Will Marlow

We all know people who hate the Internet, or claim to hate the Internet. But most of those people don't really hate the Internet, they really just hate websites.  Because somewhere along the line they were traumatized by a website that made them feel stupid.

This is why, when you're designing a website, one of your goals should be: avoid making users feel stupid.  Make your site easy to navigate, helpful, and intuitive.  Make links and buttons look "clickable."  Make text scannable.  Watch real people as they navigate your site, and look for areas that cause them to stumble or pause.  

Too often we focus on wowing people, impressing others with our technical abilities, knocking their socks off with bells and whistles on our websites.  A website that is easy to use, helpful and intuitive is a beautiful thing.

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Will Marlow is an online marketing consultant.  He can help you build an awesome website.  He's also the co-founder of  AlumniFidelity, which you should check out if you care about fundraising for schools and nonprofits.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

It used to be that a website was like a brick wall.  You would visit the website for your school, or a charity, or a business, and you saw a bunch of information on the webpage that someone from that organization posted, and that was it.  You couldn’t get any further than the brick wall.  (Early on, some websites posted real email addresses and bios of people who you could interact with from the organization, but that is basically like installing peepholes in the brick wall.)

The smartest people who run websites today are tearing down the brick wall completely, and replacing it with glass rotating doors that you can see through and walk through.  How do you do that?

• If you run a theater website and someone buys tickets for one of your shows, you shouldn’t just give them a dead receipt (i.e., a brick wall) you should give them a page that lets them write a short testimonial about how much they are looking forward to the show, and link them to a page where other fans have done the same thing.
• If you run a nonprofit and someone registers to be a volunteer at your next event, let them also signup to recruit two additional volunteers, and don’t force them to do it without help.  Give them tools to send email, import contacts, connect to their Facebook and Twitter account, and let them trigger their own reminders well in advance of the event.
• If someone makes a donation to your school or nonprofit, give them the opportunity to create a personal fundraising page (like the type that AlumniFidelity enables) that allows them to become a fundraiser, and not just a one-time donor. 
• Rather than showing only official photography on your website, make sure that there is a method for submitting photographs that your fans take at events, or launch parties, or from old events that may have taken place years ago.  You should make it easy for anyone to subscribe (and also to unsubscribe) to receive updates when new photos and videos are posted.  

The point is, the next generation of Internet marketing for all organizations is this: when a fan/customer/donor stops engaging with you, it should be because they are satisfied that they have done everything that they want to do with you.  The worst thing you can do is to put up a brick wall that prevents an energetic fan of yours from doing more to carry your goals forward.

A lot of people who design websites or manage social media profiles are focused (smartly) on making things simple.  This is generally a good thing, because visitors to your website need to be able to find what they're looking for, and they need to be able to accomplish whatever they came to do.  But simplicity isn't the only thing you should go for.  You should also try to make visitors feel "rewarded" for digging deep and spending time on your site.  Seth Godin regularly breaks the number one rule of web development (Don't make anyone think!) by making people think, but he then rewards his visitors for thinking by giving them useful and interesting information.  Two of my favorite ways that he does this are by using a picture of his head to reveal the crucial "persistent navigation" of his blog, and placing distinct links in words that run next to one another, with each link directing to its own relevant landing page.

When it comes to building a website or any type of software, it's important to make as few assumptions about how you think people will use your product as possible.  (This is especially important if you want to be taken seriously by veteran software developers and Internet entrepreneurs, who are very big on the concept of split testing everything (read about that here).

I love Favicons, which are are the tiny (16x16 square images, to be specific) that appear in the URL, or in the browser link, or in the tab of your browser when your blog or website is being viewed.  

(If you want to see some examples of Favicons that may inspire you, here is a great catalogue of some of the best ones out there.)