you’d never intentionally close your website to anyone, but without appropriate accessibility, that might be just what you’re doing.

Save Your Sanity AND Get the Logo You Love (Yes, You Can!)

You can get through an image rebranding without rehashing past mistakes or subjecting yourself to the pain of collaboration. Here’s how.

John Rochford Talks About Accessibility

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.

10 Ways to Be a Jackass in Online Discussions

Please apply the following rules to discussion boards, comments entries, and Facebook and Twitter postings if you wish to raise collective blood pressure.

Digesting All That Alphabet Soup

Here are a few tips on dealing with letter overload online.

20 Free Icon Sets for Non-Profits

The quickest shortcut to making your website look polished is to use icons. These pictures are nice and free.

Guest Post: Five Musts for Pictures That Pop

Morgan Ione Yeager shares some simple tricks to capture better images and using images online.

Reader Question: How Do I Get Feedback on My New Website?

A reader wants to know how to get honest feedback from her website visitors.

What Is the Coolest E-learning Video You Have Seen Online?

A few great examples.

Frankenspeak Contest with the Content Rules team

Share the words and phrases that you’d like to ban from marketing, sales, corporate communications, business schools, blogs and boardrooms, and you’ll be entered to win a copy of Content Rules, by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman.

QuickBooks just did something smart. They asked us what we thought of their QuickBooks Online Plus service in a survey. Since we’re a bunch of technologists who think deeply about how to make processes smoother, we told them, in detail.

Asking wasn’t the smartest part about what they did, though. Following up was. One of their software developers scheduled a phone call with us, and we all got on the phone for 20 minutes – their tech team and ours – and hashed out some really good ideas for making the service better.

The benefit for them? Good ideas that appeal to clients, expressed intelligently.

The benefit for us? The promise of better service with our online accounting system.

When was the last time you asked the people you serve what they think? Are they learning everything they can? Are they finding what they need on your website? If you ask, you might find some excellent ideas for improvement. Think of sending a website user survey as a first step. We also wrote about this last month when a reader asked us the question How Do I Get Feedback on My New Website?

Your Turn

While we’re talking about the benefits of feedback, take a minute to tell us what you think of our newsletter. You might even win a gift certificate. You lucky dog, you.

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.

We’re getting ready to launch a new website, and I want to know how it’s doing. What’s the best way to get honest feedback?

Thanks,
Roslyn Kruchten

The fact you’re asking that question already puts you on the road to a better website. A new online project doesn’t end when it launches. That’s just the ending of the development. Hopefully, you’ve done your homework into what your audience wants and needs before the launch, because then you can focus on how well you’ve delivered after that.

Here are a few good ways to get feedback on a new website, although it’s a good idea to check how well an established website is doing too.

Issue a survey – the same one you offered before beginning.

It’s always a good idea to put out a survey before you begin any web project to see how you might improve. Its results will tell you what you should build into the site, but it will also set benchmarks. Keep those results, and then after your new website has launched, you can issue the same survey and compare results.

Here’s a free user survey you can print out or e-mail to your audience.

Ask the people you know.

Simply send a message to the people in your contacts lists, though e-mail, on Twitter, Facebook or your other social media accounts. Ask people who have nothing to do with your industry, because they’ll give you insight and help point out jargon. You can ask them to simply respond to your message, or you can create a submission form for them to add anonymous comments.

Set up a usability test.

If you’ve got the time and budget, the best thing to do is set up a usability test. Ideally, you’d have a focus group with subjects and interviewers, seriously studying how they do on your site. The W3C has some excellent test scripts and interview questions you can use to model your own session.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Ask on the comments form at the bottom of this page, on Twitter @talance, or on Facebook. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

It could be a punishing snowstorm that brings down power for weeks. It could be a hacker that vandalizes your website. Or a war-torn country that inhibits communication with your team. It might even be as simple as a data backup that stops running for some reason. Running an organization with an online element is inherently risky, yet few leaders think seriously about what those risks might be and how they might affect day-to-day operations.

Earlier this month in the blog, we talked about how non-profits should think about IT risk management when they have an online element to their organization.

But how do you create an IT risk management plan? Start with these four steps:

1.     Identify possible risks.

First think of all the forms of electronic communication you use, and brainstorm together some worst case scenarios. What could possibly go wrong? Write them down.

2.     Categorize and prioritize.

Now look at your list and decide which is the most potentially damaging. You might rank the risks by Low, Medium and High, so you can decide where to put your most careful plan.

3.     Determine plausibility.

Some of the items on your list are more likely to happen than others, even if they’re damaging. An earthquake might flatten your off-site storage facility, but is it likely to happen in the middle of Utah? Rank your items based on plausibility: Possible, Probable and Likely are helpful labels.

