It’s a perennial question from our nonprofit customers: How much does that cost?

And while it’s hard to give a concrete answer - I CAN provide some ranges regarding implementing a website to better meet your mission.

First, the caveats:

• No two projects are alike!
• The more particular your needs, the more you should be prepared to spend.
• You won’t be able to control the features AND the timeline AND the budget. You’ll be happiest if you are in control of just one of those things! Otherwise - you’re likely setting yourself (and your vendor) up for failure.
• Even when you borrow heavily from another design/feature set - you’ll want and need customizations to help you in your work.
• Most agencies severely under-estimate AND under-invest in pre-launch training and post launch training. Remember the 70/30 rule for hardware? You know - 30% of your cash pays for hardware and software and 70% is for training, maintenance and upkeep? You might not spend that much in cash - but you’ll certainly spend that in effort!

Overview:

We use Plone - an open source content management system. It’s terrific. So is Joomla and Drupal, and probably several others. I think selecting a CMS these days (for most, anyway) is akin to selecting a copy machine. There are a lot of terrific models, they all cover 80-90% of core features very well, and there are plenty of vendors to choose from. And that’s probably where the rubber meets the road - vendor selection. If I think your needs will best be meet with a different CMS than Plone, I’ll tell you!

Five Areas to Invest in Your Website

1. Planning. You’ll need to ensure that you have a communication plan in place, and that you know your audience, and that you have a solid brand. If you don’t then you can expect to spend time or money figuring out:

• Audience identification
• Communication plan
• Brand creation

If you don’t have those - your project will likely be less effective. You can end up with a terrific looking website -but it may not help you meet your mission.

If you DO have those things - you still need to plan. You’ll need to finish the planning process having:

• A wire frame that calls out the major design elements
• A functional description of what the site will do
  • Interaction with other tools such as PayPal or Salesforce
  • Descriptions of features such as blogs, discussion boards and so on
  • Descriptions of what site visitors will DO (login, contribute, edit, view, and more)

All told - you might devote as few as 8-12 hours planning your new website or as many as 100. You can ask your vendor to translate that effort into dollars. Here at NPower - most of our planning projects hover between 12 and 30 hours, or $1,250 to $3,200

2. Visual Design. If you have solid branding, a style guide, a color scheme, fonts and so on, your design phase can be pretty efficient. I like to recommend giving your designer clear feedback about what you know you want first. For instance, the more you can describe some of the following items - the better the chances you’ll get what you want and more quickly, too:

• Where you want your navigation and how it will behave (hover over, drop down, fly out, etc)
• Where you want your logo
• If you want a fixed or fluid design (for instance - do you expect some content to ALWAYS be "above the fold" no matter the monitor size?
• Key elements for your home page
• How many design iterations you’d like (3 versions of the home page, followed by two revisions, for instance)
• How many unique templates you’ll need: One for the home page and then one for everything else. Maybe a special page for a third look and feel

It can be easy to get lost in the design, though. Don’t get me wrong – design is important. But your content and your features (what will the site do) are the most important part of the project!

Many features are included in a CMS tool – and you’ll want to your designer to know that in advance –so that they don’t create a design or a placement for something that is already included! For instance:

• Login button
• Calendar
• Events
• News items
• Photo Gallery
• Site Map
• Search box
• Creating forms

All told - if your design is complete, you might spend 4-6 hours in a review - so we can optimize for Plone. And if you are starting from scratch, your design phase might take 25-35 hours on a modest site, and well upwards of that if you have complicated visual design needs. Here at NPower - most of our design projects hover between 30-50 hours, or $3,200 and $5,250.

3. Implementation. This is the process of actually creating your website - making it look like your design, and making the features work the way you’ve described them. There are a LOT of moving pieces in this stage -some of which are fairly transparent, and some of which aren’t:

• Implement visual design
• Test to ensure that it renders will in as many browsers as you specify (Typically, IE6 and IE7, and Firefox 2 and 3.. But you might also want to include IE8, Chrome, Safari, or others!)
• Create a test environment
• Create a code library so we can make updated to your design and feature set incrementally
• Place some sample content for you
• Implement your features
  • Permissions
  • Publishing
  • Integration with Salesforce
  • How calendaring and events work
  • A blog, a photo gallery, a YouTube connection
  • How your navigation works
• Use technology to speed up your site

All told - implementation costs vary drastically. If you’ve provided a simple design and don’t need features that aren’t already available - your implementation effort may take as few as 25-30 hours. But if you have a complicated design, with a lot of features and special integration needs - your implementation phase might easily hit 100 hours or more. Here at NPower - most of our implementation projects hover between 40-200 hours, or $4,200 - $10,500.

4. Training and Content Entry. This generally requires just a small effort on our part and a substantial effort on yours. That’s because you have to either re-write your content (to make it suitable for its new location) or you have to re-work your existing content - sometimes both. You may have a new site map, and you probably have a different idea about your audience and your key messages. We can teach you how to use Plone in 2-4 hours - but you might spend a significant amount of time getting your content ready. In addition to what you’ll need in pre-launch training - we allow for an additional 8 hours of post launch support. Here at NPower - most of our training and content entry projects hover between 12-20 hours, or $1,260 - $2,100.

