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Hello everybody. Welcome to A Cooperative Approach to Web Design.
With us today is Elliot Harmon from TechSoup Global. As a staff writer at TechSoup,
Elliot writes content to educate nonprofits and public libraries on effective use of technology.
He has degrees from the University of South Dakota and California College of the Arts.
And also with us today is Jim Walker from Big Car. Jim is founder and Executive Director
of Big Car a nonprofit community creativity organization based in Indianapolis.
Walker, a former newspaper journalist also works as a public artist, photographer,
and writer. In 2010, Walker led Big Car's Made for Each Other Community Arts Series,
reaching 8 neighborhoods with a variety of projects that engaged adults and children
in creative activities designed to help their communities.
Walker is also a member of the Indianapolis Cluster of CEOs for Cities,
a national project focused on helping American urban centers.
One of his passions is innovating great ways to help cities through creativity.
And also with us on chat today is William Coonan, also from TechSoup Global.
And I am Kyla Hunt your facilitator for today.
So really quick, today we are going to talk a little bit about who TechSoup is
and do something thanks yous for people who made this webinar possible.
Then Elliot is going to go into Web design basics,
followed by Jim Walker's presentation on his organization's website, BigCar.org.
And then at the end of this presentation we will be taking some questions from the audience.
Throughout the presentation please submit those questions in the question's pane.
We will be taking a look at those and we will be reading them audibly at the end
of the presentation. We will try to get to as many questions as possible,
but if for some reason we do not get to any you can e-mail the presenters
or you can submit those questions to the community forum.
So really quick, a little bit about who TechSoup is.
TechSoup is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. As of June 2010,
TechSoup served more than 127,000 organizations,
distributed more than 6.3 million technology donations,
and enabled nonprofit recipients to save more than $1.8 billion in IT expenses
in 33 countries around the world.
TechSoup is part of TechSoup Global which is working towards the day when every nonprofit,
library, and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology, knowledge,
and resources they need to operate at their full potential.
I do want to take a moment to thank a few organizations and individuals
that made this webinar possible. First up is the Pepsi Refresh Project.
For little bit more information about what the Pepsi Refresh Project is,
I took this quote from their website.
"You have an idea to refresh your community. You invite people to get behind your idea
and vote for it. If your idea is approved, Pepsi will help you make it happen
with funding from a Pepsi Refresh Project grant."
I do want to mention that voting for excepted submissions will begin again on November 1,
at 12:00 PM Eastern standard time and will conclude on November 30.
This reflects a 30 day extension of voting to allow the millions of people impacted
by hurricane Irene ample time to coordinate their entries. And for more information
please visit www.refresheverything.com.
I do want to mention that Jim, one of our presenters today
is a Pepsi Refresh Project grantee.
I also want to thank Derian Rodriguez Heyman
who allowed us to use the same title of this webinar that was a title of a chapter
in Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals.
We will be sending out this short link to the Amazon listing for this book.
And with that I am going to go ahead and get Elliot started, but before we do that
I do want to take a couple of polls. So let's go ahead and do that.
The first one will be how would you describe yourself?
And so go ahead and select whichever you think you would describe yourself best as.
Again, the options are; Executive Director or Management, IT Staff, Accidental Techie,
Volunteer/Board Member.
And I'm going to be closing the poll in just a couple of seconds; 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
And I'm not sure if you can all see this, but it looks like
the Accidental Techie's have 31% of our participants. ED/Management has 26%.
Volunteer/Board Members is 22%, and IT Staff reflects 21%.
So that is a pretty evenly distributed audience that we have today.
And really quick I do want to take one other poll.
And this is going to ask when was the last time you redesigned your website?
And just to read what the options are, the first is before 2000.
The second, 2000 to 2005, the third 2005 to 2010, and the last within the past year.
And as the results are coming in, it looks like 2005 to 2010 and within the past year
are blowing the rest of the contestants out of the water here.
I'm going to close the poll in just a second; 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Let's see if I can share this. You should be able to see the results now.
Before 2000 has 5%, 2000 to 2005 has 18%, 2005 to 2010 has 46%,
and within the past year has 32%. So like I said, the majority of participants,
their organizations website has been updated within at least the past 6 years.
Alright, and with that I do want to give control over to Elliot. So I'm going to give him the floor.
And Elliot I am going to mute myself so you can un-mute yourself.
Elliot: Okay, thanks a lot Kyla, and thanks a lot to everybody for joining here.
Kyla mentioned that the Nonprofit Management 101 book which I contributed the chapter
to on Web design. And what I'm going to be talking about here pretty closely follows
that chapter, but of course there's a lot more information in the chapter.
Okay, what we will be talking about briefly is one, what is your websites purpose?
Two, setting and measuring goals for achieving that purpose for the website.
Three is conceptualizing your website which I will explain what that means when we get there.
But basically I think of conceptualizing your website as everything that you do
before you actually get around to making the website on your computer.
