When people at an organization start sharing information about their website, they’re generally surprised at how much their ideas differ. That’s one of the key reasons you need to assemble a reliable website committee to guide your organization through the process of building or redesigning your website. These people can help you decide who your audience is, clarify the purpose of your site and determine how it meshes with your organization’s mission.

Put together a group of people that represent different parts of your organization. Maybe this is the executive director, volunteer coordinator and office manager, along with whoever is part of your communications committee. Don’t have a communications committee? Get one.

Having a Web dream team helps you gather feedback in an organized way, without everybody’s opinion overwhelming you. But remember that it’s imperative for successful projects to have one person who can give the nod on development, and then have one person who can give the nod on an ongoing basis. Make sure you appoint a leader to your dream team who is a master of organizing and moving things forward.

Volunteers are great members of your dream team. Frequently, your supporters know how to do more than you think. I guarantee you have marketing, communication or technology specialists who are fans of what you do. Recruit them to help.

All (successful) development projects work with a team of people who are able to work together on a single goal. They’re the keepers of the project and can steer it in the right way, so borrow from what works.

[This article is part of a 4-part series on cleaning up your website. Check out the other articles on freshening up your design, copy and links.]

[Image: Flickr user bies]

At home, the flower beds are clean, the trees are pruned and the windows are sparklingly clear. I, probably like most of you, have been doing spring cleaning, and working my way down a list of home maintenance and improvement tasks. It’s satisfying to check those items off and look at the polished result.

At work, I’m also doing spring cleaning, and I hope some of you are too. I like to take some time every six months or so (call the second session fall clean-up) to tidy up some of the messiness that has worked its way into our website over the winter months. It’s also a good time to stand back and make some critical decisions about the functionality of your website and evaluate the direction you’re headed. Websites should never sit stagnant, and putting some time on the calendar at least twice a year to evaluate your strategy should be a given.

This week, we’ll guide you through a clean-up and revitalizing process that you can follow on your own website. Today we’ve got three things you can do to prep for your week of good housekeeping.

Put together a clean team. You’re about to do a major clean-up and make some big decisions. It’s not something one person should do alone, so put together a task force. If you are an army of one, just make sure to pace yourself. Here’s a good model for putting together a team:

• You should have someone at a high level who can either make these decisions or who has the power to put them on the schedule for evaluation.
• Also appoint someone to act as project manager. The person to put together a schedule, arrange meeting times and generally make sure everyone is moving along.
• Finally, have one or more people to do the busy work: someone to update copy, remove dead links, make little changes. Volunteers can be a big help here.

Dedicate half an hour every day. Consistency is the key to spring cleaning – not killing yourself with work. Just set aside half an hour or an hour every day for a week to evaluate what needs to be done. Your task may take longer than half an hour, but you’ll be able to budget how much time you’ll need to do it in half an hour.

Set up a place to submit comments/ideas. While you’re cleaning up the website you have, you’re going to have ideas about the website you wish you had. Establish a place for you and your team to submit ideas or discoveries so you can decide if you want to add new functionality to your website. Check out this earlier post Make a Better Website with a User Survey for ideas of how to collect ideas and responses.

Good luck setting up today. Tune in tomorrow for the next step in your polished-up website, and click here to see all stories about spring cleaning.

Many people start a web project by deciding they need a website. OK, good start, but that’s not where the project should end. Unfortunately, often it does, without any real thought given to what the website should do, what it should be used for and who should use it.

So the next step in starting a web project is to ask some questions, and who better to ask than the people who currently visit your website? Set up a questionnaire survey to find out what your audience thinks is most important. Take their comments into consideration for your needs assessment process (which I talked about here).

What those survey questions will be largely depend on your own organization’s directives. But a question like this might help you get started. I find Likkert-type questions to be the most useful in gauging opinion.

Please rate the value of each of these features, with 1 being extremely important and 4 being extremely unimportant.

- Ability to log on to access premium material
- A blog
- Video clips that demonstrate how we work

Make sure to leave a comments space so people can add features they think might be valuable. This is also a good time to evaluate some of your current processes, like asking people how long it took them to receive feedback or how easy it is to make a donation or pay for an item.

There are plenty of free survey tools out there you can use to collect responses, and just include a link to your survey online. But also send your survey out to your mailing list and include a line about it at the foot of outgoing e-mails or inserts in your paper newsletter.

Remember to not only use this exercise as building a route to a website that better serves your audiences, but add another survey in six months to make sure you’re meeting your users’ needs.

Website User Survey Template

Need a shortcut for creating your own website user survey? Request a free template we created that will help you get your website strategy in place.

Request your website user survey.

A publisher asked me the other day for advice on how to pare down the number of programs, software and tools his company uses. He is using a graphics program, a workflow program, a listserv and websites – that’s just what I know about. There’s probably more, including programs that handle subscriber databases, mailing lists, invoicing, purchasing and heaven knows what else. He’s desperately looking for a way to streamline the number of programs he has to deal with in a day.

It’s a problem that we’re seeing more and more often with our clients: there are so many free and useful tools out there that it’s easy to be sold on every one of them. Before you know it, you’ve got a million little programs with a million different users and one big mess.