5. Launch. Launching generally isn’t terribly hard, although sometimes getting all of the proper information can be a challenge! We’ll ensure that:

• Your domain name points to your brand new site
• That everything works when we move from one server to the next
• That you have a statistics package for viewing site visitor information
• That your site has caching set up for speed
• That we’ve re-directed any sub-sites or domain names that you have
• All of our code is in a code library

All told - launching (save for getting permissions to your hosts and such) is pretty speedy. Here at NPower, most of our launch tasks hover between 6-8 hours, or $630 and $840.

Adding it All Up!

A pair of quick tips about additional features for your existing Salesforce account!

It’s the 10th Anniversary for Salesforce –and they have deeply discounted licenses  to the Customer Portal and to Force.com. Both are terrific – and you should request one of those right away!

It’s most likely that the Customer Portal licenses will be right for you – the Customer Portal allows folks without a full license to Salesforce to have some limited access. You might use it to have Board members review who is attending a luncheon, for example. You can read a lot more about the Customer Portal (and you should!). You can get a one month trial - or you can purchase licenses for $12 per user, per year.

Force.com is the platform upon which Salesforce is built. That means you could use it to create a unique application. That’s pretty terrific. You can read all about Force.com,  too.

But wait! There’s more! Salesforce has ALSO announced Mobile Lite – access to your Salesforce account via your mobile phone! This could be a great help for those who are working away from their desk or laptop! You can learn all about Mobile Lite and which phones are supported – and you should!

I inevitably get at least 1 student in NPower’s InDesignclasses who asks about using the “color” Registration. This appears in both Illustrator & InDesign but I always tell students not to use it. It’s for Commercial Printers and they use it to check ink on the page.

OK that’s a little understated and simple, as far as explanations go. If you’re interested in a more in-depth approach, check out this post over at Claudia McCue’s blog. She goes into more detail on what exactly happens when you use Registration and even better, why you shouldn’t use it.

Thanks go out to the folks over at InDesign Secrets for making me aware of this.

Have you wanted to either reply or forward a message to someone in Outlook but only wanted some of the original text? In the Mac version of Outlook (Entourage) all you have to do is select the text you want in your reply/forward and then do it. What’s selected is all that’s copied into the new message.

Unfortunately the Windows version doesn’t have this functionality and up til now I’ve just resigned myself to deleted the text I didn’t want to go along with my new message. But this post over at the Contextures blog has changed that. Turns out that is you select the text and then click and drag it to one of your Outlook folders, it will create a new email with just the selected text in it.

Now if you’ve taken NPower’s Outlook Foundations class, this should be familiar. We go over how to create a new Contact or Calendar event using this process. But it never occured to me that you could do this with your email replies or forwards. A pretty cool trick!

So today I received a great question from a nonprofit staffer.

“Hi,
I would like to be able to create/design my own brochures. What is the best training to use for that. I am a little confused between Illustrator/Indesign and Photoshop. “

And boy do I hear this a lot. I was talking to another staffer last week about her organizations newsletter. At some point in the organizations history they had set up their print newsletter in Illustrator. She was incredibly frustrated, and for good reason, becuase she couldn’t get it to do what she needed.

Now I think the Adobe programs are great. They’re incredibly powerful and robust. But intuitive they are not. And using the right program for the right project can make working on your project so much smoother.

So here’s Jon’s breakdown on what to use for a project. It is by no means a hard & fast rule but keep in mind that the program you us, maybe because that’s what you’re comfortable with, may not be the right on for someone else. What if you leave, get a promotion, are on vacation, etc.; and suddenly someone else has to take over?

Adobe Photoshop - This is the best program to use to touch-up your digital photos. You can create print materials with it but it has some major drawbacks. Those being:

• Limited text control, it can make your text look all blocky & fuzzy - but it does have some really awesome effects you can apply to your text (just make sure it’s large)
• No multi-page options

Illustrator - This is the best program for creating graphics, such as your logo. You can create print materials, it allows for multi-pages & layouts. But it also has some drawbacks:

• Limited text controls - The way it handles text is better than Photoshop but it still doesn’t give you a lot of options that you may need for your piece. And just the way it can handle text in general can be frustrating
• Page controls & master pages
• Ability to create a dynamic table of contents
• Automatic page numbering
• It handles color differently, more options but they are not always intuitive

InDesign - this is the best program for creating print & PDF publications that are multi-paged and/or contain a lot of text. It is a page layout program, so while you can create graphics in it ( a lot of the tools for this are similar to Illustrator) it is difficult to get them out of InDesign if you want to use them for something else. So don’t do it!

And InDesign has some great built in tools for handing your piece off to a printer, so you can make sure all your ducks are in a row.

Of course you could always take a class here at NPower to learn how to use any of these better. Just keep in mind, I’m biased!

Are you creative? Use the Adobe Creative Suite? Want $1000?

If you’ve attended any of NPower’s Adobe trainings, then you know I’m a big fan. They’re not always the easiest to use but they pack a punch when it comes to designing & creating…print materials, websites, PDF’s, you name it!

Well Adobe and TechSoup want to recognize how use nonprofits use the Adobe Creative Suite to make a difference. They created Show Your Impact, a design contest to showcase innovative & creative use of the Adobe products. And they’re giving out $1,000 prize to 4 lucky recipients. How cool is that?

You can submit your work at http://www.showyourimpact.org/, contest submission is April 1st - April 15th. If you do apply, please let me know! I’m always interested in how others are using their Adobe products to further the great work they do in their communities.

Need ideas or want to learn what the last winner did to get their $1,000? Sign up for TechSoup’s webinar “Roadmap for Creating Successful Marketing Materials” webinar on March 5th (tomorrow). I know I am.