We spend all year coming up with advice and insight into how you can run a better website, hold a more effective online training program. Here are the top 12 most useful, entertaining and indispensable we covered over the last year.

(Make sure you don’t miss any of the good stuff coming up in 2012 – and yes, we’ve got a good year planed so far. Sign up for updates by RSS feed or by e-mail using the box to the right.)

Definitive Website Pre-Launch Checklist

Ready to launch a new site? Run through this before you flip the switch.

4 Risk Management Steps That Could Save You

Things go wrong with websites. Expect the unexpected.

Welcome to Our Website! (Except for You)

We know you’d never intentionally close your website to anyone, but without appropriate accessibility, that might be just what you’re doing.

Save Your Sanity AND Get the Logo You Love (Yes, You Can!)

You can get through an image rebranding without rehashing past mistakes or subjecting yourself to the pain of collaboration. Here’s how.

John Rochford Talks About Accessibility

John Rochford, Director of Technology at New England INDEX a project of UMass Medical School, is one of those people who takes accessibility seriously and makes websites better for everyone.

10 Ways to Be a Jackass in Online Discussions

Please apply the following rules to discussion boards, comments entries, and Facebook and Twitter postings if you wish to raise collective blood pressure.

Digesting All That Alphabet Soup

Here are a few tips on dealing with letter overload online.

20 Free Icon Sets for Non-Profits

The quickest shortcut to making your website look polished is to use icons. These pictures are nice and free.

Guest Post: Five Musts for Pictures That Pop

Morgan Ione Yeager shares some simple tricks to capture better images and using images online.

Reader Question: How Do I Get Feedback on My New Website?

A reader wants to know how to get honest feedback from her website visitors.

What Is the Coolest E-learning Video You Have Seen Online?

A few great examples.

Frankenspeak Contest with the Content Rules team

Share the words and phrases that you’d like to ban from marketing, sales, corporate communications, business schools, blogs and boardrooms, and you’ll be entered to win a copy of Content Rules, by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman.

[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.