Web Usability 101
PUBLIC
(I wrote this up because of the problems I saw with eahub.org, and because there's almost certainly a bunch of other projects with similar problems)
- Please, please, please give your project a unique enough name to make it Googleable. Do not call your project "Think", "Impact", "Give Better", "Help The Poor", etc., no one will ever be able to find it. If you can't think of a word, there's a pretty good new word generator here: http://www.wordgenerator.net/fake-word-generator.php. Yes, making up a word is better than using something that isn't Googleable.
- Conversely, don't make the name too long. One word (or a pronounceable, memorable acronym) is best. Two words is OK. Never use four or five - otherwise you get chewy names like "Google Play Music All Access" (yes, that's a real example - shame on you, Google).
- Once you have something unique, it should be pretty easy to get the .com domain name. Do it. Paul Graham explains why here: http://paulgraham.com/name.html.
- Please, please, please include your contact information - your email address, and if you want, also links to your Facebook, Twitter, personal website, etc. No one can help you if they don't know how to find you. There is a culture from the 90s, when no one had good spam filters, of being extremely paranoid about giving out your email address. This is now silly. Spam filters today are ~99.9% accurate, in both my experience and the experience of people who ought to know like Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html).
- Do not include contact forms on your website. Big corporations do this because they don't actually want anyone to talk to them. They want to take whatever you say and route it straight to the circular file, or to some dude getting paid $1 an hour who gives you a form-letter reply because he doesn't speak any English.
- A person in your target audience who's never heard of you should be able to figure out, within twenty seconds, roughly what your website does and what it's about. If they can't, they will likely assume it is crap (for good reason). Run real tests - show fresh people in your target audience your website, and see how they react. Time them with a stopwatch, to see how fast they can understand things. Yes, literally; speed is important. If they ever get confused, it is always your fault, not theirs; the audience is always right.
- Read Eric Raymond's HTML Hell page at http://catb.org/esr/html-hell.html, and follow all of the (quite simple) design tips there.
- If your project is non-profit, has a public website, and includes code of any type (beyond a stock CMS like WordPress/Drupal), include prominent links to your GitHub, issue tracker, and instructions for pull requests.