 All right. Hello, everybody again. Welcome to short evaluations of real websites. My name is Kaila. I'm going to be your facilitator today, and I do work with TechSoup Global. With me today are Suzanne Hempel and Steve Williams, both from SAP. Suzanne, could you take a moment and introduce yourself briefly? Hi. My name is Suzanne, and I work for SAP as in the translation team, so I'm responsible for quality of the German user interface and documentation. Okay, great. Thank you, Suzanne. And Steve, could you go ahead and introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Steve Williams. I'm Director of Social Responsibility for SAP, and I manage our global technology donation program partnering very much with TechSoup, I believe we're active right now in 18 countries around the world, making a lot of our financial reporting and database reporting and analytics software available to nonprofits. So I spend a lot of time working with organizations about how to use information to do storytelling, and I'm really interested to share some of that knowledge on the website content today. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. And then also assisting with chat today is Kevin Lowe from TechSoup, and so if you see his name pop up into the chat when you ask a question, that's who that is. So everybody say hi to Kevin in the chat pane. A little bit about today's agenda. This is going to be a little bit different than the TechSoup events in the past, and that we are going to be taking a look at four different organizations' websites in about 8 to 10 minutes each. The first organization that we're going to be looking at will be Family and Children's Services, and I do want to thank the representative from that organization, Mary Ann McLaughlin. So thank you, Mary Ann, for volunteering your website to be looked at today. Then next up, we're going to be looking at some Memorial Library's website, and thank you to Andrew Sherman for agreeing to allow us to look at your website. Third, we're going to be taking a look at the Rio Bravo Wildlife Institute's website, and I do want to thank Carol Sebastian. And finally, we're going to end up looking at DFW Wildlife Coalition's website, and a big thank you to Kathy. I believe this is Milaček, and Kathy, I do apologize if I just completely mispronounced your name. But again, a big thank you to all these organizations for allowing us to look at your websites today. Any questions that you have regarding anything that's said about your websites, feel free to email me after the fact, and I will be sending a follow-up email to you all. So for each of these websites, we're going to be thinking about a few different questions. For example, does the website accurately reflect the mission of the organization? So do you know what that organization is about by looking at the websites? We'll be looking at some navigation features. We're going to be thinking about the original content from the websites. We're going to be thinking about how searchable that site is. And finally, we're going to be thinking about if it's easy for a visitor or supporter to become a part of that community. And so with that, I do want to give presenter control to Susanna, who's going to be taking us through the first website, Family and Children Services. Just one note is that we are going to be taking a look at these websites for about 8 to 10 minutes each. So Susanna, if we once we start approaching the 10-minute mark, I probably will kind of interject and say that we should probably have some follow-up, some closing statements about that website. So take it away. Thanks, Kyla, and I'll keep the time in mind. Okay, so I'll get started in order to answer the questions. I think the navigation of this website is really well. I had no problem finding my way through it. It is well structured. So we have those four buttons up here, and then we have buttons below. What I would suggest though is since it seems to be a double navigation, so I have the structure here, and then also I'm located on the very first intro page, and then I have a similar structure here. And the question is, is that extra layer needed, or are these buttons here enough? Because it requires me to click one more layer, through one more layer. However, it's quite easy to navigate through it. I couldn't find a search. There seems to be no search available, so if I, for instance, wanted to search the programs, I have to navigate through it myself. So that could also be an improvement suggestion. I noticed there were a few typos. Since I have a language background, I am looking for that. And there was in the FAQs, I think under news and events, how to help. Sorry, there was an FAQ section, and there were a few typos. So reviewing the website from a linguistic point of view is probably a good idea. I would probably place the social media icons somewhere up higher, on a higher level, maybe on the side so people can use that right away, click on it right away. Right now it's hidden under news events in the media kit. It may not be obvious for a first time user. And also the events that are available also somewhere hidden. I have to know that events, while sit and use an event, and it takes me two clicks to click through the events, it would be good to have them at the entry point of the website. Because that is also a way of getting people engaged by inviting them to events. I got a little bit lost on the donate website where I clicked through. And once I'm at a very low level, there was no way to get me back up to donate other than using the back button to go back to that website where I have laid out all sorts of ways to give. And I think that is about it from my side, what I have to say. I had a couple of comments as well on a similar kind of side. But I was kind of looking at the stated intent that we got from Marianne was around attracting new patrons or new constituents. So if you could just go back to the front of the homepage. If our goal is really to attract new people and to get new constituents part of the process, then we really want to make it very obvious in terms of what specifically do we want them to do. Are we inviting them to join? Are we inviting them to show up to an event? Would we like them to donate? Would we like them to volunteer? And all of those options are available on the site. But I think one of the key things for me would be to really identify what is the key call to action that you want to have happen and be very clear on the audience that you're reaching and making sure that's very