Look more professional

Want to make your design to look more professional? Here's a few tips:

• Use a good color scheme.
  Avoid wild colors. Avoid distracting background images or ones that do not help a "professional" appearance. Match the color scheme to the intended audience, not to your own tastes.
• Use safe fonts.
  Avoid weird or wild ones. Also remember that fonts carry emotions with them. Do you really want your church to come off as "Comic"? Is that professional?
• Develop a clear, logical layout.
  A simple, clean design looks professional. Avoid a cluttered or cramped look. Navigation should be easy to understand. Minimize multiple navigation menus on the same page. Use bulleted lists logically. Use headings and white space to visually show which elements are related and which are not in the text area. Test your pages in multiple browsers -- they won't all look the same.
• Keep any graphics simple and fast.
  Images slow down display of a web page. The larger the total image file size, the slower the page displays. Sprinkling in images can also distract the visitor's eyes and create an unprofessional appearance. Animated images are very distracting and often give an unprofessional look. Always question their use.

Learn more ...

• 5 steps to a great home page (NetMechanic)
• Top 10 reasons visitors leave your site (NetMechanic)
• Web Design Tips
• Design tips (link collection at UseableWeb.com)

Looks counts

A couple studies by the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and Sliced Bread Design show that people relied heavily on visual appeal in deciding credibility.

• People said they judged web sites' credibility on non-visual factors.
• In the study, trust was actually associated with a "professional" look.
• Once satisfying the user's criteria for a professional look, visitors used other aspects of the site in evaluating credibility.

The studys' authors say that this shows a need to better educate people to be careful not to place too much trust in sites solely based on "looking good".

On the other hand, it also means that even church web sites will be "graded" by visitors based on looks. Look unprofessional and suffer the consequences.

• Read more about how people evaluate a web site's credibility

Avoid in-page links

Usability expert Jacob Nielsen says to avoid same-page links. Why? Almost all links work one way, so users expect the following:

• Clicking a link navigates you to a new place.
• After you click, the old page goes away.
• A new page loads into the window, replacing the old page.
• You first see the top of the new page.
• The Back button returns you to the old page.

Useit.com has a page of links to current issues in Web Usability

De-hack your code

While most church web developers won't want to get into the code this deep, everyone needs to know that when the new Internet Explorer 7 arrives, it will "break" some old techniques that coders used to force IE 6 to "behave". Some that code will need to be edited.
How widespread is this? Even some blog templates use the IE6 "hacks".

The Sitepoint blog has a posting on this, " Microsoft Says: De-hack your CSS". It gives code samples that won't work in IE7.

After IE 7 arrives, you may want to keep an eye on any site that produces web page "templates" you have used -- many will update their code. You can also email them and ask how they plan to handle the transition.

Assemblies of God site

The Assemblies of God (Northern California and Nevada) site uses a blog format. It has an appealing look. Great photos, all wider than "normal" (490x162 pixels), are always placed above their related heading, always within a thin gray-ruled box (a DIV tag, naturally).
Each news story has a "Tell a Friend" link to an email form plus a link for Del.icio.us bookmarking. They've also used the new standard feed icon, as agreed upon by Microsoft and Mozilla.

Tips to improve blog content

While churches probably don't need to "drive" bloggers to a church blog, the tips on the "Art of Linkbaiting" page (I know ... I cringe at the title too) can actually help you improve the content of your church blogs.

Know who you're evangelizing

Ben Gray, at "Blog Ministry," says that when we start to evangelize, we need to understand the culture of the people who are our "target audience". He briefly discusses boosting your effectiveness as a youth minister by understanding today's youth and pop culture.

For example, he says that young kids prefer IM and MySpace to email. Read the comments, too -- there's some interesting stuff there.

"Skip to content" link code

You can improve accessibility to a web page by adding a "Skip to content" link that jumps past the header and any navigation area on your web page and goes straight to the text ("meat") of the information on the page. But you don't necessarily want sighted people seeing a link they might not use. What to do?

