These are the things I wish clients would ask when they’re looking to start a new project. You can use this as a punch list of questions to ask a web designer, web development agency or someone to develop an online course:

1. Do you have any case studies?

Case studies are a really great way to see what an Internet developer or graphic designer has done for another client. Good ones take you through the problem, solution and introduce the technology. We’re careful to create case studies that are framed to show how work we’ve done for one client is applicable to many. People can find case studies on our website, but they don’t ask for them enough or ask for ones that are specific to the work they need.

2. Do you have references?

It’s a little odd how many people don’t ask me for references. They should, because talking to someone we’ve actually done work for is invaluable. An outside perspective is exactly what someone hiring a designer should be looking for, too.

3. How does your process work?

I’ve worked on enough projects to know how valuable it is to have a capable person managing the process. You’re not only hiring someone who knows about the technology and design, but who also knows about how to manage a project, how to schedule milestones, and make sure deadlines are met.

4. How did you get into the web design industry?

This is an easy question that will give you an idea of how passionate a person feels about the work they do. It will also give you an idea of the values of the web developer and what kinds of hidden skills they bring to their cache of talent. It always sparks a good conversation, and anything that opens up conversation in an exploratory call helps.

Notice that nowhere on this list is, “How much will this cost?” Everybody has a budget, but without preliminary research into what a client needs, it’s virtually impossible to give a price estimate. Plus, if you’re working on a tight budget, a good development agency can help figure out how to solve problems you have rather than cut features you can’t afford. Plus, value is not the same thing as cheap. With interactive design, you get what you pay for.

Anything I missed? If there are other questions you’ve found useful in initial conversations with web designers, add them in the comments below.

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

Newspaper articles need to explain who, what, when, where, why, how. Anything less than those elements doesn’t tell the whole story. Websites also need to tell a story. Someone visiting for the first time should be able to know what you’re about and what you do without thinking too hard. Thinking too hard, in Web terms, means clicking off your page.

Here are the questions you should be able to answer easily if your website is well built:

1. What is the site all about? What’s its identity and reason for being?

2. Where do site visitors begin?

3. What’s the site structure? Does it have a clear hierarchy?

4. How do visitors search for things?

Pose those questions to your site, and if you can answer quickly and concretely, you know it has good bones.

Everybody’s strapped for cash these days, but budgets vary widely. Some non-profits are run out of a basement and have a budget of exactly zero, and others are housed in city high-rises and have budgets in the millions. They all need websites.

Any given day at Talance, someone from either camp may call with a new web communications project. Before we know how we can best help whoever is on the other end of the phone, we need to know how much money they have to put into the project. Some people simply can’t afford the kind of work they want done.

Many people are hesitant to reveal how much they can pay for a project, but be prepared to at least have a ballpark prepared during the first phone call. Buying a website isn’t like buying a car – hiding the amount you have doesn’t help with negotiation. Web developers need to know if your budget matches the work you want done. We tell our potential clients what they can or can’t expect – even when that means the work you need does is less than you expected.

We’re really there to help you figure out what you need, and if we don’t know how much you can afford, we don’t know how to start helping you.

[Photo credit: Spaghetti and Meatballs (explore) by jshj, on Flickr]

Inclusiveness is always nice to have in any project, Web-related or otherwise. Give everybody a voice, and everybody’s happy, right?

Wrong.

In fact, having too many voices feeding into your website can create chaos for your users. The problem is that everybody has their own ideas about what belongs on a website, and those ideas might compete with one another. Plus, there’s only so much room on a homepage. You can’t cram everything on.

Add to this the fact that some of those people jockeying for their ideas to appear on your website know absolutely nothing about creating a manageable experience for Web visitors, and you’ve got one snarled, political plate of website spaghetti.

If you’re at a non-profit, there’s a good chance a little light bulb is going on over your head right now. You’ve been there. Too many people trying to take control of the site. Sadly, this is a problem non-profits frequently have, since many organizations are managed by committee. That might (or might not) make sense for day-to-day operations, but it never works with websites.