obvious. So if the goal is really to attract new, then there should be somewhere that says join us or connect or become a member or something like that, very prominent. I think the other thing that would be really useful there is that there's some great content in the spotlight that are kind of scattered around the site. There's some great quotes and some great stories of organizations and people that have been participating in the site and participating in the program. I would like to see that more highly visible because people really resonate with stories. It's great to have the program descriptions and we do need to have that, but people really do want to be able to see what that looks like and to really make a change on that. The other thing that I think would be interesting is really for an organization like this that delivers lots of programs and has lots of different things going on, it can be challenging to really have a focus and really help people understand what is the impact of what you do. So I think having a way that would show the impact of what your donations have been and the impact of what the volunteers are, really why has it made a difference that you've been in existence, what impact you've made on the community, and that helps to draw people in because they can see, OK, well, if I do this, then what might be the impact of me being able to contribute. So those are some of the highlights that I had. Some of the design is quite clean. I would definitely echo Susanna on making the social media more of a prominent component because if we're really looking at people to join that community and tend to make some of those things easy just to get out then we want to make that as simple as possible for the people. Okay, great. Because I have a couple of questions of my own and I know that we've been asked if we could make the font a little bit bigger on the site. So, Susanna, if you hit Ctrl++, that might make this a little bit bigger simply so we can see it a little bit larger. Is it better now? It looks a little bit better. It got a little bit better. Oh, even more? I saw that it expanded one time. Oh, yeah, that looks even better. So if anybody still needs it, yep, that's perfect. That sounds great. So I was really interested to hear both you and Steve talk about the need to increase the visibility of the social media. So how prominent would you recommend something like that bead? Would you recommend that to be like on the upper right section of a main home page or on every page or what are you thinking would be an ideal visibility for that? If you ask me, you have those shortcuts here on the right-hand side and why not place them below? I think there's only three. You guys only have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, so it would just be those three icons could be at the fixed area below and they just don't move. Yeah, I would definitely recommend having that on every page. And then in terms of the front page, definitely have it prominent, but I would come back to really, before making that decision, focus on what's the one thing that we want people to do on that front page. Do we want them to click the donate button? Do we want them to join us to be a volunteer or do we want them to sign up and be a member of our community? And it's just one of the most challenging things with this website design because if the answer is we want them to do all three, that's great, but the more options we give people, the more kind of confusing you get for them. So we really need to just have what's that one number one, and that could rotate. You may have some months that are focused on donations, some that are focused on engaging people, but I think to me that's the biggest thing. You'd be very clear on what's the number one goal of that site. Right, so it's just a matter of clarifying. So people don't get like sidetracked, and the number one goal is kind of swept aside. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, exactly. The stated goal from the site was attracting new patients or constituents. So is social media the best way to do that? I'm not sure. I'd have to defer to Mary Ann and team for that in terms of how to engage people, but certainly telling the stories and so on and building that community is going to be important. Okay, great. Taking a look at the questions that are coming in, and if anybody has any questions, please type them into the questions pane. There's one, I'm not sure if this is just about this site or if about websites in general, but there's a question that came in from Lisa asking, is it important to include an updated copyright at the bottom? So I guess at the bottom of a website, does that copyright need to be updated yearly? Yeah, generally, I would suggest that it is. I mean, if you're creating your own content, I think it's important to have that so people can recognize that. But I mean, realistically, you just sort of have to look at how much of what you're creating is really sort of needing a copyright and how much you actually just want widely shared, but it's certainly good to have that so you can have the attribution on your site. Okay, great. Stephanie also has asked when looking at these sites, if you had thought of accessibility compliance at all, or if you had any thoughts about that particular issue with this site in particular, and I guess with all the sites we're going to be looking at today. So that's a great point. I did not actually really take that too much into account when I was doing my evaluation, which is really quite an oversight, really. I think that accessibility is an important thing to be thinking about. I mean, it's tempting to really have nice sort of flash faces and all kinds of really interesting cool visuals and everything, but realistically, having that available for screen readers is important. One way that I've seen that is that, and one thing that actually helps is in addition to accessibility from a screen reader side, there's also the issue of accessibility of device, like whether this is accessible through mobile devices, and you can actually get a double benefit there because if you're doing a version of the site, for example, that would work well in a mobile browser, then that's much more likely to be easily accessible for someone who has visual issues or auditory issues as well. So it's definitely a good thing to keep in mind if it's all possible to make the default site work, and if that's not possible to have a parallel site that could also be repurposed for mobile. Okay, great. And