Those three issues determine for any organization how much control of their web site they are going to want to have.  It is possible that all three questions for the chapter have answers that fit into the hosting association’s arrangement.

But sometimes budget supercedes all – there’s just no money – and if that’s the case you look for the best fit for free. But it’s a fit, not a plan, and you’ll have to play by the rules for the web presence as established by those who you are attempting to fit in with. That means anything that’s free – including trying to run your web presence solely by free social media, or using free web hosting, etc. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – but if the organization’s vision of itself, and its expectation of itself, as reflected on the web, isn’t a fit, then seek out the money.

And that’s because it doesn’t take much money to register a domain and to rent cheap server space. People can learn to build and maintain a web site on hosted software servers fairly cheaply. I’m not saying these will be great web sites, but they give the organization something that you can’t get when you tag on with others for free:

Independence.

Independence from the business and technology decisions made by those who you are tagging along with. Independence from the technology limitations that are rightfully established for another organization’s web server space. Independence of URL and domain.  Independence to move your site to another server without disturbing the web site address.

These are values that organizations sometimes fail to really consider in their search for no cost.  And any organization that plans on being on the web for more than a curious moment should take it into account.

http://www.wasrg.com/employmentnotices

If volume is low, then using a simple page in Wild Apricot can do the trick. I prefer to provide a posting date for each ad to make it a bit easier for the visitor to determine the timeliness.

However, if ad placement volume is going to be high,  I like to use the Blog application. Something like this might be in order:

http://www.psls.org/employmentopps

What we have done here is create a hidden page that is publicly available (but you can do it for members only if you wish) that is a blog for employment posts, and each blog post is an employment ad. But the actual page you see above is a public content page where we inserted a gadget with the content management system for blog posts, specified the Employment Opportunities blog, and specified the number of posts to show on the page.

It’s actually very simple. You can provide a bit more detail in the Subject line. You can customize the look of the Gadget some, and the blog some. And you can have your employment list show up on another site if you wish by using the Widget code – see below for an example. But it is IMPORTANT that you know the PageID number, which you can get from the Wild Apricot Page Management info for the particular blog page.

Powered by Wild Apricot Membership Website Software

http://www.kesslerfreedman.com/2012/05/american-association-management-company-facebook-and-linkedin-pages/

This isn’t about the work association management companies do for their associations – it’s about the use of social media they do for their own company.  It’s a year later, and not much has changed:

• 150 Likes for Association Management Center in 2012. Today, 195 Likes. And this with considerable posting.
• AMR Management Services only had 81 Likes in 2012. It has grown to 119 Likes.
• Professional Management Associates had 30 in May 2012. Today they’ve grown to 36 Likes.

It’s a different story at LinkedIn:

• SmithBucklin had 1421 followers on LinkedIn in 2012. In May 2013 it has 2777.
• Association Management Center had 386 followers on LinkedIn. Today it is 701 followers.
• AMR Management Services had 36 on LinkedIn. Not high today, but at 85 followers.

So, for association management companies, it continues to look like LinkedIn is a more prospective location for activity.

“What are the basics we should want in our web site release?”

The first thing I would do is refocus their attention. Don’t just focus on your web site release, but your organization’s web presence, and they are different things. A web site is a server location and the information that can be found and the things that can be done at that location. Web Presence involves how your organization can be seen and resourced on the web. Web Presence is social media, search engines, site plug-ins hosted elsewhere, web references, analytics, online advertising, email distribution options, maps, etc. It’s not just how your site looks on the web, it’s how your organization exists on the web.

The web site, of course, can be (and for most associations should be) seen as the hub of and for this activity, but as web presence efforts evolve this can become less true, as activity for an association can take place elsewhere and never reach their web site. But one step at a time, and we’ll deal with the original question.

Does your association plan to be around in 10 years? If so, your first effort ought to be something that can get you through the next 3-4 years with the ability to evolve, and hopefully longer. Evolution means easily changing content, being able to be seen on various platforms, trying to integrate offline processes that can be done more efficiently online, measuring and monitoring results to apply to the web site, etc.

Of course, your association’s membership and marketplace, technology capabilities and expectations will determine this more specifically. But notice where the emphasis is. Ability to Evolve/Current Content/Integration of the offline to online – this means ease of use for the association to work with, and ease of use of members and marketplace to use.

So, for starters, we’d say the new association’s website should be able to do the following:

• Be accessible and useful at varying viewing resolutions – from smartphone to wide screen monitor.
• Provide for the online content provision capabilities an association should have for providing news, event information, photos, etc.
• If an association has dues and/or event registrations, accomodate that process online.
• Allow for integration with social media efforts.
• Allow for email provision and audience customization of emails.
• Allow for members-only benefit on the site.

What does this mean?

• It means that the site should have a content management system.
• It means that the site should have a transaction/event management system.
• It probably means that the site should have a contact/member management system – or at least have the ability to plug one in at some point in the future.

Obviously, if we’re willing to say this about a new association, we’d definitely recommend this for an association that has existed for years and is looking at a potential redesign. The new web site shouldn’t be just about what you can do today, but what you will need to do next year and following years. There will be a learning curve for both your administrative organization and the members that you support, and poking along with an old web site design with none of the items we list above isn’t going to help your association at all in the long term.

