Most organizations will spend most of their time designing and maintaining their website’s homepage. And that’s fine. You don’t want to neglect what’s there – the majority of your website’s visitors will see this page before any other.

But thanks to the social media functionality that makes it easy to share individual pages, such as to an event you’re putting on or the bio of someone on your site, it’s increasingly likely that a visitor might use Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon or Facebook to sneak in around the homepage.

Make sure you think of every page as a potential entry point for website visitors. This means that you may have to adapt internal pages so they make sense to a visitor. From every page, make sure a visitor

• Can access your menus
• Can easily contact you
• Knows they’re on your site – make every page harmonious with every other one

As a test, choose any page at random, and see if you can flow through your site without thinking too hard. Did you know what to do next? If not, jot down what confused you, and make sure you fix it.

[Photo credit: Adopt a Pet, Live Longer! by sayheypatrick, on Flickr]

You may already have a Donate page on your website where you make it possible (and easy) for people to support you. But how many people click through to your Donate page compared to other pages of your site? I’m willing to make the sad bet it’s not at the top of the list.

Some pages, though, are stars. They consistently receive more visitors than other pages. This might be the Dog of the Week adoption page or your contact information page. People either love or need what’s there, so they come back, day after day.

While you should stay true to the main focus of these pages, start to think of them as a way to reach out to potential donors by putting a call to donate on these busiest pages of your site.

To find which pages pull in the droves, tap your Web analytics service, such as Clicky or Google Analytics. Most have a section that lists the top 10 or more pages in terms of traffic. Pick the top pages from this list and ask people to support there.

It helps if you can elegantly work in the plea for funds with the focus of the page. If it’s the Homeless Dog of the Week page, for instance, you may want to include something like:

“Can’t take Buster home? Support him and his doggy friends by donating $20 right now by clicking here.”

That’s it. Stand back, keep checking your traffic and donation box, and see if your income doesn’t increase. Make sure to come back and tell us how it went.

In preparing for an upcoming presentation on how to create functional websites, and it’s got me thinking about all the dysfunctional sites I’ve seen recently. There’s no single feature that makes a website completely unusable, but there definitely are trends.

Below, divided into three categories, are the chief gaffes you should follow if you really feel like creating a website that doesn’t work.

Market Positioning

Build your website without thinking what you want. “Yes, we need a website!” is a lousy reason for a website, yet it’s the one too many people follow. First, make a list of all your organization’s goals, and then think about how technology might help you meet those goals. Then from that you can start to think about shaping your website around your needs.

Don’t think about who’s looking at the site. If your audience is made of 50-year-old women from the Midwest, why would you create a zippy website built to attract college students? If those people are interested in volunteering, why would you load the homepage with information on grants, staff bios and news releases? Think about what the people coming to your website want or need to see, and then give it to them.

Design

Use lots of clipart. Ooph. Steer clear of crummy clipart. Go for real pictures, even freebie stock photography, rather than goofy cartoon drawings. Check out the Creative Commons images on Flickr or Stock.xchng for good resources.

Include pictures of empty rooms. What’s welcoming about an echo-y chamber? Put some people in there!

Use flashy splash pages. They look like ads and have the same effect. People click off splash screens and never get to the meat inside. It’s like going around with two hats on. The top one doesn’t matter and makes people think you’re nuts.

Use a microscopic font. You know how on TV ads, they put all the stuff they don’t really want you to read, but are required by law to display, in teeny text at the bottom of the screen? It’s because no one can see it, and they ignore it even if they can. Small font does the same thing to your website, but the whole website.

Honestly, tell me how readable this is.

Usability

Shroud donation processes in mystery. Heavens, if people want to give you money, make it easy for them. Here, take this big bright Donate Now! button and put it on your homepage. (Right-click and choose Save As.) A gift from Talance to you.

Glom onto every widget you can find. A real danger with the proliferation of widgets and plug-ins and add-ons is that you have a website that looks like a carnival. All flash, no focus. Choose wisely with anything you add onto your site, and make sure it follows your directive of achieving your goals.

Add 50 items – or even 10 – to your menus. People’s eyes cross when they see more than seven items in a menu, so stick with that magic number.