we actually just got a question about mobile site development. Ed's wondering just how important it is right now to... And Ed, if you could clarify the question just a little bit. He asked mobile site development how important is it, and so I don't know if either of you want to speak to that just a little bit. Well, I would come back again to the audience, right? It's very difficult to answer that question in general. But I mean, if we look at this site specifically, so if the goal of the site is to add new patrons and new constituents and engage more people in connecting to the site and to the services, then I would ask the question, are those new constituents, are people that are wanting to engage with this, are they using mobile devices? And it may be the case that they are and may want to, for example, have an SMS-based system where they could be alerted to new services being offered or new events and so on, or something that could be accessible through a mobile device or maybe understanding how to map-based applications that show where different food banks and community services are. Those are all interesting, but I would really start before developing that and really understanding who is your audience and what are you trying to deliver to them before you develop that mobile application and really make sure that it's right for your audience. Okay, great. So it's really just a matter of thinking about the importance of who you're trying to reach and who your constituent or donor base is. And so I think that goes back to the idea of knowing what you're doing with the mission. That's going to be a point that I come back to for feedback on all the websites, really, because it's just such a critical thing that we have to think about the audience first. What kind of languages do they speak? What words do they use? What resonates with them? What kind of technology do they use? Are they familiar with the organization? Are they brand new? Really thinking through who are the people that are going to be coming to your site and designing it that way. So really starting with the user first and then building the design around that, where a lot of technology and ourselves and myself included working at a software company for over 20 years, it's really easy to build the technology first and then push it out to the end users. But that almost never really works out successfully. Really don't understand what people are looking for and then build it to not their needs. Okay, great. With any other questions that have come in, I will try to get to at the end of the next website. So, Susanna, why don't you go ahead and give the control to Steve. And we will go ahead and take a look at the next website. Okay, great. And I believe this is going to be some memorial library. Great. Yep. Yep, looks great. Okay, let me make that to full screen view so you can see this. Great. So if I could feedback on this, I would really kind of pick up the comments that I was just making earlier that around who is that audience and how do we get people engaged. So the stated goal of this site was really to be informational. So we do have a lot of that information. I mean, it's good to sort of have when it's going to be open and closed, the hours of the organization, calendar of events. A lot of the information is really quite easy to find. But the first thing that I kind of thought was, well, what are we really trying to accomplish with this? Are we trying to look at existing patrons of the library and get them to increase their usage and understand what else is involved and what's going on there so they can use that more? Or is it around reaching people that are brand new that have never come to this memorial library before and getting them to engage in understanding what's happening? So I think there's a couple of things that we can work with here. So first of all, there is one around getting involved piece, this idea of the friends of the library. I think this is really an interesting concept. I'm not sure how big this section is here, but there's some membership and benefit things that could really have here that people can really get involved in making the library their own. I think this is something that I would really look at moving more prominently onto the homepage. And once again, it's up here in the navigation bar of putting that right onto the homepage so that people can see that. There was also a... I can't even actually find it right now, so maybe it was kind of buried somewhere, but there is a calculator that actually showed the value that you would get by going into a library and how much money you would actually say, well, here it is right in here. There's a calculator to see how much money you would get by going to the public library. And I thought this was a really interesting way of engaging and a very interactive thing. That's something that I would really recommend making use of. So here you can say, well, if I borrow, say, 10 hardcover books a year, I borrow five books a year from my kids, and I read 15 magazines, then I can see that over the year that's actually given me a value of $330 by getting those services from the library. So I think that's something that can really be valuable to engage people and get them to see the value of what's happening. So I'd make some of those interactive pieces in ways that people that are not just seeing information but actually can use this to make decisions and engage with the site being very important. Overall, the content is generally good. I think I would look at cleaning it up a little bit. Just on this slide here, we see multiple different colors we've got bold and italic and regular. We've got black and we've got blue. There's a lot of different sort of fonts here. I would really make that a lot cleaner. And on these links here, also this content is good, but I would also look at cleaning that up just in terms of aligning the text and the graphics and so on. Make sure that we have a Facebook link here but also make that more of a general social media link so it includes other pieces. And then events. This is the calendar. This is also something that I think would be good to potentially have like an event bar down the side or something because one of the real things is that libraries can become central to communities. They can really become a gathering place, a meeting place, not just for books but for community events and political engagements and learning and community sharing, all kinds of different things. So that's a great thing on what that really