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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

Social media is here to stay. Let’s just get that out of the way. Many organizations are now looking to integrate social media into their web communications strategy and I wanted to share how FourTen Creative is helping people do so.

The Case Study – SimplyMusic

SimplyMusic approached FourTen to integrate their current website with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, an eNewsletter and a blog. The only hitch was that they had invested heavily in their existing web content platform and were not able to move their whole operation over to a Wordpress install at this time. We decided to come up with a way to complement the current website with a social-media-rich Wordpress install with some key components.

Subdomain Installation: We started by creating a sub-domain of blog.simplymusic.com and setting up an account at Bluehost.com to host it because of a locked-down hosting environment on their existing servers.  We proceeded to install Wordpress (actually WPMU for posterity’s sake) and moved on to focus on the user interaction.

Integrated Site Theme: We then created a theme that mirrored the exact look and feel of the existing site including menu structure to provide a seamless navigation experience between main site and blog (and between servers on different continents…the internet is pretty cool sometimes).

Wordpress Social Media Tools: We then set up our Wordpress install with tools to display latest tweets and send latest blog entries to the Twitter account. (Facebook can receive those same Tweets through the Twitter application installed on your Facebook profile. See previous post.) Wordpress also enables the displaying of YouTube videos in their pages and posts.

Custom Social Media Graphics: Aside from an investment in their CMS, Simply Music had invested in a fabulous set of artwork that tells the story of a musical journey. These source graphics were adapted to customize their Twitter and YouTube environments.

Newsletter: A powerful newsletter is in the works by utilizing a 3rd party distribution system (Mailchimp.com) and the blog to host full content. That means a digest email can be sent with custom a template and will link readers to media-rich content hosted on the blog.

Summary

Overall, this unified social media presence creates a multitude of new discovery points for new customers to find your content and stay connected to your business. FourTen Creative is proud to offer this full Social Media Integration for new & existing Wordpress based sites as well as existing sites running on other systems. Contact us today to learn more.

I have been fortunate to work with some of the nicest people in the world: Kindermusik educators. Kindermusik is a music and movement class offered for young children around the world. See Kindermusik.com for more info on them.

Over the past two years FourTen Creative has provided custom designed sites for four different Kindermusik locations on the West Coast. Some of the concerns central to Kindermusik educators may be relevant to your business as well. I am highlighting here some of the features and successes of these sites.

Interesting/Colorful Design: No stock templates here folks. Kindermusik educators are a colorful bunch as they appeal to infants, toddlers and young children. Each website project began with a custom graphic design process, integrating existing logos and color preferences to an appealing layout that conveyed fun, yet organized information logically according to what parent’s need.

Ease-of-Use: Wordpress has always been my first choice because of how accessible it is for web design novices. Kindermusik educators, though intelligent and capable, often don’t have time to play with html code. With easy configuration and training from FourTen, educators are ready to edit their own schedules, add photos, and blog to their heart’s content.

Social Media Integration: You’ll hear me talk a lot about this, but I’ll keep it short here. These people are social by nature and their websites need to enable the relationships that are the foundation of their businesses. Sites from FourTen can be integrated (and automated!) to work with Facebook, Twitter, email marketing tools like Constant Contact & MailChimp, video providers like YouTube and Vimeo, and come stock with a blog.

Search Engine Playfulness: Ok, well… “Search Engine Optimization” didn’t sound as fun, but making it easy for people to find you on the internet is important. Sites from FourTen also enable seamless integration with Google AdWords campaigns (even custom landing pages) and drive people to get connected to a class near them.

Low Cost of Operation: Ok, let’s be honest, a small business these days can’t afford to keep a web nerd in their basement on retainer. With Wordpress being an Open Source system, multitudes of free plugins, and the prevalence of low-cost wordpress hosting on the web, your overhead for a website could be as low as $85/yr. Seriously.

Visit some of these sites to see Kindermusik websites in action or contact us for your own.

Studio3Music.com

NotableKids.ca

MusicAndMyChild.com

Developmusic.com

By now, I hope you are convinced that every business (with very few exceptions) can benefit from engaging in Social Media. If you are convinced, you are likely still skeptical of the measurable impact of such efforts or return on the investment for staff and contractors to be engaging in such work, populating the internet with references to your company.

An immediate benefit of engaging in social media is the ability for companies and organizations to listen to what their customers are saying about them. Such insight is instrumental in forming marketing, management, product development and public relations with real data gathered relatively cheaply compared to conventional market research.

Start by identifying who your customers are and what venues are utilized for their communication about products and issues that matter to them, then try a mix of the methods below to gather feedback.

Surveys

That’s right, the good ol’ survey aint dead yet. The reason why is that aside from meeting personally with each of your customers, it is one of the best ways to get an answer to a specific question. Here are a few resources for managing surveys online.

Gravity Forms – For users of Wordpress, Gravity Forms provides an easy to use form building utility with a variety of options to create workflows and store results. Pop a survey on the front page of your website or sidebar of your blog and and start gathering insight immediately. Licences are $39 for an individual site, but included with any site from FourTen Creative.

Google Docs – Did you know that you can gather survey data through a Google Docs spreadsheet? This is especially powerful with easily quantifiable results to move your data quickly from gathering to a display of results. Here is a tutorial to get you started.

Limesurvey.org – Lime Survey is a powerful open source survey software package for administering and monitoring your own surveys. If you are going to be engaging in a surveys on a large scale or want to manage a lot of data simultaneously, Lime Survey may be worth the time investment.