One solution is to add a special class that hides the text. Example:

.skip2content {display: none}

This lets screen readers for the visually handicapped hear the link and use it but hides it form the display for a sighted person.

• How to add "Skip to content" in a Classic Blogger Blog

Are there any situations where you'd want to display that link? Perhaps. Consider a person with a motor handicap -- they can see just fine, but it takes them much longer to move a mouse or other pointing device around. They may well want the ability to Tab to that link and press Enter to jump to the page's text. In such a case, they'd need to be able to see the link.

Use English good

OK, OK. I know it should be "well," not "good." The headline makes a point. The language we use reflects on us and on the site on which it appears. So when writing for a web site, use language correctly.

A good references for proper usage of the English language is Mr. Grammar's English Study Blog. Mr. Grammar gives excellent, clear examples as well as several quizzes. Recent subjects have included different parts of speech (POS) and samples of tenses. Do you remember what the future perfect tense is?

Web page views get an 'F'

Jacob Nielsen, renowned Usability expert, says that a recent study on eyetracking visualizations shows that users read web pages in roughly an "F" shape. He lists three main implications of that:

• Write for scanners.
  Users won't read your text thoroughly. They scan parts of pages.
• Use the inverted pyramid writing style.
  The first couple of paragraphs must contain the most important information.
  This is not news to anyone versed in newspaper writing. You start with the "Who, what, where, when, why" (the 5 Ws), and sometimes "How" of a straight news story. Then and only then do you elaborate.
• Put key words in heads, bullets.
  Your page's subheads, paragraphs, and bullets should all contain key words that users will notice as they scan down your page (down the left side of the "F").

Related tips

• Use flush-left subheads vs. centered ones. Centered ones are a good bit in from the left, where readers seem to want to read.
• Use bolding in subheads and perhaps even in the start of bullets. Bolding makes words stand out and might increase the chances of getting read. Just don't go bold-happy. A long stretch of bolded text slows down readers.

How to write for the web

Below are some tips related to improving your writing for the web. These come from Jacob Nielsen, renowned Usability guru.

• How users read on the web, including scores on a sample paragraph in different writing styles.
• Why web users scan your text
• Information foraging
• Write in inverted pyramid style
• Keep it terse
• How to write for the web (this has long text)
• Apply writing guidelines - increase usability 159%
• How to write heads and subheads

Do pets blog?

This isn't eactly on-topic, but I couldn't resist this link to a funny cartoon:

• cat vs. dog blogs

More ways to read these postings

You can always come to this blog's web page to read the posts. That's my personal preference. But if you start subscribing to a "bunch o' blogs", the number of new articles may get large. One way to manage scanning them for what you really want to read is to use a " Feed Reader", which I've mentioned in prior posts.

Blog readers (a.k.a. feed readers or RSS readers) come in two basic forms -- web-based and ones installed on your PC.

• The web-based variety involves setting up an account at Google, Yahoo! or similar wites, then adding blogs to track. You log onto the Web site to see new headlines from the blogs in your list.
• The local install method gives you a program. When you run the program, many of which look similar to MS Outlook, you "subscribe" to blogs. The program then pulls down information about the blog postings and you read as you like.

Here are a few recently touted feed readers (blog readers):

• SharpReader (donationware)
• RSS Bandit (donationware)

Don't make them think!

Steve Krug's First Law of Usability for web sites is "Don't make me think!". Some of Krug's points:

• Make everything easy for the visitor.
• Visitors scan pages; they don't read them. Design accordingly.
• Visitors don't take time to learn how site navigation works. They muddle through.
• Visitors "settle" for a link they consider most-likely when none seems "right" to them.
• Users like mindless choices (again -- don't strain their brains).
• Be pithy, not verbose.
• Design navigation with all the above in mind.
• If it's too hard to use your site, visitors leave and may never return.

Steve's book, " Don't make me think: A common sense approach to usability", is thin but pithy. And it has pictures and even some cartoons to bring home the point easily and quickly. This book is for beginners, through we all can learn something here (or at least be pointedly reminded of a better way to design our web sites for visitors).