And finally we are going to be talking a little bit about content management systems.
This is a lot of ground to cover and I want to be sure that Jim has ample time afterward
to talk about Big Car. So we are going to go through this relatively quickly,
but fortunately there are going to be questions at the end.
And fortunately we are going to be pointing you to a lot of additional resources.
So be patient as we speed through this and we will try to get to your questions.
Okay, what is your website's purpose? I take a really simplistic approach
to thinking about what your website's purpose is, which is really that it comes down to
the audience and the desired outcome, what it is that you want your audience
to do when they visit that website.
And ideally, all of this should be tied to your broader organizational goals and strategy.
I think there was a time not too long ago when most organizations thought of their website
more or less as kind of a flyer for the organization that existed on the Internet
instead of existing on paper. But now we are really moving to a time when websites can
and should be much more closely aligned with your programmatic goals,
and with the metrics that you use for measuring the effectiveness of your programs.
Okay, so who is the intended audience? Potential donors, current donors, volunteers,
evangelists, customers or beneficiaries, people who are actually going to use
the organization's services. Of course for just about any organization the temptation
is to answer everyone. My kind of half joking response to that is, well you know,
most nonprofits websites aren't actually very appealing to anyone.
So making one that is appealing to everyone is going to be a tall order.
My slightly more serious response to that is to say that yes,
every nonprofit has a complicated mix of different audiences.
Still, the process of actually profiling those audiences
and thinking about what each of those audiences is really looking for
when they go to your organization's website, and prioritizing those to a certain extent,
that process is going to inform the design process infinitely.
Now that you've talked about who the audience of the website is,
the next step is okay, what do you want those visitors to do when they get to your site?
And I put some examples there. Make a donation,
though that is a kind of problematic one which we will talk about in a minute.
Sign up for a newsletter. Sign up for this service. Send this to a friend.
Really, what I see as kind of a key thing about these is that they are all things
that you can actually measure. I'd say nearly every nonprofit,
our purpose among other things is to spread awareness.
Though just purely spreading awareness is something that is not very easy to measure.
So think of these — oh, the technical term for these is conversions.
You might hear me use the word conversions a few times.
That just means what you want the audience to do. Think of those as indicators
that that awareness or that message has been spread,
and then you can optimize the website to get the most out of those.
When talking about purpose of websites, and talking about how you measure
those conversions, I often find myself talking about two interesting commercial websites.
One of those is Mighty Putty and the other one is Apple.
If you are not familiar with Mighty Putty, its a sort of white putty glue
that comes in a little tube and is advertised on television. If you are not familiar with Apple,
it is a sort of white shiny computer that comes in a cardboard box
and is advertised on television during the more popular shows.
When you look at both of these websites, they were ultimately created
with the same purpose in mind. Both of these websites were created above all else,
to sell a product. And in both of these websites the moment you look at the homepage,
it is exceedingly obvious what the product being sold is.
There is however, a major difference in design philosophy between these 2 websites.
And that is really what you see here. There is literally only one page at mightyputty.com,
and that page is the order form. The website was really designed with the idea
that you are going to be making a purchase, or not making a purchase
within about 5 minutes of visiting the website.
The Apple site on the other hand is very different. There is no order form here.
In fact if you are bored sometime, try just going to Apple.com
and clicking on whatever the featured product is. And see how long it takes you
to get to anywhere where you are entering your credit card info. I tried this the other day.
Right now the featured product on there is the new iPhone,
and it took me about 19 clicks before I got to anywhere that I would actually
be putting in credit card information. So the difference between these 2 websites
is not in what the ultimate goal is, but it is in the amount of work
and the amount of intermediary steps that come before that eventual goal.
Here is the funny thing, and this is kind of one of the main things that I want to underscore.
I think most of us would look at these 2 brands and say well, Apple is the cooler hipper brand.
That is unattainable. My nonprofit can't try to be an Apple. In reality,
most nonprofits that try to be Might Puttys fail, or at least fail in that respect.
When I look at many, many nonprofit websites, I see them kind of built with the idea
that I would want to make a donation within 5 minutes of learning about a nonprofit.
And that is not true for most of us. So I would encourage you to think instead
about using the website as a place for longer-term relationship building,
developing trust with the audience that can lead to donations or any number of other things.
In other words, try to be an Apple, because you probably aren't going to have
the perfect 30 second sales pitch of a Mighty Putty.
To look at this another way, think about when a guest comes to visit your organization.
This guest might be a potential donor or a potential volunteer.
Maybe it is somebody from a foundation. Whoever it is it is somebody
you want to get on your nonprofit's side. Think about what you would do with that person
the day she visited. Think about the people you would introduce her to.
Think about the stories that you would tell her. Think about the things that you would show her.
All of which would go into building that relationshi
which may or may not eventually lead to the conversion.
Wouldn't it be a disappointing visit if she showed up and all she saw were this big donation box?