Keyword Searches

Find out what people are saying about your company. Aside from a blind googling of your company name (which can be useful too), you can target areas of the internet for activity mentioning your name or products. Try these easy tools for free.

Google Alerts – That’s right, the most powerful search engine on the planet working for you (for free) to monitor segments of the internet. Google Alerts offers the ability to target terms and email you directly when your company name is mentioned in that venue. Give it a try.

Twitter Search – People are saying a lot on twitter these days. Rather than only getting an answer to a specific question, put your ear to the twitter rails and prepare to be overwhelmed with feedback about your products or services. Just go to Twitter and search. Couldn’t be simpler. The only hitch here is that people actually have to be talking about your products. If they aren’t then maybe the next section will jump-start and online discussion for you.

Create An Online Community

Some people won’t engage in the online discussion about your organization until a venue is provided. People used to go to great pains to create fan pages and community forums, but increasingly companies are taking it upon themselves to create these outlets to draw in their customers. Below are some of the myriad ways to create online community around your organization.

Blog – That’s right, the obvious step you haven’t staffed up for yet. Start blogging openly about your company and products and solicit comments. Leave those comments open and allow positive and negative feedback to stand, showing your customers you want to hear everything they have to say. Wordpress is obviously a fantastic option for this.

Facebook – If you don’t have a Facebook page yet, get on it! You can use the many applications to mirror your existing social media investments in your blog, press releases and Twitter. Use Facebook to drive traffic back to your blog or other venue for continued feedback or simply monitor the input of those in your Facebook network with their search tool. You’ll gain insight into your customers in a way surveys can’t touch.

BuddyPress – Wordpress offers the ability to create a network of blogs from one installation called Wordpress MU (Multi User). BuddyPress takes this one step further and transforms WPMU into a social network for internal or external use. It will take a time investment to set it up, but if your audience is looking for a way to connect to other costumers or members of your organization, it would be well worth it for the chance to engage with your core customers and further any of the efforts listed above.

Have you had any particular success with these methods? Leave a comment and let everyone know what has worked for you.

Internet Nostalgia

Remember when a table-based set of hot-linked images was the newest thing in webpages? No? Well, maybe you were too busy searching the internet on WebCrawler or checking out new bands on UBL or were stuck in AOL’s proprietary version of the web like I was. If that’s the case, check out the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for a trip down bad web design memory lane.

Disaster Recovery

On a more useful note, I just used the Wayback Machine to recover data for a client whose website was lost when their hosting company experienced ‘a regrettable loss’. The time and money you’ve invested in producing content for your site can be recovered to some degree if you check it out! Just don’t go looking for any of my old websites…seriously, don’t…it’s embarrassing.

Should I be blogging?

When I meet with clients regarding website projects, I am often asked what I recommend regarding blogging. When utilizing Wordpress as a Content Management System, blogging is a natural complement to a small business website. Some clients are clearly not ready to commit to keeping up a regular blog, but when you examine the benefits of blogging to your business, it’s hard to not want to make the commitment to writing about half a page once a week to keep a blog updated. (frequency recommendations vary greatly based on who you talk to)

1. Establish yourself as a trusted voice.

You’re an expert… whether you realize or not, your clients trust your for expert advice in your area of business. Maybe you don’t feel like an expert, but you know something specific about your field in your community that is of value. Rather than hiding that expertise behind a logo or slogan asking people to trust your reputation, why not give them a little free taste of that wisdom? Great blog content can be tips, tricks, insider info, analysis, opinion or even humor relating to your business experience. As your audience reads your words, they grow to trust you more when they need a service that you provide.

2. Enable two-way communication with your client base.

Making business decisions in a vacuum is dangerous. Why not elicit some feedback from clients and industry partners while driving traffic to your website? Blogs are a great place to allow others to join in a conversation about topics relevant to your business. The discussion can be useful for adjusting business practices, informing new products and providing valuable insight into how your customers view your business or industry.

3. Create dynamic content on your website.

Every blog entry on your site becomes a new page that search engines recognize and index for keywords and phrases. While one aspect of your business may not have much of a presence on your website, you can dedicate pages of space to discussing the ins-and-outs of it in a blog that is organized and archived for easy access and future use. You also give people a reason to come back to your site by publishing new blog entries on your front page.

4. Republish and distribute content easily.

What makes a blog a blog is RSS. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a super flexible way of taking the content on your website and making it accessible to people in a machine-readable format to be read on-demand in a program or on a device of their choosing. RSS offers the most choice to your audience of how they will access the content of your blog. As a blog administrator, you can make your content available through a feed reader, by email, by text alerts and even by an iTunes podcast. If you have multiple websites, you can even cross-publish content between sites easily with an RSS feed. If you’re feeling really generous, you can even provide widgets for people to include your content on their own web sites.

5. Allow easy archival and searchable access to your content.

Where was that article about industry practices on that web site? Well, with a Wordpress blog, archiving by date, category and keyword is automatic. With keyword tags, the possibilities are limitless to provide flexible organization of your blog content on the conditions which you think people will be looking for it. Why not enable a rating system to let the public decide what is valuable on your blog and organize access to content based on popular opinion? With each blog post creating a page with the option to have a unique page title, meta descriptions and meta keywords, search engines have much better access to indexing the material on your website. So whether clients utilize a search engine or the search function on your site, they are more likely to find the content they are looking for.