Nip this problem in the bud. Take these steps to make sure your Web project starts off with a clear vision and a clean outcome.

Include everybody – at the start.

Our solution is to send out a “needs assessment” at the very beginning of a project. This survey, distributed to a whole bunch of people, gives everybody a chance to say what they think is important to have on the website and makes everyone feel included.

Form a small committee.

Hand those surveys over to the core website team to scan for insights, ideas and important issues. And, of course, to sort out the muck. But importantly, this body is small, and has only one head.

Appoint a strategist.

It’s helpful that the leader of that team be uniformly concerned with the experience your website visitors have, the marketing and business message of your organization and have some idea of the way technology works. If this isn’t possible, at least choose a person humble enough to take direction from a hired Web strategy consultant. That’s money well spent.

Request for proposals rarely fill me with joy. More often than not they’re a source of confusion, business-speak and unfinished thoughts, which we have to sort through and make sense of so we can send a reasonable bid to an organization that wants a website.

But last week I received an RFP from a non-profit that may have performed a Vulcan mind-meld on Talance. It was as if they had seen our new-client questionnaire and had preemptively answered all the questions I have at this early stage of a project. It filled me with delight (because I’m sad that way), and I know that it will make the project run smoothly, no matter who they choose to build the site.

What made it so great? Here are a few stand-outs that you can incorporate in your next RFP to help your project move smoothly from inception to completion:

1. Think it through.

The clearest RFPs benefit from discussion and planning beforehand. Make sure you talk with your team to form clear ideas of what you want your website to be, and then communicate your wishes through the RFP.

2. Write clearly.

Some people think “RFP” and pull out their cryptic businessese thesaurus so they can load it with fancy words nobody really gets. Pretend you’re explaining what you want to an idiot. Trust us, we Web developers get more out of it that way.

3. Plan your objectives.

You cannot hope for a site that reaches your goals unless you know what they are before you begin. If you want to be the go-to guide for volunteering opportunities, write it down and make sure that every decision you make from that point forward feeds back into that goal.

4. Order your objectives.

Some objectives are must-haves, others are nice-to-haves. Rank yours.

5. Go window shopping.

Everyone has seen sites they love, whether they be your competition or a mega-commercial site like Amazon. Start keeping track of sites you like, and make notes on what you like about them.

6. Know your branding.

Unless they’re new, most organizations have gone through some kind of branding exercise in the past, where colors, logos and other standards were developed. If you’re not aware of what these standards are, start asking around. We just had to redesign a website whose colors and logo were completely wrong in an earlier version, because no one checked. Translation: expensive.

7. Name your widgets.

If you want any special functionality, like slideshows, animations, photo galleries – anything – write it down.

8. Technical needs.

If you’re bound to maintain your website in a particular format, you like a CMS like Drupal or you don’t have the staff bandwidth to do updates, cite these constraints. Also note if you need Web hosting.

9. Name your budget.

I know, I know. You don’t want to come right out and say how much you want to spend, but your Web developer really needs at least a ballpark. We receive calls from clients who have $400 to spend, and those who have $40,000 to spend. We can’t help everyone, but it saves everybody a lot of time if I can tell them up front whether we can or not.

10. Make a schedule.

Decide when you’ll accept RFP questions, submissions and make decisions. Also note any ideal launch dates.

11. Contact information.

Sounds elementary, but make sure your prospects know how to reach you if they have questions. We received a bizarre system-generated RFP a couple weeks ago that had no personal contact information and was so hard to read we couldn’t even consider responding.

Laying this groundwork is incredibly useful for Web development companies like ours, but your staff will also thank you if you take the time to plan. Bonus: your funders will love you for eliminating money-wasting mistakes early on.

Getting your website to work for you doesn’t have to mean a complete overhaul. Here are five small updates you can make without suffering.

1. Add a feedback form

One of the very best ways to get more use out of your website is to give its visitors a way to interact. If you add a contact form to your contact page (here’s an example), you’ll open up opportunities for accepting comments. It’s welcoming, will help limit spam, and can increase the amount of feedback you receive from your site. A pretty big payoff for something so small.