means, potentially playing off this slogan here. We're a Papillon public library and really expanding the definition of what public means and making some of those things visible. I think there's a lot of great things that the organization is doing that could be made more visible. So that's all of my feedback. And Susanna, I know you had some comments as well. Hold on. I'm just going through it. I didn't have that many comments that you haven't covered yet for the library. I think you covered most of it already. Maybe one suggestion was there is a calendar. There are services, adults, children. They all more or less cover a similar thing. So I would structure it more from a point that you have a calendar of events and then for adults and for children. So make it more structured rather than having a horizontal bar of all these buttons next to each other. That may increase the interactivity. That's a good point. I think all the content is here, but there's multiple ways to get to it. It may be a little bit confusing in terms of how to find a specific program, whether you go into services or children or calendar. It may show up in all three places. So it may be better just to help guide people through that in terms of how to find what they're looking for. That's really interesting to me because I actually come from a library background. And over and over again, I always hear to make that events calendar available so people know what's going on at your library, but really to think about how you're presenting those events. It's not just a matter of putting up a calendar and if you're making the information available, then you're done, but to actually consciously think about how you're displaying it. I think that's a really, really good takeaway from this. Taking a look at some of the questions that have been coming in, Larry asks, did I hear you say that multiple colored fonts on one page is not a good idea for separation of paragraphs? In my opinion, I like having things consistent. So using this as an example here, if you're going to make things different and you're going to use different colors or different fonts, you really want to make them different. So for here, for example, we've got a welcome in one font and then everything else is in a different font. And then we've also got colors here and we've got black and white here. So the way it's used here, it's not really immediately clear why this sentence is in blue and this one is in black and why this sentence is in blue and this one is in black. So color can be used effectively, but I think you really want to make sure that you're literally blocking that out. So if these were, if these are actually specific different types of content that really need to be highlighted, then I would perhaps use that with blue but also put a background color or maybe move that into a highlight or a special notice box or something like that. And similar with this one here, this also seems to be this blue and this blue, they seem to be notices like kind of late-breaking news almost. And if that's the case, then I would actually put them in a section called late-breaking news or updates or something like that just so it's really clear why you're using that differentiation. So I'm not, I don't need to say you should never use color, but just making sure you're using that really clearly to differentiate the different sections. Yeah, and Andrew from Sump Memorial Library actually just typed in saying that the color of the text was meant to be alerting, otherwise everything would be in black. But from what I understand is that you're saying that it's fine to do something like that to alert, but maybe color differentiation isn't the best way to go about it. Yeah, or if you're going to do color differentiation then make it really seven-half, for example, like a box here that's got a yellow background and text on it or something to really make it separate. Because I think when people are looking at a site, if they see something that's just a little bit different, they don't necessarily see it as being really different. Like we need to really, from a pure design point of view, you really need to make a big contrast from one thing to the next otherwise people don't really see it as a big difference. Okay, great. Yeah, and Stephanie actually also pointed out that when she sees blue font, that to her says link, and then she tries to click on it. So maybe just the fact that it's blue in and of itself is a little disconcerting to some people. Let me take a look to see if there are other questions have come in. Well, I'm doing that. I know there was a question from the last section about site maps and how important those are to a website. Do you have an opinion on that either, Steve or Susanna? So do you mean in terms of making a site map visible so everybody can see the navigation of the attic lamp? Uh-huh, exactly. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think people do need to understand how to get to where they're looking. And this also comes down to what begins at the back of the audience is that different people may be navigating things a different way. So for example, if I'm a new parent or a parent with a small case and I just moved to this neighborhood, I may be coming in looking for one specific thing on children's programming. If I'm a recently retired senior, or if I'm actually trying to organize an event, I may be looking for different things. The site map is important, but you can also sort of have sort of different entry points and you may want to have, rather than up here, like a lot of different buttons for different things really focus on what are the types of tasks and something that we want to accomplish from coming to the site and giving that as a very prominent entry point and letting people enter the site from there. Okay, great. Adam asks, is there a best practice in terms of the number of menu items across the top from which to select? The best practice in terms of the number of menus. I don't necessarily have a real best practice, but I tend to prefer sort of like five or six, seven or less, just so that people can mentally kind of hold in their heads really well if they're looking at all along the line. Great. Susanna, did you have any kind of best practices when it comes to that? I would agree with what Steve said. Think about what is being presented and what can be grouped together and what makes sense to the audience to be grouped together. So what is it? Who we are? What do we do? And what do we offer? And how can you