4.     Make your plan.

Now you have a good idea of what could go wrong and the likelihood it will. Think through each item and plot out what you would do in case it happens. Will your web project manager quit?  Have a good staffing agency on call. Did you delete your website’s homepage? Have your web host on speed dial so they can revert to the latest backup. Write down every step so anyone can pick up the plan and know what to do.

Educated plans are the best, so don’t shy from asking others what they might do. Plan within your department, and call in colleagues and other professionals for their advice.

Your turn: do you assess risk? Let us know in our poll if you have a risk management plan for your organization. We’ll share the results in our next newsletter. Take the poll!

[This appeared in our February newsletter. Wanna subscribe? Do it now!]

CIO magazine ran an article about how Egypt’s Internet shutdown should be a wakeup call for CIOs. It’s a fair point, considering how many organizations run their businesses completely online – in the cloud. If the cloud were to go down, they’d be without a business.

It’s not a far-fetched notion. The CIO article says:

Virtually every country’s government reserves the right to temporarily nationalize and control what’s considered critical infrastructure, which usually includes mobile networks, fixed-line telecommunications and Internet backbone systems.

Governments can invoke that right during national emergencies, whether they be natural disasters, terrorist attacks or any other incident that qualifies as such under a country’s legal code.

If CIOs of corporations are starting to sweat a little, so should non-profit execs. Many have organizations that work in countries where civil unrest isn’t a possibility, but a given. That doesn’t mean they should backpedal into a dark, unconnected communications landscape, in which they rely solely on mailed letters and phone calls. It just means they need to do some risk assessment.

Non-profit leaders should sit down with their entire team and think about what such an event would mean to their organization. What would people do if they rely on the website to gather up-to-date information? What’s the plan if text messaging fails? Is there redundancy built into website backups, if they’re stored on a virtual machine?

Risk assessment is one of those activities that’s easy to put off until it’s needed. But by that time, it’s too late.

With the Egyptian uprising happening in the background, this is perfect time for non-profit leaders to stop procrastinating with their risk assessment. They should think about the most necessary technologies they use and come up with a concrete plan for what to do in their home country as well as those they work in if Internet technologies are canceled.

Your Turn

Websites can have as many moving parts as a jumbo jet, so it’s easy to lose track of something. That’s why checklists abound here at Talance HQ. They’re one of the best ways we know to make sure we don’t forget something while juggling all the building, writing and planning pieces. We know that when it comes time to launch, it’s particularly easy to forget something important.

Below is a list of top items that can make the launch of any website easier and more organized. We’ll keep adding if we think of anything new. Did we forget something? Add it in the comments, and we’ll update.

Also check out our 9-point SEO checklist to help you show up at the top of those search engine results.

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

Copy

• Spelling correct on every page
• Check for typos
• All pages reviewed and accounted for
• Outdated content removed
• Placeholder content removed
• Check for consistency in writing voice, tone and style (including first person vs. third person, singular and plural, eccentric capitalizations and words like “website” vs. “web site”)
• Non-spelling errors, such as old addresses, phone numbers, former employees, etc., corrected
• Stylistic inconsistencies fixed
• Terms of use updated
• Copyright updated
• Privacy policy updated
• Contact information accessible on every page
• All hidden copy checked (error messages, JavaScript functions, transcriptions)
• Jargon removed
• Content quality evaluated

Formatting

• Most important info listed at the top of the page
• Appropriate use of bold and bullets for easy scanning
• No written text within images
• Colors and typefaces consistent on every page
• Each page format uniform
• Images resized and consistent
• Menus not overloaded with too many items
• H tags used for headlines rather than bolds or size increases

Technical Quality Assurance

• Internal and external hyperlinks work
• Pages checked against WCAG guidelines
• Private data secure (passwords, contact info, etc.)
• Usability testing complete
• Sitemap updated
• Everything works
• Important pages print OK
• All old URLs point to new URLs

Accessibility

• “Alt” attributes used for all descriptive images
• Pages accessible
• High contrast color used everywhere
• Color and size used for critical information
• Tested on most common browsers
• Tested on mobile devices

Marketing

• PR releases written
• Social media launch campaign planned
• Off-line promotion planned
• Friends, colleagues notified
• E-newsletter notification written and ready to send
• Business cards, letterhead, envelopes and other printed material updated with new address
• Voice mail updated with new address
• Email signature updated with notification about launch
• Link submitted to directories and search engines
• Ads created
• Blog entries planned or written
• Marketing plan revised
• SEO checklist completed

Support

• Training completed
• Extra help on website support procured
• User feedback surveys written
• Maintenance and update schedule created
• Plan established in case of heavy traffic
• Databases set to backup in case of roll-back

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.