1. Thou shalt break up long pieces of text with bullets, for it is easier to scan that way.
2. Thou shalt use short sentences, even if it feels thou art using more periods than commas. Punchy maketh for better reading.
3. Thou shalt bow down and worship thine spell checker.
4. Honor the inverted pyramid style of writing. It hath helped journalists for decades for good reason.
5. Useth not more than one idea per paragraph. Readers never readeth carefully enough to catch more than one.
6. You shalt not make wrongful use of verbs. Choose active verb construction rather than passive.
7. Thou shalt cut everything you write in half. Shorter articles art better.
8. Thou shalt use highlights, such as bolds and hyperlinks, to call attention to important words.
9. Thou shalt not be creative with sub-headings and instead use clear ones. They aren’t the place for cuteness.
10. Useth lists and numbers to organize ideas into an easy-to-read format (cf. 10 Commandments).

1. Let everyone on your staff and board give feedback on your design, and apply everyone’s preferences.
2. Put someone in charge who doesn’t care about the website.
3. Replace pages or menu items with PDFs.
4. Make your mission statement about six paragraphs long and put it front and center of the homepage.
5. Hide the donation forms. It also helps to make it really hard to use.
6. Don’t apply any kind of strategy to the site. Just throw it up and assume you’ll get support.
7. Make sure you don’t look “too polished,” because no one will give you money unless the site looks like it was built on a shoestring.
8. Assume no one looks at your site.
9. Put up a bunch of unrelated pages with an unclear and incoherent message.
10. Design for your board members (or yourself) rather than your audience.
11. Leave development to a volunteer.
12. Leave design to a volunteer.
13. Play hot potato with updating website pages. The biggest sucker is in charge of keeping it current.
14. Forget about your other communications efforts. Never cross reference them. Never meet with the people in charge of putting them together.
15. Make your decision on a web developer based on cost alone, assuming you don’t always get what you pay for.

Monique Cuvelier spends her days at Talance sorting through the muck and creating fabulous non-profit websites. Contact her for advice on how.

Entrepreneur’s Tech Forward blog has some solid advice on what kind of questions you should ask a company before you give them the green light to create a website for you. I agree completely with the advice, and this article is like an outline of the way we approach relationships with new organizations.

A reputable web services company should:

• Say their first step is to understand your needs
• Step up when it comes to explaining complicated technology
• Know what goes into the front end (design) and back end (architecture) of a website.

I’d be happy to share more information about how we interact with clients. Contact me at talance.com for more info.