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Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

May 10, 2012
13:00
More homepage clicks = strong call to action
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

Want to double the number of people who click on something when they go to your homepage? Here are six steps for getting more people to click, from Bob Hebeisen’s presentation on SlideShare, who says:

“With a few clever design modifications I doubled the effectiveness of their original landing page. That means for the same media expenditure they are now driving twice as many leads!”
How To Optimize A Landing Page View more PowerPoint from Bob Hebeisen

© Talance for Talance Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: conversion, landing page, marketing, slideshare, web design

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May 04, 2012
15:30
Get simple advice for website redesigns you can start using right away
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
If your website looks like it was beat with the ugly stick, have hope. Download our guide Upgrading to a Drupal CMS for step-by-step instructions on how to guide your website from outdated to fabulous:
- How to evaluate your existing website content
- How to survey your visitors to see what they want and need
- How to perform a needs assessment
- How to create measurable goals
- How to write helpful RFPs
- How to choose a web designer
- How to make smart staffing decisions
… plus templates and cheat sheets for making the whole process easier. Don’t use Drupal? No worries. It’s useful for any kind of website redesign.

Oh, did I mention there’s no cost?

Check it out now by requesting your download: Click here.

© Talance for Talance Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cms, download, drupal, redesign, resource, web design

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April 27, 2012
14:33
Focus on E-learning Benefits for Buy-In
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

Even the most energetic cheerleader may need to apply a little technique when it comes to starting a new e-learning program. Here’s how to focus on the benefits of online training to your organization’s stakeholders, not simply the features.

Focus on benefits for buy-in

You may be positive that an e-learning program is perfect for your organization, but when it comes to delivering that message to your colleagues, you’d do better focusing on the why rather than the what.

Why? Benefits make more sense than features. It might be great that your learning management system has blogs, easy to follow forums and granular tracking and analysis. But most people what to know how that program will solve their problems.

Here are some great examples of some of the biggest features and benefits of e-learning to prime your next discussion:

Instead of …

“It’s self-paced.”

Try:

“We can save $20,000 per year by eliminating monthly in-person training sessions.”

Why it’s better:

Explain what happens when you allow people to take an e-learning program as needed. In practical terms, it might mean that you can save on trainer costs, you don’t have to buy training materials, you no longer need to block out a certain amount of time for instructor-led training. Figuring out how much money that will save will help you make your case.

Instead of …

“Accommodates multiple learning styles.”

Try:

“Retention is improved because information is presented in various formats.”

Why it’s better:

In this case, it makes sense to strike the jargon about learning stylesand explain the outcome. If you’re trying to give your staff a new skill set for their jobs, it’s critically important they remember it. That’s much more important to your organization than pedagogical jargon.

Instead of …

“It’s computer-based.”

Try:

“It’s good for the environment. A study University found that the production and provision of the distance learning courses consumed nearly 90% less energy and produced 85% fewer CO2 emissions than conventional campus-based university courses.”

Why it’s better:

Back up your claim with facts. The fact that it’s computer-based training isn’t much use, but if you find a study, like the one here from Britain’s Open University, can give you the credibility and research that helps explain why it’s important.

Eventually, your discussions will be broken down into key features and if they’ll work with your organization. In the beginning, however, it helps to think about what kind of effect a new e-learning program will have and why.

[Image: Flickr user opensourceway]

© Talance for Talance Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: benefits, copy, e-learning, marketing, open university, sales

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April 20, 2012
13:00
How to Find Web Design Superheroes
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

RFPs stink as a way to find web designers. The problem is they prevent even a modicum of relationship-building, and without that, you’ll never know if you’ll be able to love the next person you hire to build or redesign your website. You won’t have a good sense of their managerial skills. You won’t know if they’ll stick around post-launch to keep updating your site. You won’t know if you simply like talking to them on the phone.

Before you face failure with your next RFP by spending a huge amount of time and resources, try these strategies for finding a web design superhero.

How to Find Web Design Superheroes
Ask around
Hands down the best way to find a web designer is to ask your friends, family and colleagues. Someone who’s been through the process with a developer can tell you if it was easy or painful.
Web search
This might be the easiest way to assemble a list of design agencies that do what you need. Try to be specific in your search with terms like “web designer Boston” or “health agency web design nonprofit.”
Meet-ups
Attend some designer meet-ups near you. This will give you the chance to press the flesh and find someone you connect with.
Associations
Contact the association that covers what you do and see if they have lists web design and development firms. Also check your local Chamber of Commerce if you’d like someone nearby.

If you really, really must, here are some tips on how to write a good RFP.

[Image: Flickr user opensourceway]

© Talance for Talance Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: hiring, meetup, rfp, web designer

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April 13, 2012
9:00
Spotlight: How a Hands-On Creative Retreat Builds Community Online
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

Ever wonder how other organizations run their web projects so successfully? Learn through Talance Client Spotlights, where you can connect with peers to pick up inspiration and proven tips you can apply to your website or online course.

Liz Engelman

Liz Engelman’s greatest enemy is the unexamined question. As a dramaturg, her job is to identify the questions a play asks, and the questions to ask of the play. She’s a bit like the confusion police; identifying the difference from good and bad confusion –anything from intentions, to anachronisms to logical gaffes. With her help, a play can be closer to the playwright’s initial vision. In short, she helps make plays become their best selves. For anyone who’s thinking, “There’s no part of my life that wouldn’t benefit from a little dramaturgy,” have hope. You can apply to Tofte Lake Center, a nonprofit creative retreat that looks a little more like your most idyllic summer camp fantasy in Ely, Minn. TLC’s purpose is to apply the principles of dramaturgy to all artistic pursuits. Read on for more about how a very in-person organization builds community online.
How does one become a dramaturg?
“I learned that just because another organization used their website in a particular way, it doesn’t necessarily apply to mine.”

I first heard about dramaturgy when I was a junior in high school, when I was taking a class called Madness in Literature. My teacher said, “Liz, you should be a dramaturg,” and I said, “Dramawhat?” She replied that I had the ability to look at the big picture and relate it to the specific. And vice versa. And I thought, “That’s cool, but how is that a job?”

Later, when I concentrated in theater at Brown, my professor suggested that I create an independent study in dramaturgy. I thought, “Okay, two different people are telling me to do this; I better listen…” So I did.
How did that evolve into Tofte Lake Center?
After 20 years of working as a dramaturg, I began to realize that there are ways of telling stories other than through the theatre. Each media has its own narrative, its own way to tell a story. I wanted to create and environment for these different types of stories to emerge. Often we hear about starving artists who live miserably in a garret somewhere creating their life’s work, and I thought there had to be a way to live as an artist without a struggle – to be nurtured and inspired and surrounded by beauty in the process. So I did what a dramaturg does: articulate the intention, build the story, take yourself seriously… and the dream starts to form.
What kinds of artists visit the center?
I like to say creative thinkers rather than only artists, as many creative people don’t identify as artists. However, most people who come are: they are playwrights and writers of all genres, (novelists and poets), musicians, visual artists, dancers and choreographers. The Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theatre Company has been in residence each of our 4 years, and have become a community face for the center. Our artists have come from all over the country (and Australia!) for their weeklong residencies, and we have been fortunate to receive funding from the Jerome Foundation to support our emerging artists program for artists who reside in either Minnesota or New York.
How do you represent a decidedly in-person creative retreat in the online world?
At first it was hard to think of how to translate an experience that’s very location-based onto a screen. Then I started thinking about how to communicate TLC’s values–conversation, innovation, community, creativity, sun and water. When I thought about how to share the impulses of and behind TLC’s story, the role of the website became clearer.

The website has become a way of maintaining our off-campus community. The site has been a way of deepening and broadening it, to partner with artists and make connections, using the site as a conduit for conversation. I used to think of a website as a static thing. I thought of our old website as an online brochure. Now it’s malleable, evolving — a way to tell our story.

I’ve found images as a way of building partnerships and interest, too. One of the artists whose images we included in our Flickr gallery thanked me for sharing his work. Letting people know I could link to their profile was a major way of building traffic to the site. The partnering opportunities have been more helpful than I’d imagined. I want to continue to find ways to use more photos as an attractor to the site.

A collaborative online gallery of Tofte Lake Center artists
What are some of the most helpful parts of your website?
Putting our applications online has been most helpful. I was getting submissions via e-mail before, and I would have to send each e-mailed application to our review panel, one at a time as I received them, and they had the most difficult task of having to keep track a hundred incoming individual applications. An applicant might resend something, and the panelist might forget where they put it, and worry that something got lost. It was thus immensely time intensive on my part. Now applicants can submit online, and it’s all stored on the website. I heard from someone who applied last year who was so happy to see that the application was now online. It was a mature professional step up.

Tofte Lake Center's online application for artists
What did you learn through a major website redesign process?
I was not expecting to learn as much as I did. I had been thinking more about the result than the process. It took longer than I thought, and this turned out to be extremely informative. The process was completely dramaturgical: identifying what I was trying to do and the best ways to structure and say it. Working on a website is a continual process. The story keeps evolving.

I also learned that just because another organization used their website in a particular way, it doesn’t necessarily apply to mine. They made certain choices in how to tell their story, but that’s not my story. Realizing that: that’s what a dramaturg does.

© Talance for Talance Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: artist retreat, community, dramaturg, flickr, liz Engelman, nonprofit, spotlight, tofte lake center, traffic, web design

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April 06, 2012
9:00
Measurable Goals: the Difference Between E-learning Success and Failure
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Think back on every one of your failed New Year’s resolutions. The reason you failed probably had something to do with abstract, unspecific goals: get thin, exercise more, enjoy life more. Without clarity, it’s nearly impossible to figure out how to succeed. You’re doomed by January 2.

Goals should be less abstract, more concrete

[Image: Flickr user opensourceway]

The same kind of thinking can harm a new e-learning project. Unspecific goal-setting can prevent you from knowing if your e-learning project is a success. If before you begin developing your training curriculum, you specify abstract goals like, “train employees,” “put this PowerPoint presentation online,” or “set up e-learning infrastructure,” you’re bound for failure. Instead, think about what success looks like, think about how you’ll arrive at success, and you’ll know if your online training program is doing what it should.

An easier way of arriving at a list of goals is to pose these simple questions to yourself or your team:
- Why do you want to do the training?
- What will your learners get out of it?
When you answer these questions, make sure to attach a number (like a percentage), so it’s measurable and a due date, so you have a focus and target–a must for continued funding.
Measurable, actionable and realistic e-learning goals
As soon as you pose meaningful questions to your team, you’ll find it’s much easier to create measurable, actionable and realistic e-learning goals. That will also help you keep spending in check and calculate the return on your e-learning investment. Training programs are expensive, so you need to be able to show how well your new e-learning initiative works.

What might those goals look like?
- Transfer 50% of training programs into online format by the end of the next fiscal year.
- Train 95% of employees in HIPAA requirements by January 1.
- Increase awareness of new products by 25% among sales staff by the end of the quarter.
- Successfully operate new medical device in five minutes or less by the product launch.
See how easily you’d be able to see if you met those goals or not? Prefix each list item with “Did we …” and you can answer each by a simple yes or no. Also by setting goals at the beginning, you’ll have something concrete to shoot for.

© Talance for Talance Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: e-learning, goal, planning, roi, strategy

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March 30, 2012
14:25
Want a Painless Website? Get Planning
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
The devil, they say, is in the details. Anyone who’s planned a considerable undertaking–be it a new kitchen or strategy for your organization–knows that the beast can rear its ugly head when you haven’t thought the project through well enough.

Want a Painless Website? Get Planning

[Image: Flickr user opensourceway]

Before you begin to think about selecting a technology partner for your new website redesign, you should do a little preliminary planning so you know what to look for when it comes time to choose. Now would also be a good time to do an internal needs assessment, so get your team involved to help.

Start with having the answers to these questions handy, and you’ll be glad you did when it comes time to start shopping for a web designer or put together an RFP (request for proposal).
1. When do you want to launch?
2. Do you already have a budget established? If your funds don’t meet your aspirations, can you break the project into phases?
3. What is the main goal for the new website or redesign (update the design, provide a better user experience, target a different audience, etc.)?
4. What’s the site’s concept? In other words, why does it exist?
5. Who is a typical person who might use the website? There might be more than one.
6. What’s the main thing people need to do on your website (search for information, sign up for something, make donations)?
7. What’s your functionality wish list for the new site (calendar, RSS, Twitter feed, Facebook Like button, etc.)?
8. What are some other sites you like, and why?
If you’ve got the answers to these questions, then you’ll be able to answer questions from your web development partner, and you’ll be in a better position to make a decision. Also check A Comprehensive Website Planning Guide from Smashing Magazine for an even more in-depth look into planning successful websites.
Converting to a CMS Website Free Guide
Need a little nudge when it comes to transferring your old website to a new CMS-based website like Drupal? Request a free copy of our website redesigning handbook that offers more tips, as well as templates and examples to take the pain out of planning.

Request your copy now.

© Talance for Talance Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: planning, smashing magazine, web design, workflow

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March 23, 2012
14:03
4 Essential Tests Before Beginning a New Website
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Thinking of embarking on a website redesign? The smartest place to start is by asking the people who use the site what they want. Now is a perfect time to embark on a new project, while you’ve got spring cleaning on the brain. Check out our series on how to spring clean your website for a fresh start.

Here are four tests and surveys you should conduct before you launch new project.
User Needs Survey
Set up a questionnaire survey to find out what your audience thinks is most important about your website. Take their comments into consideration for your needs assessment process. What those survey questions will be largely depend on your own organization’s directives. But a question like this might help you get started.
Please rate the value of each of these features, with 1 being extremely important and 4 being extremely unimportant.
- Ability to log on to access premium material
- A blog
- Video clips that demonstrate how we work
You can request a free quick and easy survey template if you don’t feel like writing your own. Make sure to leave a comments space so people can add features they think might be valuable. This is also a good time to evaluate some of your current processes, like asking people how long it took them to receive feedback or how easy it is to make a donation or pay for an item.
Web Content Test
Having an appealing design is one thing, but having readable copy is another. (Be honest: how much jargon are you using?). The web design industry magazine A List Apart puts it this way:

Whether the purpose of your site is to convince people to do something, to buy something, or simply to inform, testing only whether they can find information or complete transactions is a missed opportunity: Is the content appropriate for the audience? Can they read and understand what you’ve written?

ALA gives helpful instructions on how to test the effectiveness of your content. Examples: try some readability software like Added Bytes, Juicy Studio, and Edit Central (or even Microsoft Word’s built-in Flesch Reading Ease check), or host a moderated reading test.
Accessibility Review
A website is only useful if everyone can use it. Paying attention to accessibility is good practice for all organizations–especially since good accessibility equals good SEO–and it’s a must if you’re a government agency. You can start with these Essential Tips for Making Websites Accessible, and then you might begin a “preliminary review.”

The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative provides instructions for conducting a preliminary review of your website’s accessibility. In short, they recommend selecting a representative sampling of high profile pages (e.g., the welcome page) and those with different layouts and functionality, and testing just a few of those to see how well you’re measuring up.
SEO Audit
Making your website more friendly to search engines is a large but critical undertaking. The good news is any improvement you make is a good one. Schedule a search engine optimization (SEO) audit of your website with a few key goals in mind:
- Are you using heading tags correctly?
- Do you have a sitemap?
- Is your content skimpy?
Check out the 9-Point SEO Checklist for more tips.

© Talance for Talance Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: a list apart, accessibility, Content, section 508, seo, survey, usability, w3c

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March 16, 2012
15:00
Is your training program bleeding you dry?
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Time is money, especially when it comes to educating a group of people. Time is even more money when that group meets in person vs. online. Consider how e-learning can save your budget.

Image: David Castillo Dominici

It’s easy to overlook all of the hidden costs of in-person instructor-led training. There’s real time and cost involved in putting actual bums on actual seats. Just start to jot down the costs of getting people into a room together, and it’s easy to see how the prices quickly shoot up.
Training material costs
- Space rental and overhead
- Day rates
- Instructor travel (airfare, taxis, hotel, tips)
- Learner travel (airfare, taxis, hotel, tips)
- Printing
- Collating
- Binding
- Storage
- Food (breakfast, snacks, lunch, drinks)
- Presentation equipment
I can keep going, but you get the point, right? The instant you start gathering people into a room together, it costs a lot of money.

One of the strongest business cases for e-learning is for lowering training costs. That’s why so many companies turn to e-learning, especially when they have ongoing programs, a large number of people to train or have a geographically dispersed workforce. That was the rationale behind a government-led project Talance completed for a division of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. It’s cheaper to bring people from across the state together online.
Time involved in training
It’s easy to see how the kinds of things you can buy at your local Staples drain the coffers. One item that’s often neglected from “should we move to e-learning” calculations is the cost of time. Instructor-led training simply takes longer than e-learning.

“My company has found that on-ground courses that move to eLearning take about half the ‘seat time’ in their eLearning format,” Judy Unrein says in her article Overcoming Objections to eLearning in Learning Solutions magazine.

Unrein, who is an instructional designer for Nike and who has an M.Ed. in Instructional Design from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, goes on to say that one cause is because an online course is more streamlined. All of the “nice to know” filler information that instructors share in classrooms has been removed by the time it goes online.
Minimizing financial risk
Live trainings are also critically scheduled, and the margin of error is much narrower. For example, one of our clients, a department of a New York-based college, recently had an in-person event where the instructor didn’t show up. He simply forgot, and there was a room of people clearing their throats waiting for the star to show. They rescheduled for the following week, duplicating all the costs of the lost event.

Problems can happen online too, but when mistakes of this magnitude happen in person, the financial drain is much higher.

While every program is different, the savings of an e-learning program vs. instructor-led training can be significant. Every program considering moving training online should carefully research hidden costs of bringing a room of people together.

© Talance for Talance Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: boston, department of public health, e-learning, ilt, massachusetts, online courses, roi, training

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March 09, 2012
12:00
Spotlight: How One Organization’s Planning Lead To a Traffic Boost
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

Ever wonder how other organizations run their web projects so successfully? Learn through Talance Client Spotlights, where you can connect with peers to pick up inspiration and proven tips you can apply to your website or online course.