Three things you can do to streamline your system:

Get yourself a CMS. A content management system (go, Drupal!) is the first step anybody should take when trying to figure out how to streamline. Imagine building a house out of Legos, but without the flat foundation piece to stick the bricks to. I always try to tell people to stop thinking of CMSs as websites and to start thinking of them as company platforms. It’s the thing you build from.

Get a whiteboard and markers to sketch out a production flow. And then reproduce that flow in your CMS. CMSs are master of ushering content where it needs to be, that’s why they’re called content management systems. These things are made for you to move pages from writer to editor to publisher in a regulated way. Once you figure out how your content should travel, you can come up with a production/editorial flow and permission settings that can bypass any outside software that does this. This also goes for CRM systems, where you might be tracking how people donate or subscribe or attend events. It should all fold into the CMS.

Ditch the listserv/newsletter service. Look at getting a newsletter plug-in for your site. That way you can build up a web archive of content, do some site-specific branding on your missives and eliminate one tool from the arsenal. The newsletter tool we use lets you do unlimited newsletters with unlimited issues, so you can have a quarterly update, a weekly blast and a monthly newsletter and they can all look different or the same. It also synchs up your site visitors with subscriptions, which is useful. (If you want to see it in action, sign up for the Talance newsletter, and you can see flexible it is.)

Lemme know how your streamlining goes. Use the comments form below to ask questions and report back.

Small businesses and nonprofits are in the unusual position of being executive staff, mail room clerk and chief technologist all at the same time. Everyone can lick an envelope, but not everyone feels comfortable taking the role of CTO with no tech background. Yet that’s just what happens when you embark on a website project. Here are a few things you can do make sure the development of your website goes smoothly.

1. Decide what you need. This is a good time to start polling the people you work with, because people at your organization may have different ideas about how the site should work than you do. Start with a needs assessment, and put all the feedback and ideas into a big list.
2. Prioritize. The needs assessment will help you compile a wish list of what you want on your website, but now prioritize. If you don’t define scope, your project could go on forever and cost more than you have. Divide your list into three sections: Must Have, Will Need, Nice to Have. Be prepared to take out a clean sheet of paper for any additional items you think of during the project. We advise our clients to set aside an additional 15% of the budget for these unforeseen issues. Anything else you can get to these items during round two. Six months from launch is a good time to think of scheduling this round two.
3. Appoint a traffic cop. During your project development, you need someone to be the central command between your organization and the development team. This traffic cop doesn’t need to know about technology, but they should be organized, good at delivering information and have the ability to call the shots when needed.
4. Create a feedback forum for employees. It’s nice to have a web form or survey somewhere where people can drop comments and ideas during development and beyond. Websites should always be in motion, so use feedback as way to make sure your site does what you want it to as your organization evolves.

Which would be the smarter way to run a project:

1. Leave all decisions-making power and creative control to a single person with a genius IQ, or
2. Share decisions and idea-making among a team of interested people?

There may be some power-hungry geniuses who could effectively argue the first choice, but my money is on a shared responsibility. No matter how well I know something, I can’t honestly believe I’ll think of every angle, and that’s why it’s important to gather feedback.

Yet many organizations – very often nonprofits with limited staffs – will leave construction and maintenance of a website to a single person. What a mistake!

When we work through projects with clients, we encourage them to discuss ideas together before coming to us. They’re usually surprised at how much their ideas about the site differ. This is one of the key reasons why you should assemble a reliable tech team to guide your organization through the process. I believe this is doubly true if your nonprofit is a church or synagogue or otherwise serves a large community.

Why build a tech team?

• It helps solicit feedback from your audience/congregation in an organized way
• Helps draw out other’s talents to achieve organizational goals
• It works!

When creating your tech team, make sure you have all areas of your organization represented, and make sure you know who’s in charge. Everyone has to have a voice, but it’s imperative for successful projects to have one person who can give the nod on development, and then have one person who can give the nod on an ongoing basis.

Once you’ve got your prospects for a tech team, run this checklist by yourself:

• Does your tech team adequately represent everyone in your audience/congregation?
• Is there a single person in charge who’s good at leadership?
• Have you decided who’s in charge on an ongoing basis?

Now you’ve got your dream team, you can put them to work on discovering what should go into your site. Best place to start? A needs assessment.

Volunteers are a gift to a nonprofit website. The problem is, well, they’re volunteers. You’re counting on them to help out, but you’ve got respect their time and other limitations. A salary is a powerful incentive you can’t use with a volunteer. (Check out 21 Ways Volunteers Can Help with Your Website.)

It’s a chronic limitation for synagogue websites. The webmaster for a New York-based synagogue was talking about this with me the other day. She said, “One of the biggest challenges, of course, is that the site is managed on a fully volunteer basis and there is only so much time I can devote to it.”

We effectively face the same challenge with Talance’s company website – we squeeze in enhancements between other client projects. But knowing that anyone who comes to our website forms judgments on the quality of work we do based on what they see there, we also know it’s vitally important to keep performing upgrades.

My solution is to set up what equates to a project management checklist with a priority number next to each task and put it in a central location. Whenever a team member (including myself) has a bit of free time, we just pick something off the list and do it. Its easier to attack in bite-sized bits, and things do eventually get done.

We have our own project management software we use, but you might look at Google Calendars and Docs and Spreadsheets for hosting a centrally accessible spreadsheet you can use for a tasklist. I think simpler is always better when it comes to tracking a project.

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.