It's partly just my natural contrarianism, but I love finding indictments of common web-design orthodoxy. For years, I've frequently cited the authoritative resource dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com in discussions with colleagues. So I got a big kick out of Paddy Donnelly's beautifully designed visual essay Life Below 600px (via).

Donnolly questions "the fold," the idea that everything important in a website should be visible without requiring the user to scroll down. "Many web designers, after presenting a site design, hear the client worriedly ask 'But, where is the fold?!' Your first response is usually to switch on the guides in Photoshop to show and they then nervously say 'Hmm, yeah, we're going to need those articles, and those links, and those 6 images all above the fold.' And there goes any sense of white space, readability and storytelling you had planned for their site."

Donnolly uses the example of the 37signals website. 37signals' key links do appear at the top of the page, but a lot of important information appears below the fold. The entire page is much longer than most corporate homepages, but it's also more navigable, readable, and appealing.

In nonprofit web design, we talk a lot about the visibility of key actions for the user, the most obvious example being the "Donate" button. But who's going to give you a donation without touching their scrollwheel — that is, without hearing your story? From Donnolly:

A few days ago on January 14, 2010, TechSoup Talks! held a webinar focused on making your website more accessibility for those in need of assistive technology. Jane Vincent, Usability/Accessibility Manager from the Center for Assistive Technology, gave an overview of web accessibility and the current accessibility guidelines both nationally and internationally.

Jane walked participants through simple code and many examples to help make your organization's website more accessible for all! Examples included everything from using efficient and accessible text sizes to suggestions of usability testing to how to integrate social media into all aspects of this transition.

Thursday, February 4, 11 a.m. Pacific time

More and more nonprofits are exploring and finding benefits from using new social media tools like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter in their online communications. But while the tools themselves can be relatively straightforward to learn and adopt, many organizations struggle with how to effectively coordinate messaging and communications across their suite of online channels — from web and email, to blogs and social media, and beyond.

This free webinar will describe best practices for integrating social media into organizational websites, including basic nuts-and-bolts changes to webpage templates and enhancements to contact, staff, and email sign-up pages. Effective and simple processes for coordinating various channels and maximizing traffic between them will be explained. In addition, a range of contrasts will be drawn describing the different natures and uses of the respective channels, and methods for measuring how different channels are driving traffic to one another will be presented.

Space is limited, register today!

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If you didn't get the chance to watch it live, please take an hour to watch the TechSoup Talks! webinar What Should a Website Cost? with special guest Allen Gunn. Though Gunner does answer the webinar's titular question, he does a lot more than that, taking us step-by-step through the process of scoping, planning, sourcing, and executing a website redesign. It's a highly entertaining and engaging listen.

One point that comes up a few times in the webinar is that good content for your website is (and should be) more work than the website design itself. Gunner posits that for many nonprofits, a website design may be the first time they think in concrete terms about the story and message that they tell the public. At Poke the Beehive, Dan challenges you to ask yourself whether your nonprofit's story has a clear call to action at all: "There are countless nonprofits out there who, given their limited impact, don't really have a reason to exist. Don't be one of them. If you can't tell a compelling story about your organization and its mission, then perhaps you should reconsider what you're doing or how you're doing it."

It's often the case that different stakeholders, both inside and outside of the organization, have their own stories of who the organization is and what it does. That's expected, but the unfortunate thing is when the nonprofit's homepage and other media present a watered-down compromise rather than a clear story. Before our redesign last year, TechSoup's homepage reflected such a compromise. Each program had its own box for recent updates, but there was no overarching narrative. If your site lacks a clear message and call to action, then it doesn't matter how pretty it is: it brands your organization as confused and disarrayed; on the other hand, if your website's message is clear, direct, and actionable, then even the most technically crude site can engage with visitors in a beneficial way.

Please join us next Thursday, January 14 at 11 a.m. Pacific time for our next free TechSoup Talks! webinar. We will be discussing website accessibility with Jane Vincent from the Center for Accessible Technology.

Implementation of web accessibility can seem excessively complicated. In reality, the best accessibility practices dovetail with good overall usability and are easy to implement via standard tools such as templates and cascading style sheets (CSS). This hour-long session will cover topics such as understanding the difference between various accessibility guidelines, avoiding common accessibility errors, when (and when not) to rely on automatic accessibility checkers, and unexpected populations that benefit from accessible websites.

This free webinar is best suited for individuals with some knowledge of HTML coding who are involved with ensuring that their organization's website is accessible. Space is limited so register today!

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Miller-McCune has a story this month on geographic information system (GIS) mapping and the growing role it's playing in city-planning advocacy (via). Profiling a handful of nonprofits using GIS to expose institutional prejudice, the article argues that GIS isn't only about presenting information more attractively; it's about turning unwieldy amounts of data into a direct, actionable call for change.

One organization used GIS to correct a decades-old disparity in water services. The Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities created a map showing how the limited water lines in one rural neighborhood were serving many more white families than families of other races. The information was not new and the Cedar Grove Institute wasn't the first organization to try to do something about it. So why were they successful where others had failed?

The supporting evidence was strong on its own: African-American residents without water had made repeated requests over a period of almost 50 years to remedy the inequity, to no avail. Instead, they had to haul water from the plant or pump it from wells contaminated with sulfur and oil from old mining operations. In the interim, Zanesville had extended its water lines on numerous occasions to new, predominantly white developments that were farther away from the water plant than Coal Run.