But this is more or less what a lot of nonprofits are.
They are a big donation box and there is not much other opportunity for relationship building.
There is a person who is sort of a political strategist name Anne Keenan
who wrote this pretty great piece about this problem.
She was describing an experience that she had right after she'd signed up for a mailing list.
And she wrote, "The minute I hit submit, a giant donate button appeared.
Whoa — all of a sudden we'd skipped from flirting to something a little more intimate,
and I felt icky and strangely violated." And I think that is an experience that we have all had
in both the for-profit and nonprofit sector. So don't be icky.
Now that we've talked about kind of big picture what the purpose of the website is,
the next step is kind of talking about okay, how can you turn that around into measurable goals?
I put here, set pacific measurable goals. Visitors should sign up for our e-mail newsletter.
That's a good goal. A better gold might be 10% of referrals from XYZ campaign
should sign up for our e-mail newsletter. The difference between those 2 goals
is that one of them is measurable. After the campaign is over we can look at the results
and we can say, this succeeded at this goal or this failed at this goal.
So here are the things we will try for the next campaign.
A goal without that specificity attached to it is very difficult to say
whether you have succeeded or failed, or to say what you might try to change
in the future to meet the goal better.
Once you have established that goal, I see the next step as building the website around it.
To use the example of the newsletter sign up again, every piece of content
beit a profile of somebody in the community, beit some kind of testimonial
about what your organization does, is there a way that every piece of that content
can tie back to that conversion of signing up for the newsletter?
Sometimes in Web design people talk about the 1 click rule,
which means literally that a visitor should never be more than one click away
from whatever that conversion is. Because each time, each additional step that you add
to a process, you are going to lose some people. Now like any rule,
this is a rule that can be broken, but think about it first and break it intelligently.
The next step is actually now that you've talked about that audience,
and what that audience is supposed to do when they get to the site,
it's to kind of turn that into really more specific profiles of who that audience is
and what they would do when they interact with the site. User stories are kind of a good way
of thinking about this. They are sketches of how and why users will interact with the site.
And they are ideally based on interviews and actual intelligence
you have on that audience and stakeholders.
Here are some examples of those. Adam learns about our nonprofit by word of mouth
and finds our site through a Google search. He reads the story of our nonprofit,
watches a testimonial video, and signs up for the email list. Bonnie visits our site
to respond to a fundraising letter. She chooses from 3 donation levels and makes a donation.
Carl notices an interruption in services. He visits the site
and immediately finds an updated service schedule and contact information.
All of these are specific based on different audience,
from the audiences that we talked about earlier. And they are also measureable.
You as the site administrator will be able to look and see whether the users
that match these profiles actually got what they were looking for or not.
Once you kind of have those user stories, you can start to build that
into an information architecture which is a simple outline of what content will appear
on the website and how it will be arranged. For the chapter in the book
I made a really simple example of an information architecture.
But in fact, yours might not be much more complicated than this.
We have 5 headings About Us, Events and Services, News, Contact Us,
Donate with some subheads under each of those headings.
And key questions to talk about with your team at this point are,
does the information architecture reflect the most important user stories?
And in a way this really does come down to prioritizing. Like we talked about earlier,
we do have multiple audiences. And there is going to need to be a discussion
about prioritizing which transactions are going to be the easiest
or most immediately findable on the site.
Will new content or sections need to be added in the future?
Who will create the content for each section?
Being a writer I am a big fan of content, and content strategy.
And these are not questions that should wait until the last minute.
Now that you have the information architecture, the next step is sort of a wire frame,
a visual representation of the elements of the website.
This can be a Microsoft Word document, an illustrator graphic.
This sample one here I just made it in Photoshop. Or even a pencil drawing.
And in fact, I will say that some of the most gifted designers I've ever met do lots
and lots of sketching out on paper before they ever touch a computer.
Now if you are say working with a contractor on your website
and you show them your user stories, your information architecture, your wire frame,
the things they might come back and suggest to you might look very, very different
from the wire frame. So it is not exactly a literal recipe for the website.
It is more of a visual aid for talking about with the stakeholders,
talking about whether this meets the needs as you've laid them out,
whether this meets the priorities of your organization.
So it is really more of a visual aid than an actual step-by-step recipe for the website.
Which brings us to content management systems.
If that's a phrase that you haven't heard before, you might have also heard web CMS,
or just CMS. Those are more or less interchangeable.
And that is a program installed on the web server that manages the website.
And what's really kind of interesting about CMSes is that they sort of enforce a unified look
and feel and design across the entire website.
If you decide for example that you are changing your logo and you want to change
the color scheme of the website to match the logo, then you don't need to go through
and change each page with a content management system.
The CMS enforces that consistent design across the entire website.
And most of them have a lot of other goodies built into them too, things like blogs, forums,
e-commerce modules possibly, all of which will fit that same look and feel of your website.