Caitlyn Slowe

Caitlyn Slowe is a master juggler. She’s the go-to person to manage what’s published and when on the Health Imperatives website, a health agency in Brockton, Mass. As her organization has discovered, the items that appear on the site receive a huge boost in traffic, so hers is a key position. Here’s how she manages the homepage and about 20 smaller sites on top of her other job duties. Hint: organization really matters.
What’s your title, and how does that fit in with managing the website?
I’m the Manager of Special Projects for Health Imperatives, and one of the “projects” that my title refers to is our new website. Health Imperatives has about 40 different program sites ranging from family planning programs to a domestic violence shelter to GLBT youth services and so on.

My title was created last year when we were preparing for the launch of the new website. In addition to managing the website, I still continue to do my previous responsibilities like grant writing, event coordination, budget tracking, report writing, etc., for several Health Imperatives programs.
What areas of the site are you primarily responsible for?
I manage all of the main page content for www.healthimperatives.org and about half of the program sub-sites (some programs manage their own). On the main page, I find and post content for “In the News,” create the Slides for the slideshow (and usually the pages that they link to) and post program updates under “Announcements.”

I also manage all of the main Health Imperatives social media sites, which currently include Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
How do you keep up on learning website manager skills?
I love NTEN’s (Nonprofit Technology Network) blogs and webinars on web design and management, and Mashable also has some excellent articles and tips on managing websites and social media. The Nonprofit Facebook Guy has great info geared specifically toward nonprofits. I’m fairly new to web management, so I basically try to read anything I can find relating to nonprofit web design or social media!
What does your day-to-day strategy look like for keeping the site updated?
One of the challenges I have with managing the website is that it is not my only job responsibility, so to make it more manageable for myself, I create a calendar for each month and map out how/when I’ll update the three sections of the main page (News, Slides, and Announcements).

A snapshot of Slowe's planning calendar

I seek out and write the News blurbs and design the Slides in advance so that I can spend a minimal amount of time dropping them onto the site when their day comes up on the calendar. It’s worked well so far!

I try to update at least two different main page sections per week to keep the info fresh, and I leave each item up for at least one-two weeks (unless it is time-sensitive) so frequent site visitors will see as much new content as possible.

For social media, I rely heavily on HootSuite to help me keep up to date. I aim to do at least one tweet per day, and I limit Facebook to three posts per week (usually Monday, Wednesday, Friday). HootSuite allows me to schedule a week or more worth of Twitter and Facebook updates in advance, which is a huge time-saver!

Hootsuite is a huge timesaver for Twitter campaigns
It’s been half a year since the new site launched. What trends do you see in usage?
We have seen an exciting increase in traffic to our website since the new page launched, and it seems that people are enjoying the new format. Google Analytics is a great tool to show results in real numbers – for instance:

In 2011 between 1/29-2/28 we saw 1,580 (unique) visitors

In 2012 during that same time month-long period we’ve had 4,123 (unique) visitors (yay!)

We’re also seeing an increase in new users (vs. returning users), which tells us that our website is reaching a broader audience than it has in the past.

We’re finding that events/trainings that are advertised on our main page slideshow are receiving drastic increases in attendance. For example, a recent recurring training saw a 150% increase in registration after we advertised it on the main page slideshow. Very exciting to see these results, and we’ll definitely continue to advertise this way!
What’s the most useful part of the site?
I’d say that the slideshow has been the most useful part of the site, because it’s the first thing visitors see and can help us direct them to certain program sub-sites that otherwise may not have gotten as much exposure.

The Shopping Cart has also been a very useful tool, as it allows people to make donations to specific programs and also lets them register for trainings or events online, which is definitely the preferred method for our web-savvy visitors!

© Talance for Talance Blog, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: facebook, health imperatives, Hootsuite, linkedin, mashable, nonprofit, nonprofit facebook guy, nten, project management, social media, spotlight, traffic, twitter, Web strategy

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March 02, 2012
12:00
When Browsers Make Websites Look Bad
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Thank you, Internet Explorer, for another gray hair. As if I needed that. But there you go, rolling out another version of your web browsing software and forcing all of our clients to upgrade from IE7 or IE8 to your new IE9. IE9 is the primary browser on 36.2% of Windows 7 machines, and it’ll keep growing.

When Browsers Make Websites Look Bad

Now all of our clients’ websites will look funky, and they’ll wonder why.

Then the phone will start ringing. I’ll have to explain that their websites were built before your new browser appeared. I’ll have to tell them that a website doesn’t automatically update to match new browsers. I’ll have to find a way to explain why IE9 is a web designer’s nightmare.

In other words, I’ll have to explain what cross-browser compatibility is, and why the same sites look different depending on which browser someone is using.
What is cross-browser compatibility?
For this, I rely on NetMechanic, who describes the way browsers interpret information with this analogy:

Your Web browser is a translation device. It takes a document written in the HTML language and translates it into a formatted Web page. The result of this translation is a little like giving two human translators a sentence written in French and asking them to translate it into English. Both will get the meaning across, but may not use the same words to do so.

When we roll out a new website, we’ve got it covered. We test all of our new sites in the most used browsers to make sure they display pretty much the same in each. We also build our sites to “degrade gracefully.” In other words, if some new and unidentified browser or device comes out that doesn’t support the way we’ve built the site, it still looks reasonably OK. We do all of this before we even launch.

Sometimes, though, a new Internet browser pops up, and all sites need to be tested against it. It’s always a good idea for anyone with a website to make sure their site is usable across all the most popular browsers (old and new), mobile devices (like iPads or iPhones), or any other web browsing devices.

The web browsers that matter
How does one find out what browsers are most important for testing a site? Start with looking at an analytics account, something like Google Analytics or Clicky. Another handy technique is to check usage share for most browsers. According to StatCounter, here’s how they’re breaking down for February 2012:
- Internet Explorer – 35.75%
- Chrome – 29.84%
- Firefox – 24.89%
- Safari – 6.76%
- Opera – 2.03%
- Other – 0.73%
February 24, 2012
14:00
How To Hire a Web Designer
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

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.

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Post tags: budget, design, project management, roi, web development

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February 17, 2012
12:00
Reader Question: How Do I Engage a Group of Online Learners That Isn’t Participating?
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
We have an online course that consists mainly of students who know each other. The rest participate minimally and do not seem engaged. How do I level the playing field and make the new students feel welcomed?

Darren

People learn better in teams

It’s always tough to be the new kid, whether it’s your first day at an elementary school or an online course. It’s understandable that a smaller group of people is finding it difficult to relate to a bigger group that already knows one another.

Engaging learners is always a challenge, but it’s critically important in an online training format. Here are a couple strategies that will help learners join the group and get to know the other participants.
Have learners introduce themselves
The first step is to make sure you’re having introducing students to one another. I often make the first exercise in an online course a personal introduction, where people have to answer a few questions about themselves, where they come from, their goals for the course, and usually something irreverent like where they’d like to go on vacation, which can spark conversation.

I’ll often make this a two-part exercise, in which students have to respond to one or more other student’s postings, which helps get them talking with each other.

It also helps to have learners post pictures of themselves, write a bio, or share social media, so the others can start to make a connection with them outside of the class structure.
Create opportunities for partnering
Creating groups is a helpful tactic to have students talk throughout the course. Think about pairing the way you would seating at a dinner party: match up the quiet folks with the chatty ones.

Also structure partner exercises, like role-plays, where you pair up the new people with the others.
This overview of creating and facilitating online role-plays from Australian Flexible Learning Framework provides a good overview. Here’s how role-plays work, according to them:
- participants are allocated roles to act out within a scenario
- participants solve problems that are introduced within the course of the roleplay
- participants and facilitators take part in a debriefing stage, either online or in a face-to-face situation.
The site gives sample exercises targeted to different groups of learners and also gives instructional design tips for integrating role-plays into your courses.

Have a look at this discussion that carefully breaks down a role-play in an online course from the Articulate forums. In this situation, a participant is asked to do a role-play with someone in their office,
but the idea can be adapted to a purely online format.

Check out more articles on making your online course better.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Ask on the comments form at the bottom of this page, on Twitter @talance, or on Facebook. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

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Post tags: Articulate, assessment, courses, e-learning, exercises, instructional design, role-play, tips, training

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February 09, 2012
13:00
Guest Post: Grow Your Business: You Fuse, You Win!
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Lina Arsenault

[Silicon Valley marketing executive Lina Arseneault is our guest writer today, offering perspective on generational diversity in marketing, including your web strategy.]

By Lina Arseneault
Embrace generational diversity
Are you a for-profit organization looking for people who will help make more money than they will cost the business? Are you a nonprofit employer seeking employees with passion for the cause you serve? Does your workplace use the full breadth of talent available to it? Are you attracting the right candidates?

The key to making the most out of these challenges lies in embracing generational diversity. It will foster a culture of flexibility and collaboration in which everyone is responsible for the high quality and timeliness of the final product.
Fuse: Making Sense of the New Cogenerational Workplace by Jim Finkelstein with Mary Gavin, includes a bonus chapter from Ayelet Baron.

I love to read! A few weeks ago, I went to visit my parents in Northern Canada. Not only was I looking forward to spending time with them but I was also looking forward to the long plane ride from San Francisco so I could indulge in uninterrupted reading time. For this trip, I selected a few books including “Fuse: Making Sense of the New Cogenerational Workplace“. My colleague and friend Ayelet Baron, VP Strategy for Cisco Canada, contributed a bonus chapter to the book and I wanted to check it out.

Fuse isn’t just another generations book. It’s a thought provoking, entertaining and useful read that will have you questioning your beliefs about how to get the most out of generational diversity. It shows you how to weave together the experience of Boomers and the techno-smarts of Millennials in ways that benefit you and your organization. Authors Jim Finkelstein and Mary Gavin suggest that common points of fusion exist in all of us.
Pop quiz
Find out if your organization is cogenerationally savvy, take the Fuse quiz.

There are vast differences between employees fresh out of school and their more seasoned counterparts. As a team, working in more flexible ways gives you a chance to leverage the best qualities of each generation. That means young people can learn how to be professionals at the same time that older or less knowledgeable team members can come up to speed on their technological skills.
To find out whether your organization is cogenerationally savvy, take the Fuse quiz. Your results might surprise you.
The right kind of job descriptions
Are you attracting the right candidates? How much time and effort do you put in crafting the right job description? Does it have the correct tone?

Resist the temptation to save time by recycling a generic job description. Instead, you should consider an extra step. The Fuse authors explain the importance of tone and positioning in job descriptions.

A Millennial won’t read past the first sentence of a job description unless it hooks her. If the first line doesn’t explain why the organization is great and how it’s making a difference in the community, city, county, state, country, world, or universe, chances are the Millennial won’t bother applying.

Contrast that with the old approach of leading with the laundry list of all the job responsibilities. It might be worth taking the time to audit your job description template to ensure that you include the emotional hook in that key first sentence. In doing so, you’ll have a better chance of enticing high potential candidates to read beyond the first sentence. Consider emphasizing employees, community, and environment. Other considerations (as long as it’s true) are the promise of meaningful work and access to technology.
Reverse mentoring
Does your organization have a reverse mentoring program?

Reverse mentoring was first popularized by former GE Chairman Jack Welsh and it’s been around for about a decade. It’s a relatively new type of mentoring where the traditional roles are reversed and junior employees take on the role of teacher to their more experienced co-workers. The Millennials are coming into the workforce with networking and global-mindedness skills from which older generations can learn. In addition, Millennials are technology natives who can drive a role reversal by mentoring technology-challenged Boomers.

Read about how Nitin Kawale, President of Cisco Canada benefits from reverse mentoring.

If you don’t have a program in place, the good news is that reverse or reciprocal mentoring can take place within existing company mentoring programs. What you’re looking to do is match up employees of different generations and encourage them to meet on a regular basis to exchange ideas. Mix and match: don’t restrict mentoring relationships to people of the same gender or same fields. There so much to learn from people who are different from ourselves.
Cogenerational communication
How frequently do you communicate with your team and how do you do it?

Millennials expect management communication to be:
- Positive
- Respectful
- Motivational
- Electronic
- In person, if the message is really important
- Timely
From Fuse on “How Millennials view communication”:

There is no need to take time to listen to a voice-mail when you see a number on your smartphone – just hit redial.
Gaming = entertainment + work
Millennials are fast becoming an influential factor in the workplace and an increasingly important part of its future. They grew up with computers and cell phones the way Boomers and Gen Xers grew up with typewriters and corded telephones. Boomers see technology as a tool, or even a toy, while younger workers see it as an extension of themselves. Millennials see themselves as “technology natives,” sensible multitaskers who get a lot done. Most of them mix entertainment and work.

The Kids Are Alright: How the Gamer Generation Is Changing the Workplace by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, is an excellent reference on the impact of video games on young people. The authors argue that gamers collect valuable knowledge from their entertainment and that they’re poised to use that knowledge to transform the workplace.

Move over Stephen Covey, these are the 7 Habits of Highly Typical Gamers:
1. Everyone Can Succeed
2. You Gotta Play the Odds
3. Learn From the Team, Not the Coach
4. Kill Bosses: Trust Strategy Guides
5. Watch the Map
6. Can’t See It; Ignore It
7. Demand the Right Team
Why not help the gamers you care about find teams that match their level — and their passion for a particular challenge — and you’ll be amazed at what they can do.

Are you beginning to see how you can make Millennials’ habits work for you and for the gamification of the business (it will happen whether you like it or not)? Respect is the starting point of any relationship. All it takes is the genuine desire to learn from each other.

You Fuse, You Win!

It’s not always easy to get along… That’s because we all see things differently. And different is not bad! In fact, it can be very good! Successful businesses cultivate new and innovative ideas. From those ideas come ways to expand the business by offering new services, working more efficiently, and marketing more effectively.

As a team, working in new and more flexible way gives us a chance to leverage the best qualities of each generation. That means young people can learn how to be professionals at the same time that older or less knowledgeable team members can come up to speed on their technological skills.
You fuse, you win!
- Benefit from the best qualities of each generation
- Give young people the opportunity to learn how to be professionals as well as business leaders
- Let young people to teach others how to use technology more effectively
- Use the full dimension of available talent
Fuse: Making Sense of the New Cogenerational Workplace is a great read. I especially like the call-out features of the book. These include “fuse tips” – helpful suggestions for connection opportunities and “fusions” – bulleted list summaries that conclude every chapter.

A fused workplace can provide tremendous benefits in terms of improved morale, outside-the-box thinking, greater teamwork, and an atmosphere of mutual understanding and respect. In such an environment, there is less focus on the specific schedule of when or where the work is accomplished. The benefit to the business is a more nimble and efficient organization with increased capacity to effectively meet client needs.
Use ALL your talent
Are you creating a workplace that uses the full dimension of talent available to it? Remember that “you snooze, you lose” and “you fuse, you win”.

If you happen to be on a long flight, you might enjoy reading Drive and A Whole New World by Daniel H. Pink.
About the author
Lina Arseneault is Millennial at heart. Follow her on Twitter, read her blog.

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Post tags: Fuse, generations, guest post, Jim Finkelstein, Lina Arseneault, marketing

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February 03, 2012
11:00
Open Letter to Board Members
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

Hey, I get it. You’re a dedicated board member and you are invested all the way from your hair follicles to your bunions in your nonprofit organization’s mission. You want everyone to know how awesome your nonprofit is. For whatever reason, what comes naturally is to emblazon your mission statement everywhere you can: annual reports, brochures and, in a streak of misinformed enthusiasm, your website homepage.

Oh, no. No, no. You are sorely mistaken there. Your mission statement does not belong on your homepage. I would argue that thing shouldn’t be within throwing distance of your website. Your site is not a place where you need to talk about how you’re meeting your organizational vision. In fact, the words “vision,” “mission statement” and “statement of purpose” have no business anywhere on your website.

Why? Because nobody cares. I’m not trying to be mean here, there’s just no other way to say it. I guarantee the people you’re serving care more about what you’re doing for them than looking at your gobbledygook mission statement.

I’ll tell you now that no pregnant teen, no neglected pet, no activist, congregant, health worker, educator, mentor, counselor or any other type online audience member visiting a nonprofit’s website ever needs to know the mission statement. Not one!

I’m writing to you directly, dear board member, because you’re the unseen reverser of many a good decision about website homepages. I know this because in my work at a web development firm, I lead our clients through a painstaking process of identifying the most important information for the homepage. We look for something that will keep them there longer than 10 seconds. Too often a board member steps in during final approval to insist on the mission statement going front and center. So back we step.

Listen, I’m not a board member. I don’t know what goes on behind doors when choosing a mission statement. It could be a mixed martial arts battle over which words to choose (“innovation” or “enrich”? “Potential” or “realize”?). You might have bloody lips and bruises that prove your mix of bizpeak is the best. Respect, man. That’s got to be tough.

Still, though. It doesn’t change that no one cares.

So for pity’s sake, pretty please stop insisting your mission statement appears anywhere on your website homepage.

Respectfully yours,

Frustrated web developers everywhere

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Post tags: Content, copy, marketing, mission statement, writing

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January 27, 2012
17:11
Get More Website Traffic Without Thinking Too Hard
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

The key to success is consistency. Hard work and luck help too, but just knocking it out on a regular schedule is incredibly important. Web site promotion is no different; you have to tell people to visit it consistently and continually.

Now, saying, “I’m going to be consistent,” is quite different from actually doing it. Otherwise, everyone would keep their New Year’s resolutions instead of letting them fizzle out by March.

So it helps if you can attach your marketing reminder to something you give out all the time. That way you don’t have to always remember.

Here’s an example from a price label on a dress I recently bought. Notice how Calvin Klein stamps their website on every label. That’s an easy and consistent way for them to remind people they have a website.

Calvin Klein's web address is on every price tag

Look at the back of this price tag from REI. They’re using it to consistently remind people they have a member reward program.

REI reminds customers of its member program on every tag

Yes, you need to be consistent with your SEO and your online newsletter, but look around you and note the other missed opportunities to mention your organization and its website. Start with your website and see how it can promote itself. Your business cards? Outgoing voice mail? Car bumper? Attach it to something else that’s always being distributed that you might never have considered, and it will make your job that much easier.

