Here’s a little secret: web designers like to be bossed around. Nicely. Under certain circumstances. They like to be told of your color preferences. They like to know what styles of fonts to avoid. They want to know what things you find hard to use on the web and the things you prefer to visit.

One of the worst things a web designer can hear is, “I don’t care. Just make it look good.” “Good” is one of those enormously subjective words, the way some people think cilantro is “good” – ugh. Even if you don’t think you know what kinds of design elements you like, the chances are high that what a web designer thinks looks super may not be what you think.

You really do have preferences, even if you think you’re a design noob. You just have to learn to tap into them. Then, when you go to create a project brief, you’ll have somewhere to begin.

Where to find web design inspiration

Here are a few places for finding design inspiration:

Check your stationery for branding.

If your organization or corporation already has business cards, letterhead, a logo or anything with approved colors or branding, you should look here first for design guidance.

Look through random magazines.

Flip through a few magazines at the library or bookstore and focus on the design rather than the articles. Note typefaces you like, colors, pictures, layout – anything that grabs you.

Scan your environment for cool things.

You might have unknowingly cultivated a design aesthetic through the pictures on your wall and the stuff on your desk. Look at this interesting coffee mug photo contest, where you can see the beauty in a cup of joe.

Look through image sets on Flickr.

This enormous image database has not only photographs that might spark your interest, but also all manner of design projects, products and just about anything that someone else finds inspiration.

Check the design of other websites.

Look at other web design for inspiration. Note down what resonates with you, including overall design and good logo examples, and why.

See artwork in galleries and museums.

Check out the masters to see how they use colors together and what kinds of patterns they put together. We once built a website to match the architectural style of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Check for design in nature.

Nobody does it better than Mother Nature: the colors, patterns, textures. All wonderful fodder for design.

Read a few children’s books.

Kids’ books have masterful balance, color and content. You can use them to glean some great ideas from the layout and textures.

Web design gift card and super cute mug

Contest time

[Update! Congratulations to Linda, who won the drawing for one of the cutest travel mugs on the planet. This contest may be over, but you're still welcome to keep sending ideas for creative inspiration.]

Now that you’ve got some solid ideas of the kinds of design elements you like, do something with it.

Enter our drawing for one of these enormously cute Brewed by Talance travel mugs, and you’ll automatically receive a $150 gift card good for any new web design or update work from us. It’s part of Talance’s Customer Appreciation Month, where every week through December, we’re offering a new giveaway or contest.

How do you enter? Just add your ideas for how you find design inspiration in the comments below, and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win the mug and will receive your gift card via e-mail.

Deadline for entries is January 9, 2012. We’ll pick one winner at random from all entries on January 10, 2012 and will notify the winner via e-mail. You must leave your name and a correct e-mail address to qualify.

Enter now!

Here’s a little secret many people don’t know about building projects for the web. You don’t have to do everything from scratch. There are so many tools out there that do the tricky stuff for you, that you really don’t have to be an HTML wiz to have a polished looking website.

Here are some excellent tools to help you fake web excellence:

Table Builders

Tables are the nemesis of many well-meaning web worker. They can be tricky to build from scratch, but no need with these.

Quackit HTML Table Generator

TableGen

Code-Generator.net HTML Table Generator

Color Palettes

Color theory is a practice that people spend years perfecting. But you can fake it pretty well with these tools that help you choose complimentary colors.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Schemer Online

Elvan Online

Image Generators

A few well-placed images can help bring your site to life. These three tools help you manage and create pictures to illustrate your pages.

PicMarkr lets you to add custom watermark to your images.

Digital Post It Note Generator

Create A Graph

[This appeared in our July newsletter.  Subscribe now so you get monthly tasty tech tidbits and special deals.]

The more you pay attention to images, the better your website will be. Good graphics make the difference between a webpage that attracts and one that repels. Here are a few essential graphics tips you can follow to make your whole website better:

1. Save photographic images as JPG and save illustrated images as GIF. Learn more about GIF vs. JPG.

2. Make sure your web graphics are saved as no more than 72 dpi. That’s the standard compression for the web. Anything bigger means slow loading. Learn more about optimizing images from The Comprehensive Guide to Saving Images for the Web.