With most CMSes and definitely any CMS I would suggest you look at,
a nonspecialist can keep the website content up to date. That means you or somebody else
on your team who is reasonably computer literate can do 90% of the upkee
of the website. Now depending how ambitious your needs for the website are
and depending a little on how willing you are to get your hands dirty,
you may well need somebody to help you with that initial set up. But the goal really should be
that you don't need some kind of the fancy specialist
or contractor to keep the website up to date on a regular basis.
Here is just to kind of visualize that a little bit. Here is my very simple sketch
of how a CMS works. Up there in the upper left we have the editing interface.
That is what they call a WYSIWYG, or what you see is what you get interface
similar to the one you have in Microsoft Word. And then the CMS turns that content
into the HTML, the actual code that is then read by the web browser.
So that is kind of a graphical idea of how a content management system works.
Now the big four open source CMSes are Drupal, Joomla, Plone and Wordpress.
Those are all free and they are all relatively popular in the nonprofit community.
There are consultants who work primarily or exclusively with nonprofits
who work extensively in those four CMSes. And also because they have a big pool of users,
lots of people have built extra modules and things for them.
Our friends at Idealware have put together really the definitive guide
to those four CMSes for nonprofits. I put the URL for it there. That outlines the pros and cons
of each of those, and it also includes a directory of consultants.
So it's really a great resource I would encourage you to download.
Now all of that is not to downplay the proprietary CMSes.
I wrote there if you use a proprietary CMS, understand what you are paying for
which means that a good reason to use a proprietary CMS
would be that it has functionality that you need.
Perhaps it is using the Microsoft SharePoint CMS
because it is able to work with your dynamic CRM.
Or there are other proprietary CMSes out there that are specifically made
to work with other CRMs or fundraising databases.
Those are good reasons to use a proprietary CMS,
but again understand what you are paying for.
And with that I think I'm at the end of my segment, so I will pass it back over to Kyla.
Kyla: Alright, awesome. Thank you Elliot. I really appreciate that.
So I am going to go ahead and give the presenter control over to Jim
so he can go ahead and get his section started. Again, keep putting those questions
into the question pane. And if you have any technical problems
or you really have any content related questions, feel free to ask at any time.
So Jim I am going to go ahead and give you control.
Okay, looks good to go. Thanks.
Jim: Okay, thank you. Okay, so I'm kind of I guess doing sort of a case study
of what a website can be like for a nonprofit. Big Car is a small nonprofit in Indianapolis.
We serve the community here in different ways through education and art,
and a description here you can read. We formed in 2005. We have four staff people now,
but operated for the first several years with just a couple of people.
I was primarily maintaining the website and updating it with the help of a web designer
who helped build the site originally. And as mentioned,
we were a 2011 Pepsi Refresh winner.
So I just wanted to highlight some of the aspects of what we found important
when we were thinking about our site, and what we wanted it to be.
For us we really wanted to have our site be a self-serve site that we could go into and update,
and run, and kind of have it be fresh and keep it going, and not have to worry about
calling someone up or emailing someone and saying, can you change this or fix this.
So the CMS that we used right off the bat was Movable Type.
And I think it was an open source version of Movable Type.
I know there is one you can pay for, but I think we've been using the free one.
And as you can kind of see here, all of this code is generated through uploading things.
And for the first few years of doing this I didn't really understand what I was doing that much,
and sort of figured it out and figure out what the different code things kind of did,
and when I messed them up, what they would do. And that was sort of all done
without any kind of training. The guy just sort of set me u
and let me struggle and fail until I figured it out.
So what we update the most with our content management system is stuff like the schedule.
So every day something new comes up, at least every few days I get in there
and update the schedule. It would be the one that you can see on the left there.
And then the main menu part that goes down the middle of the site is the place
where we update with news. A flier is up so all the latest events
and things that are going on are really clearly indicated there.
So what we wanted to really go for when we got our site started was to make something —
and I feel like this is really important — something that is attractive to people,
and also something that fit us. So we really wanted the design of the site to match
our organization and not to be sort of shoehorned into the template
that a designer had. So we came up with some concepts and worked with a graphic designer
to come up with newer versions of our site as we sort of went along.
This was what our site was like when it first opened, or when it first went up in 2005.
Basically where that question mark is — this is off an archive — there was our logo,
and that was the whole thing. So it was really obviously very minimal,
and there wasn't a lot to it. But we just wanted to get some information out there.
And it didn't really fit with the sort of energy that our organization had
and all the things that were going on. But it did divide up into the categories
of what we were going to do. And it was sort of like a wire frame, just sort of sitting on a page.
So we had our original About section that was live, and some of these other things
that were here. And our organization changed drastically from the beginning,
and so our website started changing to match that. So here is sort of a different where we are
now with our About, and it definitely adds a lot more to what we are doing.
So the second version of our site was this one where we brought in more color,
added different navigation on the top and on the left, and started have the things
that I could update using Moveable Type to bring in new things that were going on
and keep the freshest news and the things we wanted to highlight the most there
in that spot in the middle of the main page.
