Think back on every one of your failed New Year’s resolutions. The reason you failed probably had something to do with abstract, unspecific goals: get thin, exercise more, enjoy life more. Without clarity, it’s nearly impossible to figure out how to succeed. You’re doomed by January 2.

Goals should be less abstract, more concrete

[Image: Flickr user opensourceway]

The same kind of thinking can harm a new e-learning project. Unspecific goal-setting can prevent you from knowing if your e-learning project is a success. If before you begin developing your training curriculum, you specify abstract goals like, “train employees,” “put this PowerPoint presentation online,” or “set up e-learning infrastructure,” you’re bound for failure. Instead, think about what success looks like, think about how you’ll arrive at success, and you’ll know if your online training program is doing what it should.

An easier way of arriving at a list of goals is to pose these simple questions to yourself or your team:

• Why do you want to do the training?
• What will your learners get out of it?

When you answer these questions, make sure to attach a number (like a percentage), so it’s measurable and a due date, so you have a focus and target–a must for continued funding.

Measurable, actionable and realistic e-learning goals

As soon as you pose meaningful questions to your team, you’ll find it’s much easier to create measurable, actionable and realistic e-learning goals. That will also help you keep spending in check and calculate the return on your e-learning investment. Training programs are expensive, so you need to be able to show how well your new e-learning initiative works.

What might those goals look like?

• Transfer 50% of training programs into online format by the end of the next fiscal year.
• Train 95% of employees in HIPAA requirements by January 1.
• Increase awareness of new products by 25% among sales staff by the end of the quarter.
• Successfully operate new medical device in five minutes or less by the product launch.

See how easily you’d be able to see if you met those goals or not? Prefix each list item with “Did we …” and you can answer each by a simple yes or no. Also by setting goals at the beginning, you’ll have something concrete to shoot for.

The devil, they say, is in the details. Anyone who’s planned a considerable undertaking–be it a new kitchen or strategy for your organization–knows that the beast can rear its ugly head when you haven’t thought the project through well enough.

Want a Painless Website? Get Planning

[Image: Flickr user opensourceway]

Before you begin to think about selecting a technology partner for your new website redesign, you should do a little preliminary planning so you know what to look for when it comes time to choose. Now would also be a good time to do an internal needs assessment, so get your team involved to help.

Start with having the answers to these questions handy, and you’ll be glad you did when it comes time to start shopping for a web designer or put together an RFP (request for proposal).

1. When do you want to launch?
2. Do you already have a budget established? If your funds don’t meet your aspirations, can you break the project into phases?
3. What is the main goal for the new website or redesign (update the design, provide a better user experience, target a different audience, etc.)?
4. What’s the site’s concept? In other words, why does it exist?
5. Who is a typical person who might use the website? There might be more than one.
6. What’s the main thing people need to do on your website (search for information, sign up for something, make donations)?
7. What’s your functionality wish list for the new site (calendar, RSS, Twitter feed, Facebook Like button, etc.)?
8. What are some other sites you like, and why?

If you’ve got the answers to these questions, then you’ll be able to answer questions from your web development partner, and you’ll be in a better position to make a decision. Also check A Comprehensive Website Planning Guide from Smashing Magazine for an even more in-depth look into planning successful websites.

Converting to a CMS Website Free Guide

Need a little nudge when it comes to transferring your old website to a new CMS-based website like Drupal? Request a free copy of our website redesigning handbook that offers more tips, as well as templates and examples to take the pain out of planning.

Request your copy now.

Maybe your logo started with a clever idea you once loved, but now seems … well … hokey. Or it was something that no one on your Logo Procurement Committee absolutely hated. Or (this is the most likely scenario) you were over-rushed, understaffed, underfunded and that piece of clip art worked just fine, but now you’re still using what was meant to be a placeholder.

Whatever the reason behind having a look that doesn’t fit your organization comfortably any more, you know when it’s time to update. Just sprouted a couple gray hairs thinking about embarking on the process? Deep breaths. You can get through an image rebranding without rehashing past mistakes or subjecting yourself to the pain of collaboration. Invest a little time up front to think clearly about what you need out of a logo and what it should do, and the rest will come. Trust me; we do this all the time.

Of course, deciding that you need a new look is easier than deciding what it should be. The key is to think critically and logically. When Talance takes on a new project, we pull out a set of trusty checklists and run through them with our clients until we have a good idea of likes, dislikes and needs. Only then do we start thinking about creating a new image.