3. Don’t use HTML to set the width and height. Instead, resize the picture to the appropriate dimensions. Doing otherwise will make your page load slowly and could skew the look of the picture. In other words, if you need

<img width=”200″ height=”200″ src=”boat.jpg” alt=”sailboat” />

then your image (boat.jpg) should be 200×200px rather than a scaled down 500×500px image. Just like this perfectly sized pic:

Here are more tips on web design from the Talance blog:

• Save Your Sanity AND Get the Logo You Love (Yes, You Can!)
• You’re Doing It All Wrong! How to Use Pictures on a Website
• How To Design by Committee (And Live To Talk About It)
• Make Websites Easier for Older People
• 7 Best Homepage Updates

Share the love! Refer a friend to Talance, and you’ll receive a gift certificate worth $150 for Web or print design. Use it alone as a freebie or save on something big. Not doing any website updates right now? Keep sharing the love by giving the certificate to one of your friends or colleagues.

One coupon per customer. Offer not valid with any other coupon, discount or previous purchase. Excludes consultations, fees, outstanding invoices, or websites built by anyone other than Talance.

Cash in now!

If you’ve never seen the words “how to” followed by “design by committee” without words like “throw yourself out a window because you were involved in this horror show known as” in between, you may be shocked to read on. You may be one of those people who’s been trapped on a committee and all its egomaniacs, petty arguments and grudging concessions and know what a mess committees can make of things like web projects. Wikipedia puts it this way:

“The defining characteristics of ‘design by committee’ are needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision.”

That pretty much sums it up.

But as much as people hate to have web projects designed or decided by committee, it still happens. All the time. Like at almost every company we work with. So, as much as it pains me to write this article, I’ll do it anyway knowing that if a committee is going to be involved in a web project, it should at least be run the best way possible.

Don’t design by committee

I know what I just said, but if you can find a way of disbanding the committee, do it. Have one capable, knowledgeable person in charge, and other parties involved weigh in at appropriate times. Note I said “weigh in” and “appropriate.” Not make the final call, unless those parties are uniquely qualified to do so.

I once worked on a website project for teens. The COO – in other words, the 50-something-year-old who was in charge of writing contracts and making sure the organization was following its overall strategic objective – decided that keys were a better teen image than whatever shape the designer came up with. I suppose the reasoning was something like most people get a driver’s license when they’re teens. That means they can drive cars. You start cars with keys. So the final design had keys all over it, which looked weird and spoke to no one.

Opinions are valuable, but they’re just opinions. Let the experts make the final call.

If there’s no escape, organize responsibilities

If a committee is unavoidable, assign separate responsibilities rather than giving everyone a share in every single responsibility. The trouble is taste is inherently subjective. Some will agree, but many will have different opinions. Giving everyone a chance to weigh in on everything goes exactly nowhere. Or worse, it leads to compromise. (”I hate the blue.” “Well, I hate the red.” “Then let’s just choose green. At least nobody hates it.”)

Yet, if you give each person on the team his or her own role and responsibility, they can feel as protective about the thing they’re in charge of as they like. Plus, it helps eliminate indecision and might actually move a project along faster.

Foster collaboration rather than compromise

Sometimes nixing the “I don’t like” and the “that’s ugly” kind of comments can make a difference. When reviewing a design or idea, ask instead, “What works and what doesn’t? Why?” Instead of making or responding to visceral comments, ask, “What can we tell the designer that will address our concerns?” Reasoning and thinking together can help you arrive at rational decisions that leave everyone feeling included.

Speak for your audience, not yourself

The bane of committees is the egomaniac who feels their preference must be reflected in the design. If you’re the rational person on the team, you may understandably feel irritated. Remember, preferences are natural. The person you are and the position you have will influence your taste. You can’t help it if your gut is telling you that you like something or that you don’t. It’s what guts do.