And you can see the difference between that and where we are now.
We came back in, it's still the same basic structure, but we moved a few things around,
added some new buttons on the left, changed our navigation on the top,
and really brightened up the color and reflected the redesign that we had done
for our organization. The website hasn't been rebuilt, we just kind of gave it a new skin
and a new look, and kept the same functionality and the same content management system.
I'm planning to, we as a group are working on creating a new site,
but for now we are just sort of working with the one we have here.
One of the things we felt was really important was to keep it personal
and to have it have a lot of faces. So these are just a few of the artists that you can see
if you click on the art, the collective page. And since the beginning of our site
we've tried to have a lot of faces and a lot of people to keep it really feeling,
to have that human sort of touch to it, because of the distance the technology kind of creates.
So a key to us from the very beginning was to have our website be flexible,
and to be flexible as a group, and to be able to change our navigation,
and adjust from where we started. These are the 3, only the 3 things we had on the left
on our site navigation. And we had a forum on there that we ended up getting rid of
because it didn't work out very well. Sometimes we would just add things to change things,
drop things from the site, and keep it evolving along with us as an organization.
So these are the ones we added. One important one was to have a way for people
to make donations. We didn't have that there before.
The same is true with the top navigation. When we first started as an organization
we divided our programming between writing, art, music, and art shows,
and we also offered some public relations support to other nonprofits.
That all changed later on and we sort of adjusted to reflect our new approach
which is really to talk about who we are with the collective one,
and then to show what was going on in our gallery, what was going on
in our community art projects, and to have a holding place for all the multimedia stuff
that we had been doing to document our projects.
And the one consistent one that stayed was the contact button.
So for us, we wanted to keep the site easy to navigate
so people wouldn't get lost or feel like they were overwhelmed.
And sometimes I think our site now still has a lot of options, maybe too many.
But we try to keep it clean, so when you look at it you are not overwhelmed with options
and the focus brings you into the main stories that you want to cover.
And the most important news and kind of a hierarchy of things
that we wanted to make sure people stopped and looked at.
One thing that I think we found that's important, and that we are interested in maintaining
in our next site is to have this big button that is the home button that can always get you back
to where you need to go.
One of the major changes that happen for us since we have kind of gone along
with our site through the years, is making it connected to external things like YouTube
and just other ways to connect with people. So right off the bat we had the Big Car list serve
that we created for our newsletter. And that was something that we found to be really important
right off the bat when we got started in 2005. And then we continued to do that
and use that as a way to communicate with people.
We also felt like from the very beginning connecting with other organizations
that were our friends and using links as a way to sort of share and find others who have links
on their page, as a way for us to sort of cross pollinate and connect.
And it also helped with friendships with other organizations,
local, and national, and international.
Originally, the way that we documented our shows and put pictures u
was just through uploading pictures into directly onto the page.
And so you had to scroll way down to see every single picture.
So it was a pretty awkward way to look at pictures from our events.
Now we use Flickr and we host all of our photos on Flickr.
And we keep up this photo stream slide show so people can see what the latest photos are
that are uploaded on Flickr. Then also we use other external things like Evoca and Vimeo
and YouTube, and Scribd to host our audio, video, and documents like PDFs.
So here is just a bunch of our sets on our Flickr. And one of the things that we do
is not only connecting out to these places, but we'll put on the photos,
the videos and the documents and audio links back to the BigCar.org site
to kind of get things going both directions. So when somebody click on a photo, or a set,
we try to send them back to our website.
Here is another example of how we had our video clips. And they were just uploaded.
You had to upload these video files which is a real pain, and would also be sometimes
really slow for people to view. And now we just use our YouTube channels and Vimeo.
And we found that it's really important to use, to get pro accounts.
And TechSoup is where we got our Flickr Pro account, and that has been really important
and the Vimeo Pro and some of the others can really make a difference.
So I feel like they are working investment.
We also early-on, set up Facebook groups and Twitter for our Big Car
and used that as a way to stay connected with people.
I'm taking you to the Big Car group page and Facebook.
And also taking you to our Twitter page which is linked to Facebook.
So there again, you can link people back to your site from both of those as often as you like.
So one thing that we really felt like we needed to do with the site was keep it fresh,
and keep the news that you have on there up-to-date, not leave things on the main page
or out where people will see them that are more than a couple of weeks old.
So like this story is about something that happened on October 6,
so is going to need go down pretty soon. We kind of think about the dates that people see,
especially on the main pages, sort of the way you would with journalism
where if it's old news it's time for it to go and be replaced by something newer.
But we kind of did an experiment for a while where we tried to kind of have daily content,
because we thought we wanted people to come back every day.
And I don't think that ever really worked out, and it was a lot of work.