If you’re thinking about having a new logo designed in the near future, start now with solid planning. Start with the items below (you can bookmark this article and use it as a checklist), and when you begin on the logo design process with a designer, you’ll be that much close to having something you love and that works for you.

Peg the decision-makers.

If possible, peg just one decision-maker. Nothing kills progress and creativity more efficiently than a committee. Pick the chief to sign off on ideas, or – if you must – co-chiefs. It helps if they’re buddy-buddy, though, and can work together well.

(Can’t get by without a committee? Try this strategy guide.)

Know your audience.

I know, we’re always harping on about audiences in this blog. But you can’t hope to reach the people you really need to reach if you don’t know who they are. The over-50 crowd doesn’t respond to the same images as the under-20 crowd does. Dig up some demographics.

Work on your elevator pitch.

Can’t describe what your organization does in the time it takes to ride from the lobby to the fifth floor? Get to honing. Your logo will be a graphic representation of your work and must be communicated quickly and efficiently. You must be able to describe what you do succinctly in words before that can be translated to art.

Know your goals.

Seeing a trend here? You have to know what you want before you ask for it, and this includes knowing why you want that new logo. Is it because you want to appeal to a different cross-section of people? Do you need something that works better in print? Do you want to represent yourself with a new tone? Note your goals, and then prioritize them.

Find inspiration.

Copying is a no-no with logo design (and any designer that doesn’t respect that should be avoided!), but inspiration is a different matter. Start noticing colors you like (or need), typefaces that speak to you, patterns that catch your eye. Keep a folder of examples or even carry around a digital camera to take snaps of winning ideas. It can help push your designer in the right direction.

You can start with 30 Typography Focused Logo Designs and 70 Latest and Creative Logo Designs for Design Inspiration if you need some inspiration sources.

Find anti-inspiration.

This is arguably the easiest part of any logo design project: noting what you hate. I’m not sure what this says about humanity, but talking about your hates comes remarkably fluidly. It’s helpful too, because if you say so early in the project, you’ll help your designer steer away from what you can’t abide.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page to submit it. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

PowerPoint presentations are in many ways excellent jumping-off points for an online course. Working with slides forces you to think in discreet thoughts, which is essential for online communication. Plus, if you’ve already got a PowerPoint, then you’ve probably already gone through the hard work of planning what you want to teach and how you’ll arrange your lessons.

The key issue to remember is that a PowerPoint presentation is not an online course. It’s just that: a presentation. That’s what webinars are for.  An online course addresses different goals and is administered differently; it’s not simply a way to deliver your presentation online. An online course is more akin to a classroom experience, except that it happens remotely.

If you’re looking to create a full online course, the best thing to do with your PowerPoint is to use it as a planning tool. Most e-learning programs begin with a storyboard (this site explains what they are and provides some helpful examples), which is an outline for your online course.

From there, you can start to flesh out your course into text (you’ll have to convert all the words you say during your slideshow presentation into written copy) and activities to deliver on your online platform.

If you want more advice on planning for an online course, check out this helpful article from The E-Learning Coach blog.

You’d never throw a party without sending invitations. Who wants to sit alone with four dozen spinach triangles and a couple cases of beer? (If you just answered, “I do!” then you might want to get out a little.)

That’s effectively what you’re doing if you’re like one of the many people I talk who aim to have an “interactive” website but don’t kick-start the festivities. They expect people to start participating, yet they don’t tell anyone what’s happening or make it a destination worth visiting.

It helps to think of your website as a venue where the party never ends. An always open house. How do you do this? By applying some of the same principles you would to any bash you host.

1. Send out invites.

If you know how to reach them online, you can invite them through e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, listservs or however you normally chat with them. Are your partygoers the type to read a paper invite over an electronic one? Put it in the mail. The point is to invite them. Check out 18 Ways To Promote Your Website for ideas.

2. Keep inviting.

Remember, you website isn’t the one-time event of the year. It’s the ongoing event of the decade. Inform people they’re welcome to drop by any time. And then keep inviting them. People forget, have dentist appointments, get interrupted, so you need to keep the invites coming.

3. Plan something fun.

You don’t have to whack a piñata every time you throw a shindig, but people minimally expect snacks, drinks and good music. Why would they come to your website if there weren’t some kind of payoff? Make it worth their while, and they’ll keep coming.