Understand this reaction, and make every effort to direct the conversation to the people who really matter: your audience members. Ideally, this will take the form of user testing. Even informal user testing, where you send the idea to a handful of your audience members and ask for their feedback.

If you can’t do a simple audience survey for some reason, at least put yourself in their shoes. If you were your main demographic, would you respond to these colors? If you were of a certain age and background, would you respond to that style of writing? Do the people who use your site use products whose designs are similar to what you’re considering?

Despite your best intentions, you may very well be pulled into a committee or form one. As long as you make sure you’re asking the right questions, and everyone can come to a sensible decision.

1. Let everyone on your staff and board give feedback on your design, and apply everyone’s preferences.
2. Put someone in charge who doesn’t care about the website.
3. Replace pages or menu items with PDFs.
4. Make your mission statement about six paragraphs long and put it front and center of the homepage.
5. Hide the donation forms. It also helps to make it really hard to use.
6. Don’t apply any kind of strategy to the site. Just throw it up and assume you’ll get support.
7. Make sure you don’t look “too polished,” because no one will give you money unless the site looks like it was built on a shoestring.
8. Assume no one looks at your site.
9. Put up a bunch of unrelated pages with an unclear and incoherent message.
10. Design for your board members (or yourself) rather than your audience.
11. Leave development to a volunteer.
12. Leave design to a volunteer.
13. Play hot potato with updating website pages. The biggest sucker is in charge of keeping it current.
14. Forget about your other communications efforts. Never cross reference them. Never meet with the people in charge of putting them together.
15. Make your decision on a web developer based on cost alone, assuming you don’t always get what you pay for.

Monique Cuvelier spends her days at Talance sorting through the muck and creating fabulous non-profit websites. Contact her for advice on how.

Zen Garden by euart, on Flickr

It’s 9 a.m., Monday morning. The phone is already ringing as you download the dozen or more e-mail messages that came in over the weekend. Someone pops their head into your office and tells you that the main printer has gone down and no one is there to fix it. Can you? This is especially troubling, especially because a major grant report is due by noon.

A typical day for countless strapped non-profit managers who are forced to do too much with too little. It’s how most of our clients are, so I understand how challenging it can be to take on a new web development project. We guide our clients through the process, but it still takes collaboration and planning from everyone. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

The trick with any big project, is to divide the greater goal (building a website) into more manageable bits. I once read that the great cellist Yoyo Ma’s father told him to “couper la difficulté en quatre” (divide the difficult part into four pieces) when working on a difficult piece of music. That simple formula helps with almost anything that makes your heart palpitate.

Web projects naturally break into smaller phases, so it’s relatively easy to focus on what’s important right now versus what needs to happen by launch. Forget about launch. At the beginning, think about general goals, then fill in the gaps.

To take Mr. Ma’s advice literally, here’s how you can think of a web development project in four easy-to-manage phases:

1. Research
2. Design
3. Development
4. Maintenance

When you’re in the Research phase, the other three phases shouldn’t even be registering yet. Instead, break Research into four smaller tasks that you can focus on sequentially, such as:

1. Deciding who your ideal website audience is
2. Asking representatives from that audience for their website wish-list ideas
3. Asking your staff what their wish list is
4. Deciding who will be part of your website team (internally and externally)

If any of those seem like too much work, divide them into four tasks. Keep going granular until you feel like you can check off each item amongst the rest of the responsibilities you have each day. Websites are vitally important, but so is running your organization.

Focus on only what you need to when you need to, and you’ll see that you can accomplish more than seemed possible in the beginning.

How many times have you sat down in a hairdresser’s chair and said, “Surprise me”? Not often, I’ll bet. All but the most adventurous (or foolhardy) have at least a minor plan when they have their hair cut.

Now, why would you subject your website to the same risky random results? Any time you’re planning to launch a new website or overhaul your existing one, have a plan. In the biz, we call this a project brief.

