Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

Here’s to a resounding “maybe”! That’s right - it may or may not, and here’s why:

Internet Explorer has the majority of the web browser market - but it doesn’t yet meet industry standards for rendering your website. Internet Explorer 7.0 is more standards compliant than Internet Explorer 6.0.

(There are a LOT of other browsers available, too - IE for the Mac, Safari, Opera, and several others -so what follows isn’t a complete list!)

(And what exactly ARE those standards? Stay tuned - that’s for another posting - for now - we’re talking about implementing your visual design, not about searchability or accessibility!)

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 IS standards compliant, though - so most coders (NPower Seattle included) START by making sure that your website is code compliant. Unfortunately, that also means that once we make your website look great in Firefox - we have to “break” the code to make it render decently in other browsers.

Plone lets us do some clever coding tricks that help a little, particularly with IE 7. We can tell Plone to use a special style sheet if it “sniffs” your computer and knows that you are using IE7. Or IE6. Or any other browser for that matter - but as you add more stylesheets to create and maintain - you drive up your cost and potentially complicate future upgrades.

IE6 is a different matter - we have to insert non-standard code along with the good stuff to make it work with IE6 - and sometimes that means that we have to compromise in one browser or the other.

What does this mean for you?

1. If NPower Seattle is creating your website using Plone - we’ll ensure that it looks great in Firefox, looks very good in IE7, and renders decently in IE6. You can ask us to make additional adjustments if you’d like - but that kind of tuning can be expensive.
2. If you are working with another vendor, ask them for a browser compatibility statement so you know how your website will render in different browsers.
3. If you have a complicated visual design, have an audience using many different browsers, budget extra (and ongoing!) time for browser compatibility testing.

We’ve been implementing Salesforce for nonprofits for a year now - and the free licenses they offer to nonprofits continues to be compelling. The Salesforce Foundation is active, is helping spur adoption in the nonprofit community, and is also working with their 3rd party vendors to reduce their pricing for nonprofits or provide their tools for free.

I wanted to take a moment to list some of the reasons why Salesforce makes sense to some of our customers:

• It’s a great tool for keeping track of your constituents - web based, easy to use, and at a great price - freely available.
• It’s exceptionally well tested. Our database experts really are good at their work - but they don’t have the luxury of testing every feature and line of code the way Salesforce, Adobe or Microsoft do. So - if we have to start from scratch using Access, SQL, or any of those other terrific tools - well - ours won’t be as rock solid.
• The user interface is very well done. And while our database and website experts create good looking and easy to use user interfaces - we don’t generally have an unlimited design budget! A frugal design budget means that we rely heavily on input from our nonprofit customers, rather than conducting a lot of usability testing, focus groups and so on. Salesforce has a large investment in their user interface that a modest development budget can’t match.
• It works great for tracking donors, volunteers, and roles.
• You can integrate easily with your Plone website -so website visitors can RSVP for events, can sign up for classes, or can indicate interest in knowing more about your agency.
• When Salesforce updates their tools, you get those updates without having to install any software!
• You can use Salesforce as the data source for your enewsletter communications - and can keep track of your subscribe/unsubscribe information in Salesforce.
• It is fast for us to customize - so once you have your requirements thoroughly documented - we can get Salesforce ready for you quickly.

Salesforce isn’t a one size fits all solution. The parallel between selling a widget and securing a donation make it a terrific choice as a donor management tool. And we’ve created some customizations that also make Salesforce great for volunteer tracking. We haven’t yet created other customizations, but here’s a short list of things we’re hoping to develop:

1. Flexible outcomes based tracking
2. Grants management for granting agencies

The experts at Techsoup have done it again -another short, concise and spot on article about web development. It will take you two minutes to read - and if you’re considering launching your first site, moving to a Content Management System (CMS) or giving your existing site a face lift - you should read it.

It matches with what we’ve learned here at NPower Seattle - content is the most important ingredient in your website, your visual design should be pleasing but customers should notice your content rather than what your site looks like, and you need to be able to edit your content at will!