Put the most important info at the very bottom of the page. People look at the top left of web pages to pick up the most important information. If there’s something you really want people to read, put it up there and not down below.

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

A reader asks:

I’ve heard from so many places you shouldn’t put anything below the scroll. Is it really OK?

There are so many rules in Web design that you really shouldn’t break. It’s a shame that the Do Not Scroll rule has gotten so much long-standing traction.

Back when we all started designing web pages, we noticed that people tended to look at pages in one glance, and then move on to a different site. The theory was they wouldn’t make the modicum of effort to use the scroll bar to look at the bottom of the page.

This fed the idea of packing as much information at the top of the page as possible, often with nothing at all below. It lead to a raft of websites that could fit on postage stamps, a favorite new refrain of “Keep it above the scroll!” and a deep-seated fear of putting anything on the lower part of the page at all.

Then there came blogs.

Blogs are all about scroll, with the most recent postings at the top of the page and story after story trailing down the page. I’ll bet you, reading this right now, will give this blog a good scroll so you can see what else we’ve written about recently.

Yes, people do tend to look at the upper-left-hand corner of the page more carefully than other places on your website. But it really is OK to put information at the bottom of the page. It’s sure a lot better than fitting everything you can into a postage stamp.

Take a look at these glorious examples of pages that contain loads of information well below the scroll, pulled at random from the Web browsers open on my machine:

From Last.fm

From Oprah.com

From Weather.com

From SlideShare

[Photo credit: "covering the eyes" by Secret Seasons, on Flickr]

Here’s a harsh reality you must face when you’re thinking about the design of your website: nobody likes to look at computer screens.

Yes, we all do it all the time, but that doesn’t change our physiology. Most people suffer from screen fatigue simply because monitors flicker and render an image that’s grainer than print. Think about how many times you’ve gotten a headache from spending too long looking at a computer screen or blinked your dry, irritated and watery eyes. Happens to me almost every day. That’s why I sit by the window; frequent eye breaks.

That’s also why we can’t help scanning websites. Our eyes seek out big fonts, bullet points and images to help us make quick identifications rather than focus on tiny text. It means that sometimes we frequently don’t take in enough information to get the full picture – we just glean what we can quickly.

Good web designers will think about these usability issues when designing a site. Make sure you think about what you need to do to present your site so it’s easiest for people to read.

One of the mistakes web designers often make, especially those that come from a print background, is assuming visitors are coming to a site only through the homepage. It makes sense with a brochure or booklet: you first read the cover and then flip through the pages. You really only need the title on the cover.

But this makes no sense on a website. People are going to be visiting your site from any page they find. For instance, if they’re looking for your organization’s mailing address, they’re going to search for “Your Org mailing address” and probably be taken directly to your contact page.

The biggest mistake you can make is to skip branding on internal pages. Make sure that your logo, address and other important information is just as visible from internal pages as they are from the homepage.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has a great article about what prevents people from giving online (Confusing Web Sites Discourage Donors From Online Giving). What does it come down to? Bad design.

Nielsen Norman Group, which conducted the research and wrote it into this report. A summary of the biggest problems, which I can testify are the same problems we fix too:

• Poor presentation of the charity’s mission
• No information on how contributions are spent
• Poor page design and unclear content makes it hard to find how to donate

Most of those issues are text related, so make your changes right now.

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.

[The following is reprinted from the technology issue of Torah at the Center, and educational publication from Union for Reform Judaism. Read the whole technology issue by clicking here.]

By Monique Cuvelier, Usability Consultant and CEO, Talance.com, Burlington, MA

The last thing you want a student to do in an online course is to think. That sounds wildly counterintuitive, considering most instructors want students to have thinking caps strapped tightly on and cranked to maximum when they sit down to learn. However, if students are thinking too hard about what to do with online course software, they’re not going to be engaged in the course materials – and that’s the reason you want them there in the first place.

The benefits of e-learning programs are clear. They’re convenient, bring students together who live in different places and can be adapted to address the various needs of students. But many organizations focus too closely on the benefits and not enough on usability, the ease in which students can navigate a course and accomplish learning goals.

