Archive for March, 2010

We printed up some 4×6 postcards for Studio3Music to distribute at their previews, events, and in the locations they run classes. These are a simple way to give people a physical reminder of an opportunity to come back to your website.

Liftupchile.com was started to raise awareness and funds for the ongoing relief effort in Chile after the 8.8 magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami of Feb 27th, 2010. At the site you can view images of the destruction and learn how you can donate to the relief effort. Pick up a custom designed Lift Up Chile t-shirt to show your support and spread the word.

This post continues the Get Your Non-Profit Online for under $125 series. Start here.

Step #1 Website (part 2)

Well, by now you have secured a domain name, set up hosting, and installed WordPress with one of those fancy one-click installs. Now to tackle WordPress.

Basic Settings

WordPress is a pretty intuitive program to get started with, but let me point you to some of the important settings that will likely be needed to take your WordPress blog to the place where you can mange your web presence.

Start by clicking on Settings in the admin menu. You will want to make sure your Blog Title and Tagline are the name of your organization and a short mission statement. You’ll want to get these right because templates will reuse the information in multiple places.

Now click on your Reading settings. Tell is to display a Static Page as your front page so it feels more like a normal website than just a blog. Select the default About Page or any other page you feel is appropriate. Later on you will want to create a page called Blog or News and set this as your Posts Page.

Get Yourself a Nice Theme

Under Appearance, click on Add New Themes. Go searching for a nice theme that works for you. Try not to do a Google search for themes because you’ll just get confused. Go to wordpress.org/extend/themes and look at the most popular ones. They are popular for a reason! Also consider a premium theme from a developer like WooThemes. I make no money from this referral! I just think their themes rock.

Once you enable your new theme you will likely have some new options to control under Appearance or Settings. See the theme’s documentation for all the info.

Many organizations will get distracted at this point trying to make the site look the way they want. Your choices are paying for a designer to put the site together for you, or finding a volunteer to handle it. In my experience as a designer, many people will put off the easy part of creating their website, waiting for the complex part to be tackled by a volunteer. So, since this is a tutorial for an organization lacking that budget, just deal with the lack of logo for now. Come back and upgrade later!

Load Up On Plugins

Ok, choosing plugins can be like choosing a plumber. Just cus everyone else uses them doesn’t mean they are quality. Some are. I am recommending that you read comments at wordpress.com/extend/plugins before committing to any.

Under plugins, select Add New. Here is my list of recommendations. You’ll find plenty of varying opinions on these as well, so take it or leave it!

• Akismet: Included with WordPress. Filters spam comments. Worth it!
• All In One SEO Pack: Enables setting of meta data on pages, posts and site-wide. Very useful for making sure your site is visible to search engines and handles keywords automatically on posts.
• Google Analyticator: Handles placing your analytics code. I recommend it because it displays a snapshot of your site traffic on the dashboard.
• Gravity Forms: Forms! Everyone needs forms, especially a general contact form. Gravity Forms is the first plugin I ever paid for and I use it on every site. So flexible and the key for me is that it stores form data in your database for future use or export. This means you can use it in so many different ways.
• Google XML Sitemaps: Creates and updates an xml sitemap. This is another way to make your site more likely to be fully indexed by Google and other search engines. That makes you easier to find when people are looking for you.
• Sociable: Adds those social media icons for people to bookmark and republish your pages and posts on social networks.
• Twitter Tools: Whether you want to send your posts to Twitter or bring Twitter into your posts, this creates the link.

Once you have gotten all of your plugins set up, you’ll be ready for content! So start writing.

Next post: Driving Traffic to Your Website

Check out the new site for Little Folks preschool and child care in Redmond, WA. This little school needed a solid website that was search engine friendly and easy to navigate for parents to find information. FourTen Creative created a new look to match existing promotional materials that looked fresh and was easy to maintain.

Check it out.

This post will be the first in a series focused on getting non-profits with limited resources online. Check back for future posts.

The Online Imperative

Many non-profits work in the world of  immediate need. For them, it is a luxury to think of technology upgrades, social media connectivity and custom websites. But in our modern society, communication is key to sustaining support for these organizations and the web is key for effective communication.

The goal of these posts will be to get your non-profit online in as few steps as possible with the greatest reach and simplest maintenance in mind. We will accomplish this through a variety of open source and low-cost tools to manage your web communications presence.

Step #1 Website

There are a few pieces to line up to get your website online: Domain, Hosting and Software. There thousands of people out there willing to sell you all of these at a wide variety of prices, so I am providing recommendations based on my experience only.

Domain (yoursite.com) - Choosing a good domain name is the first step in building an effective website. It saves everyone a lot of time and mental energy if you choose a memorable and easy to spell domain name for your site. Try to avoid hyphens, exotic domain extensions (.biz or .xyz) as the people you are trying to attract to your site might end up somewhere else. Chances are that your desired domain name with a .com extension is taken, so get creative, you acronyms to your advantage and utilize the old standby prefixes and suffixes like ‘my’, ‘go’, ‘online’, and ‘web’ when you really can’t find a good option.

It is ideal to combine your domain name provider with your hosting provider (see below), but when that isn’t possible, large companies like enom.com and godaddy.com tend to be the most affordable and easy to use options.  Bluehost.com will include a free domain name for life with your new hosting account.

Hosting (the servers) - Once again, there are plenty of people willing to charge you a wide variety of prices for hosting. Many offer proprietary content management systems (or CMS, covered below) or website building tools that lock you into their methods and capabilities. These are to be avoided for the large part especially as a cost consideration in this tutorial.

The other choices involved in hosting are the platform (windows or unix) and other database and email services. I recommend a unix based service that allows for mysql database hosting and full control over email accounts. I use Bluehost.com for many reasons including cost, customer service and features. There are other comparable providers and some are even cheaper, but I am sticking with my experience here. You can click on the link above to sign up at their site. Their hosting runs about $6.95/month and is the greatest cost involved. Off to a cheap start huh?

Software – Many people are immediately intimidated at the complexity of web design based on a fear of code. Html, php, and javascript will all be utilized to build your site, but there’s no reason for you to know anything about it. That’s because website management has by and large moved to a Content Management System (CMS) model. The difference is that you only need a web browser and internet access to maintain your site as opposed to costly software and you are not locked to your files being stored on one computer.

There are many fine CMS’s out there, but I exclusively recommend WordPress. Technically, people will tell you WordPress is blogging software and not a full-blown CMS. Millions of people using WordPress to manage their website would disagree, as would I. Out of the box, wordpress can manage most sites any small non-profit would need. The benefits of WordPress include a wide developer community, free templates, free plugins to extend capabilities and tons of great tutorials…like this one! And best of all, this open-source software is free!

If you chose the right hosting provider above, then they likely offer ‘one-click’ installs of WordPress. If not, you can download it from WordPress.org and follow the installation instructions. The goal here is to do this without programmer intervention. However, when you need help, a one or two hour investment in an experienced web designer may save you 20-40 hours of headaches.

To install WordPress with Bluehost, you log in to your account, click on SimpleScripts down the screen and select WordPress from their list of applications. It will ask you for some details and bam! You’ll have a website ready to configure.

Our next post will focus on the configuration process for your website.

Money paid so far: $6.95/month for hosting 1 year = $83.40 (but maybe you found a better deal!)

Next post: Configuring your new WordPress website