You’re a busy person. You don’t have oodles of time, money and technical expertise to put into your synagogue website.

And now you don’t have to.

Talance is launching a new service called Synagogue Sites 1-2-3 that makes it a breeze to have a website that truly communicates with your congregation. This is no electronic brochure.

>> Get more details and pricing here.

Here’s how it works:

1. Pick your favorite design

Get started with a clean, super-powered website hosted on the Drupal content management system (CMS). It includes tools for improving search engine optimization, a Microsoft Word-like text editor and six months free Web hosting.

2. Customize

Send us your logo (if you have one – we can help if you don’t), your two favorite colors and a couple pictures to include on the homepage. You can also pick from any of these Web tools for free:

• E-Newsletter
• Interactive Calendar
• Blog
• Advanced site search
• File storage
• Listserv
• Membership forms
• Members-only section
• Photo album
• Registration form
• Shabbat times calendar
• Weekly Torah Portion (from MyJewishLearning)

You can keep updating from an extensive list of advanced Web tools.

3. Relax

We do all the set-up and configuration to get you up online fast – in just five working days.

Special Bonus: Are you a Synaplex synagogue? Mention it when you sign up, and receive 20% off through September!

Learn more and sign up today!

It helps to see what other organizations are doing right to guide your own Web strategy. Here are six stand-out examples from non-profits that have a presence with websites, Twitter and Facebook.

Websites

10ThousandDoors.org is a gutsy move by the United Methodist Church to be a truly interactive experience. The whole site is innovative, but the Talk page is a new breed of discussion boards that has really opened up sharing and communication.

Take the Walk has a great counter on its homepage. They tally the number of miles supporters have walked to support fighting AIDS in Africa. The placement is perfect: front and center. This ensures the site is geared toward pulling in new supporters.

Twitter

Ashoka started promoting their e-book through Twitter and quickly built up a following. This multi-tasking post is smart, because they thank their followers, help everyone feel included and continue the promotion all in one Tweet.

The town of Richmond, VA, had a double-header of a good idea. First, they started a city wiki (others here), and then they set up an automatic Twitter feed that publishes any updates to the wiki. It gives you a real-time, accessible view of any changes that happen at the town level.

Facebook

Peta launched a Facebook Cause to raise funds and donations to protect animals. They’ve raised nearly $60,000 and have enabled others to recruit more supporters and raise funds on their behalf.

Synagogue 3000 claimed a great web address so they’d be easy to find on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/synagogue3000) rather than the ugly and hard to remember stream of numbers that Facebook adds to the end of your URL when it assigns one to you. Click here to set yours.

[Photo credit: WinTrash by fabiux, on Flickr]

If ever there was a time to feel sorry for trash cans, now is it. I know we’ve been kicking them a fair amount at Talance HQ, and certainly our clients are. What’s unleashed this sudden aggression on the waste bins by our desks? Internet Explorer 8.

With existing websites, there’s always a lag between when a new Web browser comes out and when you can get all the kinks and wrinkles ironed out so your site displays accurately everywhere.

But there’s an added problem when new versions of browsers debut. They’re inevitably buggy and have all kinds of problems that are yet to be discovered. That takes time. Internet Explorer 8 has made so many changes with the way it renders webpages that it could take a very, very long time to iron out problems. Recognizing all the problems that people are having with IE8, Microsoft added the Compatibility View button, which (in theory) lets you switch back to IE7 if a website isn’t displaying correctly.

This is a good reason for Web users – like you – to put off downloading any new browser software until some of these problems have been discovered and fixed, but it’s still a problem when it comes to website building.

What’s the solution? Well, nothing really good. Largely, you’ll have to wait until problems in IE8 are fixed and ask your Web developers to start taking a look at your site to make sure it appears correctly in the new browser. Just be patient, take your time and look at it as a reason to refresh your website.

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.

[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

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.

[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.]

A house may be well-built, but the kitchen looks outdated, it’ll be hard to sell. Websites are the same way, which is why after you’ve cleaned up your links and website copy, you should think about cleaning up your design as part of your spring cleaning ritual. (We’ve been talking about spring cleaning your website all week – click here to see all the articles in the series.)

As you live with your website, you’ll make changes and upgrades to suit your organization’s goals. But those changes, made iteratively over time, don’t always synch up with the overall look of the thing. That’s why it’s important to step back a few times a year to make sure your site looks like a cohesive piece and still looks up to date.

For example, you might have added a picture here or an icon there to help address a need, but it might not fit overall. Or, you might have jumped on the bandwagon of a design trend that doesn’t hold up any more. I believe the Web 2.0 glassy effect is going to look as outdated as avocado-colored refrigerators in the near future.

It’s always a good idea to get an outside opinion on how your site looks and what can be done to improve it, but here’s a little checklist you can run through to see how messy it’s become over time:

• Does your website fit the monitor? Many websites built a few years ago were built with smaller monitors in mind. As a result, when seen on today’s big monitors, they look either like tiny postage stamps in the middle of the screen, or they expand where there’s a wide open space in the middle. Make sure your sites fit modern monitors.
• Do you have unified icons? You might be grabbing a graphic here to illustrate your e-mail and a graphic there to highlight your Facebook account. But do they match? Look for an icon set that matches to give your site a unified look.
• Does your site match your branding? Your organization might have had the website designed two years ago, but only last month revamped all the print material. Make sure that you’re presenting the same branding everywhere, from your site to your print collateral to your Twitter account. If your other properties have been updated, it’s time to tweak your site to match.
• Are you using CSS? If not, you should be. Cascading Style Sheets are the practical way to control the display of your website instead of using old-school HTML tags. Once you create a CSS, you need only make one tweak to change all the font around your entire website, for instance.
• Do you have an Under Construction image anywhere? For heaven’s sake, if you do, get rid of it.

Make sure to read the other articles in our series on spring cleaning your website. Make sure you don’t miss anything by subscribing to the RSS news feed. Not sure what an RSS feed is? Click here.

Never one to shy from a bit of self promotion, I wanted to share this list of 100 (Non-Design) Blogs that Every Web Designer Should Read. Friendly Web Tools makes the cut!

But I also wanted to mention it, because this is a tidy list of what really are some of the most useful blogs out there to do with the Web, even if you’re a web design newbie. Nice collection!

Also, check out my post on the blogs I visit most often.

[Update: make sure you check out this other post on more killer church websites and the specifics that make them great. Also check out our easy solution for church/synagogue websites.]

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.

Entrepreneur’s Tech Forward blog has some solid advice on what kind of questions you should ask a company before you give them the green light to create a website for you. I agree completely with the advice, and this article is like an outline of the way we approach relationships with new organizations.

A reputable web services company should:

• Say their first step is to understand your needs
• Step up when it comes to explaining complicated technology
• Know what goes into the front end (design) and back end (architecture) of a website.

I’d be happy to share more information about how we interact with clients. Contact me at talance.com for more info.