Thinking of embarking on a website redesign? The smartest place to start is by asking the people who use the site what they want. Now is a perfect time to embark on a new project, while you’ve got spring cleaning on the brain. Check out our series on how to spring clean your website for a fresh start.

Here are four tests and surveys you should conduct before you launch new project.

User Needs Survey

Set up a questionnaire survey to find out what your audience thinks is most important about your website. Take their comments into consideration for your needs assessment process. What those survey questions will be largely depend on your own organization’s directives. But a question like this might help you get started.

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

You can request a free quick and easy survey template if you don’t feel like writing your own. 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.

Web Content Test

Having an appealing design is one thing, but having readable copy is another. (Be honest: how much jargon are you using?). The web design industry magazine A List Apart puts it this way:

Whether the purpose of your site is to convince people to do something, to buy something, or simply to inform, testing only whether they can find information or complete transactions is a missed opportunity: Is the content appropriate for the audience? Can they read and understand what you’ve written?

ALA gives helpful instructions on how to test the effectiveness of your content. Examples: try some readability software like Added Bytes, Juicy Studio, and Edit Central (or even Microsoft Word’s built-in Flesch Reading Ease check), or host a moderated reading test.

Accessibility Review

A website is only useful if everyone can use it. Paying attention to accessibility is good practice for all organizations–especially since good accessibility equals good SEO–and it’s a must if you’re a government agency. You can start with these Essential Tips for Making Websites Accessible, and then you might begin a “preliminary review.”

The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative provides instructions for conducting a preliminary review of your website’s accessibility. In short, they recommend selecting a representative sampling of high profile pages (e.g., the welcome page) and those with different layouts and functionality, and testing just a few of those to see how well you’re measuring up.

SEO Audit

Making your website more friendly to search engines is a large but critical undertaking. The good news is any improvement you make is a good one. Schedule a search engine optimization (SEO) audit of your website with a few key goals in mind:

• Are you using heading tags correctly?
• Do you have a sitemap?
• Is your content skimpy?

Check out the 9-Point SEO Checklist for more tips.

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.

Anybody who’s seen any teen romantic comedy worth its salt knows the makeover scene. It goes something like this (cue trendy pop song):

Cool friend takes dork friend to the mall. Dork exits the fitting room in a preppy outfit, friend shakes head. Dork tries on a rock-and-roll outfit with sunglasses, snaps fingers. Friend pushes dork back into fitting room. Dork emerges wearing the perfect outfit, looking better than friend. Friend gives one resounding nod. Transformation complete.

What’s important in those scenes is that the makeover happens with the help of a cool friend.

You, blog reader, are our cool friend, and it’s makeover time at the Talance flagship newsletter. If you subscribe to our newsletter already, great. If not, you’re probably acquainted with it through our monthly blog summaries. You can also refresh your memory by looking through our blog archive. And if you don’t subscribe, sign up now!

So help us find the perfect mix of what you want to read and find useful by taking our newsletter survey. Bonus: if you give your e-mail address, you’ll be entered into a drawing for an Amazon gift card.

Take our newsletter survey: http://bit.ly/tmnc7H

Thanks!

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.

Ask the people you don’t know.

Set up a quick test with a user testing tool like FiveSecondTest. This service lets you create two designs of a website and test it on a random sampling of people. People who see it vote with their gut for the version they like better. Anonymous testing can reveal preferences and problems that you can’t discover from asking your friends.

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.]

What Our Clients Value Most

We at Talance team think of ourselves as just as cuddly and welcoming as a Tickle Me Elmo, but that’s not really what counts. What counts is that YOU think so too. We also think it’s important to know what you want, where we can improve, what could make Talance a better company, and thus, what could make you a better organization.

So, we asked. Last month we sent out a customer satisfaction survey to our existing clients, offered up a Starbucks gift card for one lucky respondent (WTG, Ellen!) and hoped that you think as kindly about us as we do about you. We also followed up on a few particularly compelling responses via a market researcher to see how we might address your needs better.

The results? In a word, amazing.

Survey Highlights

Our survey yielded an impressive 57% response rate, which made us extremely grateful and tipped us off that we have a healthy relationship with our clients.

The results and comments made us fairly glow. Every single respondent said they would consider us for a new project.

Furthermore, we’ve got some major cheerleaders out there. Everyone said they would recommend us to their contacts.

We received some excellent suggestions regarding the services we offer and are already acting on folding in some of those services.

Our clients overwhelmingly indicated that what we do makes life easier for them – and we rock with deadlines.

Where We Excel

Because we work online and think it’s useful to visualize data, we took all the comments from our survey and created a tag cloud out of them. The theory was that we could see at a glance what people associate with us most strongly. The results are fascinating, and heartening, so we’re sharing them with you here. Click the image below to open a larger copy in a new window.

Talance's Value (Click To Enlarge)

Too many website projects are conceived by and built for committees. Seldom do organizations think of asking their users what they’d like to see on a site. This month, we’re helping you out by giving away an Audience Website Survey Template. We’ve pulled a handful of useful questions from our own development process that you can use to poll your own audience to see what they think of your website. We guarantee you’ll find the results illuminating.

>> Get your copy now!

[This little gem is the e-mail newsletter our subscribers just received. Want a slice for yourself? Sign up now.]

The more you know about the people who visit your website, the better. Creating a profile of the people who visit your organization site can help you make better decisions about what you can do for them.

Your website should be the central repository for this research. Here are a few tools you can add to your existing website to compile info on your users.

Feedback forms.

A simple feedback form can gather so much. Tuck these around your website soliciting comments, and you’ll start learning more about who your people are.

Surveys.

If you want serious feedback, host a survey. If you build this into your website, you can keep names, contact information and responses local to your website rather than a third-party service. You can also set it up so you receive e-mail alerts every time someone submits a response.

E-newsletters.

E-newsletters are good sources of information as well as good ways to deliver targeted information to your subscribers. Make sure you have a sign-up form on your website as well as archives.

Call (888) 810-9109 or e-mail if you want demos or pricing.

August Birthday Goodie: Free Webinar

We’re halfway through our 10th year and still celebrating. For August, we asked you what you wanted for a freebie, and you spoke. You want a crash course on how to write for the web. We’re taking registrations through August, so sign up now for this handy session on how to fine-tune your writing to appeal to online readers.

Keep, Cut or Kill: Writing for the Web is Sept. 2, 2010 at 2 p.m. Eastern.

>> Register now!

[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.

I’m asked many times by clients what kind of social media they should invest in. It’s a tough question to answer, largely because it depends on what kind of social media makes sense to the people who you’re trying to reach. That’s why the best idea is to ask them directly.

Put together a survey, either printed or digital, and distribute it to your constituency or congregation to see where they’d like to hear from you in terms of social media. Ask them what kinds of social media they currently use, and then ask them how much and often they use them. It’ll give you a good idea of their capabilities and tendencies.

You can also make a pretty good educated guess. If your constituency is made up of largely older people, you’re probably best off seeing if you can transition from a printed bulletin to an electronic newsletter. If your audience is young and hip, hit them where they go: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube.

Also check out our social media survey.

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.