Friendly Web Tools Blog

The sorry truth about your carefully crafted website copy is that people aren’t really reading it. People scan web pages very quickly, and they only pick up bits of information from a few key places, namely top left.

For you, it means you should think like a resume writer when you go to put words on your site:

• Use bullet points. Like the ones here. Isn’t it easier to scan?
• Use bold to set off paragraphs and sentences. Again, it snags your eye as you scan downward.
• Use information-carrying words at the beginning of paragraphs

Overall, emphasize quality over quantity. As beautiful as the writing is, most people simply don’t read it.

It’s a good probability that at least one in 20 people can’t see everything on your website. That’s because a higher number of people than you probably expected are color blind in some way. Some statistics I’ve seen say that as many as 18 percent of people have some kind of visual limitation.

Around 90 percent of the people I tell this fact to are shocked - the rest know it because they’re used to not seeing everything on a website. But what if they’re missing something terribly important, like a news alert or a call for contributions or all your website navigation?

I love the Colorblind Web Page Filter because it makes it easy to see what your website might look like through a color-deficient eyes, those that can’t see red/green or blue/yellow.

For some help choosing the right high-contrast colors for your site, try the Color Laboratory. It’s handy because it “allows you to select colors and see how they appear next to one another, and in various foreground/background combinations. It also allows you to see those colors as they might appear to color-blind users.”

Makes the incredibly important job of picking the right colors easier.

One surprising fact about our own research into how people use websites is that they use the “contact us” page a lot. They glean a lot of information from it. They go there to see where you’re located, to find directions, to meet the people who work for your organization.

What a pity that so many websites hide their contact information, especially if it’s the kind of organization with a real-world address that people might actually be visiting.

So before you do another thing today, go to your own website and challenge yourself to find your contact information. Ask yourself:

1. Is it on every page?
2. Are directions easy to find?
3. If it’s in the footer, does it make sense to move it up to the top of the page?
4. Does it include your mailing address or just a link to your e-mail address?

If the answer to any of these is no, you know what to do next.

There could be a million reasons people aren’t using your site - maybe it’s summer vacation time, maybe there’s something going on in the news that’s diverting their attention, maybe you don’t even have a site yet - but I think there are three main barriers that keep people from visiting a site.

Here are those top three reasons and what you can do to remedy them.

The Problem: You don’t know your site visitors.

Which is to say, you either haven’t found your target audience, or if you have, you haven’t reflected that on your website.

The Solution: Find your target audience/market.

This Target Market Worksheet (in PDF format) from Entrepreneur is a valuable exercise for any nonprofit.

The Problem: You don’t understand your site visitors.

A big part of making sure people are using your site is understanding what they do when they get there. If you pay attention with some analytics tools, you can learn a lot about where people are going or not going when they hit your web address.

The Solution: Get hold of some analytics tools and start using them.

Some of my favorites:

ClickTale

Clicky

Crazy Egg

The Problem: Your site visitors don’t know or understand you.

Sometimes it’s as simple as they can’t find your website. Or maybe when they get to your site, they can’t figure out what to do there.

The Solution: Start promoting your website (a topic I visit often in this blog), and start to apply some usability techniques.

Learn more at this webinar.

During yesterday’s e-seminar Help! No One’s Using Our site (which we’re offering again, because some people who couldn’t make it asked for an encore performance), the topic of killer church websites came up.

I like to recommend church websites to nonprofits or for-profits, because some of these sites are masters of community building. Think about it: the Christian church was built on and survives on reaching large numbers of people, many of them new, and creating a community around them. They see the web as a ministry tool, and some of them have done wonderful jobs with their websites. A great lesson for any site looking to create community.

Here’s a list of my four favorites. Seen any others that you love? Tell me about them in the comments.

Mars Hill Church
http://marshillchurch.org/
A model of clean navigation. I especially love the “I am new here” button on the top left. What a great way to draw new people in - so much more engaging than “About Us.”

Revolution Church
http://www.kcrevolution.org/
If they sold websites in Urban Outfitters, they’d be stocking Revolution Church. Just beautiful, and excellent use of social media.

Fellowship Church
http://www.fellowshipchurch.com/
An enormous church that addresses a big congregation well. Very easy to see where the closest sermons are. And they’ve done a great job with new ways to address pastor Ed Young.

Saddleback Church
http://saddleback.com/
You’ve heard about this, because it’s where Barak Obama gave a speech. But it’s a nice website that gives a lot of information in an engaging way. I like the FAQ-style menu on the homepage.

Good website navigation is so intuitive you never even think about it. Bad navigation you certainly notice, because it makes you work hard to get where you want to go. The trouble is, intuitive design takes careful thought. You’ve really got to predict your site’s visitors’ movements, and be ready for any effort they’ll make.

Not all website designers do, of course. Many - quite innocently, I must add - think not a bit about how people use websites. They don’t read reports, they don’t think critically about what confuses them whey they visit sites or they get a little too creative in their efforts.