contribute? Maybe these are what are the focus areas of the websites and then go from there and make it intuitive for the user so that they know where to click and keep the different users as Steve pointed out in mind. How would they find their entry points? But definitely I also suggest to have less items at the horizontal bar. Okay, great. Thank you, Susanna. Just a couple of more questions before we go on to the next website and I do want to reiterate to the audience that for some reason we don't get to your question. You can go ahead and email me and I can forward it to the presenters and I can put my email in the chat pane in just a moment. We are going to try to get to as many questions as possible, but I did want to throw that out there. So Steve and Susanna, this is just a general question. Can you change the social media icons to match a specific website? For example, change the square around the Facebook icon to an outline of a hand. Do you know if that kind of specification of these icons is doable or is it even preferable? Well, there's a couple things. When you go to the different sites, they'll usually have a range of icons that you can choose so there is a little bit of flexibility. But in general, I'd recommend not getting too much of that because that Facebook document is very recognizable and the Twitter icon is very recognizable. If you customize it too much, you can kind of start to defeat the purpose of having the icon because people won't really understand what that looks like. But usually, for those kind of sites, there's multiple options that you can choose from in terms of what you want to actually embed on your site. So you can customize a little bit, but I'd recommend not doing too much. Okay, great. And Carrie asks, do you think there are too many exclamation points? And she says she's asking because she tends to use them a lot and she wonders if that's off-putting. Yes, I mean, because exclamation points mean we're saying something exciting, we're doing something exciting again. So, yes, it's generally, I would like to minimize the amount of that. The exception that I would say is depending on the style of the website and what you're trying to get across, if you're specifically trying to design a very conversational, very casual site which is really almost like a friend-to-friend kind of relationship, then you can be a little bit more loose in how you do those kind of things. But if you want something that's going to be definitely more speaking to the general public and be more something that sounds more credible and more authoritative, then you want to minimize that and look at kind of the language and the way you're using those things. Okay, great. Thank you. And with that, I think that it's time to move on to our third website. So, Steve, if you can give control to Susanna, and we'll take a look at the Ria Bravo Wildlife Institute. And again, I do want to thank the Summit Memorial Library, but I guess to take a look at their website, that's a thank you, Andrew. Okay, so I'm taking over. Can you see my screen? I can. Yes, you can. Okay. So, this is the Wildlife Institute, and what I noticed right away is when I was looking at it, it's a lot of text, a lot of information and presented, which is great. However, I would definitely look at what kind of information is being presented and whether it can be condensed. I find myself being a lot on the Internet. I surf a lot, but I don't necessarily read long articles. So, if you want to rework this website, definitely look at what are you saying and whether or not it can be condensed, whether or not it is something that is true information that the user needs to know or whether it is just a filling sentence that only carries small information and can be removed. So, the less text, the better I find. As you can see also, there are typos, and that usually puts me off as a user, so definitely also do a spell checker for the website that would help. So, the website was very interesting. It contained a lot of information. However, I would also change the quality of the pictures. They look very outdated. So, if you either can get a higher resolution or a different quality of the pictures, that would be great. Otherwise, just judging from the pictures, I would think also I've somehow associated pictures with the quality of the information, and I would think, oh, the pictures are outdated. What about the information? And so, the website is very structured. As you can see, you have all these drop-down lists and it makes sense, the drop-down lists where they sit. However, I was wondering what is the difference between a program, a project, and events. And also, when I click on events, it's somehow talking about past events, or it is not clear to me as a user whether these events happened or are going to happen, especially the first one. I think it brings up a calendar if I'm... So, here, okay, I see pictures, so probably that has already taken place, but adding the year makes it clear for the user, okay, this event already happened, so there's nothing I can join anymore. What else? I am not so sure about this term. I tried to look it up. What it means? I was not clear exactly about this word. I hadn't heard it before and I asked a couple of people. They didn't know and I searched at Google with it. I couldn't find more information on it. So, I thought that was it. So, I think what I'm hearing from you, Suzanna, in this is it's kind of a theme of just being clear in the language that's being used and to think about maybe terms that the organization uses internally and to try to clarify that for somebody who might just be visiting. I guess it also was Steve brought up in the beginning to say, okay, so who is the audience? How well educated are they? Maybe they already know everything. They know that word and if not, does it make sense to use words like this or shall we use a clearer language? It depends on who is the user. Who do you want to attract through your website? Do you want to inform people or do you want to describe what you do in easy words? It really depends what the website wants to achieve. If I want to donate, which probably is one of the aims of the website, hold on, if I come from the Urban Ecology Center, it would be nice if that was linked to the actual donation. So, I've read all this. I came to this part and it says, give today. Yes, you convinced me I want to donate, but there's nothing. It would be nice to link this so I can just click it and we'll be able to donate money right away from here. So, linking