Want more ideas? Our task-a-day web promotion checklist gives you many ideas you can use to promote your site.

Have ideas? Leave them in the comments below.

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Post tags: internet marketing, promotion, tips

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January 20, 2012
14:00
Learn from Apple’s Interactive Digital Textbook
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

Apple's Interactive Digital Textbook

A year ago, skeptics were doubting the value of learning through a cell phone. When McGraw-Hill released its “mConnect” open-standard mobile learning platform aimed at emerging markets, some tech pundits, presumably who sit at computers all day, were finding it difficult to think in any way other than sitting in a classroom or staring at a monitor for instructor-led education.

That’s before everyone became addicted to their iPads and education apps started multiplying by the thousands. On January 19, Apple kicked off its education event in New York releasing iBooks 2 and highlighting its iTunes U app, which made the limitations of traditional textbooks – namely that they’re dry enough to be a fire hazard, terribly dated and incredibly one-dimensional – painfully clear.

Textbook traditionalists might not have been like me, spending more time doodling in the margins than reading the copy between them. They might have been able to memorize the dates and formulas they read as printed in chapters. But a decade of working with online students has proven that you have to meet them where they learn best. Active learning is always the best kind of learning.

Even if you’re not ready to fill your professional development training program with iPads, remember the classrooms of 20 years ago were different places than they are now. New learners learn differently and expect to have access to information and quick feedback. As you think about the way you present information to students, be ready to meet their expectations and embrace the innovations that are proven to keep them engaged.

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Post tags: education, ibooks, ipad, itunes u, mcgraw-hill, mconnect

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January 13, 2012
10:00
Top 5 Predictions About Nonprofit Websites in 2012
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

If there’s one takeaway from 2011, it’s that the economy is haywire and technology is evolving faster than an oiled bullet. In that kind of nutty atmosphere, it can be a challenge to predict what will happen to web-based technology in the coming months.

What does 2012 hold for nonprofit websites?

We do see a few trends emerging for the next year, however. Here are our predictions for 2012 web trends. Take note for when you next talk to your web design firm about and also pay attention to so you can to succeed in your NGO or company.
1. More design for mobile devices.
Look around you. What’s in the hands of the people surrounding you, including your own? An iPad or iPhone? Nook? Kindle? Tablet? Blackberry? Everybody’s using some kind of handheld device. While corporate websites have been mobile-compliant for years, nonprofits will finally start to catch up. Want to peer into the future of mobile design? Read Mobile Web Design Trends and Best Practices.
2. App-lification of websites.
All those people with mobile devices are getting used to responsive design that they can manipulate with their fingers. Move over “point and click,” and make way for “touch and swipe.” People are beginning to expect interactive design with websites, so expect to see websites look and behave more like they came from the app store.
3. Websites focused on user experience.
Since people are spending so much time with their heads bowed over their handheld devices, they also expect to understand what to do with an app without having to guess. This means websites will be built with careful attention to user experience design (UX), in other words, built with humans in mind. Nonprofit leaders might finally understand that the less people have to think about a website, the more likely they’ll donate, sign petitions, volunteer or otherwise participate. Finally!
4. Less Flash.
We’ve long believed Flash to be big and clunky plug-in, with way too many distracting splash screens and blank spaces on the iPad. There are other technologies out there that make web movies and play on a host of devices, so expect to see more of these letters in the alphabet soup: AJAX, CSS3 and HTML 5.
5. Move to online donations.
Smart charities are already asking for money online with little more than a click. Many smaller nonprofits have been slow to relinquish check-cashing for ecommerce web design. We see some of that fear waning, and expect more nonprofits that don’t allow online donations to begin earning some electronic cash.

What do you think will be trending in 2012? Give your vote for one of these five in the comments below or tell us what you think we’ll see in the future.

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Post tags: design, e-commerce functionality, fundraising, navigation, nonprofit, trends

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January 06, 2012
15:39
Best Articles from 2011
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

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.

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Post tags: Web strategy

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December 30, 2011
14:22
10 Horrid Words You Must Never Use (Plus, Win a Copy of Content Rules)
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Be a better blogger

Here’s a nauseating mix of nonsense terms that are far too common on the web, in blogs, in e-mail newsletters, in online training or in writing in general. They’re collectively called “Frankenspeak,” according to Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman, authors of the book Content Rules. The term is described on the Content Rules book website as “convoluted text that doesn’t sound like it was spoken by a human, but instead sounds like it was created in a laboratory.”

Handley and Chapman have launched a campaign to ban these words and phrases from “marketing, sales, corporate communications, business schools, blogs and boardrooms.” Handley reveals what she considers the 10 most horrendous examples on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog. Take note whether you’re a blogger or in charge of writing anything, and never use these phrases again:
1. Impactful
2. Leverage
3. Synergy
4. Revolutionary (or innovative)
5. Email blast
6. Proactive
7. Solution
8. Buy-in (or other mashed up words like mission-critical or best-of-breed)
9. Run it up the flagpole (or other ridiculous corporate-speak phrases like “eat your own dogfood” or “at the end of the day”)
10. Nazi (when not actually describing a Nazi member, i.e., “brand Nazi”)
Looking for more advice on writing better? Check out 10 Commandments of Writing for the Web and request our free Perfect Blogging Checklist.

Win a Copy of Content Rules
Contest time

[Update! Congratulations to Julie, who won the drawing for a signed copy of Content Rules by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman. This contest may be over, but you're still welcome to keep sending examples of frankenspeak.]

Make the leap from marketing-speak to respectable publisher on the web by following the advice in Content Rules, which you can win as part of Talance’s Customer Appreciation Month festivities. We’re taking the chance to say thanks for letting us work with you on your web and e-learning design and development. Entering is easy: just tell us below in the comments your favorite example of Frankenspeak, and your name will automatically go into the hat for the book drawing.

Note: If you want even more hand-holding, you should check out our grammar gaffes contest, where we’re giving away two hours’ free communications consultation with Kyla Cromer.

Deadline for entries is Jan. 30, 2012. We’ll pick one winner at random from all entries on Jan. 31, 2012 and will notify the winner via e-mail. You must leave your name and a correct e-mail address to qualify.

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Post tags: ann handley, blog, blogging, cc chapman, content rules, contest, copy, customer appreciation, digital dads, marketingprofs, writing

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December 23, 2011
10:00
Last-Minute 9-Point SEO Checklist for 2011
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

The last couple weeks of the year is usually down time in most offices, distracted by holiday parties and run on skeleton crews. We have a productive idea for making the most out of these last nine days of 2011: do a little something to improve your search engine results. We wouldn’t dream of taking you from those festive glasses of bubbly, so we’ve come up with a task-a-day SEO checklist that won’t overwhelm you but that will leave your website performing better in the new year.
SEO Tweaks 1. Know and use heading tags.
These are widely misused but can help visitors as well as search engines navigate your site. The W3C says, "A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces." This Improve the Web article has a great break-down of how you might use the H1 tag, suitable for people who are less than acquainted with HTML mumbo jumbo.
2. Swap out your outdated bold tags.
Search engines like Google scan through the text on your page for keywords – the words that best represent what the page is about. One of the things they look for is words in bold, assuming that you bold things that are important. Bolds should use tags, not outdated bold tags. The Spunky Jones SEO Blog has a nice description of why strong is better than bold for SEO.
3. Submit your site to some directories.
Don’t assume everybody knows your site is there already. Submit it to directories that address what you do. Library Spot has links to some of the most popular nonprofit directories. Don’t forget to look for directories in other countries.
4. Bookmark it.
You might already Tweet the heck out of your site’s articles or pages, but don’t forget other social bookmarking sites. Search Engine Journal has a wicked long list of 125 social bookmarking sites.
5. Add a sitemap.
Search engines use sitemaps to quickly find each page on your site. Add one. If you have a big site, make sure it’s automatically updated.
6. Beef up your content.
Search engines like meaty text. Make sure your site has an adequate amount of text instead of a few floating headlines. If your pages should be longer, go ahead and beef them up. Just make sure to optimize for easy reading.
7. Plan your blog.
The best way to keep the search engines (and people) coming back is to blog. If you don’t have one yet, take a couple hours and plan out some ideas for a new blog you can launch in 2012. If you do have one, still sit down and plan out some ideas for 2012. You’ll appreciate being organized.
8. Update your content.
Everybody – humans and search engines alike – hate old content. Conduct a search-and-destroy mission on old dates and duplicate junk on your site. Our Definitive Website Pre-Launch Checklist is a handy tool for systematically updating.
9. Don’t lose yourself in your quest to be Number One.
Listen, everyone wants to be number one. While it helps to be the first listing in Google, but it’s not worth obsessing over. No matter what certain SEO charlatans promise, it’s impossible to guarantee being listed number one. Just concentrate on building a useful site that works well, and more people will use it.
Free SEO Analysis Contest
Contest time

Improve your search engine readiness with a free SEO analysis – a $600 value. If you win our drawing for a free analysis, we’ll comb through your site to tell you where you can improve your site for better performance on search engines.

How can you be entered to win? Just use the comments below to tell us about the next step you’re going to take to improve your search engine rankings (it’s OK to use one of the tips above – that’s why we wrote them!), and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win.

Deadline for entries is Jan. 23, 2012. We’ll pick one winner at random from all entries on Jan. 24, 2012 and will notify the winner via e-mail. You must leave your name and a correct e-mail address to qualify.

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Post tags: checklist, search engine, seo, tips

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December 16, 2011
9:00
Choose Your E-learning Tools: Essential Dos and Don’ts
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Guest post by: Robin Neidorf

Win Teach Beyond Your Reach!

If you’re asking yourself, “Is running a distance learning program for me?” then read on. Use the following as a checklist while you’re evaluating online education tools. It’s an excerpt from the book Teach Beyond Your Reach by Robin Neidorf. The e-learning guide takes a practical, curriculum-focused approach to setting up and running successful online classes. The guide for new and experienced distance educators allows them to develop and deliver quality e-learning courses and training sessions.
Do:
Ask informed questions.

Demo a tool before you commit to using it.

Try freeware or open-source tools.

Go for low tech whenever possible.

Ask potential students for their input.

Network with other instructors; ask them what they use; compare notes, success stories, and battle scars.

Keep up with changing technology; treat yourself to an occasional seminar or conference.

Stay open, creative, and flexible about your teaching.

Assume that you will find the right solution (although it may not be the one you thought you’d find).
Don’t:
Use technology for its own sake; it must enhance the learning and instructing experience or it will be merely distracting (at best) or a barrier (at worst).

Change your requirements, objectives, or audiences without keeping your partners (especially your technology partners) informed.

Assume everything will work as promised; test and retest (preferably with members of the learner population) before the course begins.

Ignore the unwillingness of your students to use a tool; sometimes they’re not just ready and you may need to take smaller incremental steps than you’d like.

Let failure or challenges discourage you from believing in the possibilities of distance education.

“Get married” to a particular tool or solution; it might not be all things to all situations.

Use the tool as a substitute for good course design and delivery.

Migrate content from one tool to another in a cut-and-paste approach.

BY ROBIN NEIDORF

Robin Neidorf is the author of Teach Beyond Your Reach: An Instructor’s Guide to Developing and Running Successful Distance Learning Classes, Workshops, Training Sessions and More (Information Today, Inc., 2006), soon to be published in an updated second edition. She has taught communications and writing through the University of Phoenix Online and has co-taught creative writing online through the University of Gävle in Sweden. As a consultant, she has helped organizations develop and implement successful distance learning and self-paced tutorial programs. Robin holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Teach Beyond Your Reach Free Book Contest
Contest time

[Update! Congratulations to David, who won the drawing for Teach Beyond Your Reach by Robin Neidorf. This contest may be over, but you're still welcome to keep sending ideas for picking a learning management system or exercise ideas.]

You could win a free copy of Teach Beyond Your Reach as part of Talance’s Customer Appreciation Month, courtesy of e-learning pro and author Robin Neidorf. How can you be entered to win? Just add your favorite training exercise, lesson idea or experience to the comments below, and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win.

Deadline for entries is Jan. 16, 2012. We’ll pick one winner at random from all entries on Jan. 17, 2012 and will notify the winner via e-mail. You must leave your name and a correct e-mail address to qualify.

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December 09, 2011
10:00
Top 8 Places to Feed Your Inner Artist (Plus, Win a Gift Card and Travel Mug)
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
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!
web design inspiration

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December 02, 2011
13:00
Get Out the Red Pen
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Or, Utilizing Effectuated Methodologies (What?)
Kyla Cromer

Guest post by: Kyla Cromer

If what I see surfing around every day is any indication, many people have a hard time writing in a clean, clear way, especially for the web. There aren’t any tricks to it, but here are some key concepts I try to use:
1. First things first. Decide what to say and make the most important points first, in case your reader gets bored or distracted and wanders off mid-read. We all do it.
2. Prepare for scanning. An oldie but goodie: use subheadings, bullets, and numbered lists when you can, in case the reader is skimming. We all do that, too. (More on why we scan.)
3. Cut ruthlessly. When reviewing a draft, imagine you’re a cranky, very impatient person – your great aunt Edna, say – and ask, “So what?” after reading each bit. If there isn’t a good answer, cut it.
4. Think small. Don’t use big words when small ones will do. They slow things down and increase the likelihood your reader will go find something better to do. “Gigantic” is more evocative than “big,” but “utilize” isn’t better than “use.”
5. Write what you know. Avoid words like “evocative” if you don’t know what they mean. There are many free dictionaries on the web.
6. Keep it basic. Skip the trendy terms and expressions, like “planful,” or “that said.” They can have more than one meaning, or be just plain wrong. Some readers will stop to ponder, be confused, or even go look it up. Keep them with you!
All of these points assume you will take time to write a draft or two. Or three. Do it! If possible, have someone else read your draft, too. If you can’t do that, take a long break – preferably overnight – and you’ll likely notice things that are unclear or unnecessary, and catch a mistake or two.

Last, notice I said, “key concepts I try to use.” Don’t drive yourself crazy – or someone writing for you – chasing perfection. One can’t effectuate that no matter what methodology is utilized.
Garbled Grammar Contest
Contest time

[Update! Congratulations to Michael, who won the drawing for a free consultation from communications consultant Kyla Cromer. The contest may be over, but you're still welcome to keep sending your favorite pet peeves. It just feels good to vent.]

Need help with your copy? You can win a free clear-writing or site-review consultation as part of Talance’s Customer Appreciation Month, courtesy of writing and online communications consultant Kyla Cromer. Just add your favorite grammar pet peeve (sentences that end in prepositions, anyone?) to the comments below, and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win.

Note: You can pick up more tips on terrible writing with our 10 Horrid Words contest, where you can win a signed copy of the excellent book Content Rules, written by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman.

Deadline for entries is January 2, 2012. We’ll pick one winner at random from all entries on January 3, 2012 and will notify the winner via e-mail. You must leave your name and a correct e-mail address to qualify.

BY KYLA CROMER

Kyla Cromer is a writer and editor who works on projects on and off the web, uses various types of social media, blogging and web content management platforms, and offers website consulting. She also provides tech support house calls for little old ladies in her neighborhood. Reach Kyla through KylaCromer.com, Twitter @kylacromer, LinkedIn or by emailing kyla@kylacromer.com.

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November 24, 2011
10:00
How We Love Thee, Customers
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Customer Appreciation Month = Par-TAY!

We’re letting the deals flow through the whole month of December, because it’s Customer Appreciation Month at Talance.

Why? Oh, just because we love you. From time to time we like to come up with excuses for expressing our gratitude for your support, loyalty and general fandom.
A month of fun-days
Sounds like fun, right? Here’s what we’ve got lined up:
December 2 Garbled Grammar Contest
Tap into your inner curmudgeon and share your favorite mixed metaphor, mysterious company tagline or other language gaffe. You’ll be entered to win a free clear-writing or site-review consultation from writing and online communications consultant Kyla Cromer. (Kyla’s current favorite: “Qwest is becoming CenturyLink. Two companies, stronger connected.”)
December 9
Cutest Mug Ever and Gift Card

Share where you find design inspiration, and you’ll receive a gift card via e-mail. One lucky entrant will receive a limited edition Talance travel mug. Man, these things are cute.
December 16 Teach Beyond Your Reach Drawing
Enter to win a free copy of Robin Neidorf’s acclaimed book about e-learning Teach Beyond Your Reach: An Instructor’s Guide to Developing and Running Successful Distance Learning Classes, Workshops, Training Sessions and More. All you have to do is tell us about your favorite training activity.
December 23 Drawing for a free SEO analysis
Tell us what you plan to do to make your website more findable on the web, and pick up nine quick tips for improvement. We’ll select one entrant to win a free SEO analysis and report – a $600 value!
December 30 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. Ann is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and C.C. is the Founder of Digital Dads.
Logistics
Here’s how it’ll work. Every week we’ll publish a new special offer on the blog either from us or one of our trusty partners. And, because we appreciate future customers too, we’re making each offer available to anyone, whether they’ve worked with us before or not.

A new contest opens up every single week of December on the blog and runs for 30 days. Specific details about each offer will be posted with each post, so make sure you’re checking back for updates every week. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed (not sure what an RSS feed is?) or sign up for our Weekly Deal E-mail list so you don’t miss a thing.
Keep in the loop
Each week’s treat will debut on our blog, but we’ll send notifications also on our Twitter account and on our Facebook page to learn more. So, while you’re thinking about it:

Follow us on Twitter.

Like us on Facebook.

Sign up for our Weekly Deal E-mail list

Excited? We are too! From all of us at Talance: thank you!
Teach Beyond Your Reach: An Instructor’s Guide to Developing and Running Successful Distance Learning Classes, Workshops, Training Sessions and More

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November 18, 2011
10:00
Learn To Listen, Get Great Ideas
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
QuickBooks just did something smart. They asked us what we thought of their QuickBooks Online Plus service in a survey. Since we’re a bunch of technologists who think deeply about how to make processes smoother, we told them, in detail.

Asking wasn’t the smartest part about what they did, though. Following up was. One of their software developers scheduled a phone call with us, and we all got on the phone for 20 minutes – their tech team and ours – and hashed out some really good ideas for making the service better.