There’s no real right or wrong way to write a brief, as long as you capture information and make it easy to deliver information to a web developer. One risk is to make the brief too, well, brief. Err on the side of too much information, and then you can edit down what’s superfluous with a web professional.

There are a few items that you should always include in a project brief, however. Here are a few:

Budget

Some organizations are understandably cagey with this information, but know what you have to spend and what’s reasonable for the site you want. Make sure to share this information with your developer, at least a general ballpark. A budget of $1000 will get you a very different website from one that costs $10,000. Tip: No website is free. Even the free ones.

Deadlines

If you absolutely must launch a website in time for a big event, to fulfill a grant requirement or for some other reason, note it down. Look a year into the future and plan for any deadlines, vacations or other scheduling requirements that might affect development.

Your profile

Put into a paragraph what you are and what your organization does. This will help you focus your needs with the website, and it will help any developer better understand how you work. It’s also useful if you include ways you differ from others in your industry.

It goes without saying to leave out the jargon, right?

Demographics

Next, provide a profile of the people who you serve. These are the people who visit your website – or who you wish would visit your website. Note their age, location, gender, website connection speed – whatever you can do flesh out who will be using your website. People who fit the 60-80 age range use websites differently than those in the 15-25 age range.

Sites you like, and a few you don’t

Start a list of the websites you’ve seen that you really like. Maybe you like the color palette or layout or some kind of functionality. Any time you see a site, add it to your bookmarks so you can pass this information on.

Similarly, make a list of the sites you don’t like. This can give a web developer valuable insight into your preferences as well.

Your primary tasks

List how you’ll be using the site on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. This can help you budget your own time when it comes to managing the website, and it also helps prioritize the information on your website.

Your visitors’ primary tasks

What things do you want your visitors to do when they come to your website? Put yourself into your audience’s shoes, and make a prioritized list of the things you want them to do when they’re at your site. This might be registering to volunteer, donating money, picking up event information. It can be helpful to ask your audience what they’d like to do at your website.

Design is a dirty word for many non-profiters. The idea of an organization spending time money making something look polished and clean, some think, is a sign that organization is spending time and money where they shouldn’t. All resources should be funneled into the cause.

That’s not saying much for design. Design may be artistic, but it’s not art. The design process is calculated and defined. It follows methodologies and steps that support the objectives of a website and is there to help the viewer accomplish tasks.

While your focus should definitely go into your cause, you should also explore every outlet you can to help support what you do. Think about how you look at websites and how quickly you make judgments. In a snap, you decide if that organization is trustworthy. You decide if the donation process makes sense. You evaluate how easy it is to pledge support – if that Donate Now button isn’t easy to find, you might assume donations aren’t important.

If you have a scrubby website that looks like your favorite niece built it between classes, people will think that you’ve got an equal organization. Inspire trust in your visitors. Show them respect. Trust that design serves a purpose other than to look pretty, and let your website shine.

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

Websites are like silverware drawers. They start out the vision of order, with special compartments for everything. Then a grapefruit spoon gets mixed in with the soup spoons. Someone tosses in a ladle because they can’t figure out where else it should go. Toast crumbs accumulate at the bottom. Before long, what was a bounty of neatness can become a chaotic mess just from day to day living.

It’s understandable, because websites are always growing and changing. Nevertheless, it helps to take a periodic assessment to figure out what should go where, and if it’s operating at optimum capacity.

Here are a few things you can check right now:

1. Is your name clearly identified on your homepage? Make sure it appears on internal pages too.
2. Are your organization’s colors consistently used? It’s a good idea to limit your colors to two.
3. Are there broken links? If so, fix them right away!

While that’s a good start, you should do a complete website assessment and do it regularly. Lucky for you, we’re here to help.

This month, as part of Talance’s year-long 10th anniversary celebration, we’re performing free website analyses to determine how you can improve the performance of your website. The analysis includes a review of design, user-friendliness, search engine visibility and how popular it is in social media. We’ll deliver you a handy report you can keep and refer to while you make updates.

>> Request your FREE website analysis now!