4. Take pictures.

You know how weddings nowadays have disposable cameras in the middle of the tables? It’s because everybody likes to see themselves and their buddies participating. That transfers to your website too, whether it’s actual photos of the people you know or representations of them.

5. Make it pretty.

Picking up the dirty socks from the sofa and doing the dishes translates into fixing broken pictures and links and correcting typos. Read our Spring Cleaning guide so you can get everything sparkling before the party starts.

6. Plan for amounts.

In the event-planning world, you need to know who’s attending your party so you rent a big enough space, have enough canapés and staff appropriately. If you have the kind of website that’s likely to receive a surge in traffic, make sure you’re expecting it. If you aren’t, people might receive a message that the website isn’t available. Up your hosting account, talk to your webmaster about planning for what happens if 100 people try to click the same thing at once.

Zen Garden by euart, on Flickr

It’s 9 a.m., Monday morning. The phone is already ringing as you download the dozen or more e-mail messages that came in over the weekend. Someone pops their head into your office and tells you that the main printer has gone down and no one is there to fix it. Can you? This is especially troubling, especially because a major grant report is due by noon.

A typical day for countless strapped non-profit managers who are forced to do too much with too little. It’s how most of our clients are, so I understand how challenging it can be to take on a new web development project. We guide our clients through the process, but it still takes collaboration and planning from everyone. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

The trick with any big project, is to divide the greater goal (building a website) into more manageable bits. I once read that the great cellist Yoyo Ma’s father told him to “couper la difficulté en quatre” (divide the difficult part into four pieces) when working on a difficult piece of music. That simple formula helps with almost anything that makes your heart palpitate.

Web projects naturally break into smaller phases, so it’s relatively easy to focus on what’s important right now versus what needs to happen by launch. Forget about launch. At the beginning, think about general goals, then fill in the gaps.

To take Mr. Ma’s advice literally, here’s how you can think of a web development project in four easy-to-manage phases:

1. Research
2. Design
3. Development
4. Maintenance

When you’re in the Research phase, the other three phases shouldn’t even be registering yet. Instead, break Research into four smaller tasks that you can focus on sequentially, such as:

1. Deciding who your ideal website audience is
2. Asking representatives from that audience for their website wish-list ideas
3. Asking your staff what their wish list is
4. Deciding who will be part of your website team (internally and externally)

If any of those seem like too much work, divide them into four tasks. Keep going granular until you feel like you can check off each item amongst the rest of the responsibilities you have each day. Websites are vitally important, but so is running your organization.

Focus on only what you need to when you need to, and you’ll see that you can accomplish more than seemed possible in the beginning.

[Image: Flickr user euart]

Newspaper articles need to explain who, what, when, where, why, how. Anything less than those elements doesn’t tell the whole story. Websites also need to tell a story. Someone visiting for the first time should be able to know what you’re about and what you do without thinking too hard. Thinking too hard, in Web terms, means clicking off your page.

Here are the questions you should be able to answer easily if your website is well built:

1. What is the site all about? What’s its identity and reason for being?

2. Where do site visitors begin?

3. What’s the site structure? Does it have a clear hierarchy?

4. How do visitors search for things?

Pose those questions to your site, and if you can answer quickly and concretely, you know it has good bones.

[Photo credit: Mind Map covering the issues of Owning a Cat by MyThoughtsMindMaps, on Flickr]

Think about what happened the last time you really considered what should be on your website. Ideas and thoughts probably flowed in on your stream of conscious in no particular order, but rapidly:

• “We need to update the contact information.”
• “Oh, and Chris at the front desk needs to be added to the staff page.”
• “Didn’t someone say the other day they wanted a place to put articles about us?”

That’s a good thing. When you’re starting to plan a Web site, you want to consider every little thought or suggestion that’s come at you since the last time you updated your site. Your chief job should be to get everything down so you can process the information and make reasonable decisions when it comes to organizing the information on the site.

Here at Talance HQ, the best tool we’ve found to capture these early ideas is a mind map. “A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing,” says Wikipedia.

We’re very un-technical about it too. We take a big sheet of paper, or several scraps of paper, and write down everything we think of, drawing lines to connect ideas, or grouping the scraps of paper together.

The process is pure catharsis for website planning, and remarkably effective at helping you organize what seems like idea-chaos. Plus, since it requires no technical prowess, it’s a good activity for even the most technically challenged in your organization.

Request for proposals rarely fill me with joy. More often than not they’re a source of confusion, business-speak and unfinished thoughts, which we have to sort through and make sense of so we can send a reasonable bid to an organization that wants a website.