I’ll be addressing usability in an upcoming e-seminar (there’s still time to register if you hurry - click here to do so) , but I wanted to share some common mistakes, in no particular order, in case you feel like frustrating your site visitors and driving traffic away:

1. Use inconsistent navigation. Vary it from page to page. Sometimes put it on the top, sometimes put it on the side, and forget to add menu items here and there.
2. Get cutesy with navigation. Rather than saying “Home,” “About Us” and “Services,” say “The Homestead,” “Meet the Gang” and “What Makes Us Tick.” It also helps if your audience is mostly English-speaking and you write your navigation in a foreign language with foreign characters - like Hebrew (you know who you are …).
3. Don’t add a home link and assume everyone knows to click your logo to go back to the homepage.
4. Put your navigation links in alphabetical order or order or length - anything but order of importance.
5. Make pages open in new windows, thereby risking pop-up blocking software won’t allow that page to open and disabling your site visitor’s back button.
6. Forget sub-navigation - put every single link on every single page.
7. Put navigation at the bottom of the page or somewhere else “below the fold.”
8. Give users multiple choices to perform one action. For instance, if you’re selling something, list three different places they can buy it.
9. Use too many menus. At least three. In different places. With redundant choices.
10. Don’t even use navigation - just put some links around the page.

Most of my co-workers are a little freaked by the economy, but one of my nonprofit clients said something troubling to me the other day. He said many of his colleagues are reluctant to spend money on technology because they fear the recession.

I don’t always believe you have to spend money to make money, but in this case it’s really true. Some nonprofits have such horrendous websites that they pretend they don’t even exist rather than face the task of fixing them. They don’t understand that by having an ugly public face they’re actually hampering the advancement of their goals and sustainability. (NB: We’re hosting a presentation on usability on Sept. 2, 2008 at 2 Eastern - you can register for free.)

You don’t have to believe me. Jakob Nielson, the widely respected king of usability, wrote a wonderful article called “Do Government Agencies and Non-Profits Get ROI from Usability?” He says:

Although the gains don’t fall into traditional profit columns, there are clear arguments for improving usability of non-commercial websites and intranets. In one example, a state agency could get an ROI of 22,000% by fixing a basic usability problem.

Did you see that number? It really is 22,000 percent. Staggering. I don’t know a single funder that wouldn’t gasp at that kind of return and justify the funds to improve a website. Yes, people might read something about you in The Chronicle of Philanthropy or The Nonprofit Times, but people learn about your organization by going to your website. And they won’t learn anything if it’s not usable.

New websites don’t come free, but to have an unusable website and do nothing with it is a complete waste of money.

So today’s friendly Web tool is actually a whitepaper from ZD Net that will help you calculate the ROI (return on investment). It’s for a CRM system, but it can be applied to a website as well. Read it and get to cleaning up your website!

I admit to an obsession: I must know where you’ve been clicking when you go to the Talance.com website. And an excellent service I found today is only fueling my need.

CrazyEgg is a tool that lets you see in different graphical formats where people are clicking on your website, or what are known as hotspots. This isn’t to say the most popular pages, but where people are clicking once they arrive at a particular page.

This is very revealing information. It’ll tell you, for instance the most commonly accessed areas of your site, so you can put premium information there. It also tells you if there’s a disparity between where you’re thinking people are clicking and where they actually are.

And I love that it tells you graphically, for instance in heatmaps:

Or with confetti:

What I like most about CrazyEgg is that it’s free. At least a stripped-down version is. If you want heavy coverage for a big site, you can sign up for a monthly plan.

[The following article originally appeared in the FreePint Newsletter at http://www.freepint.com.]

My Favourite Tipples
By Peter Maureemootoo

As an expert in how people interact with computers, I always try to think of the simplest way to present information to learners when building and publishing online courses. I turn to these sites time and again for creating a better user experience.

• The Usability Toolkit from the Society for Technical Communication <http://www.stcsig.org/usability/resources/toolkit/toolkit.html> contains scads of checklists and templates that help you organise online course design.
• Q&A with Don Norman <http://digbig.com/4sdjj>. I respect usability guru Don Norman enormously, and in this excellent article, he shows what he knows about how people learn.
• Gadwin PrintScreen <http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/> is one tool I can’t live without when building courses. This free software makes creating custom-sized screen grabs a snap.
• Why People Can’t Use eLearning <http://digbig.com/4sdjk> is a compelling white paper that shows the other side of the hype - when e-learning goes bad.
• The WellStyled Workshop’s Color Schemes Generator 2 <http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html> lets you create pleasing colour palettes that always work on the Web.

Peter Maureemootoo is president and co-founder of Talance, Inc., <http://www.talance.com/>, a company that publishes and builds online courses and robust, large-scale websites. He has special expertise in creating intuitive and compelling systems for all users.