Non-Profit Tips

This article covers the contentious issue of creating a Flash-based web site. One of the major issues is using Flash generally means your site won’t rank well in the search engines. While this article presents a new solution, it isn’t easy or cheap — two things a non-profit web site should be.

Flash: The Pink Elephant or the Spark

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SearchEngineLand reports the following:

Looking to learn more about search marketing? Bruce Clay is running a contest for newbies to gain training through his company plus a ticket to our upcoming SMX Advanced show. There’s a further twist. You need to find a non-profit group that can get helped along with you. Review the site, how you think they should be helped, and that’s your entry into showing promise to win. (from SearchEngineLand)

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Website Grader is an interesting site that grades your site on factors such as web page structure, readability levels, etc., your competition, and give you a grade. One of my sites garnered an 86% score and another site got 51%. A domain I sold a few years back (it has a really nice, recognizable-type name) has a 37% score.

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This is about as scary as it gets. We’ve all spent YEARS trying to figure out the best way to get our email through to everybody and now Microsoft has totally messed up HTML.

Microsoft takes email design back 5 years

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Of all the e-mail questions I receive, this one amazes me the most. I used to answer these e-mails by saying the best way to figure out if your site is ineffective was to look around at the different sites in the non-profit world, look at all the Daily Design Discussions, and notice the similarities between what I mention and what’s on your site.

Now, I’m providing an easy-to-use solution. Compare your site’s features against two easy-to-use checklists and find out if your site’s design is ineffective.

The article is broken up into four parts.

1. Is My Web Site Ineffective? An Introduction
2. Is My Web Site Ineffective? Checklist 1
3. Is My Web Site Ineffective? Checklist 2
4. Is My Web Site Ineffective? Yes? What Do I Do Now?

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Submitter’s comments: Got a good one for you. I think that it will simply explain itself.

Vincent’s comments: I get a lot of suggestions for sites that appear to have serious problems but may not actually appear to be so bad to their intended audience. As we know, you have to design for your audience.

Here’s a really good example of a design that seems to have a lot of aesthetic problems. However, there is a significant audience that will find the design comforting. I don’t know what the look of Trinity Broadcasting is these days, but this site’s design would fit in with the old TBN look.

I won’t get into whether or not the product should exist. I’m not qualified. However, I am qualified to say that the boy’s outfit looks a lot like the kind worn by a certain post-Civil fraternal organization.

Armor of God’s PJs

Technorati tags: webdesign | usability | webdev | accessibility | web graphics | website design | web standards | Accessibility

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Submitter’s comments: While the issue of drug abuse is a worthwhile cause for a charity, this website is immensely confusing. It opens with an intro showing crosses looking like the Hewlett- Packard logo and words like “Advice Support, A Helping Hand” (Oh - so I am on the customer support website for HP am I?)

The intro “warms you up”, and for what…when you actually get to the content, the most striking things on the page are some blue hoops and flying balls. The music on the site is cheesy (but I actually like the total song by Underworld).

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Submitter’s comments: I’m not sure if you’ve seen this one before… They may be in the fashion/clothing business, but their website is a piece of crap.

What is currently up there is (marginally) better than their previous site, which was just their logo and an extremely loud buzzing noise (which you could not turn off).

There is no useful information available. None. Just a few addresses.

Vincent’s comments: Oh, it’s a “fun” site. You get to click on the falling Flash balloons and pop them. Isn’t that what a web site is supposed to be about?

TSUBI

Technorati tags: webdesign | usability | webdev | accessibility | web graphics | website design | web standards | Accessibility

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Submitter’s comments: Recently I had a web design class assignment where we had to find an example of a bad site and then say why we thought it was bad. The site I used was www.michrenfest.com. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I had to analyze it. Their images are not optimized, they have two different page layouts (one with a large background image & image map for navigation and another with a large background image and Flash navigation), barely readable text on a couple of the pages, the artisans page is pretty much useless as it doesn’t give any information beyond the name of vendors are just some of the things I found.

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