The trouble is that creating good usability should look natural and easy, but it’s incredibly hard. What seems the natural way to work in an online arena is not natural; it takes planning and design. In the six years that I’ve been making online learning environments more intuitive for students and teachers at my company Talance.com, I’ve seen students drop out of courses, give up on their favorite topics and turn their ire to their hapless instructors all because they were confused and frustrated by the technology.

Below are a few rules you can think about when evaluating online courseware or creating a simple online learning environment from scratch.

Familiar Workflows

Students should move naturally from one task to the next. Tasks should guide the students to the right information at the right time. For instance, you may want the student to work through the course this way: log in, read any pertinent announcements, review reading material, discuss a project in the bulletin boards, submit a writing assignment. In this case, make sure the announcement appears on the course homepage and that instructions for the writing assignment are at the end of the reading material. Include enough shortcuts that students can navigate easily from one task to the next.

Free-Flowing Communication

Students should have open channels of communication with you (the teacher) and other learners, whether the course is synchronous or asynchronous. Add options for navigation. Icons on the homepage that take you to different sections of the course are OK – as long as you’re on the homepage. Use tabs at the top of the screen to create quick access to frequently used sections of the course, because they can be seen from any page. Course participants should find it easy to send course e-mail, and they should know at a glance if they have new messages. They should know where to find help, through an FAQ or an e-mail form where they can submit technical support issues.

Flexible Enough to Foster Creativity

Multiple-choice questions may be fine in some circumstances but are too rigid on their own to address all learning styles and encourage creativity in an online course. Present several ways for students to learn and interact, such as real-time chat rooms with whiteboards, and essay-type questions in tests. Allow students to upload Microsoft Word documents, which let them work in their familiar computer environments rather than typing responses into text forms.

Hebrew-Language Support

Think about how your software handles Hebrew, if you require it for your class. Support for Hebrew is often not included in the first release of software packages. Can you render characters in Unicode or graphically? Discussion boards in particular may have difficulty rendering Hebrew characters, especially along with English. Can you allow students to attach Word documents that are formatted for Hebrew?

Just the Essentials

One hazard of working with an online course is there is no page limit. Avoid information glut by presenting students with just the information they need. Create places for secondary information elsewhere in the course for those who want to learn more.

Following these principles is only the first step to creating a more usable online course. Make better usability an ongoing effort by constantly noting problems students have, asking for feedback and making adjustments. Eventually, you’ll find the more you think about how students learn in an online environment, the less your students will have to.

Usability is one of my favorite subjects, because it’s so often ignored yet it’s so utterly necessary to the success of any online project. If someone doesn’t understand how to use your website, what use is it? Your web projects have got to be easy, easy, easy for visitors to use.

You should be thinking about user-friendly design from day one, but you should also be continually refining what you’ve got. There are numerous online tools out there you can use to help you evaluate the usability success of your web projects, but here are five I recommend for learning more about how people use your site. You can also check out previous postings on usability.

1. SUS – A quick and dirty usability scale (Word doc). One of the best ways of finding out how people feel about your web project is to simply ask them. This template from the Usability.gov website is a great place to start when thinking about questions. You can either distribute this document or turn to a tool like SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang to ask for feedback on your site.
2. Color Contrast Analyzer Juicy Studio. Many more people than you probably think have trouble picking up all colors, maybe as many as one in 10. Make sure your design has high contrast colors – no black on blue or yellow on white. Try a tool like Color Contrast Analyzer Color Analysis to choose the right colors for your web site.
3. AnyBrowser.com. We all become used to looking at websites on our own computer screens, but they’re not all set at the same resolution. It’s a good idea to test your site on various browser sizes so you can see how it shows up for others. This site helps you do it easily.
4. BrowserCam. This tool lets you see what your site looks like if you’re viewing it from a Mac, PC, Blackberry or any number of other operating systems or browsers like IE or Firefox. Extremely useful to view your site through this before you launch.
5. StomperNet Scrutinizer. Organizations with big bucks have the money to spend on eye tracking programs, where they actually record where people look on a webpage and are able to figure out what people are seeing or aren’t seeing. StomperScrutinizer is the poor man’s alternative, which is a browser that tracks the mouse and forces the eye to look at the location of the mouse.