Whatever your website’s purpose, it will most likey contain a form. Whether it is for lead generation, comments, or purchases, that form is in danger of becoming an obstacle.

Generally speaking, most post don’t like to fill out forms—online or off.

After reviewing my own sites, I realized that I am asking for too much information (or TMI)—information that I really don’t need up front. One bit of information that I never used and was rarely filled out was the physical address. In fact, I cut my form in half by eliminating everything that related to physical address.

In my case, I don’t send direct mail, visit clients, or even care where they are located. Most communication is done via phone, email, instant message or Skype. I haven’t met most of my clients in person. I have worked for organizations in several states and even Canada, so location isn’t an issue.

Yet, I was asking them to give me more information than necessary just to get in contact.

Now, after revising my forms, I only require their name and email, and have made their organization, phone, website URL, and comments optional. Time will tell if I get more leads or not, but I least I am now practicing what I preach.

Next on my list is to reduced my four-page Web design survey to essential information.

I subscribe (online) to a Chritstian magazine whose subject matter is computing and technology. It has been around for quite a while and is full of great resources for anyone and especially churches and ministries.

What seems strange is that their online distribution and email newsletters are quite lo-tech—it’s like so early 2000’s.

I get an email newsletter with intros to a variety of articles with a “read more” link which, when clicked, take me to a blank page on the web and begins downloading a PDF for me to read. And these aren’t even on-screen-friendly PDFs horizontally formatted with links either. Each one of these averaged about 500K. You can also download the entire magazine for a wopping 1.6MB. The PDFs were made from files that I presume would have been sent to a printer. And, if you happen to find the link to their website—where you would expect to see a full online version—watch out as it is riddled with dead links.

I wouln’t be so critical of this expcept that this is supposed a magazine who is pushing churches and ministries to use the latest technologies, but they are not up to speed themselves.

I think as Christian organizations we love to talk about how relevant we are, or how hi-tech we are, or how cool we are. When we have to say it we usually aren’t.

Personally I have a strong disdain for the term “Web 2.0.”

Techie people define it in terms of platforms, code, feeds and a host of other terms (e.g. Ajax).

Designers associated it with brighter colors, relections and a bubble look (think Apple’s interface).

Internet users don’t care what it looks like (MySpace.com lack design, for example), or know what goes on behind the scenes (MySpace uses Coldfusion, which most programmers scoff at), but associated it with anything “social,” like YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr.

Businesses often have no clue whatsoever, but demand that their site is Web 2.0.

So just what is it? (more…)