Detroit is Pretty Awesome, You Guys

Well, it’s been a light week for the blog, because I am vacationing (and very successfully, thankyouverymuch) in Detroit, to help ring in my best friends brand new masters degree in graphic design.  Since I’ve already written a bit on the topic of web design this week, I thought, in keeping with the theme, I’d put together some more design resources for those of you out there building, re-building or being fed up with your existing sites.  I’ve been walking around the beyond-beautiful campus here at Cranbrook and reading, in crumbling marble letters on their red brick buildings, one of their aesthete’s credos: A Life Without Beauty is A Life Half Lived.  I wonder, seriously, what my own corresponding tenet of website appreciation would be. . . A Site Without Usability is Scarcely a Site At All?  A Site Without Proper Search Engine Optimization is But Half a Site?  If You Hate The Way Your Website Looks, Then Go To Art School and Learn How To Change It?  A Beautiful Website Is Only Half The Battle?

Regardless, here are some items to help you with design implementation and inspiration:

16 Sites For Web Design Inspiration: this has some sites with CSS and WordPress theme examples, many of them a nice resource if you’re looking to start building a new site.

A Couple More CSS Galleries: One and Two

50 Favorite Design Resources From Pronet

The Ten Commandments Of Web Design

Design Blogs I like:

Outlaw Design Blog

Abduzeedo

Colorburned

And Finally. . .

A List of The  50 Best Web Design Blog Posts from 2009- I’ve gotten through almost all of these and they are uniformly awesome, so put on your reading glasses and get started.

Good luck finding inspiration, everyone.

-A.J.

Take charge of your sites potential

This is one of those weeks where I’m feeling like the creative well is dry, so I’ll be directing you today to a couple fascinating articles to help you develop your website further.

These 25 tips on how to improve your website are quite general, perhaps just the teeniest bit dated, and some of them are repeats of concepts I’ve already tried to drill into your thick skulls (just kidding, readers), but can be used as a kind of Web Improvement for Dummies bible.  If you don’t know too much about the web world and are trying to suss out best practices for guiding your website to conceptual and practical success, this is a handy one to have printed out and tacked on your office wall.

Article Number Two, for your consideration, is a fairly comprehensive guide to improving the conversion rate on your website.  The term conversion sounds kinda culty and scary, but it’s perfect for what it actually means: as far as web sites go, your conversion rate is the percentage of your web visitors that perform the task you want them to perform.  All websites have a different idea of what a conversion is, for their particular site.  For us, a conversion on the blog is someone subscribing to it and on our DonationPay official site, it’s someone signing up to be notified.  For an online retailer, it would be a sale and for NPO’s a conversion might be signing up for a newsletter or making a donation. Before you start your web design process, one of the first things you should decide is what a conversion is for you and build the site based on guiding your web traffic to perform that particular task.  And if you already have a site but you’re not sure what a conversion is for you, chances are your site is underperforming, so get sure, right quick, and start using these tips to guide your web traffic to the right place.

-A.J.

Beth Kanter Freaking RULES

So, I feel I’ve been quite explicit about this matter: social networking is good, very good, for non-profits.  The Twittering, the Facebooking, the what-have-you. . . all these activities can be incredibly fortuitous for your organization, I think you should get on it, like, yesterday, blah blah blah.  You’ve heard this from me too many times already in the short life of this blog. . . however, today I thought I’d share my favorite resource for ideas on how to actually accomplish fundraising and mission-spreading goals using these tools: Beth Kanter’s blog.

Beth has worked in the non-profit sector for 30 years and she has a nearly endless knowledge base to draw from.  She is also a savvy user of newish social networking technology to further her own personal and professional goals and is a preeminent scholar of the social networking medium as a vehicle for change.  Her blog is incredibly comprehensive, compassionate, whip-smart, funny, and has a big heart proudly beating with social conscience.  She offers practical information on how to use technology in positive, communicative ways (which is what we’re all about), like here, here and here.  In short, we at DonationPay think Ms. Kanter keeps a pretty perfect blog and we can’t recommend her highly enough.

Observe how she spent her 53rd birthday this month, for instance.