2. Make menus consistent

Clicking through the pages of your site should not cause motion sickness. Yet some websites have inconsistent navigational menus. Sometimes they actually jump around. Sometimes the options change. Sometimes they don’t even work. Make them consistent and reliable, and you’ll find more people will be clicking around.

3. Limit what’s on your homepage

You wouldn’t stuff all your house’s furniture into the foyer, would you? Same thing with all the content on your website. Put your front-page stories on the homepage, and tuck the rest of the information where it logically belongs.

4. Add some links to and from your social networking accounts

Many organizations have well-used Facebook, MySpace or Twitter accounts, but you’d never know it from the website. Do some cross-linking, and add some links on your site. (Note: Join for the Talance Facebook Fan Club, and we’ll give you some lovely social media icons.) People can learn more about what you do, and they can subscribe to your accounts and receive updates and reminders.

5. Launch a blog or microblog

Even if you update it just once a week, a blog is a great add-on to a website. It increases your chances of telling the world what makes you so great, and it keeps people coming back for more.

When people at an organization start sharing information about their website, they’re generally surprised at how much their ideas differ. That’s one of the key reasons you need to assemble a reliable website committee to guide your organization through the process of building or redesigning your website. These people can help you decide who your audience is, clarify the purpose of your site and determine how it meshes with your organization’s mission.

Put together a group of people that represent different parts of your organization. Maybe this is the executive director, volunteer coordinator and office manager, along with whoever is part of your communications committee. Don’t have a communications committee? Get one.

Having a Web dream team helps you gather feedback in an organized way, without everybody’s opinion overwhelming you. But remember that it’s imperative for successful projects to have one person who can give the nod on development, and then have one person who can give the nod on an ongoing basis. Make sure you appoint a leader to your dream team who is a master of organizing and moving things forward.

Volunteers are great members of your dream team. Frequently, your supporters know how to do more than you think. I guarantee you have marketing, communication or technology specialists who are fans of what you do. Recruit them to help.

All (successful) development projects work with a team of people who are able to work together on a single goal. They’re the keepers of the project and can steer it in the right way, so borrow from what works.

http://www.jfsmetrowest.org

We’re glad to announce the launch of Jewish Family Service of MetroWest New Jersey. It’s a social service agency that needed help reaching families in need and more donors via the web.

Jewish Family Service of MetroWest New Jersey offers a wide range of mental health and social services to people of all ages. But the agency was having a hard time delivering its message online. They were worried about their low presence in search engine rankings, the site’s confusing navigation, a lack of new donors and a low number of new client intakes. What’s more, the in-house staff couldn’t edit – or even see – the old website.

We (Talance, Inc.), a Boston-area Web development and design firm that specializes in user-friendly websites for non-profits, created for them an easy-to-use website with high visibility and the ability to accept online payments.

The Drupal-based website—which includes optimized search engine capabilities, an online shopping cart for accepting donations and selling tribute cards, a calendar of events, a news updates section, a newsletter and more – is now manageable by a staff without any in-depth technical expertise. The site also effectively informs its constituency about upcoming events and community resources. The new platform has helped JFS MetroWest achieve its goal of having a lively website that’s easy to maintain, increase donations and publicize a rich selection of programs and services.

Project Breakdown

• Better design: the old black and white design was replaced by a vibrant site with color photos that represent the services offered by the agency.
• Expandable text-based menus: Given the extensive menu of services available to the community, Talance created a menu that allowed for many options that don’t look overwhelming.
• Shopping cart: The new shopping cart allows donors to purchase tribute cards, make donations and buy tickets for events.
• Calendar: The new and improved calendar brings the numerous events and programs onto the homepage while highlighting what’s available on the current day.
• JFS in the News: A list on the homepage allows the agency to highlight its most recent media coverage.
• Newsletter: A customizable newsletter can go out to the constituency while being archived on the website.
• Friendly URLs: As part of an overall search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, each page has a unique address that’s easy for visitors to read and that is easily catalogued in search engines.

Check out the whole case study to learn more.