the websites with each other for fast access would also be, I would recommend that. I would echo Susanna on her point. I think thinking back to some more library example, having a calendar of these events, because when you look at the main page, and there's all those events and things coming up, having an easy way to find that would be really helpful. I think a really big opportunity here is that if the stated goal that we saw is around attracting new people and new constituents, there's actually quite a range of ways that people can do that. You've got the ability to join a mailing list, you've got donate today, you've got volunteer, you've got employment opportunities, and you've got the project. So what I would do is look at, is there a way that we can really make that higher priorities and more prominent. So for example, we've got right now on the main page already, it says, and actually on all the pages, to join your mailing list and please donate today. And those are specific calls of action, but it doesn't really say like why you would join your mailing list, like what you actually get. And please donate today. It doesn't necessarily say why you're doing that or is it general or is it first specific project. So I think I would look at, can you, if the goal of the site is to attract and engage new people, is that really, is the drive to get more people on the mailing list or to get more people on your social media list or to raise more dollars or to get more volunteers at your events. And all four of those are, I think, definitely doable, considering the quality of the content and some of the work that's being done. But doing, trying to do all of that at the same time can be challenging. So I would see two directions that could be possible. One is to really focus on specifically one of those at a time, and right now we're just focusing on messaging or communications. We're just focusing on volunteers. We're just focusing on donations. That's one approach. The other approach would be to really make a whole engagement itself, really the main goal of the site. So to have that, rather than just be two boxes on the side, perhaps a banner or a box that goes all across the top, that really says, and engage with us or join us or connect with us. And with like four buttons, volunteer, maybe just three buttons, volunteer, share, and donate. And that's three things that people can do and make it really quite obvious where they would go. The other thing that I would add that is a good opportunity here is to start to more prominently talk about the impact of what's happening. Because when you look at what's been going on, there's tons of events. There's tons of programs. The organization's been in existence for a while. But if I'm coming in here and I want to kind of assess the credibility, so what has the organization done? Is that measured in acres of wildlife preserved or number of animals or number of children educated or tons of CO2 averted from your remediation projects or millions of gallons of water cleaned? What are some of those numbers that you can highlight and make really prominent so people really see the impact and value of the organization? There are a couple things I'd add to Suzanne's comment. Right. And so, I mean, I think, again, what I keep hearing just over and over is to be really clear in your goals and to be really clear when creating a website for people visiting the website to know what to do and to really feel like they know what the purpose of the website is and what the purpose of the organization is. And it feels like it just keeps coming back one thing that I really like. I did want to highlight and also to express my appreciation for everyone that put forward their website and listened to the critique, because I know it's very easy for us to rattle off all these things and it's hard to actually put into practice. But really, that idea of being clear with the audience, being very focused, that's a challenge that not only non-profit websites face, but the vast majority of websites out there, a lot of corporate sites, you have no idea what the company does, what they sell, why you're there, and you just don't really interact with it. The good thing about that is that these are really not technical challenges. These are challenges around understanding your organization, understanding your constituents and what you want to achieve, and then you can use the technology to put that into practice. Okay, great. I do want to ask one question before we move on to the next website, which I do want to make sure that we have time for the last website. Juanita asks, regarding Susanna's comment about condensing text, would this organization's quality and depth of work still come through if they used more bulleted listings to convey information? So I guess the question is, by condensing the text, do you think that that would kind of not reflect what that organization is and the quality of their work? Yes. I guess, again, that goes back to the question, what is your goal with the website? Do you want to be informative? Yes, and that's fine, have a lot of text. But what I noticed when you look at about the institute and the first section comes with a lot of sentences that our effectiveness can be traced to our outside box thinking. What exactly does that mean? What is it? These sounds like standard sentences that almost everybody can say about themselves unless you have specific examples. And why not let those examples speak for themselves other than describing it through sentences like this? Just my recommendation is to look at text when it's written, how much information is contained in the text and is there a way whether I can condense the information somehow or restructure, work with bullet points, work with other, work with graphics to make it more interesting to read. Right. As we all know, reading on the screen takes a lot of time and people tend to not do it. Right, and Juanita just said to clarify will bullet points be useful and still convey depth? And I think what you're saying is that you can still convey depth but just in a different... that writing for the Internet sometimes is a little bit different than writing for a... in a different format. It all depends. It doesn't mean we need to necessarily replace all the text but I would think of it in terms of different levels of detail. I'd say look at three levels. One, how can you content that whole page into one sentence that describes what you do? And then look at how can you condense that whole page into a