When you’re starting up a NPO, a small business or taking an existing business online, one of the most stressful aspects of your transition\startup can be finding a web designer.  Its hard enough to manage a website and wrangle it to even moderate success, once it’s already operational, but getting a site built that fits your NPO’s mission, looks the way you want it to (or some facsimile thereof), is within your price range and has the functionality you need. . . well, I’ll just say that it can seem sometimes to be an insurmountable task.  There are many factors that contribute to the creation of a successful website and one of the most important is that most elusive creature: the good web designer.

Your web designer should make you feel like this:

I Want To Go To There

Not like this:

Ha, Ha, Ya Burnt!

I digress, but seriously, picking a web designer or design company to build your site will take some time, some energy and definitely some cash, but, as usual, your efforts will be rewarded in the end.  Here’s some tips on the selection process and what to look for in a web designer:

Why You Should Pick Them

1.) You Think To Yourself : ‘I Can Work With This Person’

Assuming your potential hire is also a competent designer, you should evaluate their compatibility with whoever will be their primary contact at your organization.  Are they personable, genuine and non-salesy?  Do they make you feel comfortable?   This is a very non-specific tip, I know, but basically all I’m saying is for Pete’s sake, just make sure you like the guy before you pay him to work on your site for three months.

2.) You Like Their Portfolio

If it’s a small business or single-practitioner that you’re looking to hire from, be sure they can show you a portfolio that showcases their skills in programming, design and information architecture.  Be sure that you actually like this portfolio.  Most companies have at least sample portfolios up online (including us), and should also be able to provide you with at least one business reference, so you can talk to someone who’s actually had the experience of working with them.  Anyhow, be sure you like the portfolio and if you’re still not sure, ask to see more of their work.  Bonus points for other sites built with companies in your industry, but if  a company has designed lots of other sites for people you know or work with and their portfolio leaves you totally cold, don’t hire them.  You’re looking for the rare (ish) combo of liking the designer and liking the work.

3.) They Tell You ‘No’

This is not true 100% of the time, but often your vision for a website that represents your business is going to be a lot more expensive and complicated than you think it should be.  If you say to your potential designer that you’d like a site that can keep an archive, be regularly updated with new content, contain a blog, a store, a donation station and incorporate design elements reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright, all for around, say, 3 grand and they say ‘oh, totally, no problem, we can do that for you in 2 weeks’. . . well, either they’re severely undercharging for their time, they don’t know what they’re talking about, or they can’t clearly communicate what their process is.  A large, comprehensive, content-managed site is a serious undertaking, even for a big design company and while it’s not your job to know exactly how much web work costs, how long it takes and what is and isn’t possible, it is theirs.  And they should tell you.  You want a web designer that’s going to help you get the most and best bang for your buck- no matter how much that may be- and someone who will strategize honestly with you about what you can and can’t get for how much you’re willing to spend.

4.) They Give You an Incredibly Clear Estimate and Work Plan

Once you go through the initial meet-and-greet, look at their portfolio and decide to proceed to the next step, most companies should give you a written cost estimate and plan of attack.  This estimate should clearly detail the amount of hours the project is anticipated to take, the cost of labor for those hours and a statement of what, exactly, they will provide for the price they’re quoting.  When we do web design work, Noah and I come up with a low-end estimate (the cost of the whole project will not be below x amount) and a high-end estimate (the cost of the whole project will not exceed x amount) and we write a carefully detailed Work Prospectus that states, in precise detail, what features, design, project management, and functionalities are included in the prepared estimate.  If a client decides they’d like to add or subtract a particular feature of their planned site (say, they want to eliminate their online store, but add a subscription service), we re-do their estimate and Work Prospectus.  You should feel  confident that you know what’s going to happen once they start work, how much time (approximately) the project will take and have a clear design plan when you start.  Your web designer should also let you know things like how many design re-drafts you’re permitted before you start getting charged for labor, how much the cost of processing will be for your online store and should also offer reasonable suggestions about design and site development.

5.) They Want A Lot of Information About The Project

Don’t be put off if your potential web designer comes back to you multiple times about your desired aesthetic, functionality and site mission; be excited!  This means you have a web designer who cares enough to prepare you an accurate estimate and one who is invested in making a site as close as possible to the one you see in your minds eye.

What You Should Expect Throughout The Process

1.)  Promptness

After you hire someone, you should be able to get ahold of them, with a turnaround time of one business day.

2.)  A Thorough Timeline

Your web designer should have no problem telling you where they are on your project and where they expect to be in a week.