The benefit for them? Good ideas that appeal to clients, expressed intelligently.

The benefit for us? The promise of better service with our online accounting system.

When was the last time you asked the people you serve what they think? Are they learning everything they can? Are they finding what they need on your website? If you ask, you might find some excellent ideas for improvement. Think of sending a website user survey as a first step. We also wrote about this last month when a reader asked us the question How Do I Get Feedback on My New Website?
Your Turn
While we’re talking about the benefits of feedback, take a minute to tell us what you think of our newsletter. You might even win a gift certificate. You lucky dog, you.

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November 11, 2011
14:30
Everybody Loves a Makeover
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Anybody who’s seen any teen romantic comedy worth its salt knows the makeover scene. It goes something like this (cue trendy pop song):

Cool friend takes dork friend to the mall. Dork exits the fitting room in a preppy outfit, friend shakes head. Dork tries on a rock-and-roll outfit with sunglasses, snaps fingers. Friend pushes dork back into fitting room. Dork emerges wearing the perfect outfit, looking better than friend. Friend gives one resounding nod. Transformation complete.

What’s important in those scenes is that the makeover happens with the help of a cool friend.

You, blog reader, are our cool friend, and it’s makeover time at the Talance flagship newsletter. If you subscribe to our newsletter already, great. If not, you’re probably acquainted with it through our monthly blog summaries. You can also refresh your memory by looking through our blog archive. And if you don’t subscribe, sign up now!

So help us find the perfect mix of what you want to read and find useful by taking our newsletter survey. Bonus: if you give your e-mail address, you’ll be entered into a drawing for an Amazon gift card.

Take our newsletter survey: [bit.ly]

Thanks!

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November 04, 2011
9:00
What Is the Coolest E-learning Video You Have Seen Online?
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
This is an excellent question that I found while trolling through LinkedIn Answers, but it’s not unlike standard brainstorming questions I’m asked every time we launch an e-learning project.

Read the full discussion here, or check out these highlights:

The Machine is Us/ing Us. Very creative and compelling way to tell the story of Web 2.0 through imagery.

5 Tips for Success. Really funny video created by Articulate that shows the capabilities of their product and also outlines what doesn’t work with web presentations.

5 Tips for Success

Mortgage-Backed Securities. A good explanation of a complicated and possibly dry subject.

How about you? Seen any examples of e-learning videos lately that you particularly like? Add them in the comments below.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Ask on the comments form at the bottom of this page, on Twitter @talance, or on Facebook. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

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October 28, 2011
9:00
Cheat Your Way to a Professional-Looking Web Project
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
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

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October 21, 2011
14:00
Drupal 7: Ready for the Plunge?
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Ready to jump into Drupal 7

One of the least exciting things to hear when you start on a new web project is, “Not yet.”

That’s just what we’ve been saying since Drupal 7 debuted in January 2011. True, it’s a robust and powerful system with excellent accessibility, and we’re using it for a few of our clients now, but not everybody.
Why not jump in? First of all, it’s not quite ready for everyone. Contributors to Drupal 7 are still busy finding and patching bugs and upgrading the features from earlier versions so they work on this new version.
Secondly, it can be a heavy expense. Upgrading from an earlier version of Drupal isn’t simply downloading a patch and refreshing your screen. It’s a whole new website. Any new website takes time to build, not even including moving over all the content (words and images) and testing. Time and complexity equal money, and an organization needs to have a strong case for upgrading before making that decision.
One exception is if you’re using a very old version of Drupal, such as version 5 or earlier. The Drupal community stopped supporting and patching version 5 last year, so they’re vulnerable to security breaches and should be updated as soon as possible.
Our advice? Absolutely pull on your swimsuit, but check with your developer (or just contact us) before plunging into an upgrade.

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October 14, 2011
14:36
Communicate Better Through Imagery
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
[This appeared in the most recent version of our newsletter. Subscribe now so you get monthly tasty tech tidbits and special deals.]

There’s a reason we learn to read with picture books rather than novels. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? We humans are very good at gathering meanings from pictures, even better than we are at interpreting words. Images carry powerful messages to which words can only aspire. You can gather a whole story from a picture (remember Life magazine?), but it’s easy to be distracted by just about anything while reading big blocks of text.

Using well-appointed pictures on your website, online course or other online initiative will not only help you tell your story better, but it can also help your visitors hear you.

Icons are quick informative hits, like this example from Mass Mentoring Partnership.

Favicons help you find the browser page you seek.

An evocative photo can earn a donation or volunteer, such as this stirring one from the Global Animal Foundation.

Here’s a quick test to see whether you’re using imagery effectively on your website: translate it into a language you don’t understand. Google has a good tool for this. Can you tell now what your site is about? Would it make sense to someone who had no background in your industry? If the answer is no, then you must think about what visual elements will help you to communicate your message better.

This issue of the Talance newsletter is all about imagery. Read on for tips and ideas to help you create and use graphics better. Here are a few articles from our blog to get you started:

Web Design Tips for Better Images

You’re Doing It All Wrong! How to Use Pictures on a Website

What Happens If You Go Bonkers for Pictures

20 Free Icon Sets for Non-Profits

The Good, The Bad, The Logo

Do you have any interesting stories about how you’re using imagery effectively? Send us your thoughts and suggestions, and we’ll feature them in an upcoming blog post.

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October 07, 2011
22:56
Reader Question: How Do I Get Feedback on My New Website?
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
We’re getting ready to launch a new website, and I want to know how it’s doing. What’s the best way to get honest feedback?

Thanks,
Roslyn Kruchten

The fact you’re asking that question already puts you on the road to a better website. A new online project doesn’t end when it launches. That’s just the ending of the development. Hopefully, you’ve done your homework into what your audience wants and needs before the launch, because then you can focus on how well you’ve delivered after that.

Here are a few good ways to get feedback on a new website, although it’s a good idea to check how well an established website is doing too.
Issue a survey – the same one you offered before beginning.
It’s always a good idea to put out a survey before you begin any web project to see how you might improve. Its results will tell you what you should build into the site, but it will also set benchmarks. Keep those results, and then after your new website has launched, you can issue the same survey and compare results.

Here’s a free user survey you can print out or e-mail to your audience.
Ask the people you know.
Simply send a message to the people in your contacts lists, though e-mail, on Twitter, Facebook or your other social media accounts. Ask people who have nothing to do with your industry, because they’ll give you insight and help point out jargon. You can ask them to simply respond to your message, or you can create a submission form for them to add anonymous comments.
Set up a usability test.
If you’ve got the time and budget, the best thing to do is set up a usability test. Ideally, you’d have a focus group with subjects and interviewers, seriously studying how they do on your site. The W3C has some excellent test scripts and interview questions you can use to model your own session.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Ask on the comments form at the bottom of this page, on Twitter @talance, or on Facebook. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

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September 30, 2011
15:27
Guest Post: Five Musts for Pictures That Pop
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
By Morgan Ione Yeager

Very often the simple inclusion or exclusion of a particular element can either result in a great photo or in a great photo gone wrong. Here are some details to pay attention to while choosing the photos you upload to your website or use for other media. Also, learn some simple tricks to capture better images in the first place and therefore cut down on editing time.
1. The man who grew a pole out of his head.
Are you looking at the chef or the pole on his head?

This one is really common. Once you start looking out for this you will notice it all the time and it will drive you crazy! Be aware of any kind of vertical or horizontal line that is in the background and behind a person’s head. It can create an odd intersection or look as though person has a weird protrusion. Most often this happens with street poles/signs, door frames or tree branches.
2. Remember that bright colors draw the eye.
If the subject of the photo is in the center of the image, then that’s where you want the viewer’s eye to go … not to the person wearing a bright red shirt in the top right corner. Often a simple crop can get rid of distracting peripheral objects or people.

Flash spots are also something to look out for. Generally taking photos of people in front of mirrors or glass can leave you with a blinding white spot, which is very distracting. Professional photographers know how to manipulate light and use off-camera flashes that make these kinds of photos successful.
3. Don’t amputate your subjects.
The father of the bride is cropped at his wrist.

This means try not to crop people at their joints. If you crop right at someone’s elbows, knees, neck, wrist, etc. it can often look very awkward.

A better crop, cropping them both mid-thigh.
4. Frame the image.
The vertical edge of the viewfinder was lined up with the beach sign for a straight and balanced image

If you are taking a photo, try to frame the image by lining the vertical edge of the viewfinder up with something vertical you see through the viewfinder. This will create a more balanced image and will simply look more professional. If you are working with photos that are already shot, use the rotate and crop tool in your editing software to straighten the image. Again, use vertical and horizontal lines to gauge how straight the image is.
5. Simpler is often better.
The photo has been cropped to eliminate the clutter and make the pole less obvious.

If there is too much going on in a photo it can be confusing. The viewer’s eye wanders restlessly, unable to find a place to focus or settle. Be aware of unnecessary props, extra people, any non-essential subjects or objects. Often cropping a bit tighter on the main subject can help.
About the Author
Guest blogger, Morgan Ione Yeager of Morgan Ione Photography, is a professional photographer based in New York. She specializes in shooting people, food, interiors and travel images. She travels all over New England to shoot for online and print publications, small businesses, restaurants and events.

View her portfolio and blog at:

morganionephotography.com

morganione.blogspot.com

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September 23, 2011
14:24
Combating E-learning Slackers
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Anyone who has facilitated an online course knows the biggest challenge isn’t grading assignments or figuring out how to use the discussion forums. It’s engaging learners. E-learning is a mixed bag of ages and learning styles, and the challenge for instructors is helping students get the most from a course as possible. Ability with technology has less to do with success in an online course as you may think. In Elizabeth Gruenbaum’s article, “Predictors of Success for Adult Online Learners: A Review of the Literature ,” students at the graduate or undergraduate level has more to do with it. Age doesn’t matter much either. Older learners work just as hard as younger ones. Gruenbaum’s lengthy article, which appeared in the February 2010 issue of eLearn Magazine , is rich with insight into how facilitators can anticipate how a learner will fare in a course. Read the whole thing for details, but here are a few takeaways on how to support all online learners:
- Provide reflective prompts – encourage them to stop and think about the material
- Make specific and clear syllabi and assignments with progressive calendar deadlines – seeing all the tasks laid out helps learners check them off the list
- Provide students specific performance feedback on a timely basis – respond asap on activities to keep the momentum of the course going
- Heavy participation in discussion boards – go beyond a short response: request clarification, reinforce students’ ideas, correct misunderstandings, and ask for consensus within areas of disagreement
Also make sure to read the comments section of Gruenbaum’s article, where online instructors share their experiences.

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September 16, 2011
10:00
A Well-Balanced, Healthy Website: Health Imperatives
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
A Well-Balanced, Healthy Website: HealthImperatives.org

Health Imperatives, a public health agency in Brockton, Mass., knows that the healthiest clients are the ones they can reach the best. That’s why they worked with Talance to create an innovative new website that brings together their myriad programs under one domain.

The new website brings together several features designed to help guide visitors around the site, including a handy “drawer” style menu (click Programs and Services), plus a robust multi-site format that keeps the various programs, each with its own identity, looking similar. Because the site is built on Drupal, administrators from each program are able to make their own edits.

The site incorporates many features, including an online store, registration for a large online learning program, forums, search and private user areas.

Visit the site.

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September 01, 2011
14:39
Web Design Tips for Better Images
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
[This appeared in our July newsletter. Subscribe now so you get monthly tasty tech tidbits and special deals.]

The more you pay attention to images, the better your website will be. Good graphics make the difference between a webpage that attracts and one that repels. Here are a few essential graphics tips you can follow to make your whole website better:

1. Save photographic images as JPG and save illustrated images as GIF. Learn more about GIF vs. JPG.

2. Make sure your web graphics are saved as no more than 72 dpi. That’s the standard compression for the web. Anything bigger means slow loading. Learn more about optimizing images from The Comprehensive Guide to Saving Images for the Web.

3. Don’t use HTML to set the width and height. Instead, resize the picture to the appropriate dimensions. Doing otherwise will make your page load slowly and could skew the look of the picture. In other words, if you need

<img width=”200″ height=”200″ src=”boat.jpg” alt=”sailboat” />

then your image (boat.jpg) should be 200×200px rather than a scaled down 500×500px image. Just like this perfectly sized pic:

Here are more tips on web design from the Talance blog:
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August 26, 2011
9:00
Guest Post: How to Be a Social Media Mentsh
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
The following article first appeared in the Sustained! web magazine from PEJE, an organization that serves day schools. Ken Gordon is the Social Media Manager of PEJE. It’s an excellent article about how to build an online community on Facebook that can be applied to any organization.

Read the full article on Sustained!

Ken Gordon, Social Media Manager of PEJE

So you started, or joined, a Facebook page for your Jewish day school community. You put up a few posts… and the only response was the soft click of crickets in your backyard.

What now?

Now you grapple with an important and awkward truth: social media is not entirely obvious. Using Facebook is not like reading a book. Or listening to a teacher in class. Or, you know, just talking to another person. Social media is a strange new kind of human communication, and it has its own obscure commandments. For those of us who didn’t learn to talk and tweet at the same time, this stuff must be gleaned on the fly, later in life.

You won’t find a handbook on Jewish day school social media citizenship in the how-to section of any bookstore, or anywhere else for that matter. Indeed, the day school world is only starting to emigrate into this part of the universe. (Which is why AVI CHAI started their Social Media Academy for day schools, which is a great first introduction to the world of Fans and Followers.)

Point is: Your Facebook kehila may be very perplexed; if so, show them the proper way to behave by offering a few essential principles of good social citizenship. Be a mentsh and teach these new citizens the rules of the road—or just pass this column along, if you’re too busy—and soon we’ll all be Active Daily Users.
You’re a Regular
Encourage your people to build in regular—daily, weekly, etc.—visits to your social media sites. How to manage this? Ask them. Send an email to your colleagues or close friends in the community requesting that they set aside a regular time of day to engage your page. (Ten minutes over morning coffee sounds good to me.) As for people far outside your offline network: advise them, in your newsletters and/or your email signature, to stop regularly so they can catch all your great links, videos, and updates. Just be sure that you, and/or your administrator, post enough valuable and diverse content to warrant such regular visits. (On the PEJE FB page, we post plenty of articles that come from outside sources. People tend to find it refreshing and useful when you share content that isn’t just, say, “selling” your own stuff. Another tip: FB users in general, love video and photos.)
Lights! Camera! Action! Interaction!
The most important thing about social media is the interactivity of its participants. Newbies need to understand that their input is wanted—desperately wanted. We them to react to the material posted on a Facebook page (and maybe even react to other people’s reactions). How to do this? Glad you asked…
More Impressions than Rich Little
The most passive way to contribute to a FB community is to simply view a Status Update or Link on Your Wall. Facebook counts each “impression,” which The Next Web defines as the “raw number of times each entry has been seen on the wall and in the news feed of fans.” The page administrator will receive regular reports on the number of impressions, which will delineate the range of your influence and indicate what does and doesn’t interest your community.
Click and Read
Your people can do better than a few impressions. Actually clicking on a link posted by a Facebook user, and then reading it, is the first real step to joining the online community. If something catches your eye, be sure to click away.
You Like?
Hitting the Like button—beneath a link or status update—is an even more active form of Facebook behavior. Likability is Extremely Important in the social media world, and it’s also a good strategy for those of you who are seriously time-pressed. But it’s not as substantial a response as the following two methods.
Sharing Is Caring
Sharing is good because it helps spread the word around. And if you’re not the kind of person who likes to speak (or write) in public, this may be the best way you can serve in the PEJE social media crew. You click on the word “Share” right underneath the piece of content in question. A box opens up. You write in it, click the “Share” button, and it goes on your wall. Or you click the “Send a Message Instead” link. You fill in the names of the person/people you want to tell about this, write a message, and then send it off.
All the Rest Is Commentary
Write a response, a thoughtful response, to a Status Update or shared Link and you’ve done something with true social significance. The process is simple: You click on the word “Comment” right underneath the piece of content in question. A box opens up, and you write your comment. Simple. Note: Not every comment has to be a dissertation—such things are better employed in grad school and your Friends will likely lose interest in a lengthy response—but it is a good idea to respond intentionally when you’re commenting.
Answer the Call
When confronted by a good question in a Facebook status—good administrators are constantly asking questions—you answer it. It’s OK to hang back and read how other people respond … but it’s generally good manners and a healthy social attitude to answer legitimate questions put out to your Facebook community.
Be a Model
Note: you can’t be the only person on your Facebook page. Imagine a Facebook page that is nothing but status updates that get Liked and Commented On by the administrator. (This would be, as John Bender said in The Breakfast Club: “Sorta social—demented and sad, but social.”)

When you set up a FB page for your school, particularly when you’re first starting out, it’s essential that you invite some good role models to the party. People, that is, who know how to be a regularly active member of your community. So don’t be shy. It’s not cheating to ask for help, it’s essential. Remember, this is social media.

Two kinds of invitations may be necessary.
1. Invite people you know are comfortable with Facebook, and your community, to join your group. These are folks, let’s say, who know about day school and social media and will naturally become part of your community.
2. Invite qualified people to respond to a stimulating question. You can—and should—arrange debates. Find a provocative piece of content, ask a provocative question, and then invite several smart people (of varying opinions) to respond on the page. One great way to get people to respond: call FB friends out by name with a tag.
The great thing about modeling good social citizenship: it’s contagious. What are you waiting for? Stop reading this and show your community the way of FB. The more you engage the page, the more people will engage with you.

BY KEN GORDON

Ken Gordon is the Social Media Manager of PEJE. He cordially invites you to friend our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter.

Read the full article on Sustained!
[www.peje.org]

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August 15, 2011
20:00
20 Free Icon Sets for Non-Profits
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

The quickest shortcut to making your website look polished is to use icons. These little pictures, plenty of which are cheap or free, look way better than anything most mortals can do with Photoshop. A little pop of color, used judiciously, can help bring life to bland webpages. Coordinated sets of icons also make pages look like you put a modicum of thought into how the out-put looks. And, importantly, visitors are more likely act based off a compelling picture rather than a chunk of text.