handful of bullet points that really go in just a little bit more detail. And then all the background, you can still have there but I would suggest putting that either into a separate page or putting like a PDF case study or a report or something so that people that want to look at that detail, people that really want to see all the detail will read it but you move it out of the way so rather than just distracting the people that don't want to get all that detail you can really have that key information there and then make the other stuff there as a background. Yeah. Okay, great. You can go ahead, Susanna. Yeah, I'm just thinking what are the three points that a first time user wants to take away from an introduction page of that website? What are these three points that you really want to get across and then start from there and as Steve recommended and then let other users who are interested in more details choose for themselves that they want to drill down in some sort of fashion through links or additional PDFs. Okay, great. And I think that we should probably move on to the last website since we only have about 10 minutes left. So again, thank you to the Rio Grande Wildlife or the Rio Bravo Wildlife Institute for allowing us to look at your website. And Susanna, if you want to give Steve control one last time. Sure. Thank you. Okay, so let me just get this up here. Okay. And again, while he's switching over I do want to reiterate that if there are any questions that we don't get to you can go ahead and email those to me and I can forward them to the presenters and I will be reaching out to you individually as well. Okay, Steve. Great. So this is an interesting site. A couple of comments just off the top. One is I think the site itself it feels a little bit dated so I think it could be just generally cleaned up and made a little bit more streamlined and really just the text and everything kind of really tightened up and made it in a more streamlined format I think would be great. But one of the things I really wanted to call out is so good is these testimonials from some of the volunteers and people that have worked with the organization these are just great stories. I would really look at how could you make these stories and these people that are part of the organization a real focal point for the site because these stories are amazing and also the fact that since you've got people volunteering since 2003, since 2005 these stories are just great and it encourage people to go on the website and read this and I know it's well improved. But you've got a really great resource here that I would love to see really at the home page here that talks about what the organization is doing and what in fact that's having on people. That's one thing. The other thing that I would look at is around looking at the tone. So when I see here what's your wildlife concern and I have intruder, excluder this feels, I don't really have concerns about wildlife but I have interested wildlife or curiosities or things that I want to find out more of it. So maybe rather than being what's your wildlife concern be more like understanding or some of those kind of things. So that would be one thing I think we could definitely take a look at. The other one in terms of the navigation structure it's really not obvious when you click on this on the rabbit what's actually underneath in terms of all these different items. So there may be a way to highlight and more in more depth describe what's going to happen when you click on these because it's not obvious whether hearing and finding information about the rabbit's animals specifically or mammals in general or what I'm going to find in here. So maybe more clearly label sort of what some of those things are and group them thematically could be an interesting one. The other thing that I think that I would highlight around is about the donate here which is good and the fear on once again what are we really looking for? Are we looking for volunteers? Are we looking for people to donate or are we actually looking for a change in behavior? Are we actually looking for people to do something differently and being clear on that. And I guess the last thing that I would sort of focus on is or sort of two more things. This is an interesting one here around while people get this engagement with the community and this combined with the people part could be a really great way to help sort of bring that real community connection as a big part of the organization of the website. Thought that could be great. But the final piece that I wanted to sort of raise the question was around the content that's there is to start to understand what's unique about this information here like for example the sticker injured bird information or some of these things. Is this unique information? Is this information that I could also get on Wikipedia? Is this really unique to what DSW Wildlife Coalition is doing? In which case it really becomes very valuable. So if it is unique then I think that will be something that could be really highlighted on the website here that this is and it could become like the place to go for understanding how to deal with some of these issues and learn more about wildlife in that urban context or however we're phrasing that. But to really focus on what is unique and different about this site than other information that might be available on the web. So those are some of the comments that I had. That's just the energy. Do you have other feedback you wanted to mention? Suzanne, are you there? Do you still have Savannah? Sorry, I was on mute for a short while. No problem. I do have some feedback on the how to support website. What I noticed is the information is again very wordy, lots of words but really what you, there's three information that I can get out of it is I would like to give money or I want to volunteer. So these are two things I can do and from there I can give, donate electronically or even through cash or I can actually buy something to shopping and then donate through it. So I would restructure that information to make it easier for the user to grasp what all the information on this website in just a few seconds whereas if I look at it from now it takes me a few minutes to understand all the possibilities that I have to support this organization. So again, looking at the concept of above and below the fold which is kind of strange to apply to websites that really come from the newspaper industry where people often don't read what's below the fold in the page. So