3.) Excellent Communication

Your web designer should give you regular updates on the status of your project and be professional and honest about how much things cost and how much they know.  If you’re having an issue with the quality or quantity of their communication, let them know.

4.) A Product You Love

At the end of the process, you should come out with a website you love that is a pretty close approximation of what you wanted in the first place, taking into account cost and functional limitations.

5.) A Clear Agreement about Upcoming Web Work

Most large sites, especially ones with a store, a newsletter or regularly updated content, require substantial management from the administrative end.  Your web designer should let you know how much it will cost for web management per month, if he or she is available to perform those services and what kinds of repairs are included in the cost of the initial service.  If maintenance work wasn’t included in your initial estimate, expect to pay for it or have someone within your organization learn to manage the site themselves.

How To Be A Good Client

I’ve included this last bit because being a good client is difficult. The easiest way get a product you love is to work harmoniously with your web designer- challenge them, expect their best work and devotion to your project, but also listen, compromise and cede to some of their more informed opinions.  It’s not like being an unruly or demanding guest in a restaurant; your web designer isn’t going to spit in your food or, say, ruin your website.  But there are some things that make projects take twice as long, cost more and feel exponentially more stressful.

1.) Please Know What You Want

When you get an estimate and initiate a project, be prepared to fill out a worksheet on what you want from your website: visually, functionally and informationally.  If you tell your web designer what you want at the beginning and then decide halfway through that you’d like to go in a different direction, expect to pay to have the project started from scratch.  Your web designer is not obligated to perform extra work because of your changing whims, so it’s smart to have an organizational meeting about what the desired website will look like and do, before initiating work with a web firm.

2.) Listen, for the love of God, Listen

When your web designer gives you suggestions about programming, SEO, information architecture, design or, you know, just about anything pertaining to their area of expertise, listen to them.  You don’t have to make every project modification or feel like you’ve lost control of your project, but, if you’ve selected a web designer that you trust, let them guide the project with their expertise and knowledge of the web world.  When you say you want your web traffic to land on two separate splash pages before they get into your site and your web designer gently tells you that this may have, er, a little bit of a deterrent effect on your chances of success, listen.  Chances are they know better than you.

3.) Do Not Ask For An Estimate Unless You Think You Actually Might Hire

For most companies, a comprehensive estimate and project plan take at least two or three hours work.  The best thing to do is shop around to five or six different web companies, have some phone conversations and whittle it down to two or three in final contention.  Most web designers complete five or six proposals per job they actually get, but, to be respectful, don’t initiate this process unless you’re pretty seriously considering hiring that company to work for you.  Just a heads up that it is super annoying to have to do an 8 page proposal for someone who is clearly not serious about having web work done.

4.) Elect One Person In Your Office to Handle Web Affairs

It can be insanely frustrating to have a constantly-switching point-person. Find a person who has enough time and energy to work with your web designer from a projects inception to it’s completion.  It’s best when we know who has final approval, who represents the interests of your NPO or company and who has the authority to guide the project from your end.

5.) Even When You’re Not Paying, Be Respectful

If you’re working with a company who’s volunteering their time, working at a reduced rate or are helping you out with some initial info to get a site launched, be clear about what you need and expect from them.  If you’re getting someone you know to build you a website for free, talk to them about the site as you would a paid designer, so they know what you’re expecting and so they can assess the actual amount of time the project will require from them.  Don’t expect your web designer to be your indentured IT servant indefinitely; make an agreement about how many hours per month will be spent on your website.  Many companies, including us, have done work for sites and friends whose organizations we believe in, and very happily, I might add.  However, it’s truly helpful to know in advance the depth and breadth of a project you’re getting involved in; don’t tell your web person that it should just be a couple hours a week, when they’re actually expected to comprehensively manage the site, perform maintenance and administrate your sites email newsletter.  It’s better to be honest and up front at the beginning, so you can get a corresponding reply from your web-savvy friend or pro-bono designer, so they’re only doing as many hours of free work as they have to spare and the whole enterprise doesn’t put too much stress on the relationship.

6.)  Be Like The Dude.

Okay, folks, those are the basics: how to find a good web designer and how to act right once you have one.  Good luck finding a web designer\designee relationship that will be creatively, financially and personally rewarding on both ends.

-A.J.