We use Plone to create websites for our nonprofit customers - it’s efficient for us and easy for our customers to use. In the end, though - our most successful projects are those that have regular content updates that stay on message.

If you’re nervous about writing for the web - there are a LOT of resources for you, including NPower’s Tech Savvy Communications. You won’t be able to read it in two minutes - but you should read it!

NPower Seattle (in conjunction with NPower Indiana) has crafted a set of key benchmarks for evaluating the technology infrastructure of nonprofits. We believe that every nonprofit should be able to use this tool to measure where they are - and then make plans to address any areas that might need fixing.

Creating those benchmarks was a lot of hard work - but we’re not stopping there. We’re hosting a Stable and Secure Technology Scan on September 21st, from 9:30 - 1:00.

Tech-savvy volunteers will use a web-based survey tool and answer a series of questions about your nonprofit’s technology infrastructure. These questions test to see if nonprofits meet each of 12 key benchmarks and immediately produce an appropriate set of recommendations and resources.

You can register online now if you are in the Greater Seattle area!

We’ve been implementing Plone websites for our nonprofit customers for about two years now - almost one a month, which seems like a lot of website development for a modest sized agency such as ours.

As we’ve become more and more expert with Plone, I’ve sometimes had to take a step back to remember some of the GREAT features that Plone has that I’ve started to take for granted:

• You can edit your content from a modern web browser. It’s almost as simple as that - visit your site, login, click the edit button, and change your text!
• You can quickly and easily create a news or event or “spotlight” posting that populates the home page (or any other page, matter of fact!) of your website, and then stops publishing when the event is over.
• You can create as many pages as you want.
• Your sitemap is always up to date
• The search tool searches both your site and the innards of your Word and PDF documents
• You can have “member only” sections of the website for board members or staff or for other stakeholders
• We can implement a Plone website (where you get more of a website, a LOT more) for the same effort level as websites that were challenging for you to edit.
• Yes, you can integrate your Plone website with Salesforce!

I’m delighted about how well this is working out - we’re more efficient, customers are getting much better websites, we’re contributing to the local and world wide Plone community, and we have experts on our team that are leading the way.

Special thanks to our colleagues and collaborators at ONE/Northwest for their cheerful and timely help as needed, and to our own Jesse Snyder, who has moved our Plone hosting and creation efforts to maturity.

YouTube, Flickr, Picassa, GoogleEarth - the list of vendors that allow you to share pictures or video, store them, place them on your website - that list seems to be growing all the time! For some nonprofits, using those tools to promote their mission and to tell their story is both affordable and meets their branding and marketing requirements, too.

Lately, several of our nonprofits customers have asked about hosting their own streaming media files, or using a service to do the same thing. My colleague Rachel Mercer did some great initial homework - and here’s what we found:

One Free Option:

Youtube will let you post and share your video content and display on your website. But you’ll have to live with their file size limit (100mb) and their limit on length of video (10 minutes), and their branding. You can see an example of how Real Change is  using YouTube for their needs.

Hosting Your Own:

Say the word expensive, just to get started. You’ll need a server, you’ll need expertise in hosting a webserver, you’ll need to learn how to encode your video content, you’ll need to pay for the additional bandwidth, and you’ll likely need ongoing maintenance. We haven’t created a fully tested shopping cart, because there are so many variables:

• How long are your videos?
• How many concurrent users will you have?
• How much data will you have to pay for?

But you’ll want a decent server - and those start in the $3,000 - $4,000 range if you are buying new.

Using a Service:

This can be a great, middle of the road option - someone else maintains the server, provides backup and encoding assistance, manages how much data you’ll need and more. Again, though - your pricing structure will vary based on concurrent use, bandwidth charges and so on.

How To Learn More/Next Steps

1. Spend some time working with your internal team defining your needs. How much video, how many users, what should you do about your brand, what are the up-front and ongoing costs. And consider a pilot project - if you can get your video on YouTube without expending a lot of effort - you may be able to gather a lot of information about how streaming may work for your agency.

2. Read up! Techsoup has a great article with more information!