here we have these pieces but we actually have to scroll down to see the shop for a cause section. So thinking about how you can make sure that the things you want people to see are visible right away without making them scroll down. And the other thing is I think it also goes about the fund the very first page, the home page is all in italics. The question is why italics? Is that quoted from somewhere? Can that not be normal fund? You know, we've actually had at least a couple of comments about font in general and about the fact that it is difficult to read in font or to read in italics. Is there a specific font that you think is more readable on the internet? I know Nancy said that two of the websites have used a serif typeface and two use sans serif and her understanding is that on the web a sans serif is the approved font but she actually finds serif fonts easier to use. So I don't know if either of you have a recommendation on that. I don't think I have enough qualification to make a recommendation on what the best font is to use but I do know that there are lots of resources available that would be able to give that advice but making sure it's easy to read and also being consistent with your design is important. Okay, great. I'm not an expert on this but I'm sure there are resources to tell you what is the most readable font on the internet and I just googled it. It says Times New Roman or Vedana 12 points. I'm sure that information can be retrieved somewhere. Right and just to throw this out there have been a couple of participants that have chatted in saying that they have heard that sans serif font has been considered more readable on the web so just for what that's worth as well. Let me take a look at what other questions have come in because we do just have a minute or so to go and if anybody does need to leave please know that we will have a recording of this available within a week and make sure to fill out that event survey that pops up. One question came up that says scrolling down bothers this participant's hand and shoulder because of nerve damage so do you have suggestions for designing for the screen so that chunks of information are visible on the screen without scrolling? Well, I think one way to do that is you can look at for example using tabular structures. This is actually like so for example here we've got make a calcination volunteer with us and shock for a cause. There's four different categories. You can imagine that we've actually got a lot of white space over here on this side. We've got a lot of white space over here on this side. You could have like a two by two matrix that has make an electronic donation, calcination volunteer with us and shock and use that to de-organize the information up top. The other way is to really be quite clear on how much information is really required. So here we've got one, two, three we've got four paragraphs of text describing this shock for a cause concept is that are all four paragraphs really required? Could we strip that down? And that's really, I mean in general like there's also lots of great resources online about writing for the web but we really need to be really sort of stripping that down and really just focusing on what's the critical most important. So to that question just reducing the amount of text overall on the site could really help with that scrolling issue. Great. And I think with that we are pretty much out of time. I do want to thank this last website the DFW Wildlife Coalition. So Kathy thank you very much for allowing us to take a look at your site and again thank you to all the organizations that volunteer their websites for us to take a look at it today. I'm going to take the control back. I would really like to echo that I mean I know how much work it is to put together these websites and I know how important it is for you and I really appreciate you putting yourselves up to be able to get that feedback. I really appreciate that and then appreciate the time that we want to take today to hear those comments. Exactly. Let me go ahead and get through this to the end. Yeah and again Steve and Susanna thank you both so much for being willing and able to talk a little bit with us about these websites. If anybody does have any additional questions that they would like to ask they can go to our forum at this Bitly site that I have up here on the screen which is Bitly 4 slash evaluations websites forum and if you have any solutions to any of the issues that we've talked about today it would be a good place to put those solutions there as well and again you can go ahead and email me at khunt at techsoupglobal.org I just do want to take just a moment to thank again Steve and Susanna and all of the people at SAP that Bitly link that you see right there goes to the SAP donor page from TechSoup so go ahead take a look at them they're a great donor partner for TechSoup and thank you to our webinar sponsor Citrix Online they do provide go to webinar access for TechSoup Global and we do have a donor partnership with them as well and just one moment a little bit about who TechSoup TechSoup is again we are a nonprofit just like the majority of you out there we do try to provide technology and technology resources to nonprofits and libraries some of those resources of course can be found on the techsoup.org websites you can go to the learning centers read articles go to the community or blog link to read information that way to take part in our community you can go ahead and take part of our product donation program and you can subscribe to buy the cup or new product donation alert to great newsletters and just one moment of your time to talk a little bit about some upcoming webinars that we have coming up on December 1st we have legislative matching with the Cicero API and that's going to be on December 1st at 11 a.m. Pacific time and on December 8th we will have training and a visible audience delivering effective webinars and I will actually be one of the main presenters for that webinar along with Stephanie Girding so we hope to see you better again thank everybody for attending today's session if you need to leave at this time you can go up to file exit leave webinar and please take just one moment to fill out the survey that pops up this does help us in creating better webinars and if there are any questions that you still have again I will be reaching out to you specifically so thank you everybody thank you all the organizations and thank you to Steve and Susanna and thank you Kevin thank you everyone