This is an excellent question that I found while trolling through LinkedIn Answers, but it’s not unlike standard brainstorming questions I’m asked every time we launch an e-learning project.

Read the full discussion here, or check out these highlights:

The Machine is Us/ing Us. Very creative and compelling way to tell the story of Web 2.0 through imagery.

5 Tips for Success. Really funny video created by Articulate that shows the capabilities of their product and also outlines what doesn’t work with web presentations.

5 Tips for Success

Mortgage-Backed Securities. A good explanation of a complicated and possibly dry subject.

How about you? Seen any examples of e-learning videos lately that you particularly like? Add them in the comments below.

[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.]

This little gem has been hidden on the main Talance website, but we thought we’d bring it to wider attention. Use this checklist every three months or so to make sure your website is still up to date and healthy.

Site Content

• All links work
• All downloads work
• All forms work
• Contact information on homepage and accessible on every other page
• Addresses organization’s goals
• Has a favicon

Usability

• All images have ALT tags
• Custom 404/page not found page
• Each menu has no more than seven choices
• Home link in navigation
• User-friendly page titles

Readability

• Font size not too small
• Wide margins
• Good use of bullets, subheadings and bold
• No underlines except for hyperlinks
• High contrast text and images

Operation

• Looks OK in most common Web browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera)
• Uses limited Flash to comply with iPhone and iTouch
• Images are sized correctly (i.e., big image not squeezed into small box)
• Colors and images are consistent
• Loads quickly
• Looks OK in different screen resolutions
• Looks OK with various screen color settings
• URLs work without “www”

Security

• Pages requiring SSL access are accessible only via SSL
• No one has access to restricted areas that they shouldn’t have

[Welcome to the Talance Friendly E-mail Newsletter. This is text of the issue our e-mail subscribers just received. Sign up on the lower right-hand side of the Talance homepage.]

Hi, Friends!

The world, as they say, is atwitter about Twitter. It’s amazing, considering that last November, when we surveyed Massachusetts non-profits to see how they were using social media, no one even knew what a microblog was! Now everybody is Twittering.

That’s why we’re presenting the Talance community a 30-minute free webinar on Does Twitter Matter for Non-Profits?, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 from 2-2:30pm Eastern, presented by Talance’s own Monique Cuvelier. Learn how you can make sense of this madly growing tool and how it applies to you.

We’re keeping the presentation short – so you still have time to eat lunch – but we’ll stick around for 20 minutes for a Q&A session and also be scheduling free follow-up web strategy consultations for anyone who wants them.

»Register for this free webinar now!

Talance offers a new security service to evaluate and fix security vulnerabilities in client websites. The Talance Security Update Service (TSUS) monitors the Drupal community for discovery of any threats so you don’t have to. We help protect your website, web information and users against the latest security threats by delivering immediate and ongoing updates for various vulnerabilities as soon as they’re discovered.

One year of unlimited monitoring is available for only $49. If you’re interested in this package and having Talance monitor and update your website, please contact us.

»Contact us to sign up now!

Are you one of our many clients who are ramping up their social media strategy but haven’t yet integrated it into your website? If so, you’ll love this.

We’re offering a stylish and effective collection of social media links and icons to keep your constituency plugged into your ongoing social media marketing efforts. This little upgrade is fast and effective.

»Contact us to put this on your site now!

Want to pick up quick tips and resources on technology and web strategy for your non-profit?

»Follow us on Twitter.

The most popular recent posts on Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog. Make sure you’re reading http://talance.com/blog and sign up for the news feed.

Spring Clean Your Website – Part 1
Three things to prep for your week of good housekeeping.

Spring Clean Your Website – Dead Links (Part 2)
Find and remove your dead links.

Spring Clean Your Website Copy (Part 3)
As time passes and your goals and objectives evolve, so should your website copy.

Spring Clean Your Website: Refresh the Design (Part 4)
Make sure your site looks like a cohesive piece and still looks up to date.

Five Great Takeaways from Church Websites
Tweaks that can make your church or synagogue site better.

Killer Church Websites
Websites that engage and create community

Working Your Out-of-Office Reply While You’re Away
Get a little fancy with this message and do a bit of promotion while you’re at it.

Need Some Help?

Talance has helped clients launch scores of projects, ranging from websites to online newsletters to CRM projects. Please click here to schedule a time to talk about your next project or to request a proposal.

Find Us Fast

Read About Talance

Receive the newsletter. Subscribe Now!

Send to a friend. Don’t keep this good stuff all to yourself. Click that Forward button.

Join Talance on Facebook.

Backups are the buzzkill of most people who work on computers. Being organized is often tedious. But spending a few minutes on a regular basis making sure that the information on your computer is safely stored somewhere else for emergency retrieval is time well spent.

SimpleTech Signature Mini makes the job a little less tedious, because this external backup device was designed by Italian sports car designers. It’s also very handy, because it’s about the size of a deck of cards, and you can bring it with you wherever you travel.

This one includes local and online backup and comes with Fabrik Local Backup software, so you can schedule automatic backups from your computer relatively easily and store around 2 GB – quite a lot – of your important information. Not all backup drives do this.

It’s also worth noting that you can use this cute thing not just for backing up documents, but you can have a handy place to put your photos, songs, or anything else you might want to bring along for a lecture or meeting presentation.

Think about using an external tool for backing up your important data. Check out this post I wrote earlier on handy tools for saving your data from yourself.

Some scary news: US border control now has the authority to swipe your laptop, cell phone or other electronic device. Bad news no matter which way you look at it, but you could be utterly lost if you’re traveling and US agents decide to retain your laptop indefinitely.

My best advice is to travel with a stripped-down piece of equipment that contains only contact names and travel details and download information from an online storage space when you arrive at your destination.

But you might also give a shot at TrueCrypt, free open-source software that locks down the information on your laptop so that only you can get at it. Not only does TrueCrypt encrypt your files, but it hides them so snoops don’t even know they exist, a practice called steganography.

It’s worth learning a bit about how this works if you travel and can’t live without your laptop. Of course, border control can still take your iPod, so there’s a good reason to travel with a cheapy MP3/4 player.

It’s no ordinary occasion that Microsoft, Sun and Cisco engage in a project together. But this is no ordinary occasion. Hackers have discovered a potentially very dangerous ways to take people to different websites even when they think they’ve typed in the right address. For instance, you may type www.cnn.com into your webpage, but you may be redirected to a fake site that can steal your identity or money in a technique called spoofing. The BBC reported the story; an excerpt:

The flaw, discovered by accident, would allow criminals to redirect users to fake webpages, even if they typed the correct address into a browser.

Internet giants such as Microsoft are now distributing the security patch.

Security expert Dan Kaminsky said that the case was unprecedented, but added: “People should be concerned but they should not be panicking.”

Here’s a bulletin from Microsoft that details the patch and security threat. Not a bad idea to install that one.