So we kind of created this daily comic that was based on things that people said to us,
or sent in comments, and then we we do these collage things. And it was kind of fun,
but I think we did 10 days worth and then we quit, because it was really too much work.
And we really didn't see that having a daily update was drawing people to the site.
They would go when they needed information or wanted to know when things were happening.
So the key for us is just to have an informative site, and one that has news and information
that people need, but also information that people like the media could use.
And have a one sheet there that they could click on to get this sort of short scoop on who we are,
and to be able to download and see that there is other media coverage.
This is also a good way for people to find out about what is going on with your organization,
even if they are not in the media.
And one thing that we have been doing for several years is keeping our logo there
on the site for people to download because it comes up a lot when you are partnering
with people, or some kind of a thing where a designer wants to use your logo
to put on a poster or something.
So basically for us, now we are sort of in this position where we are planning to redesign
the site and we want to go a little bit further in the direction that we've been going,
taking the idea of sort of organizing this a little bit more and keeping it from being
sort of overwhelming. And we've been looking at other sites. And I really feel like
that looking around at sites that you like and sort of thinking about
what you can borrow from them, and just doing research to sort of create a hybrid
of things that you can use and ideas you can borrow.
This is an organization in Chattanooga Tennessee that has a site that
we were looking at. And we like the simplicity of it. And this is sort of the direction
with the redesign of our site we are going to go in, where there is a little bit less going on.
Even though I think we are probably going to end up working more with a slider like this,
because I don't know that we are going to be able to give up having something
on the main page that we want to highlight, because we are really used to that.
This is a partner organization of ours in Indianapolis that has recently redone their site.
So we are also looking at ideas from them that we want to borrow from them
as we work on our site.
So basically, those are the things that we are kind of highlighting with our site.
And kind of where we are and our plans for the future.
And I appreciate your time and I'm happy to answer any questions.
Kyla: Awesome. Thank you so much Jim. Yeah, it's really interesting to see how your website
has been evolving along with the change of focus of your organization,
and how that is really reflecting that. So that's great.
I do think we have quite a few questions both for you and Elliott.
Really quick, let me get my fancy, or not so fancy question slide up.
Just give me one second.
Alright. So let me take a look at some questions.
First of all, I do want to go ahead and ask some questions
that were directed towards Elliot specifically about CMSes.
And it's asking about specific content management systems.
So is Adobe Contribute a CMS or what do you think of Plesk?
Do you have any opinions on either of those?
Elliott: I am not familiar with either of those, so I really don't even want to try to make u
an answer. We can certainly find some stuff about those and get the information to you.
Contribute is available through TechSoup, correct? Yeah, it is.
So we can certainly send you some information about those,
but I don't want to try to speak out of what I actually know.
Kyla: Okay, cool. And we did have a question asking,
do I need to go through a consultant to create a Wordpress site?
Elliott: I'll tell you my personal experience with this,
because I have actually been playing with Wordpress a fair amount recently.
I'm starting a thing outside of work. And over about 2 weeks I made a reasonably good site
in Wordpress that is functional. Its definitely not the most attractive site in the world,
but it is functional.
It's kind of like I said earlier, that how much of this you can do yourself depends partly
on how ambitious your goals for the site are. It also just depends on how willing you are
to get your hands dirty in this stuff personally. I have pretty high tolerance for that,
so I managed to kind of fumble my way through making a website.
I don't know if I have a better answer to that than Wordpress is certainly more user-friendly
than some of those others. There are a lot of free templates available for Wordpress.
I would imagine that most nonprofits would want somebody with a little bit more design chops
than I have for example, somewhere in the process of putting together a website.
But I'm also a big fan of John Wayne-ing things and trying it yourself.
Kyla: Okay, cool. So this question is about CMSes, but it is really directed towards Jim.
And they wanted for you to reiterate what CMS you are using currently,
and maybe what CMS you are looking to use in the future.
Jim: The one we are using right now is Movable Type. And I have used Wordpress once,
and that may be the direction that we go. Movable Type has been fine.
I think in the free version that we've had, we had a few hack problems or something
that was just not good for a little while, but it seems like they've taken care of that.
But I think Wordpress is probably the direction we'll go in the future from what I understand.
Kyla: Okay, cool, thank you very much. And this question I think whoever wants to answer this,
maybe Elliott, we have somebody that says that they currently have a website created in Drupal.
And it doesn't entirely do what they want. And the creator is no longer
in the organization's picture. But they also have decided to start using a CRM.
So there comes this chicken and egg question. Which comes first, the CMS or the CRM?
Elliott: So I'll try to take a stab at that question, and Jim should certainly feel free to chime in
if you want to. I think it's possible that earlier on I might have overstated the importance
of CRM integration. If there is a specific reason why you need CRM integration,
that your constituents need to be able to login for something specifically connected
to your organization's services, then you definitely want to look at putting together
that solution in a unified way, and probably getting a consultant to help you
through that process. But for most nonprofits, I think the importance of CRM integration
is kind of overstated.
