Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

The folks at NTEN have turned out a survey regarding how nonprofits are using Content Management Systems. Since NPower Seattle uses Plone - I was delighted to see that Plone achieved high marks in Quality, Support, Usability and more.

You can download the entire study from the NTEN website  -free if you are an NTEN member.

A lot, it turns out - your designer can make choices in the design phase that can significantly reduce the ease in which search engines can find your site.

Search Engine Optimization is important -both during the design phase of your project AND after your site has launched.

During design, you’ll want your designer to understand how and when the use of tools such as Flash or AJAX may reduce the searchability of your site - and you’ll want to review those choices and measure the benefit: is it better to look great or is it better to be seen? This is a business choice that you should make before you approve your design!

AFTER the design phase - you’ll want to keep an eye on your keywords, the titles of your pages, and much more. There’s a terrific SEO Guide for Designers available at Web Designer Wall - it will take you all of 5 minutes to read - but a lot longer to implement!

PS - We implement Plone here at NPower Seattle - and I’m happy to report that Plone does a terrific job with “friendly names” and with other items mentioned in the article, such as managing your keywords!

We’ve been implementing Plone and Salesforce for the last pair of years - and I was thinking about my early days at NPower. When I began working here 5 years ago - there weren’t a lot of software options from the open source community that we thought were a good fit. Sometimes, it was because the software wasn’t ready. Sometime it was because the software was great - but there wasn’t any documentation. And sometimes it was because there didn’t appear to be a strong enough community to support that software.

That has changed a lot - and lately, I’ve been thinking about the different way some software is described - here’s a quick primer:

• Open Source: This is software that you can acquire and install and can modify the underlying code to make it do what you want. For example, Plone is open source, and Photoshop is not.
• Open Data Model: This has more to do with the vendor than the software - but when I think of “open” software, I think of if I can access and manipulate that software and if I can integrate it with other tools. For instance, both Plone and Salesforce have an open data model - they can exchange information freely (provided someone knows how to connect them, and we do!) without breaking a licensing agreement or paying an additional fee. Blackbaud products aren’t open - if you connect without purchasing an additional license, you void your contract.
• Open Pricing: This is admittedly fuzzy. But I think that if a vendor is selling a product, they ought to commit to a pricing structure, even if they best they can do is offer a range. Some tools are free or freely available. For instance, Plone is free to use (but probably not free to configure). Salesforce will grant you 10 licenses if you are a qualifying nonprofit - but you should probably find an expert to help you configure and import your data. And many Microsoft products are available for an administrative fee.

I’m pretty excited about the combination of all three of these “open” descriptions - some items are free or freely available, some are easy to integrate, and some are transparent about their pricing model. All told - this translates to good news for the nonprofit sector!

The folks at TechSoup continue to provide quick and salient information about web design - I’ve blogged about a lot of these - but a reminder almost always helps. The article (which you should read) mentions 5 Principles - here’s my favorite:

Design is not Art.

Art is about personal expression. It is about the life, the emotions, the thoughts and ideas of the artist. It matters very little what observers do; their activity is not required, only their appreciation. The practice of Art doesn’t require them. It is a necessary activity for the artist and the artist alone.

Creating a terrific design is hard work - but you can help your designer by providing:

• Your logo and your brand
• Your audience identification
• A color palette
• A sense of screen layout - top navigation or side navigation for instance

The more you provide - the better chances that a designer will deliver something on the mark!

We’ve standardized our website work in Plone, a terrific Content Management System. Out of the gate, Plone performs very well in search tests - but those are just the easy wins - the technology piece of helping your site be searchable, rather than the people piece!

The folks at Human Service Solutions have published a very nice (and pretty short - just 5 pages) article called SEO Fundamentals. (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization), and I think it is a must read. Here’s a a great framing question:

If your organization’s mission has to do with environmental protection, are your target visitors most likely to search for “acid rain”, “save the forests”, “toxic waste”, “greenhouse effect”, or all of the above? Do you want to reach visitors who are local, regional or national in scope? These are considerations that need careful attention as you begin the SEO process.

You should read the entire 5 page article - it will take 10-15 minutes at the most! Implementing a strong search plan isn’t rocket science for most - just work to research, test, and then implement - and then do it all over again!