So stop snagging any old picture off Google Image Search (naughty, naughty!). Here is a list of free icon sets guaranteed to make any non-profit’s webpage better, whether you’re into donations, social media, activism, environment, or health and human services. Have you seen anything I’ve left off? Leave a link in the comments.
Donations
Donate Now Buttons

Donate Now Buttons

Festive Donate Buttons

Festive Donate Icons

Open Source Icons (including money icons)

Open Source Icons

Themed Fundraising Buttons for Email

Themed Fundraising Buttons

Credit Card and PayPal Icons

Credit Card Images
Social Media
Vector Social Media Icon Set

Vector Social Media Icons

Scribble Social Icon Set
Scribble Social Icon Set
WG Social Media Icons

WG Social Media Icons

Double J Social Media Balloons

Social Media Balloons

Buddycons

Buddycons
Health and Human Services
Fruit/Food Bank Icons

Paradise Cherry Icons

Education Icons

Bitty Education Icons

Jana free baby icon set

Parenting/baby icons

People & Disability Icons

People and Disability Icons

Medical Toolbar Icons

Medical Toolbar Icons
Environment
Environment Icons

Environment Icons

Ecology Icons

Ecology Icons

Recycling Icons

Recycling Icons

Weather Icons

Weather Icons

Water Icons

Water Icons
Activism
Endangered Animal Icons

Endangered Animals Icons

Sign Up Petition Icon

Sign the Petition Icon

World Flag Icons

World Flag Icons

Military and War Icons

War Icons

Multi-ethnic People Icons

Multi-ethnic People Icons
Themed Fundraising Buttons for Email

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August 03, 2011
20:29
Refer a Friend, Get $150
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Share the love! Refer a friend to Talance, and you’ll receive a gift certificate worth $150 for Web or print design. Use it alone as a freebie or save on something big. Not doing any website updates right now? Keep sharing the love by giving the certificate to one of your friends or colleagues.

One coupon per customer. Offer not valid with any other coupon, discount or previous purchase. Excludes consultations, fees, outstanding invoices, or websites built by anyone other than Talance.

Cash in now!

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July 27, 2011
18:36
Herring Consulting Network Launch Party and Contest!
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
The Herring Consulting Network is launched!

HCN is helmed by Rabbi Hayim Herring, a thought leader in Jewish life who helps organizations build their own leadership. You can learn more about him on his new site, which Talance designed and built on Drupal, and his blog, built on WordPress.

He’s celebrating his launch with a special offer on his blog:

All those who comment on this week’s question will be entered into a drawing for a free consulting session!* There will be three different levels awarded: One three-hour session, one two-hour session, and one one-hour session. The drawing will take place on August 17, 2011, and winners will be notified via email. So go ahead, share your responses by commenting below and you might win!

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July 19, 2011
5:00
Digesting All That Alphabet Soup
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
[This appeared in our July newsletter. Subscribe now so you get monthly tasty tech tidbits and special deals.]

Alphabet Soup

Anyone who works in the non-profit world knows it’s lousy with acronyms (although there are plenty of for-profit violators too). It seems that every charity that has a full name in English that everyone understands, yet they insist on using an acronym that no one outside their office recognizes.

If all you are doing is distributing documents internally, by all means go nuts with your abbreviations. But if those obscure references are headed for your website, think again.

Why? Because websites are intended for the public. Nearly every one of Talance’s clients claims that the aim of their website is to reach more and more people and make their information easier to use. One of the first barriers to friendly, accessible information is to go overboard on the acronyms.

It doesn’t have to be that way, however. Here are a few tips on dealing with letter overload online:
- Spell out the acronyms on first reference (e.g., “The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) offers useful tips on creating better websites”).
- Use the <acronym> tag. This lets users hover their cursor over each acronym to see what it stands for.
- If a descriptive term is better, always use it instead of the acronym.
Need an acronym review? Submit your site between now and August 1, 2011, and we’ll do a free survey of your website to dig up lurking acronyms. We’ll send you an acronym report so you know what to tweak.

>> Request your free acronym audit now!

Meanwhile, read more about how to make your website all-around more accessible.

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June 10, 2011
20:02
10 Ways to Be a Jackass in Online Discussions
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Please apply the following rules to discussion boards, comments entries, and Facebook and Twitter postings if you wish to raise collective blood pressure.
1. Use all caps. I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW MANY PEOPLE DO THIS EVEN THOUGH THEY’VE BEEN WARNED AGAINST IT FOR YEARS.
2. Stay off topic, perhaps discussing the demise of the semicolon, one of the most misunderstood pieces of punctuation. You can use the semicolon to join two independent clauses that bear a close relationship; a period is sometimes just too much. Independent clauses can stand on their own as sentences, but a semicolon can bring two of them together. Wait. Where was I?
3. Make it personal if you disagree with someone. As in, “You don’t like cilantro? You’re a pathetic and ugly sad sack.”
4. Jump to the end of a discussion without reading the whole thing. That way you can make clueless statements or ask obvious questions that cause everyone to write you off.
5. Slip little spammy messages into your postings. (Seriously, though. Click here to read more about how you can be a better person for $9.99 per month.)
6. Curse like a **** sailor.
7. Make sure 2 use ur worst speling n grammar.
8. Post irrelevant personal messages to everyone. (Andrea: doesn’t this remind you of the time you threw that flaming marshmallow at Travis’s head?)
9. Be sarcastic. E.g., “Smooth move, ExLax.”
10. Hit Submit before you’ve finish
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June 01, 2011
18:12
Widget Worth
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
We never expected to spend as much time as we do building widgets. Increasingly more often, our clients come to us for Twitter stream sidebars, custom Facebook pages and Facebook Like buttons. We’ve known anecdotally that there’s a growing demand for these social media hooks, and now there’s justification.

Lijit, a provider of search, content delivery, and analytics tools for online publishers and networks, has just released a report that reflects how many publishing organizations rely on social tools blended into their sites. Many, many sites have widgets installed, implying that websites are not stand-alone and serve as a hub for more wide-reaching campaigns. Over the past two years, they found:
- 2010: 735,834 sites surveyed, 84.8% with widgets installed (13,541,022 widgets)
- 2009: 744,848 sites surveyed, 84.7% with widgets installed (13,826,562 widgets)
Why the huge numbers?

“To either make their sites better, or to give them more understanding about the readers that visit their site, or to make money,” says Lijit CEO Walter Knapp in an article in EContent Magazine, which featured the study.

The article outlines the wealth of social tools available for augmenting the site and also extracts key date from the study. A helpful benchmark in case you’re deciding whether you want to add a widget to your site.

Check out the top 50.

Top 50 widgets and tools implemented on publisher websites

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May 18, 2011
11:31
John Rochford Talks About Accessibility
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

Some people think having accessible websites is like having a swimming pool. Nice to have, but too expensive and too much upkeep. Unlike a swimming pool, however, an accessible website means that anyone can view it whatever their limitation, ranging from a physical limitation like limited or no eyesight, to having a handheld device with small display.

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. Talance has been working with Rochford and his team on the online training component for an initiative called Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH). It’s a major undertaking that aims to streamline and coordinate how healthcare providers work with each other and patients.

Monique Cuvelier, Talance’s CEO, asked Rochford about his work in accessibility, his biggest headaches and his proudest moment.

Monique Cuvelier: I think a lot of people who care about accessibility have a compelling reason to do so. What’s the driving force behind your involvement in accessibility?

John Rochford: The driving force for me is the result of the combination and the evolution of two of my passions. One is for computer technology. The other is for helping people with intellectual disabilities. My professional career started in the mid-1980s with a succession of jobs serving people with intellectual disabilities. During that time, people shunned computer geeks like me. Yet the people I served embraced me. That they are such an open, friendly, and accepting people has always been heartwarming to me.

In the early 1990s, I sought a graduate degree at The Shriver Center for research, training and service related to intellectual disabilities. It has a project, New England INDEX, which provides free information about programs and services for people with disabilities residing in Massachusetts. All of the software INDEX designed at the time for that purpose was as accessible to people with disabilities as we could make it.

I started to extend our software to the web in the mid-1990s. Since then, I have designing websites as accessible as technology and funding have allowed, and as best as my developing expertise could make them.

MC: What does a typical accessibility test or process look like for you?

JR: We start by building accessible web applications. This makes it much less costly to fix accessibility issues, and much easier to test for related deficiencies. We use automated testing software to check for problems across a website. We have also used assistive technology products in our testing. A good example is that we make sure all our web sites are compatible with screen reader software for people who are blind. Most importantly, we have people with disabilities test our web sites.

MC: What kind of digital media are ignored the most with accessibility?

JR: All digital media (e.g., videos, music, etc.) are natively inaccessible. Only a tiny percentage of websites are helpful to people with disabilities by incorporating accessible media players and/or by providing alternative, accessible content. An accessible media player, for example, provides controls (e.g., play, pause) that work with screen readers so people who are blind can use them. Such controls are also good for people with physical disabilities who may not be able to use a mouse.

The National Center for Accessible Media is a good resource about accessible digital media. For many years, we have used on our websites its ccPlayer, an accessible media player, and its captioning services for our video content.

MC: What’s the single biggest rule people should follow to make pages accessible?

JR: Make sure people with disabilities test a website and every version of it.

MC: What’s your biggest accessibility headache?

JR: My most significant challenge is convincing people to make their websites accessible. I find it appalling that I have to work to convince the staff of organizations, which serve people with disabilities, to make their sites accessible. What people do not realize is that an accessible website is easier to use for everyone, which is always good for business.

MC: What was your proudest moment in accessibility?

JR: It occurred early in my career after I installed speech recognition software for a young woman. I was showing her how to use it instead of a keyboard and a mouse, which she could not use. She cried as she told me it was the first time she would be able to write a letter to her mother. I consider that achievement of hers to be the special one.

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May 11, 2011
18:27
Customers: Satisfied!
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
What Our Clients Value Most

We at Talance team think of ourselves as just as cuddly and welcoming as a Tickle Me Elmo, but that’s not really what counts. What counts is that YOU think so too. We also think it’s important to know what you want, where we can improve, what could make Talance a better company, and thus, what could make you a better organization.

So, we asked. Last month we sent out a customer satisfaction survey to our existing clients, offered up a Starbucks gift card for one lucky respondent (WTG, Ellen!) and hoped that you think as kindly about us as we do about you. We also followed up on a few particularly compelling responses via a market researcher to see how we might address your needs better.

The results? In a word, amazing.
Survey Highlights
Our survey yielded an impressive 57% response rate, which made us extremely grateful and tipped us off that we have a healthy relationship with our clients.

The results and comments made us fairly glow. Every single respondent said they would consider us for a new project.

Furthermore, we’ve got some major cheerleaders out there. Everyone said they would recommend us to their contacts.

We received some excellent suggestions regarding the services we offer and are already acting on folding in some of those services.

Our clients overwhelmingly indicated that what we do makes life easier for them – and we rock with deadlines.
Where We Excel
Because we work online and think it’s useful to visualize data, we took all the comments from our survey and created a tag cloud out of them. The theory was that we could see at a glance what people associate with us most strongly. The results are fascinating, and heartening, so we’re sharing them with you here. Click the image below to open a larger copy in a new window.

Talance's Value (Click To Enlarge)

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April 20, 2011
14:00
Save Your Sanity AND Get the Logo You Love (Yes, You Can!)
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Maybe your logo started with a clever idea you once loved, but now seems … well … hokey. Or it was something that no one on your Logo Procurement Committee absolutely hated. Or (this is the most likely scenario) you were over-rushed, understaffed, underfunded and that piece of clip art worked just fine, but now you’re still using what was meant to be a placeholder.

Whatever the reason behind having a look that doesn’t fit your organization comfortably any more, you know when it’s time to update. Just sprouted a couple gray hairs thinking about embarking on the process? Deep breaths. You can get through an image rebranding without rehashing past mistakes or subjecting yourself to the pain of collaboration. Invest a little time up front to think clearly about what you need out of a logo and what it should do, and the rest will come. Trust me; we do this all the time.

Of course, deciding that you need a new look is easier than deciding what it should be. The key is to think critically and logically. When Talance takes on a new project, we pull out a set of trusty checklists and run through them with our clients until we have a good idea of likes, dislikes and needs. Only then do we start thinking about creating a new image.

If you’re thinking about having a new logo designed in the near future, start now with solid planning. Start with the items below (you can bookmark this article and use it as a checklist), and when you begin on the logo design process with a designer, you’ll be that much close to having something you love and that works for you.
Peg the decision-makers.
If possible, peg just one decision-maker. Nothing kills progress and creativity more efficiently than a committee. Pick the chief to sign off on ideas, or – if you must – co-chiefs. It helps if they’re buddy-buddy, though, and can work together well.

(Can’t get by without a committee? Try this strategy guide.)
Know your audience.
I know, we’re always harping on about audiences in this blog. But you can’t hope to reach the people you really need to reach if you don’t know who they are. The over-50 crowd doesn’t respond to the same images as the under-20 crowd does. Dig up some demographics.
Work on your elevator pitch.
Can’t describe what your organization does in the time it takes to ride from the lobby to the fifth floor? Get to honing. Your logo will be a graphic representation of your work and must be communicated quickly and efficiently. You must be able to describe what you do succinctly in words before that can be translated to art.
Know your goals.
Seeing a trend here? You have to know what you want before you ask for it, and this includes knowing why you want that new logo. Is it because you want to appeal to a different cross-section of people? Do you need something that works better in print? Do you want to represent yourself with a new tone? Note your goals, and then prioritize them.
Find inspiration.
Copying is a no-no with logo design (and any designer that doesn’t respect that should be avoided!), but inspiration is a different matter. Start noticing colors you like (or need), typefaces that speak to you, patterns that catch your eye. Keep a folder of examples or even carry around a digital camera to take snaps of winning ideas. It can help push your designer in the right direction.

You can start with 30 Typography Focused Logo Designs and 70 Latest and Creative Logo Designs for Design Inspiration if you need some inspiration sources.
Find anti-inspiration.
This is arguably the easiest part of any logo design project: noting what you hate. I’m not sure what this says about humanity, but talking about your hates comes remarkably fluidly. It’s helpful too, because if you say so early in the project, you’ll help your designer steer away from what you can’t abide.

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April 14, 2011
2:40
First Impressions Matter Online
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
The first impression someone has of your website carries the most impact. As rich and useful as your website is beyond the homepage, this is still the most important page of all.

Don’t waste the opportunity to turn one-time visitors into loyal supporters. Take a minute to look at your homepage and make sure it supplies the following elements:
1. An elevator pitch explaining what you do. Make sure this is SHORT – not a page-long mission statement.
2. A way for people to get involved easily. You might include a link to your Facebook page, a sign-up form for your newsletter or a donate button.
3. Attractive imagery. Avoid pictures of empty rooms and building fronts.
You can also look at the seven best ways to update your homepage. Make sure you’re not driving people away after you’ve worked so hard to bring them to your website.

[This article originally appeared in our 52 Web Marketing & Promotion Tips newsletter. Get a quick tip delivered to your inbox weekly. Sign up for 52 tips now.]

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April 08, 2011
4:00
Reader Question: How do I turn my PowerPoint presentation into an online course?
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
[Have a question you’d like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page to submit it. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

PowerPoint presentations are in many ways excellent jumping-off points for an online course. Working with slides forces you to think in discreet thoughts, which is essential for online communication. Plus, if you’ve already got a PowerPoint, then you’ve probably already gone through the hard work of planning what you want to teach and how you’ll arrange your lessons.

The key issue to remember is that a PowerPoint presentation is not an online course. It’s just that: a presentation. That’s what webinars are for. An online course addresses different goals and is administered differently; it’s not simply a way to deliver your presentation online. An online course is more akin to a classroom experience, except that it happens remotely.

If you’re looking to create a full online course, the best thing to do with your PowerPoint is to use it as a planning tool. Most e-learning programs begin with a storyboard (this site explains what they are and provides some helpful examples), which is an outline for your online course.

From there, you can start to flesh out your course into text (you’ll have to convert all the words you say during your slideshow presentation into written copy) and activities to deliver on your online platform.

If you want more advice on planning for an online course, check out this helpful article from The E-Learning Coach blog.

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March 23, 2011
13:10
Essential Tips for Making Websites Accessible
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Slick web designs might impress the board, but what good does that do if your visitors can’t see? Making your website accessible is extremely important for people with visual or physical hindrances. Tiny fonts and low-contrast colors might look good in practice, but they’re useless if they can’t be read or used to navigate your website.

The upside to embracing accessibility is that your digital materials, be them websites, online courses or electronic documents, will be better used by everyone.

Here are nine tips that make a more accessible website.

[You can find an article about the importance of accessibility and helpful tools in the last issue of the newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter.]
Graphics
Make sure you use images, icons and other visual elements consistently and appropriately.
Text equivalents
If you you’re using graphics, figures or illustrations, make sure you include a line of text or a longer description for people who can’t see them.
Headings
Use H tags to organize and structure your content rather than using larger fonts and different colors. This is a helpful article on H tags and best practices.
Remember PDFs
PDF documents are often neglected in an accessibility review. Make sure they’re accessible too.
Spell out abbreviations and acronyms
Screen readers have a hard time with acronyms – they think they’re full words. Either spell them out or use coding to make them readable. Look at the acronym in the previous paragraph to see an example.
Use tables appropriately
Not everything should be in a table; many contain information that’s more readable when they’re simply written out. If you do use a table, make sure you’re marking it up appropriately.
High contrast
When you use colors, make sure they stand out. I like to run websites through Vischeck to see how they display to people who are color blind.
Captions or scripts
If you’re using video or audio, use closed captioning or provide a script for people to read along.
Use descriptive links
No more “click here.” Use descriptive text around your hypertext.

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March 17, 2011
21:48
Welcome to Our Website! (Except for You)
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
[This appeared in our March newsletter. Wanna subscribe? Do it now!]