Kyla: Okay, great, thanks. Sorry, I had a little bit of a glitch here.
So Jim, did you have anything to add to that?
Jim, are you on?
Jim: I guess I don't. I'm here. I didn't really even know what CRM is. So I guess I do now.
But I felt like the content management system was crucial right at the beginning,
and I understand the connection between. But for our organization
with being a small as we are, we really just needed to be able to keep it up to date.
And I think one thing, and I've heard that a lot about different people leaving
who've set up websites, or that people will have some students that offer to do it for free
and then they are gone. I think thinking through who sets up your website
and how much access you are going to have is really crucial,
because I think that ends up being a problem for a lot of organizations.
Elliott: Hey Jim, do you guys use a some sort of system for people
who want to like RSVP or buy tickets for an event?
Jim: No. Not something from the site, I think we've used like off-site services
like Brown Paper Tickets and things like that, but we haven't integrated those in with the site.
Elliott: Okay. I was just wondering. That's another integration question
that would be worth thinking about for some nonprofits.
I didn't know if that was a big issue for you or not.
Jim: Yeah, most of our stuff is pretty grass-roots,
so it's just like a pay at the door kind of thing.
Kyla: Okay, cool. The next question is, can we expect a website designer
to also be a graphic designer?
Whoever wants to take a stab at that.
Elliott: I am also not a big expert in like what the field of consultants looks like necessarily.
There are many that do both. There are many that do various sort of combination of services.
I would encourage you to look at that listing of consultants in the Idealware guide.
I would also encourage you to look at a webinar that we did a year or 2 ago called,
How Much Should a Website Cost? That was presented by Allen Gunn
who works a lot with those consultants, so is much more familiar with what is going on
in that field than I am. But I think I interrupted Jim. I think he had something to say.
Jim: Yeah, I think like with our site, when we redesigned it, the look was designed
by a graphic designer, and we handed it to the web designer and he worked with it.
And I think sometimes those people are one and the same,
and sometimes one is more interested in how things look in the designer aspect of it visually.
And maybe the web designers are sometimes more on the functionality side of things.
So maybe a collaboration between both and maybe having both involved
is a good idea if you can.
Kyla: Right, and I feel like this question kind of goes with graphic design as a follow-up.
The question is specifically about Twitter, should Twitter backgrounds
be informative or just attractive? But I think that can go with website backgrounds
or website layouts in general, if attraction or information should be the crucial thing.
Elliott: Information should be the crucial thing. There's a story that I told in the chapter
that you can see online too, the has to do with an organization where I have a couple of friends
that had somebody build a website for them entirely in flash.
And it was a super attractive website with pop up menus and all those fancy things,
but with this major problem that nobody at the organization knew how to actually update it.
So it just sat there and got more and more stale literally for years.
I think that — I'm certainly a believer — and I want to hear Jim's perspective on this as an artist
and personally putting together that site too — that there is a certain kind of simplicity
with a certain kind of style and chutzpah is the right way to go most of the time.
Specifically the question about Twitter backgrounds.
Quit putting lots of extra information in your Twitter backgrounds.
It's annoying and it is not readable on a lot of browsers.
And people can't click on those links because that is just a picture. So don't do that.
Jim: Yeah, I think that simplicity is really important. The flash designed sites —
the other thing to keep in mind with sites that we are working on with the next round
is that you are going to be — people are going to be viewing them on smaller devices
all the time with phones, and with iPads and things like that.
So I think that even is further reason to keep them simple.
Kyla: Okay, cool. And I am going to keep reading questions.
I do want to point out that we have quite a few more questions to go through,
and only about 6 to 8 minutes left in our time.
So if there are any questions that we don't get to, you can e-mail us
and we will try to follow up with you directly. And I will be sending out the e-mail afterwards
for you to do that, or I will be putting it on the community forums
and you can ask more questions there, and we will try to answer
any unanswered questions there as well.
So to continue, we do have a question that says, our nonprofit has the IT know how
to keep the organization moving forward, but the main driver of the organization does not.
And since we use Google sites, have a news feed set up, but the few paid employees
do not have the knowledge of how to maintain content within the CMS.
So do you have any ideas of how to work with them to solve this problem?
Jim: I would say training, training for everyone. But you can go ahead Elliott.
Elliott: No, I agree with that. This is a major problem that gets to something bigger
than web design which has to do with mission alignment between IT
and the rest of the organization. Providing that training in a way that is useful
to the rest of the organization, but then also providing that continual support
and not having the IT exist just sort of on an island. So I think it is a problem on both sides.
Kyla: Okay, great. I really like this next question simply because I think of this as something
that we always talk about collecting user feedback, and collecting information
about your community base. But a lot of times we don't necessarily know how to go about that.
So this question is, I'd like to know more about effective ways to collect user feedback,
and adapt or modify the site to better meet our objectives. Elliott, you can go first.