The team at Microsoft’s Office Live Small Business has a great blog posting on how to use the Contact page on your website. You should read it, and see how you measure up! Here are the salient points:

• Always list a physical mailing address
• List all appropriate phone numbers
• List at least one email address that is checked regularly
• Include a photo or map of your business
• If you have a blog, include a link to it
• List the events you attend or promote

One of the reasons we love using Plone for our website services is that we can give our customers access to editing their own contact page - that’s one step closer to using your website effectively!

A colleague at One NW spotted this article and posted a link - many thanks to Jon for pointing this out!

It’s a pretty quick read - 23 Lessons from Eye Tracking Studies. Many key takeaways here, the most notable being that content still wins - better than graphics, better than ads, better than things that flash.  Other key takeaway - is that navigation along the top appears to draw better attention than along the side.

You should read the article, pass it along to your team, and make sure that your web design professional sees it, too!

If you’ve been looking for a good content management system, you’ve likely encountered what I refer to as the “CMS Wars”: Three of the tools available generate a lot of debate, a lot of interest, and a lot of fierce loyalty.

(If you’re wondering, the tools are Plone, Joomla and Drupal).

They should - each tool is terrific and getting better quickly. The good folks at Idealware continue to publish and host webinars about these tools. And one of my Plone experts just sent along a lengthy and very thoughtful article from someone who has implemented both tools - which makes for a great perspective!

We implement Plone here at NPower Seattle, and have been happy with the sites we’ve been able to create, the speed at which many of our customers learn how to use Plone to update content, and with the broader Plone community, too.

All of that said, though - as the tools get better and better (think about your copy machine!) - I think that you should due your homework about feature set and functionality AND give equal consideration to your local vendor or service provider. Often, the service and breadth of experience of your provider will make a bigger difference than the tool you select!

Launching websites is one of the best parts of our work, because it is so tangible - many agencies have fresh designs, fresh content, fresh features - or all three - and seeing them available on the internet is exciting.

The actual launch has lot of moving pieces though - here’s a quick primer:

There are 3 moving pieces in most website launches:

1. Where the site is physically hosted
2. Who owns the name (for instance www.mynonprofit.org)
3. Who manages the Dynamic Name Server information (also referred to as DNS)

Your new site will be physically located in a new spot – on servers that we lease and manage for our nonprofit customers. To make your site launch, we’ll need to change some DNS settings on your behalf. You can think of it like changing your address at the post office –we need to “point” your name (www.mynonprofit.org) to the new physical location.

Sometimes, your current webhost manages all three of those moving pieces, sometimes just one or two.

So – here’s the 64 dollar question for us:

Do you know and have access to the agency or vendor that managers your DNS? Oftentimes it is someone such as www.networksolutions.com, or www.godaddy.com. Both of those vendors have easy to manage control panels that allow us (or you) to make those changes. We prefer to have access to making those changes ourselves. In the past, it’s been challenging to troubleshoot when we didn’t have access. For instance, one agency was able to change their www.mynonprofit.org to the new site – but didn’t change their http://mynonprofit.org to the new site – so they had TWO publically available sites! And – if you are getting your email from a third party –we want to make sure that we don’t change those settings, either. And some agencies have multiple names that all are supposed to be pointing to the same spot -so it can be a challenge if we don’t have the access we need for a successful launch.

And some notes about the actual launch:

When we’re ready (that means you’re designs and content are all in place and you’ve told us to launch), it can take up to 36 hours for those changes to propagate throughout the internet. We can make those changes at anytime – but usually try to do so near the end of the day, and often on a Thursday or Friday – 3:00 or 4:00 PM – so that most of that propagation can take place after business hours. But if you have a sense that your website visitors will be using your site during those hours – we could also make those changes earlier in the day.

What happens when your website helps you seamlessly collect donations (or registrations for events and classes), when your newsletter lets you select your contacts from your database, and when your website displays the class schedule from your database?

You’re getting close to effective use - your database integrates with your enews tools, your website “talks” to your database, your website visitors participate by giving or signing up, and you can track them in your database.

Create once, use many times.

My colleagues here at NPower Seattle have been working hard at identifying and integrating tools - and while we have a lot to learn - we’re getting really good at integrating these tools.

We use Plone and Salesforce for many of the web and database needs of our customers, and we’re gradually helping nonprofits integrate Vertical Response and the payment tools offered by PayPal.

Kudos to Evan Callahan and Jesse Snyder for both their hard work and their strategic thinking. Obviously, every nonprofit applies business rules in a different way, so we’ll always have to think and code creatively. But now that we’ve integrated these, working out the unique kinks and logic that is particular to another agency won’t be as challenging.