I’ve yet to work with a client who doesn’t use the word “welcoming” in some way to describe the website they want. No doubt that goes for just about anyone reading this article right now. In fact, most people will spend considerable thought and effort coming up with the best open-looking fonts, the friendliest text, the warmest colors when it comes to designing a website or online course, all in the service of being more appealing to their audience. For this, I commend them.

But you can’t really be selectively welcoming. “Welcome,” by definition means everybody, not cherry-picking the people who are the easiest to accommodate. It means you need to make your website accessible. It also happens to be a legal requirement for many states who have to comply with Section 508.

So your job – if you’re serious about welcoming – is to make sure your website appears for everybody, no matter if they’re using an iPad, have low vision or some other disability that prevents them from using your website as you intended.

Where to start? An accessibility evaluation is the best place. Talance works with many government clients who are required to follow Section 508 accessibility rules, so we can give your site a thorough evaluation. Contact us for information.

You can also improve your website’s accessibility by running it through one of these free tools. They’ll give you a handful of items you can fix yourself, as well as a solid notion of what to take to a web company to address. Try any or all of these:

Wave

Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility

Functional Accessibility Evaluator

WebAIM Section 508 Checklist

Want more? Talance can provide expert web accessibility evaluation and consulting to pinpoint problems and provide specific recommendations. Contact us for information.

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March 10, 2011
15:30
New Logo for Brockton Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Announcing the new Brockton Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program logo:

Brockton Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program Logo

BTPPP is an organization in Brockton, MA, that aims to reduce teen pregnancy rates. They needed a new logo for web and print that would appeal to teens as well as their mentors.

Talance delivered! The new logo is modern and abstract but still demonstrates health and wellness, rather than sex, and inclusiveness.

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February 09, 2011
14:38
4 Risk Management Steps That Could Save You
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
It could be a punishing snowstorm that brings down power for weeks. It could be a hacker that vandalizes your website. Or a war-torn country that inhibits communication with your team. It might even be as simple as a data backup that stops running for some reason. Running an organization with an online element is inherently risky, yet few leaders think seriously about what those risks might be and how they might affect day-to-day operations.

Earlier this month in the blog, we talked about how non-profits should think about IT risk management when they have an online element to their organization.

But how do you create an IT risk management plan? Start with these four steps:
1.     Identify possible risks.
First think of all the forms of electronic communication you use, and brainstorm together some worst case scenarios. What could possibly go wrong? Write them down.
2.     Categorize and prioritize.
Now look at your list and decide which is the most potentially damaging. You might rank the risks by Low, Medium and High, so you can decide where to put your most careful plan.
3.     Determine plausibility.
Some of the items on your list are more likely to happen than others, even if they’re damaging. An earthquake might flatten your off-site storage facility, but is it likely to happen in the middle of Utah? Rank your items based on plausibility: Possible, Probable and Likely are helpful labels.
4.     Make your plan.
Now you have a good idea of what could go wrong and the likelihood it will. Think through each item and plot out what you would do in case it happens. Will your web project manager quit? Have a good staffing agency on call. Did you delete your website’s homepage? Have your web host on speed dial so they can revert to the latest backup. Write down every step so anyone can pick up the plan and know what to do.

Educated plans are the best, so don’t shy from asking others what they might do. Plan within your department, and call in colleagues and other professionals for their advice.

Your turn: do you assess risk? Let us know in our poll if you have a risk management plan for your organization. We’ll share the results in our next newsletter. Take the poll!

[This appeared in our February newsletter. Wanna subscribe? Do it now!]

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1. Why is your synagogue using Twitter?
2. Non-Profit Websites, Meet the iPad
February 02, 2011
8:00
Egypt’s Internet Shutdown a Lesson for Non-profits
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

CIO magazine ran an article about how Egypt’s Internet shutdown should be a wakeup call for CIOs. It’s a fair point, considering how many organizations run their businesses completely online – in the cloud. If the cloud were to go down, they’d be without a business.

It’s not a far-fetched notion. The CIO article says:

Virtually every country’s government reserves the right to temporarily nationalize and control what’s considered critical infrastructure, which usually includes mobile networks, fixed-line telecommunications and Internet backbone systems.

Governments can invoke that right during national emergencies, whether they be natural disasters, terrorist attacks or any other incident that qualifies as such under a country’s legal code.

If CIOs of corporations are starting to sweat a little, so should non-profit execs. Many have organizations that work in countries where civil unrest isn’t a possibility, but a given. That doesn’t mean they should backpedal into a dark, unconnected communications landscape, in which they rely solely on mailed letters and phone calls. It just means they need to do some risk assessment.

Non-profit leaders should sit down with their entire team and think about what such an event would mean to their organization. What would people do if they rely on the website to gather up-to-date information? What’s the plan if text messaging fails? Is there redundancy built into website backups, if they’re stored on a virtual machine?

Risk assessment is one of those activities that’s easy to put off until it’s needed. But by that time, it’s too late.

With the Egyptian uprising happening in the background, this is perfect time for non-profit leaders to stop procrastinating with their risk assessment. They should think about the most necessary technologies they use and come up with a concrete plan for what to do in their home country as well as those they work in if Internet technologies are canceled.
Your Turn

 <a href=” [polldaddy.com] mce_href=” [polldaddy.com] your organization assess IT project risks?</a><a href=” [polldaddy.com] mce_href=” [polldaddy.com] software</a> 

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January 21, 2011
19:26
National Center for Jewish Policy Studies Launch
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

Introducing the NCJPS Website

Every website launch is a celebration, and today we’re tipping our glasses to the brand new National Center for Jewish Policy Studies (NCJPS) website.

The NCJPS is a nonpartisan think-tank publishes on topics of concern to the Jewish community, including synagogues in Jewish life, vouchers for religious schools and interfaith marriage. The website is a place for supporters to learn about research, consultations, conferences and scholarly publications.

Talance is proud to help communicate this organization’s mission. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing to the new National Center for Jewish Policy Studies website.

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January 17, 2011
18:40
Learn More About ATutor and LMSs
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Come learn about ATutor, Blackboard and other learning management systems during a panel discussion at the Boston chapter of the American Society for Training & Development. The meeting is Jan. 18, 2011, from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. in Newton, MA.

Here’s the overview from the ASTD:

The first part [of the meeting] is Tech Talk, featuring Shawn Stiles, providing an overview of Lectora. In this presentation, Shawn will discuss Lectora, a popular development tool. His presentation will be an overview of the product including costs, competitors, why he likes this product as well as some pros and cons. He’ll also cover a brief how-to demonstration and end by showing the final product, live and on-line.

The second part of the evening will be an interactive panel discussion with several LMS expert, sharing and comparing their insights on specific LMS tools. LMS experts will be covering discussions on products from Learn.com (Shannon Courtney), Blackboard (David Rosenbaum), ATutor (Monique Cuvelier) as well as others.

Location: Rebecca’s Cafe 275 Grove Street, Auburndale, MA 02459, 617-969-3382. For those who have not been to this Rebecca’s location, it is very easy to miss as you will not see a sign for Rebecca’s from the street. 275 Grove St. is the Riverside Office Park, right next to the Riverside MBTA train and bus stop. Rebecca’s is located at the back of the building, by the parking garage.

See you there!

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January 11, 2011
14:08
Definitive Website Pre-Launch Checklist
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Websites can have as many moving parts as a jumbo jet, so it’s easy to lose track of something. That’s why checklists abound here at Talance HQ. They’re one of the best ways we know to make sure we don’t forget something while juggling all the building, writing and planning pieces. We know that when it comes time to launch, it’s particularly easy to forget something important.

Below is a list of top items that can make the launch of any website easier and more organized. We’ll keep adding if we think of anything new. Did we forget something? Add it in the comments, and we’ll update.

[This appeared in our January newsletter. Wanna subscribe?]

Copy
- Spelling correct on every page
- Check for typos
- All pages reviewed and accounted for
- Outdated content removed
- Placeholder content removed
- Check for consistency in writing voice, tone and style (including first person vs. third person, singular and plural, eccentric capitalizations and words like “website” vs. “web site”)
- Non-spelling errors, such as old addresses, phone numbers, former employees, etc., corrected
- Stylistic inconsistencies fixed
- Terms of use updated
- Copyright updated
- Privacy policy updated
- Contact information accessible on every page
- All hidden copy checked (error messages, JavaScript functions, transcriptions)
- Jargon removed
- Content quality evaluated
Formatting
- Most important info listed at the top of the page
- Appropriate use of bold and bullets for easy scanning
- No written text within images
- Colors and typefaces consistent on every page
- Each page format uniform
- Images resized and consistent
- Menus not overloaded with too many items
- H tags used for headlines rather than bolds or size increases
Technical Quality Assurance
- Internal and external hyperlinks work
- Pages checked against WCAG guidelines
- Private data secure (passwords, contact info, etc.)
- Usability testing complete
- Sitemap updated
- Everything works
- Important pages print OK
- All old URLs point to new URLs
Accessibility
- “Alt” attributes used for all descriptive images
- Pages accessible
- High contrast color used everywhere
- Color and size used for critical information
- Tested on most common browsers
- Tested on mobile devices
Marketing
- PR releases written
- Social media launch campaign planned
- Off-line promotion planned
- Friends, colleagues notified
- E-newsletter notification written and ready to send
- Business cards, letterhead, envelopes and other printed material updated with new address
- Voice mail updated with new address
- Email signature updated with notification about launch
- Link submitted to directories and search engines
- Ads created
- Blog entries planned or written
- Marketing plan revised
- SEO checklist completed
Support
- Training completed
- Extra help on website support procured
- User feedback surveys written
- Maintenance and update schedule created
- Plan established in case of heavy traffic
- Databases set to backup in case of roll-back
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January 05, 2011
8:15
Talance After 10 Years
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
2001 to 2011 and Beyond

When I was a kid, I thought the relativity of time had something to do with how it sometimes flew by, and other times it crept along (like my trip to Disneyland at 10 vs. my entire school education grades K-12). I’m hardly any brighter about physics now, but it still seems the last 10 years have passed by both in a blur, and also slow enough for a tremendous amount to have happened.

It was just after New Year’s Day in 2001 that we officially launched Talance, handling software development, writing copy and managing projects. Every year has been absolutely packed, but we’ve been marching steadily toward our goal of being a friendly, dependable technical resource for nonprofits and government agencies.

I’m happy to say that on the days when I have time to look up, I feel like we’re doing it. We’ve started new initiatives (print design), built up some of our cornerstones (e-learning and web development) and meet clients that feel more like friends. We’re working together to evolve in a space that’s changing so fast it’ll give you whiplash if you watch (ahem, social media).

Rather than making this a 10-year retrospective, I’d like to look forward. It’s much more useful to think about where we’ll be 10 years from today rather than the other way around. Where’s the progress in that? I don’t know what the technological landscape will look like (did anyone expect to be here back in 2000?), so we’ll bundle up our collective experience and move forward on a clear open road, equipped for twists and turns.

I know that wherever we are, it’ll be built on a foundation of expertise and helpfulness. Thanks to the clients who work with us and thanks to all the developers, designers, testers, writers and all other people who have helped make Talance what it is.

Here’s to the next decade.

Monique Cuvelier
CEO
Talance, Inc.

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2. Top 10 Blog Posts
December 16, 2010
15:58
Worst. Requests. Ever.
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
We’re not naming names, but we hear a lot of crazy requests when it comes to building websites. The worst are those that utterly disregard what the poor visitors have to contend with when they look at the site. Read these quotes, and do exactly the opposite.

[This appeared in our December newsletter. Wanna subscribe?]
Top 10 Most Ridiculous Web Design Requests of 2010
1. Can you please make that tab say [insert any 10 or more words here]?
2. We need this website built yesterday.
3. Can you create sub-sub-sub menus?
4. Put everything on the homepage so no one has to search for anything.
5. Half of our committee hates green, the other half hates blue, so just make it gray.
6. I know we’re ready to launch, but the CEO doesn’t think the site is “user friendly.” He’d like you to rebuild it so it looks like this [insert here schematic created solely from the rectangle tool on PowerPoint].
7. Can you make all the menu items open in a new window?
8. Can you make us #1 on Google?
9. Make the logo 200% bigger.
10. Can you copy this other site? We want ours to look exactly the same.
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December 07, 2010
17:37
Changing Medical Practices Through E-Learning
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Overhauling the way Massachusetts’ medical practices deal with patients is no simple task. Not when you’re considering coordinating all of a patient’s health needs, including managing chronic conditions, handling visits to specialists, dealing with hospital admissions and reminding patients when they need check-ups and tests. Add to it archaic systems that involve stacks of paper medical records and rows of filing cabinets in doctors’ offices.

Many doctors deal with patients’ various medical issues by writing a referral and then maybe hearing about what happened at yearly check-up time.

The Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Health and Human Services hopes to fundamentally change the way medical practices work with the Patient-Centered Medical Home Initiative. The 3-year demonstration project is part online and part in-person. Participants, which include 46 primary care medical practices, receive live coaching from facilitators, help establishing and maintaining patient registries and extensive training through a learning collaborative, managed by e-learning technical provider Talance, Inc. ( [talance.com] ).

The program involves all types of doctors in every corner of the state, including large, urban community health centers and small, rural group practices. Even in a state as small as Massachusetts, where it’s possible to drive from one end to the other – the long way – in a few hours, it’s still a challenge to train a broad range of practices at the same time. That’s why it’s vital for the project to incorporate online learning as a way to help manage the project.

In many cases, e-learning is the only way to effectively push health care management shifts. It’s an industry that naturally drifts toward in-person connection, where doctors talk to people face-to-face in examination rooms. When it comes to reforming office administration on such a large scale, that model won’t work. It’s the reason that 37 percent of training hours involved electronic technology in 2009, according to Alexandria, Va.-based American Society for Training and Development.

E-learning may be key in conforming to the Obama administration’s Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), which passed in 2009. Providers will have to adopt health information technology (HIT) starting in 2011, a requirement that includes more than $36 billion in incentive payments to reward providers whose electronic medical records (EMRS) meet the government’s test of “meaningful use”.

The end result is overall cost savings.

“At the heart of our effort to ensure access to care is a commitment to strengthening primary care and reforming how we pay for that care,” said Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. JudyAnn Bigby. “This new initiative is one of the key building blocks in our strategic work to make all primary care practices in Massachusetts transformed into advanced patient-centered medical homes by 2015.”

The Patient-Centered Medical Home Initiative (PCMHI) was designed by the Executive Office of Health and Human Services in consultation with a multi-payer, multi-stakeholder council of consumer, physician, nurse practitioner, hospital, insurer, state agency and other interested stakeholder representatives. The Council is co-chaired by Secretary Bigby and Dr. John Fallon, Senior Vice President and Chief Physician Executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.

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November 04, 2010
15:25
10th Birthday Giveaway: Website User Survey
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Too many website projects are conceived by and built for committees. Seldom do organizations think of asking their users what they’d like to see on a site. This month, we’re helping you out by giving away an Audience Website Survey Template. We’ve pulled a handful of useful questions from our own development process that you can use to poll your own audience to see what they think of your website. We guarantee you’ll find the results illuminating.

Get your copy now!

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October 20, 2010
14:39
How Anthem Pets Boosted Fundraising with LinkedIn
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
CASE STUDY: When faced with the task of gathering donations for the pet rescue group Anthem Pets, this board member found an untapped font of helpful advice in LinkedIn Answers. Here’s how she uncovered it – plus some fabulous fundraising ideas.

By Corine Cuvelier, Board Member, Anthem Pets

Get more donations with puppies

I recently joined the board of directors for Anthem Pets, a non-profit rescue organization north of Phoenix. One of my new duties is to solicit donations for their fundraising event. Since I’m new to the area and don’t have many contacts, I decided to give social media a try.

The most successful tact was to pose the following question on LinkedIn Answers:

Doing fundraising for an animal rescue group. Any hints on how to approach local companies for donations in a down economy?

I’m on the board of a local animal rescue group and in charge of fundraising for our two main fundraising events, one of which is an auction. I’ve sent e-mail to several local businesses, and either haven’t heard back or have been rejected due to the economy. Any hints on how to approach businesses?

Within three days, I received 12 suggestions, mostly from strangers. Many of which were excellent. I’d like to share these posts; your non-profit may benefit from them as well.

Simply ask for smaller donations that they can afford…

Now this submission didn’t seem too applicable because I asked a huge liquor chain for a donation and they wouldn’t even give me a bottle of wine!

Go to their door with a puppy that needs a home and a T-Shirt. Seriously. People have a hard time saying no to an honest-to-god puppy.

I found this an excellent suggestion and I think I’ll borrow a puppy. After trading a couple of e-mails with this man, it turns out he is a former pet-store owner and has a lot of experience in the field. With LinkedIn you tap into some great experience.

Go to local businesses that would benefit from the advertising and the image boost of being involved with your organization. Be prepared to offer them something in exchange for their support (an inexpensive thank you plaque? a banner at the event? a glowing review?) and take them some statistics or other information that helps them justify giving to YOUR organization over other non-profit groups. For example, you might say that you have experienced an X% drop in funding in recent years and an X% increase in need since families cannot keep pets after foreclosure.

I think you have to go to people to “do business,” not just to walk away with something for your organization. How can you help them? How can they help you? Be flexible and get creative. If they give you $100 worth of products and you ping $1000 worth of business, they will be sure to support your next event.

Some businesses might not be able to afford to do much but they could allow you to advertise at their business for free (a poster?) or maybe they could offer services (printing of said posters) and some places might be willing to “loan” you one of their staff members for a few hours.

I also think that email is too impersonal and suggest that you call or go in person. I do a lot of fundraising for the PTA and many student organizations and this has worked in the past.

This suggestion came from a woman who is a student, but obviously has a lot of experience fundraising. Her creativeness spurs me to think of different ways to tap into my community.

I plan on putting some of these suggestions to use verbatim; however, just their creativity led me into some paradigm shifts in what I’ve asked for and received.
- An historic painting from a now-closed downtown building.
- An hour’s worth of space planning/design time placed into a sweet designer basket (this will also benefit the designer as free advertisement).
- Tickets to the local Christmas pageant (free advertisement to an upcoming production in the community).
Have more ideas for how to network for fundraising ideas using social media? Leave a comment below.
About the Author
Corine Cuvelier lives in Arizona and is a volunteer and board member who has been active in many non-profits. Her professional life is in the medical industry. If you’d like to donate to Anthem Pets rescue group or adopt an animal, please post your request on the Anthem Pets Facebook page.