Elliott: This is a great question, and I talk about this a little bit more in the chapter.
I don't know if we mentioned this earlier. I would encourage you to get a hold of the book,
but you can also read my chapter online. I think that when you are kind of assembling that team
of people to work with on the website, that shouldn't only include people in the organization.
That should include your volunteers. That should include sort of key evangelists
for your organization in the community.
When you include those people in the design process, something really interesting happens.
You get their perspective as the big champions of your organization.
And you also learn how other people who care about your organization talk about
the organization. You learn kind of what their are 30 second elevator pitch is
about your organization. So I am a big believer in those focus group meetings
with kind of your key, your organization's key champions in the community.
There are also certainly things you can do a surveys. As most of the people here know,
TechSoup is in the middle of a major site redesign. And throughout that process
we've been doing lots of surveys of the community.
We've been doing lots of focus group meetings with the community.
So I don't think it is possible to ask too much, and people do appreciate being asked.
Kyla: Jim, did you have a follow-up to that?
Jim: Yeah, I agree. But for small group, the focus groups are probably easier
like working with people that you have nearby. Yes, I guess the main thing
when you are a smaller group, doing a major survey would be a challenge
in compiling that data. But talking with people who are close, like Elliott said,
to your group is probably the quickest easiest way to just get it done.
Kyla: Okay, cool. These next 2 questions I'm going to just kind of loop together.
One is how often do you recommend doing a complete overhaul of your website?
And the other is approximately how many hours would it take to develop —
this question is for a skin for a website, but I'm curious about just developing a new website
in general. And Jim you can go first with this.
Jim: The skin for our site didn't take long at all. We just did the design for the right dimensions
that the web builder gave us. And then we just went that to him to put in place.
So he might say it took a while, but it didn't seem like it took nearly as long as it would
to do a whole redesign. And most of that stuff, the big stuff,
with migrating over to a new content management system and things like that,
are the longer term things that I'm sure Elliott has more of an idea on that than I do.
Elliott: That timeframe, it really does depend a lot on how big the organization is,
and how ambition your plans for the website are. I would encourage people to pad that timeframe
to include time for those focus groups and interviews and all of those sorts of things.
You can build a website in a month, and then spend the next year
kind of trying to work your programs to fit that website, and that would not be advised.
Kyla: Okay, awesome. So like I said, we do only have a couple of minutes left.
So I'm going to ask a couple more questions that came in directly for Jim.
And any of the other questions that we don't get to, again I put the URL
for our community forums, so I will be trying to address a lot of unanswered questions there.
So be looking for that. And in the follow-up e-mail that I send out I will be sending out e-mails
that you can send follow-up questions.
So Jim, these are just a couple of questions for you.
The first is regarding your past and future redesign decisions.
Do you feel that the purpose of the site evolves with the design,
or are the redesigns more to freshen up the look?
Jim: I think we are really happy with the look. I think the redesign is sort of to go back to
something Elliott mentioned earlier to connect the site better with where we have evolved
as an organization, and also to simplify. I think that sometimes when people have to navigate
all over the place or go scroll down, you lose that attention.
So we want to simplify to keep people from scrolling down
and also adapt to people looking at the site on smaller screens
and to make it easier to view on mobile devices.
Kyla: Okay, cool. And then finally, how did you set up your donations page?
Jim: I think that — gee, I don't even remember. The donations button on our site runs through —
I think it just may be a PayPal link. Yeah, So we just run that through PayPal.
So all of our donations are handled through PayPal.
Kyla: Okay, awesome. So like I said, we are at the end of our time
so I do want to go ahead and wrap this up.
So again, Elliott and Jim, thank you so much for your wonderful presentations today.
It's been really, really informative. I will attempt to do any kind of follow up for any questions
we may have missed. And just as a reminder, we will be sending out the archive and the links
for this presentation within a week.
Using GoToWebinar we do need to get the archive into YouTube
before I can send that link out, so it is a little bit longer of a delay.
But we will be getting that to you. Never fear.
Also be aware that we do have an upcoming webinar
that might be applicable to this audience, which is Short Evaluations of Real Websites.
And that is happening on Thursday, November 10, at 11:00 AM.
And I will be sending out this bit.ly for the registration as well.
And during this free one hour webinar presented in cooperation with SAP a donor partner
of TechSoup, web design experts will take a look at a succession of real nonprofit
and library websites. So be sure to check that out.
And as well as thanking our presenters, I do want to thank our webinar sponsor Citrix Online
for providing the GoToWebinar tool that we are using today.
And I do want to thank William Coonan for helping us out on chat.
And I want to go ahead and thank all of our attendees today.
Thank you for attending today's webinar. And again, Elliott and Jim, thank you very much.
And if all attendees could be sure to fill out the survey that comes up when you exit
today's webinar, that will help us in developing future webinars.
So again, thank you. And in order to leave you can go up to file, exit, leave webinar.
Thank you very much.