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.

[Image: Flickr user euart]

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!

[Image: Flickr user vinnie7]

Website 911: An Organization Specializing in Grief Gets a Massive Makeover

National Alliance for Grieving Children (NAGC) is one of the nation’s largest associations for organizations specializing in grief. The website is an important channel for professionals, as well as parents and caregivers, to find local resources for addressing loss. NAGC asked Talance, Inc. (http://talance.com), a Boston-area Web development and design firm that specializes in user-friendly websites for non-profits, to develop a new website that would express a delicate balance between hope and loss, while making it easier for professionals and caregivers to discover a wealth of information. It also had to be a platform that would be an online community for members and also be search engine optimized to expand to more members and clients.

Objectives

Talance’s main objectives were:

• Develop a professional-looking website with as many self-serve functions as possible
• Create an engaging and friendly design that remained sensitive to the subject while still expressing hope and healing
• Make it easy for members to sign up for events and access restricted content
• Show a growing collection of resources for professionals and caregivers
• Provide a way to easily add content to the website
• Optimize the website for search engines

We developed a site that combines a friendly and professional design that always looks evolving and intuitive. The new website looks professional and warm. It incorporates special features that made the website look active while only a small team was in charge of updates. In preparation for an upcoming feature on Sesame Street, it was also important to have a map of available centers and have a robust structure in case the site experienced a surge of traffic.

Check out the whole project profile and learn more about our work.

First impressions count for everything when it comes to websites. In real life, you might have second crack at forming someone’s view of you: making a joke or warmly shaking someone’s hand. But online, when the average viewer’s attention is being pulled in a million different directions, you have to hit them exactly right to make sure they keep coming back.

Working with clients over the years, we’ve uncovered five simple tips that will help you present a great first impression so you can convert a website visitor into a fan.

1. Make your pages consistent.

Few things are as confusing as when each page looks different than the page that came before it. Web users need consistency when it comes to websites. This means when they click through the items in your menu, they always thing they’re on your site. If your structure is sloppy and inconsistent, you look sloppy and inconsistent.

2. Ensure quick load times.

If you think the people in the line at the DMV are impatient, multiply that by a factor of a bajillion to approximate their impatience with website loading pages. If your site doesn’t open in a reasonable amount of time, your visitors are gone, baby.

3. Clean up your logo.

Your logo is the flag of your website. It communicates important information about you at a glance. If that information has anything to do with tired clipart or design ideas borrowed from anybody else, it can have a negative effect on your visitors.

4. Appropriate colors.

Colors can communicate a mood to someone before they even read a word. The colors of your website should be attractive and also appropriate. An IBM blue probably isn’t the right color for a preschool website, and electric pink isn’t the right shade for a funeral home.

5. Everything works.

If a link is broken, if your margins are askew, if your images don’t load – these are all big mistakes that reflect badly on you as an organization. Taste is subjective, but operability isn’t.

Pick up a magazine and try to notice what you look at. Where do your eyes go? Directly to the middle of the page? The big headline on the right-hand side? What do you do when you hold the publication: flip from the back to the front like I do?

Now go to a new website you’ve never seen before, and think about where your eyes go. If you’re paying attention, you’ll discover you do not look at the same places. You’re certainly not going to the back cover first and work your way forward.

This is because websites and print publications are designed completely differently. Occasionally a client will come to us with a design that’s been created by the company that made their brochure or put together a postcard for them. Invariably, these websites don’t work. Even when they’re beautiful, print publications are simply made for a different way of reading.

So next time you pick out a Web designer, it’s OK to suggest colors and ideas and even the look and feel of a print publication, but don’t try to reproduce it online.

If you’re trying to sell a house, update the kitchen and bathroom. If you’re trying to get people to use your website, do it with these easy upgrades.

1. Most recent blog entry.

Some organizations have a blog, but hide it. An easy way to bring your words closer to your visitors is not only to provide a prominent link to your blog, but to also let the first few entries display on your homepage.

2. Twitter feed.

If you have a Twitter account, you should provide access to it on your website. It’s surprising how many organizations have an account, but you’d never know it by visiting their site. Treat your Twitter updates just like your blog updates, and show the most recent ones on your website.

3. Big Share buttons.

Any time you publish something worth sharing, you should encourage people to do so through e-mail or a social network. Big buttons encouraging people to share do better than small ones.

4. One-click donation.

It’s a pity if you miss out on donations simply because no one can figure out how to donate on your site. Make sure it’s easy to donate by clicking just one link.

5. Search.

If you have more than five pages, include a way to search your website. And make search easy to find. No hiding it in the lower regions of your site.

6. CMS (Content Management System).

If you’re struggling with keeping a mass of single-file pages looking the same, give up and get a CMS. Your visitors will respond to the organization.

7. Call to action links.

Tell people what you want them to do whenever you provide a link on your site. If you want donations, name your donation button “Give.” If you want people to register for your newsletter, call your newsletter link, “Sign up for the newsletter.” People will respond if you make it clear.

8. Home link.

Always, always provide a clearly labeled link that says Home.

9. Feedback form.

If there’s no way for people to respond to you, they won’t. Make it easy with a feedback form.

The best thing you can do for your website is to keep thinking about it. Keep tabs on what people like and what they ask for. Make upgrades on a regular basis, and you’ll notice a difference.