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October 18, 2010
19:13
Non-Profit Websites, Meet the iPad
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

The most surprising thing about the iPad is how quickly and seamlessly it has nestled into the working and daily life of so many people. Gartner reported that Apple will sell 19.5 million units by the end of 2010 – way more, way faster than the iPhone.

Even if you’re not thinking about creating an iPad app for your non-profit (it’s not a bad idea, by the way), you minimally should be thinking about how your website looks on an iPad. A good chunk of your supporters may already be looking you up from their tablet, but according to the report from Gartner, the market is going to blossom with media tablets: 54.8 million units in 2011, up 181 percent from 2010. That means your constituency is likely to be moving to a handheld unit.

You should know minimally that if you’re using Flash, it’s not showing up at all on an iPad. But how about the rest of your site? How many of you have thought about how your site looks and performs on an iPad? Weigh in on our poll, and then check back in coming weeks as we report on our findings and give you tips on how to make your web project perfect on the most popular viewing devices.

Have you tested your site on the iPad?online surveys

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October 14, 2010
14:27
Fall Web Cleanup
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

[This little gem is the e-mail newsletter our subscribers just received. Want a slice for yourself? Sign up now.]

After a summer of pollen and yard games, the house and yard is in much need of a fall clean-up. Fall clean-up is time to clear out the cobwebs and fix items that broke over the course of the season.

Web projects also collect clutter, whether it’s a website or online course. While you’re in a tidy mindset from keeping up your house, turn your attentions onto your website. Here are a few easy things you can do to tune up your web project for fall and not lose your mind.
1. Solicit comments.
Ask members of your organization and your constituency for ideas of what they think needs improvement. You might be surprised to hear what people from the outside think.
2. Put together a clean team.
Cleaning up is much easier if you do it with a task force to share the load. If you are an army of one, just make sure to pace yourself.
3. Dedicate 30 minutes a day.
It’s much less disruptive to pick away. You’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish if you do a little every day, rather than taking off two weeks for a major overhaul.

Need more tips on how to keep your web project ship shape? Look through our blog archives for hints on maintenance.

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October 01, 2010
14:06
You’re Doing It All Wrong! How to Use Pictures on a Website
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
We see some common mistakes on our web travels at Talance. We see a lot of them that have to do with image formatting on websites and blogs. No doubt that a gripping image can compel a visitor to spend more time with you or even give you money. But you can ruin the best photo with bad habits.

Here’s what people do all wrong with pictures on websites, and how you can learn from their mistakes.
Infraction: No ALT tag
Not every web browser can see every picture. Obviously, blind people can’t see pictures, but other people have pictures turned off, and some browsers restrict certain kinds of images (hello, Gmail and Outlook). That’s what the ALT attribute is for. It’s meant to be attached to each picture so there’s a text equivalent in case the picture can’t be displayed. At least someone can read a description of what the picture should be.
How to fix it
This one is easy. Every time you add a picture to your site, fill in the ALT text box or “image description” field. Almost every web editor prompts you for this information. Here’s what it might look like:

Where to add the ALT tag
Infraction: Huge image, small space
Many people know how to take an enormous web photo and make it look small. You can set the image to shrink it down to fit in a reasonable sized box on the page. This technique can squish the picture into a weird shape and also slow down the loading of your page.
How to fix it
What’s better is to make the picture smaller to begin with. Pick one of the hundreds of image resizing programs out there – we use Photoshop in the office – and crop it down. It will load fast and look right.
Infraction: No padding
The eye craves white space. When text is crammed up against a picture, there’s no white space, which makes the page look junky and makes it more difficult to read.

You can see I’ve added a picture here with no padding. See how the words are all mashed up against it? Makes it difficult to see the picture and read the text surrounding it.
How to fix it
Introduce yourself to padding. Padding puts a margin around your pictures, which helps break up text and helps the eye move more fluidly down the page. The best way to add padding is to ask whoever is in charge of building your site to add it directly to the CSS file. But you can add it manually too.

In your image tool on your web editor, look for Image Properties. Sometimes this is in the advanced settings. Look for fields called Vertical Space and Horizontal Space, and enter 10. That will give your picture a nice gutter to help it stand out. See how the same picture as above looks that much nicer just because I added a little breathing room around it? It gives a more polished look to the whole site.

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September 27, 2010
16:55
Never Fear Budget Busters Again
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Even the very best laid plans can run into unforeseen problems. The causes can range anywhere from an indecisive decision-maker to a natural disaster that takes the office out of commission for a while. Whatever the reason, any online course, website or other online is subject to delays and changes. We at Talance do our best to estimate and build systems to prevent hold-ups, but no one can tell the future. Sometimes things just cost more.

If you’re smart and allow that things you can’t imagine might happen, you can help your deadlines and decision stay as close to budget as possible. (It also helps to spend your money on the most valuable features.) At the very least, follow these tips to make sure budget surprises don’t catch you unawares.
Pad your budget
First of all, pad your budget from the get-go. We provide our clients with a quote before a project begins, but we can’t imagine every change that could happen. We always advise our clients to set aside 15-25% of the total estimated cost to account for unforeseen events or upgrades.
Relax your schedule
You may never miss an appointment, but that doesn’t mean that everyone on your team is so careful with deadlines. Plus, holidays have a way of popping up and skewing schedules. Pad them out. Allow for more time than you thing something might take. We try to finish projects a month before the drop-dead date arrives.
Present a unified front
Be organized and unified with your decisions. If you’re faced with a decision on design or content, make sure everyone in your organization agrees before you tell your web company. Poll everyone you need to and sign off on that decision in advance. Every time you change your mind costs time, and time costs money.
Sock some away
Put away enough money for the end of a project. Starting on an online project is not where it ends. They have a life beyond launch. Budget for recurring fees, web hosting, maintenance or subscription plans. Look further out to the next six months to a year so you can afford upgrades to technology, content and design in the future.

Most of these points involve being realistic and organized. Open communication and firm decision can remove the fear factor from web projects and help your bottom line stay in the black.

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September 22, 2010
18:22
Simple Tip for Attracting Attention
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
How many times have you been in a restaurant or bar with a TV in one corner that keeps snagging your eye? It’s a human response to follow movement, and video is a proven attention-getter.

If you want to call attention to something on your website, you can apply the same techniques through video. Thanks to services like YouTube and Vimeo, it’s pretty easy too.

Think of who your visitors are and create a simple video that appeals to them in just 30 seconds or a minute in length. See how traffic changes on your website before and after you add a video.

Keep experimenting until you find what works with your audience. Check out this video from ReadWriteWeb on NPR’s experiments with social media.

NPR’s experiments with social media from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

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September 16, 2010
15:15
10 Trust-Building Tricks: What Non-Profits Can Learn from E-Commerce
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Then why do so many non-profiteers forget these same requirements when it comes to their own websites? If sites like Amazon or Dell or eBay were run the way many nonprofit websites are, they’d be out of business as soon as you can say “customer loyalty.”

Double-standards don’t work with online visitors. Whether someone is looking to spend $10 on a Mother’s Day gift or give you $10 for your next fundraising effort, they’re still looking for a positive experience. They’re looking for the right kind of feedback and ease of use. They want what we all expect when it comes to a welcoming and comfortable online experience.

Here are e-commerce some ideas you can apply to your website – no matter if you’re selling products or simply trying to gain an online following:
1. Easy to find contact information
Shoppers like to know that they’re dealing with real people at a real company when they’re handing over a check or credit card information. They want to have a phone number in case something goes wrong with shipping. They want the assurance that someone is there to help if they need it. Lack of contact information – or hard-to-find contact information – can erode trust and make people less likely to have a transaction with you, whether you’re accepting dues, donations or sign-ups for your next event.
Non-profit fix
Make sure your contact information is on every page of the website in an easy-to-see spot. Some of the most common spots are at the top of the page in the header or on the bottom of the page in the footer. Also make sure you provide multiple ways for people to reach you, including your physical address, a phone number, an e-mail address and a contact form. The more you can give adds to the level of trust.
2. Prompt and friendly feedback
As soon a shopper clicks that Submit button and authorizes money or personal information to transfer to someone else, they like a little assurance. Asking for feedback as soon as a person has acted on something (they call this “conversion” in the biz), also allows an e-commerce company to learn from the experience. Successful sites give chances for feedback immediately.
Non-profit fix
Ask for feedback immediately upon accepting some kind of information from your visitor – as soon as they sign up for a newsletter or send you a donation. You might create a quick survey asking for feedback on their experience. Ask them how easy it was for them to find what they were looking for, if they have ideas for improvement or if anything stood out as particularly good or bad about the process.
3. Clear Navigation
Take a look at some of the most popular shopping sites, and study their navigation. Even Amazon, which sells just about anything you can imagine, has a fairly simple and pared down navigation. Successful e-commerce sites make it easy to find items with well-named categories. Each category is also populated with items – no orphan categories allowed.
Non-profit fix
Think about what you want your visitors to accomplish when they come to your site, and shape your navigation accordingly. Remembering that people read from left to right, put the most important item on the farthest left navigation item. Make sure you don’t repeat items within navigation, and make sure each menu item leads somewhere. No “coming soon” pages!
4. Effective search
If a shopper is looking for barbeque tongs, they’ll often just type “barbeque tongs” into a search box to find them. It can be much easier than navigating through menu systems, especially if those are complex menu systems.
Non-profit fix
Make sure your content management system has a built-in search engine that delivers the most helpful search results. Your visitors should be able to enter keywords and find any applicable content that matches those keywords. It’s even better if you can guide your visitors through categorized searches, if you have a website with heavy content.
5. Detailed product information
Shoppers like to know what they’re buying. They like detailed shopping information, including prices, sizes, specifications and pictures. The more information available makes people more comfortable with parting with their money or personal information.
Non-profit fix
Every time you ask for a transaction from your visitors – money or signing a petition or any kind of interaction – provide them with as much information as possible. If you’re collecting money for the next youth trip, show pictures of the last trip and give an itinerary. If you’re trying to save endangered tigers, provide numbers of wild tigers and details of how any funds will be spent.
6. Clean Checkout Process
The last thing e-commerce sites want to stand between a shopper and their purchase is a clumsy checkout process. They do everything they can to make it smooth and involving as few steps as possible. The more steps between deciding to pay and actually paying equals more opportunities for abandoned shopping carts.
Non-profit fix
Make it easy to accept donations or sign-up forms. Once someone chooses to give you money, let them review their order, enter their billing information and check any additional fees on the same page. It also helps is your shopping cart or submission form are completely integrated into your website – it pays not to use a third-party service for this. If you must include other pages, make sure they’re short and match your site exactly.
7. Dependable Customer Service
The best shopping sites take pride in their customer service. They make it easy for customers to find contact information (see above) and also get in touch if they need more involved help. They also make privacy policies, return policies, shipping rates and FAQs easy to find from every page. Well served customers are happy customers, but there’s also a practical use for these good practices. The more information they provide to shoppers up front, the fewer questions they have to answer.
Non-profit fix
Copy these same pricniples, and you’ll have a happy constituency. Have a special address or system you can use for support, and present a phone number for people who prefer not to use technology. Create an FAQ that addresses the most commonly asked questions that come in. If you’re collecting personal information, make it clear what you’ll do with that information in a privacy policy.
8. Multiple Payment Options
The best sites are open to accepting your money any way you care to give it: credit card, check or PayPal. They’re also open to people who have cards other than Visa or MasterCard, by accepting AmEx and Discover.
Non-profit fix
If you’re accepting money, provide as many payment options as possible to help the money flow in. You can subscribe to a payment service that allows all the major credit cards, and also provide the option of sending in electronic or paper checks. PayPal is useful, because that opens up the choices your donors have for paying.
9. Prevalent Store Policies
The best online stores make it clear what their return and shipping policies are, and lay out their other store rules. Many simply put it in an FAQ or page with links to more detailed pages.
Non-profit fix
If you have terms and conditions or privacy policies, make it easy to find. Spell out exactly what you do with private information. Tell your visitors how you might be interacting with them (newsletters, Facebook, etc.). Informed visitors are much more likely to be happy about making transactions with you.
10. History and Credibility
One of the reasons so many people feel safe about buying from Amazon is that they know so much about them. They know the company’s history, they know Jeff Bezos is a nice guy and how he built it. They also know that history includes years testimonials from happy customers. That’s what sets a fly-by-night company from one people feel comfortable doing business with.
Non-profit fix
Tell your story. If you’ve been around for awhile, talk about your beginnings. Even if you’re new, you probably have individuals with a positive history who work for you – tell their history. Also demonstrate the good work you’ve done in the past. Show how you’ve used funds and the positive impact your organization has made. Tell your visitors why it makes sense for them to trust you, and they will.

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September 13, 2010
16:53
5 Ways To Supercharge Your Event Listings
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Online calendars are an effective and affordable way to improve attendance at your events and generally promote what you do. Zip them up with calendars, directions and sign-up forms, and you’ll have even better attendance. Here are a few tips to help you create your best-ever listings.

Full Attendance at an Event
1. Add a map.
If your event is in a physical place, a map answers questions about location before they’re asked. Google Maps makes it dead easy to embed an interactive map into the event detail page, and makes it easy for your attendees to find driving directions. Use the Link feature on Google Maps to find the website code you need to include the map.

As a helpful addition, add any site-specific directions, such as, “Second door on the right,” or “Parking permitted in Lot A on Sundays.”
2. Link to sign-up forms.
It should be dead easy for registrants to sign up for your event as soon as they learn about it. Create direct links to your registration form with a call-to-action button: “Register now!” If you don’t accept online registration (and you should!), at least provide a downloadable signup form in PDF format with mailing directions.
3. Write a full listing.
Brevity has its merits, but it’s helpful to create as complete a listing as possible on the event page. Include goals of the events, dates and times, speaker information – as much information as you anticipate people asking.
4. Add pictures.
Include visual interest with pictures of the event location, speaker headshots or pictures of people enjoying previous similar events.
5. Let attendees add the event to their calendar.
Many online calendars (including Drupal) let you provide events in a downloadable format, such as ICAL or ICS. Attendees can then save the event to their Outlook or other calendar program. They’ll have a hard time forgetting your event if it’s on their own schedule.

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September 10, 2010
13:54
3 Musts of Non-Profit Website Marketing
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
There’s a prejudice in the non-profit world against marketers. They’re often thought of as “slick” (not my word – a direct quote), slimy and very, very expensive.

The truth is, a marketer should look just like you, whether you’re slick or a slob. If you’ve decided you want a website, you’ve got to tap into your inner marketer to make it a success. Suppress your shudders when you hear words like “strategy” and “metrics” and “target audience” – instead learn what it means to be your own website marketer, and your site will be better.

You don’t have to enroll in classes at Sloan to apply a few elementary marketing skills (although it can’t hurt, if you have the time and budget). Bone up on these few areas, and you’ll be in a much better position to be using your website as a tool that works for you rather than an annoying necessity.
1. SEO
Have a basic understanding of how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) works. The good news is as long as you apply a little common sense, your search engine standing will improve. Write in natural language, make sure you use sensible page titles and include the words that best describe what you do, otherwise known as “keywords.”

This is a great article on understanding the basics of SEO.
2. Social Media Basics
Even if you’re not on board with compulsive Twitter updates, realize that social media is a useful tool for reaching a target audience. Spend some time looking for the social networks that your audience uses. Participate often, and give your fans and followers ample opportunities to communicate with you.

Check out this list for how to get started with social networking.
3. Copywriting
Think about how much time you spend reading when you’re on a website (pretty much all of it, right), and then think about how much thought you give to the copy. With most non-profits, there’s a discord.

Learn about writing for the web, and pepper your site with calls to action. The care you take will pay off when it comes to communicating a clear message.

Copyblogger gives loads of good advice with content-based marketing.
Pace Yourself
Marketing is a job that never ends. The best way to accomplish it is to nibble away bit by bit on a regular basis. Make a schedule for yourself, and devote yourself regularly to different marketing tasks.

If want a little help, try out 52 Website Marketing and Promotion Tips, which gives you one easy thing to do per week.

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September 01, 2010
16:57
52 Web Promotion & Marketing Tips
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
It’s the gift that keeps on giving: a new online marketing and promotion tip every week. As part of our year-long birthday festivities, we’re celebrating by giving away a new e-newsletter.

52 Web Marketing & Promotion Tips helps you energize your website with a piece of actionable advice delivered directly to your inbox every week, so you can keep your site fresh and vibrant. From writing and link building to best practices and strategy, we’ll help you reach your website goals in for the whole year.

One short and sweet tip each week, all year long. What could be easier?

Click here to subscribe before you get behind!

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August 31, 2010
15:21
How to Write for the Web – Live Webinar
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

We’re covering the most important elements of taming your website copy in Keep, Cut or Kill: Writing for the Web webinar on September 2. We’ll reveal how to plan for a copy overhaul, how to be merciless with what you do have, and how to optimize what’s left. You’ll get practical techniques to purge and polish.

The 30-minute presentation is lead by our CEO Monique Cuvelier, who spent 20 years as a journalist and web editor. Here are a few ideas from the talk as a preview:
Know your audience first.
You need to be able to put yourself into your readers’ shoes before you know how to speak to them. Teens will respond to different language than Baby Boomers will.
Be merciless.
Website copy has a tendency to grow and expand, especially over time. Every once in a while, review your copy and be totally honest with yourself. Do you need it?
Clean up.
When you’ve cleared the website clutter and you’re left with the content that really should be there, make sure it reads well. Optimize for web reading, and people will respond better.

>> Sign up for the live event

September 2
2 p.m. Eastern
Online

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August 27, 2010
10:13
Contra Costa Midrasha’s Small Investment & Big Payoff
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
It’s easy to think in extremes with websites. Your website might be looking a little tired, and you might think, “Time for an overhaul!” Often all you need is a little freshening up, and you’ll notice a big payoff. As long as you’re reasonably happy with your content and you don’t have any technical problems, you can execute a few tweaks that are far cheaper than an overhaul, and that pay off big time.