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Google and the nonprofit community have had a very Jim-and-Pam* relationship over the past two years, as Google has repeatedly extended the end date for donated Google Checkout services but stayed equivocal about whether we can expect to see the free services indefinitely.

Today's good news is that the checkout services will be free for another year (until January 1, 2011), but only for nonprofits also enrolled in Google Grants for free advertising. If you have a Google Checkout account and a Google Grants account, you need to link them to take advantage of the donated checkout service.

Even if you don't use Google's nonprofit offerings, it's worth looking at their announcement because it also offers an interesting discussion on suggested donation amounts. During a recent disaster-relief campaign, Google decided to run tests on various suggested donations to see which one yielded the best results. To my surprise, Google reports that leaving the donation amount blank brought in the best numbers. Of course, the big takeaway is that you should run this sort of test yourself, as results will be different for different audiences. If you're relying on intuition, you're wrong.

This week, we decided to revisit an older article, Free, Easy Ways to Add a Calendar to Your Website. This is one of TechSoup's most popular articles (thanks in no small part to Google), but some parts had gotten a little dated and it was well in need of an update.

The most obvious change is that far more nonprofits are using web CMSes and using them more intelligently than we were three years ago. Idealware's excellent report on the big four open-source CMSes (Drupal, Plone, Wordpress, and Joomla) noted that only Plone offers a calendar function out-of-the-box, but the other three support additional calendar modules. While researching the article, I found some great examples of nonprofits using these modules to incorporate upcoming events seamlessly throughout their sites, not just on a single calendar page.

The other big change is that more nonprofits are using social networking sites. If your nonprofit has a Facebook page but you don't use it to invite fans to upcoming events, then you should definitely think about it. As we mention in the article, there's even a new application that automatically converts events from any iCalendar-compatible calendar into Facebook events.

While we're on the subject of calendars, the Human Calendar (one of my favorite web doohickeys) is looking for someone in the Portland area to volunteer as the face of 2010! "Prefer someone that is out of the age 25-35 and/or caucasian demographic, but anyone is welcome."

Update: Marc has followed up with some more insight about how orchestras could improve their social media metrics. See his blog post and join the forum discussion.

Beth's Blog has an interesting guest post today by Marc van Bree, who's recently been studying how orchestras use social media. His findings are interesting not only for orchestras and performing arts organizations, but for anyone who's trying to use new media to spread awareness.

…Social media activities, familiarity, and usage seem to be widespread among orchestras. Managers find social media important and organizations are generally enthusiastic. However, the efforts are far from organized and strategic. It seems many orchestras are dipping their feet in the social media pool, but do not have the policies, budgets, and metrics in place to effectively use the tools at their disposal, even if they do recognize the need for checks and balances.

The full report is 24 pages, but it's definitely worth a look. One thing that struck me is that when van Bree asked participants what the goals of their social media campaigns were, "Increasing web traffic" was the most popular response, just above "Increasing brand awareness" and well above any goals that directly impacted revenue (ticket sales and fundraising were sixth and eighth, respectively, out of eight choices).

Respondents were right in not treating social media as a silver bullet for fundraising, but the apparent focus on website traffic seems odd to me. Web traffic is much easier to measure than most other kinds of impact, but it seems a clumsy proxy for the less transparent goals of awareness and education. Upon watching a YouTube video about your nonprofit's message, would you rather a viewer visit your website or send the video to 100 friends?

I've been thinking a lot recently about nonprofit website design and what different nonprofits' websites say about themselves and their supporters. When I try to think of well-known corporate websites to draw analogies from, I keep returning to two: Apple and Mighty Putty. Both sites serve roughly the same purpose (to sell a product); what's different is the timetable for achieving that purpose.

It's absurdly easy to buy Mighty Putty. There's literally nowhere you can browse to on the website where you can't order it. Since there's only one item for sale, there's no need for a "Cart" or other extra steps. Apple is different. When you click on the huge photograph of the featured product (currently the iMac), you're greeted not by an order form but by a full page of information and more photos, with links to even more info about the product. Apple's goal is still to sell you a product, but their website design is based on their understanding that they need to invest a lot of time into that transaction.

Imagine what would happen if Apple added an order form like Mighty Putty's to its homepage. No one would buy a computer without consulting any additional information; even if someone did buy, Apple would miss out on the opportunity to offer her additional peripherals, warrantees, etc. On the other hand, what if Mighty Putty redesigned its website to look more like Apple's? The multitude of links and choices would overwhelm users and many would give up before they ever entered their credit card information.

The funny thing is that at least in the nonprofit world, it's a lot harder to be a Mighty Putty than an Apple. Many nonprofits try to be Mighty Putties, but most fail at it (of course, there are exceptions: I CAN's Adopt a Word campaign comes to mind). As Seth Godin asked in a recent blog entry, "Do you really expect that the first time we transact, it will involve me giving you money in exchange for a product or service?" He goes on to list various online interactions that could eventually lead to a purchase (or a donation) and point out that facilitating these actions costs nothing. "I can give you permission to teach me something. I can watch a video. I can engage in a conversation. We can connect, transfer knowledge, engage in a way that builds trust… all of these things make it more likely that I'll trust you enough to send you some money one day."