Make it obvious!

It seems like everywhere I drive lately in Dallas there is construction going on. Yesterday, on my way back to the office from lunch I got some dirty looks from some construction workers as I drove by a job site. When they started yelling, I looked over and saw a worker over by the side of the road with a stop sign and I realized that they expected me to stop! Since I was already well on my way through their zone and there wasn’t anything going on that I could tell, I just kept going and cleared the way for them. I started thinking about what I did wrong and what lesson I should learn from it.

Replaying the scene, I realized that there was a normal stop sign on the corner (that I stopped at) before entering the construction zone. I did my normal looking around to make sure no one was coming and I did take note of the construction going on. I realized too late that the worker standing on the side of the road had a stop sign pointing toward me and that he expected me to heed the sign. He wasn’t in the middle of the road (but right by the curb), he wasn’t holding the sign (it was resting on the ground), he wasn’t waving the sign, and he wasn’t doing anything else to get my attention until it was too late. I understood that I really had not done anything wrong. If they really wanted me to stop, they should have taken action that caused me to notice.

After this thought process, it occurred to me that this experience had application on the Web – make it obvious. As one very good and simple book that I would recommend on Web usability states clearly in it’s title Don’t Make Me Think (by Steve Krug, currently in its second edition)! If you want me to take a specific action or do something that’s important on your site, then make it obvious and don’t make me have to scan the whole page carefully and over-analyze my options. Put a call to action in “the middle of the road” which on the Web is 1.) in the middle of the page, 2.) the upper-most section (the masthead), or 3.) the right-hand column. Also, make it clear what is needed from the user – do I need to just click, enter some information, etc.

Church Web sites are Broken

I found an interesting item on one of my favorite blogs -- Church Marketing Sucks (or Stinks, if you prefer). They ran a survey that simply asked the question "What's broken in your church?" and left an empty box for responses.

Aside from the basic "some of our windows are broken" answer, guess what got the most responses? The church Web site with 21% of the people who responded! Now obviously, the survey was strictly online and the site is used by people who care about church communications. So, it's a biased survey but still very interesting.

What can little ole me do to help the church body to improve in this area that's broken? Well, for starters the session that I've been asked to lead at the Church Leadership Conference is a start. I wonder if there is more that I can do?

In case you missed the above link, read the full discription of "What's broken?" from Church Marketing Sucks.

Church Leadership Conference

One of the reasons that I haven't posted anything lately is that I've been preparing a presentation. I have the priveledge this fall to have been asked to lead a break-out session for the Church Leadership Conference being organized and led by the Southern Baptist of Texas Convention (our state's collection of churches, the SBTC). I prepared and led a discussion on Effective Web Sites geared primarily at churches.

The Leadership conference is being held in three locations -- Euless (between Dallas and Fort Worth), Spring (north of Houston), and Tyler. The Conference locations and dates are as follows:

• Euless was held last Saturday, September 9th,
  
• Spring is on Saturday, September 23rd, and
  
• Tyler is on Saturday, October 7th.

If you are interested in more details, feel free to check out the press release or the accompanying Web content on the Conventions site.

The first conference was tons of fun and I had a good turnout at the sessions (3 sessions per conference). As is usually the case, my first presentation was the worst and my third run-through was the best. The SBTC recorded the sessions and they are planning to have the audio files available for download on the Conference Web site at some point (of course the taping was of the first session!). I am planning on looking into a file service so that I can share my presentation slides through this blog and I will link to the SBTC site once they get the audio available.

July Scattershooting

Not much time to post, so here are the highlights:
* World Cup: I am so glad that Italy beat those Frenchmen! Collin even got into watching it with me.
* Church Budget: I'm on our church's Finance Committee and after a very interesting process (and a lot of work by our staff) we've almost got the draft budget worked out.
* Potty Training: Started yesterday with Caris -- she's so ready and doing great so far. Enough said on that topic.
* New Web Site: We rolled out a new Web site at work recently. Lots of good lessons learned and set up well for another related site in a few months. I'll share the URL next week most likely. I continue to be amazed at how strategic Web work should be to do it right.
* Speaking Engagement: I was asked to speak at a Church Leadership Conference. I'm honored and will post more about that later.