But last week I received an RFP from a non-profit that may have performed a Vulcan mind-meld on Talance. It was as if they had seen our new-client questionnaire and had preemptively answered all the questions I have at this early stage of a project. It filled me with delight (because I’m sad that way), and I know that it will make the project run smoothly, no matter who they choose to build the site.

What made it so great? Here are a few stand-outs that you can incorporate in your next RFP to help your project move smoothly from inception to completion:

1. Think it through.

The clearest RFPs benefit from discussion and planning beforehand. Make sure you talk with your team to form clear ideas of what you want your website to be, and then communicate your wishes through the RFP.

2. Write clearly.

Some people think “RFP” and pull out their cryptic businessese thesaurus so they can load it with fancy words nobody really gets. Pretend you’re explaining what you want to an idiot. Trust us, we Web developers get more out of it that way.

3. Plan your objectives.

You cannot hope for a site that reaches your goals unless you know what they are before you begin. If you want to be the go-to guide for volunteering opportunities, write it down and make sure that every decision you make from that point forward feeds back into that goal.

4. Order your objectives.

Some objectives are must-haves, others are nice-to-haves. Rank yours.

5. Go window shopping.

Everyone has seen sites they love, whether they be your competition or a mega-commercial site like Amazon. Start keeping track of sites you like, and make notes on what you like about them.

6. Know your branding.

Unless they’re new, most organizations have gone through some kind of branding exercise in the past, where colors, logos and other standards were developed. If you’re not aware of what these standards are, start asking around. We just had to redesign a website whose colors and logo were completely wrong in an earlier version, because no one checked. Translation: expensive.

7. Name your widgets.

If you want any special functionality, like slideshows, animations, photo galleries – anything – write it down.

8. Technical needs.

If you’re bound to maintain your website in a particular format, you like a CMS like Drupal or you don’t have the staff bandwidth to do updates, cite these constraints. Also note if you need Web hosting.

9. Name your budget.

I know, I know. You don’t want to come right out and say how much you want to spend, but your Web developer really needs at least a ballpark. We receive calls from clients who have $400 to spend, and those who have $40,000 to spend. We can’t help everyone, but it saves everybody a lot of time if I can tell them up front whether we can or not.

10. Make a schedule.

Decide when you’ll accept RFP questions, submissions and make decisions. Also note any ideal launch dates.

11. Contact information.

Sounds elementary, but make sure your prospects know how to reach you if they have questions. We received a bizarre system-generated RFP a couple weeks ago that had no personal contact information and was so hard to read we couldn’t even consider responding.

Laying this groundwork is incredibly useful for Web development companies like ours, but your staff will also thank you if you take the time to plan. Bonus: your funders will love you for eliminating money-wasting mistakes early on.

Someone wrote me yesterday looking for details on how I work with clients. I was saying on an N-TEN blog that it’s important to perform an internal needs assessment before you really begin to work with a website developer.

People generally know when they need a new site, but many tend not to start by asking what purpose the site should serve, what kinds of issues it should resolve and how it should look. Of course, this step is important in all companies, but I find it an absolute necessity with nonprofits that are governed by a board or committee.

So the first step we take with a new client is to encourage them to have these conversations together internally before talking to the website developer. That’s the idea behind a questionnaire we developed and hand out to our new clients before beginning on a project. I encourage our clients to send out copies to everyone on the team (from receptionist to CEO), have them fill it out independently and decide together what the final version should look like. Then they come to me with a filled out copy, and we talk through it together.

Everyone’s always really glad of this exercise, because people at organizations often don’t realize how different their thoughts are about their website. And it saves a lot of time and money when it comes to making a solid decision and putting together a reliable schedule.

Make sure to read through this blog posting on how to go about asking for a new website. It’s about what to expect from the company you hire. This is very important, because I find increasingly more often that a designer or a web developer will offer to build a website, but a designer lacks understanding of the underlying architecture, and web developers lack an understanding of how to bring it all together aesthetically.

We work with a project manager, a web developer who is an expert in human factors (meaning the way people naturally interact with technology) and a designer. All of us are able to address many questions before they’re asked and we consider our chief role as that of advisor. Inevitably, with expectations set early on, everyone is always happy with the final outcome.

You can find more info on our site on the kinds of sites we build. Oh, and we also have a deal with N-TEN members, so we can offer a discounts there, depending on what you need.