Contra Costa Midrasha just went through what I’d classify as a “refresh” rather than a “relaunch.” CCM is a program for Jewish high school kids in Walnut Creek, Calif., and every year they start a big registration push to recruit more students.They were already planning a “Put Yourself in the Picture” direct mail campaign and had designed a postcard.

It seemed like the perfect time to breathe new life into the website while using it as the hub for registrations, donations and news about events. After a few discussions with Devra Aarons, the program’s executive director, we came up with a plan of attack that would be budget-friendly but still achieve her goals of getting new recruits and collecting information. We decided to also align the site with the “Put Yourself in the Picture” campaign.

Here’s the plan:
- Design a new header to match the campaign.
- Add punchy noticeable buttons to encourage donations and registrations.
- Create motion and interest through an interactive slide show.
- Use an expanded online registration tool.
- Promote their new social media campaign.
- Use analytics accounts to track usage.
New header
The old website header was designed to match a brochure. It was eye-catching, but this was probably the most impactful way to update the look of the site. We used an existing postcard for the upcoming campaign and extended the movie metaphor with CCM’s color palette and some layered textures. Here’s the old banner:

And the new banner:

Donate and Register buttons
For a long time, Devra knew she wanted to add call-to-action buttons to encourage donations and registrations. There was a blank area above the banner that was the perfect spot. We created a couple buttons that matched the new header and that stood out.

Slideshow
The biggest wow factor on the page comes from the slideshow. It cycles through a series of pictures with text, and each image links to a corresponding page. Since Devra wanted to ramp up registrations, we made them all lead – for now – to the registration page.

Registration tool
Devra decided to largely scrap the paper registration and put it all online. The form was long, to be sure, but we streamlined as much as possible and used fieldsets to group like information with like. We also used collapsible fields, which open with a click and reveal more information. This is helpful for information that might not be relevant for everyone. The end result for the user is a friendly flow of information that’s a little easier on the eyes.

The payoff here was clear and nearly immediate. Registrations started coming in right away, and the feedback was good: “I got a lovely e-mail from a parent saying how user friendly our registration form was!” Devra said.

Promote social media
CCM just started using Twitter, so we added this and a link to their Facebook Group to the homepage, where it’s easy to click through.

Analytics
Finally, Devra set up accounts on Google Analytics and Clicky, both helpful tools to show the who, what, where and when of people visiting the site. After making these kinds of changes, tracking usage becomes a helpful benchmarking tool to know what decisions are resonating and identifying possible issues. The data that comes in over the following weeks and months will help plan for the future, as needs and responses change through the course of the program.

Here’s the whole site, but make sure you visit so you can see it all in action.

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August 25, 2010
10:52
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Your Users
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

1. They’re not all using their desktop computers.
Seen all those people trying to meld with their Blackberries? They may be looking at your site on that thing, so make sure it looks good.
2. They have the patience of a puppy chugging espresso.
Get to the point. Fast.
3. They like pretty things, but value efficient navigation more.
Designers do funny things when they get hold of sites. They make them look beautiful, but don’t always think about what they’re supposed to do.
4. They don’t always like slide shows.
Slide shows often go nowhere. Sometimes they want to get directly to the meat.
5. They love trusted recommendations.
Think of what partners and relationships you can recommend that actually do your users a service. It’s karmic – it’ll come around to you.
6. Pop-ups.
They make them go away and hate you a little bit.
7. They adore before and after stories.
This should set off little bells amongst fundraisers.
8. Forcing behavior.
Listen, people will sign up/donate/attend if they want to. Don’t slap them around with a request.
9. iPads, iPods and anything that handles apps.
Do you have an inner app? Think what apps provide, and see what something similar might do for your website.
10. Egotism.
Talk about your capabilities and successes, but don’t go on and on about why you’re the best. Total turn off.

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August 18, 2010
19:01
A New Day Dawns
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Take a look at A New Day, a heroic organization in Massachusetts that helps victims of sexual and relationship violence. We helped them bring a bright and hopeful face to the work they do with a new logo to match their new name (they’re formerly known as Womansplace Crisis Center). The new logo provides instant recognition to non-native English speakers and those who may be illiterate. It also communicates calm, freshness, vibrancy and empowerment.

A New Day Logo

Visit them at their website: anewdayma.org, and stay tuned, because big things are planned for this space.
Who Is A New Day?
A New Day is a free and confidential space for survivors of domestic and sexual violence and their family. They provide counseling, medical advocacy, 24-hours’ response to individuals who have been sexually assaulted (including meeting them at the hospital and staying with them through procedures), legal advocacy and prevention, working in the community to change the way they think about and respond to domestic and sexual violence in hopes to stop it at its roots. Check ‘em out. They’re worth every bit of good will they get.

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1. The Good, The Bad, The Logo (April 2010 Newsletter)
2. 5 Ways Your Website Can Make a Great First Impression
August 11, 2010
15:05
Find Your Hidden Audiences
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

We talk a lot about discovering who your audience is and talking directly to them through your website. If you’ve been a faithful reader, you know by now that it’s an exercise in self-aggrandizing to focus the website on the big wigs at your organization. However, you should also be looking at less visible audiences.

Let’s say you’re a social services agency, and you say, “Our audience members are the people who come in for treatment or services.” Good start, and your website should make it clear to those people how to do things like book appointments and give feedback on services they’ve received. But you have more work to do.

If you’re that social services agency, think about what you can add to your website to address these additional audiences:
Local and regional governments.
You’ll want to swap information with them and also receive client referrals. Make it easy by providing clear channels and maybe even building networks on the website to facilitate the flow of data.
The locals.
Social care businesses occupy an important segment of the community, so remember to engage the people around you who may one day depend upon you. They are one of your strongest sources of new clients, so think about how you can make it easy to include them.
Partner organizations.
The other social care, transport, hospitals, education, law enforcement, housing services, leisure services and benefit entitlement services all depend on you for information and vice versa. Create a strong connection to them through technology, and you’ll serve yourself better, as well as your clients.
Your staff.
I’m not talking about putting biographical information on the staff pages. I’m talking about how your website should support your field staff in their daily activities.

The key is to think about your website not as just a way to push information to your primary audience, but to also think about it as a connecter throughout your community. This is the kind of thinking that will help you and your website reach out to new people and make them better cared for while making your website a worthwhile investment.

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August 09, 2010
13:00
3 Ways to Get to Know Your Community
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
[This little gem is the e-mail newsletter our subscribers just received. Want a slice for yourself? Sign up now.]

The more you know about the people who visit your website, the better. Creating a profile of the people who visit your organization site can help you make better decisions about what you can do for them.

Your website should be the central repository for this research. Here are a few tools you can add to your existing website to compile info on your users.
Feedback forms.
A simple feedback form can gather so much. Tuck these around your website soliciting comments, and you’ll start learning more about who your people are.
Surveys.
If you want serious feedback, host a survey. If you build this into your website, you can keep names, contact information and responses local to your website rather than a third-party service. You can also set it up so you receive e-mail alerts every time someone submits a response.
E-newsletters.
E-newsletters are good sources of information as well as good ways to deliver targeted information to your subscribers. Make sure you have a sign-up form on your website as well as archives.

Call (888) 810-9109 or e-mail if you want demos or pricing.
August Birthday Goodie: Free Webinar
We’re halfway through our 10th year and still celebrating. For August, we asked you what you wanted for a freebie, and you spoke. You want a crash course on how to write for the web. We’re taking registrations through August, so sign up now for this handy session on how to fine-tune your writing to appeal to online readers.

Keep, Cut or Kill: Writing for the Web is Sept. 2, 2010 at 2 p.m. Eastern.

>> Register now!

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August 04, 2010
18:08
Keep, Cut or Kill: Writing for the Web Free Webinar
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

Scissors and friends by BOSSoNe0013, on Flickr

We’re halfway through our 10th year and still celebrating. For August, we asked you what you wanted for a freebie, and you spoke. You want a crash course on how to write for the web.

We’re taking registrations through August, so sign up now for this handy session on how to fine-tune your writing to appeal to online readers.

Keep, Cut or Kill: Writing for the Web is Sept. 2, 2010 at 2 p.m. Eastern.

Click here to register now!

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August 02, 2010
12:49
Six Party-Planning Tips That Make Your Website Rock
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
You’d never throw a party without sending invitations. Who wants to sit alone with four dozen spinach triangles and a couple cases of beer? (If you just answered, “I do!” then you might want to get out a little.)

That’s effectively what you’re doing if you’re like one of the many people I talk who aim to have an “interactive” website but don’t kick-start the festivities. They expect people to start participating, yet they don’t tell anyone what’s happening or make it a destination worth visiting.

It helps to think of your website as a venue where the party never ends. An always open house. How do you do this? By applying some of the same principles you would to any bash you host.
1. Send out invites.
If you know how to reach them online, you can invite them through e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, listservs or however you normally chat with them. Are your partygoers the type to read a paper invite over an electronic one? Put it in the mail. The point is to invite them. Check out 18 Ways To Promote Your Website for ideas.
2. Keep inviting.
Remember, you website isn’t the one-time event of the year. It’s the ongoing event of the decade. Inform people they’re welcome to drop by any time. And then keep inviting them. People forget, have dentist appointments, get interrupted, so you need to keep the invites coming.
3. Plan something fun.
You don’t have to whack a piñata every time you throw a shindig, but people minimally expect snacks, drinks and good music. Why would they come to your website if there weren’t some kind of payoff? Make it worth their while, and they’ll keep coming.
4. Take pictures.
You know how weddings nowadays have disposable cameras in the middle of the tables? It’s because everybody likes to see themselves and their buddies participating. That transfers to your website too, whether it’s actual photos of the people you know or representations of them.
5. Make it pretty.
Picking up the dirty socks from the sofa and doing the dishes translates into fixing broken pictures and links and correcting typos. Read our Spring Cleaning guide so you can get everything sparkling before the party starts.
6. Plan for amounts.
In the event-planning world, you need to know who’s attending your party so you rent a big enough space, have enough canapés and staff appropriately. If you have the kind of website that’s likely to receive a surge in traffic, make sure you’re expecting it. If you aren’t, people might receive a message that the website isn’t available. Up your hosting account, talk to your webmaster about planning for what happens if 100 people try to click the same thing at once.

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July 30, 2010
11:44
8 Non-Profit Website Tools That Really Work
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
It’s true that your website should be a reflection of your organization’s goals and audience, but there are a few proven tools that we suggest again and again because they simply work. They make a more interactive website. They drive more support. They deliver information most efficiently.

I happen to be right, but you don’t have to take my word for it. I ran a check against some of best top non-profit websites out there – the ones that were official nominees for the 14th annual Webby awards – to see what tools they had on their homepages.

Here are the top eight and why they work so well. Keep reading and you’ll see the breakdown for Teenage Cancer Trust, ASPCA, One, SocialVibe and The Nature Conservancy.
Search
There’s only so much information you can cram onto your homepage. Search provides a way for website users to tap into your reservoir of information.
Donate button
You’ve got to earn money, and people want to give it. Don’t stand in their way.
Newsletter
Establish a regular newsletter and then encourage people to sign up. This way you can remind them that you exist and that what you do matters.
Slide show
Slide shows are an efficient way to display evocative, image-based content in a confined space.
Blog
Blogs not only keep your constituency informed of what you’re doing, but they also help fill your website with content. That gives search engines more to latch onto, and therefore drive more people to your website.
Social media plug-in
Whether you have an initiative on Facebook or Twitter or some other social networking platform, bring it into your website. It serves as a cross-promotional element and gives people other ways to interact with you.
Featured stories
Websites can go stale quickly, but a list of featured stories or news items can keep it fresh.

Here are the tools those top five non-profits are using on their websites. Look familiar?
Teenage Cancer Trust
- Search
- Donate button
- Slide show
- Latest news
- Newsletter
- Directory/support network
ASPCA
- Search
- Join now button
- Donate button
- Newsletter
- Highlighted stories
- Online shop
- Social media accounts
One
- Join now button
- Search
- Slide show
- Newsletter
- Blog
- Social media accounts
SocialVibe
- Slide show
- Newsletter
- Facebook link
- Twitter feed
- Blog
The Nature Conservancy
- Search
- Newsletter
- Slide show
- Interactive map
- Social share
- Social media accounts
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July 28, 2010
18:18
10 Commandments of Writing for the Web
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
1. Thou shalt break up long pieces of text with bullets, for it is easier to scan that way.
2. Thou shalt use short sentences, even if it feels thou art using more periods than commas. Punchy maketh for better reading.
3. Thou shalt bow down and worship thine spell checker.
4. Honor the inverted pyramid style of writing. It hath helped journalists for decades for good reason.
5. Useth not more than one idea per paragraph. Readers never readeth carefully enough to catch more than one.
6. You shalt not make wrongful use of verbs. Choose active verb construction rather than passive.
7. Thou shalt cut everything you write in half. Shorter articles art better.
8. Thou shalt use highlights, such as bolds and hyperlinks, to call attention to important words.
9. Thou shalt not be creative with sub-headings and instead use clear ones. They aren’t the place for cuteness.
10. Useth lists and numbers to organize ideas into an easy-to-read format (cf. 10 Commandments).
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1. Supercharge Your Web Writing
July 23, 2010

Permalink for 'Online Course or Webinar?'

12:06

Online Course or Webinar?

» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

table.sample { border-width: 2px; border-spacing: 1px; border-style: none; border-color: gray; border-collapse: separate; background-color: white; } table.sample th { border-width: 0px; padding: 4px; border-style: none; border-color: white; background-color: rgb(235, 246, 250); -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; } table.sample td { border-width: 0px; padding: 4px; border-style: none; border-color: white; background-color: rgb(235, 246, 250); -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; }

You may have piles of experience presenting to live groups but are fuzzy on how to make the transition online. Particularly confusing is the difference between an online course and a webinar. While both formats let you present information to people from afar, they’re not the same, nor are they mutually exclusive.

If you’re considering opening up your training to include an online element, this matrix might help you find the best tool for the job.

Ask yourself …	Webinar	Online Course
Is it a short, one-off training best suited for an hour or less presentation?	X
Do you need to track attendees, for instance if they’re employees required to attend sexual harassment or compliance training?		X
Would attendees benefit from interactive exercises?		X
Should attendees be able to submit assignments?		X
Do you need to know who attended?	X	X
Do you need to know what material attendees looked at?		X
Would you rather not have a staff member be in attendance?		X
Do you need participants to see each other?	X
Do other participants need to see you in real time?	X
Are you converting a workbook or binder?		X
Are you looking to do a presentation for free?	X
Do you need professoinal help gearing your material for an online audience?		X
Would you like to use discussion groups, wikis or allow users to use a device?		X

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July 16, 2010
15:33
How To Design by Committee (And Live To Talk About It)
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
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.

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July 14, 2010
14:42
Your Turn: Choose a Birthday Treat
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog

We thought next month we’d let you tell us what kind of deal you’d like to receive from Talance in celebration of our 10th year. Pick your favorite; we’ll offer the winner on August 1.

What birthday deal should we offer next month?online survey

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July 09, 2010
18:01
How To Tell If Your Website Is a Success
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Simply launching a website is a success in itself, but how do you know if it’s hitting the mark with your audience? It’s a crucial question to ask so you know that the time, effort and money you put into your investment is paying off.

The key is to set goals before you even begin on your website project, and then break those goals into measures of success. For instance, your goal may be to transmit your message to more teens. Ways you can measure the success of that goal might be:
- More registrations from people aged 13-18
- More website referrals from teen-centric partners or resources
- More repeat visits from people in the 13-18 age range.
It’s a good idea to quantify each of those bullets to match your audience share.

Just as each of your goals will be unique to you and your organization, so will the measurements of success. Generally speaking, though, here are some other ways you can tell if your website is doing what it should:
Increased traffic.
Sign up with an analytics account (I like Clicky and Google Analytics) and see if your traffic goes up.
Repeat visits.
Increased traffic isn’t the same as repeat traffic. You want people to find your site and keep coming back.
Increased sales or donation ratio.
Start counting how many visitors you need to make one sale or donation. If 1 in 100 visitors makes a purchase, your sales ratio is 1 percent. If you’re successful, this so-called conversion rate will increase.

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July 07, 2010
14:48
28 Tips for Better Blogging
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
Birthday Cake Cupcake by clevercupcakes, on Flickr

Writing is hard work! Make sure your blog posts aren’t tarnished by easily avoidable mistakes. Fret no longer with our free Perfect Blogging Checklist.

>> Get a copy of our Perfect Blogging Checklist now!

Tell your friends and colleagues to get a copy, and you can be reading better blogs too.

It’s all in celebration of Talance’s 10th anniversary. Check back every month of 2010 for a new birthday goodie.

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1. Gadget Monday: Blogging Equipment
2. 3 Ways to Get to Know Your Community
July 02, 2010
14:34
Supercharge Your Web Writing
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
[This little gem is the e-mail newsletter our subscribers just received. Want a slice for yourself? Sign up now.]

The best websites are organized websites. Plan your pages with a content analysis before you write one word. Here’s how to start:
Define your writing style.
You might appear in some of the most distinguished academic publications in the nation, but is that what your website visitors read? If they’re teens looking for activism opportunities, probably not. Think about the writing style (serious, academic, slangy, sensational) they’re most likely to respond to before you start to write.
Create categories.
Divide your existing or to-be-written pages into main categories. They may align with your menu options, but don’t think too much about that yet. Just group pages into the most important categories. Better to be general at this early stage than overly specific.
Make a content inventory.
Take a close look at the pages you already have and decide if they fit into your categories. If there are gaps, plan for new pages. Add all pages – existing or planned-for – into a spreadsheet. Add columns for categories, intended audience members, who’s responsible for writing each page, importance, topics, keywords or anything else you might notice.

This kind of analysis takes work, but it’s the best way to know that you’re saying what you need to say. It will also help you enlist the right authors and give you a clear understanding of the most vital – and outdated – information on your website.

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June 30, 2010
12:03
15 Ways to Create a Horrible Non-profit Website
» ‎ Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog
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.

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