Time to get going.

This would also mean that this is the 20th Anniversary Year of Commercial Web Developers – those that actually create web sites for others for commercial purposes.  Although we’d like to say that Kessler Freedman, Inc., has been around since the beginning, the truth is we started a little later,  in 1995.

Obviously the industry has changed a lot and by the lack of news, I think it’s also clear the industry doesn’t spend much time on reflection of its past.  It has been reported that by the end of 1993,  there were 623 web sites.  Some of those were not experimental in nature, or institutional information clearinghouses, but were actual commercial efforts.  It’s actually a bit surprising that there’s no effort to claim the longest running commercial web site at this point, it would seem to have some promotional mileage to it.

http://www.kesslerfreedman.com/2012/07/pennsylvanias-lobbying-firms-on-the-web/

I was curious: how many of those lobbying web sites provided “news” content on their web sites in the public area – so that search engines and other sites could link to that content?

Answer: 44 lobbying firms. Now, this isn’t 44 that are doing it necessarily in the best fashion or even very regularly. There were a couple with news that was as recent as 2010, which really isn’t news. And there some that are only including Twitter feeds, including some that really don’t have complete control of their Twitter feed search results. This includes some that bury their news on an almost hidden navigation link, or three screens down on the front page (and only there).

Still – 44 lobbying firms provide news on their site of some sort. And after all, lobbying firms are in the information and news business.

There are 76 lobbyist business links on the above page, which means that 32 firms have static web sites.  They do not provide any real “news”.

That seems counterintuitive to their business model – and to efforts to become more visible on the Internet.

Wild Apricot is Growing
http://www.kesslerfreedman.com/2012/10/wild-apricot-is-growing/

Game Planning Your Database Records Importation into Wild Apricot
http://www.kesslerfreedman.com/2012/10/game-planning-your-database-records-importation-into-wild-apricot/

Wild Apricot’s Member Side Data
http://www.kesslerfreedman.com/2012/08/wild-apricots-member-side-data/

The Evolution of the Association Web Site
http://www.kesslerfreedman.com/2012/04/the-evolution-of-the-association-web-site/

Wild Apricot and Email
http://www.kesslerfreedman.com/2012/02/wild-apricot-and-email/

Wild Apricot 4.0
http://www.kesslerfreedman.com/2010/11/wild-apricot-4-0/

And that’s just fine with us.

More and more sites are built with content management systems (CMS) that allow the client to directly update their site. I cannot remember the last time we built a site that didn’t include one, it has been years. With a bit of training of the customer, and the proper interest by the customer, the reason for the majority of updates that we used to do in the five years of this century and the last few years of last century is gone.

There are still updates we do from time to time for clients that have a CMS, but these become more like special requests rather than the standard flow of work – tricky items, or what are actually design or layout issues, that are treated as updates. And that’s fine, but the continuing swing away from regular website updates allows for development into more interesting technology application areas and away from what was generally a text conversion process.

Unless you truly have a static site – one with almost no changes from year to year – it makes sense to incorporate a CMS in your site for purposes of both functionality (so you can make the content change when you are ready to make the change) and cost (paying for design labor once rather than update labor over and over again). When the time comes to design or redesign your web site – a CMS most likely should be part of your plan.

If you’re curious about industry trends and statistics about the various CMS options, you can find interesting reports here and here.

Those searches primarily are about organizations and locations. I’m not going to give away EVERYTHING we do in search, but I will say that we’ve found that DuckDuckGo  can be much handier for getting mailing addresses than Google. There are times that you have qualifiers and required expressions within a search that Google will still present 180 results when you know there’s really only a couple of legitimate ones. DuckDuckGo seems cleaner. It may not be as complete – but sometimes the search you’re putting in requires a deep cut of specific data, and sometimes it requires a shallow cut of specific data.

Like any search engine, you need to play around with a search to hone the results you get. But I find it a useful tool for this specific need. I won’t deny that I use Google for about 80% of all my search needs, but DuckDuckGo is one of the others that I will use depending on the search requirements.

A side note: clearly there are quite a few folks that have discovered DuckDuckGo in the past couple of years, based on their usage report.

“First of all, one of these days I’m going to put together a piece about web design/development Requests for Proposals (RFPs). It’s a big subject and I have mixed feelings about the entire process. But one general piece of advice I have for organizations when they put out on RFP is, in all cases where software or hardware is specifically mandated, there should be an explanation as to why the mandate, and the answer “because that’s what we have” should not be considered automatically acceptable. Your investment into that software or hardware, if substantial and forward-looking, can be a great reason to require it, and that detail should be provided. But there are so many options out there now, for so many components of a web site, that a good developer is going to wonder why you’re requiring the one you’ve selected over something that may be a better fit. Detail matters.”

Before we go any further, I’ll just admit it, I’m not a big fan of RFPs.  We see a good amount of website design or redesign RFPs, and in my opinion, most of them miss their target.  There is a great tendency to focus the RFPs into two areas:

1 – the appearance of the website, particularly into how it should integrate design elements from other materials; and
2 – the technology the website will use, based on current server environment.

This is not to say that those are not valid concerns, but they should not be primary.  Primary should be the requirements that relate to the main question for the organization:

What do we want the web site to do for us?

Now it’s true that the resulting proposals may provide a variety of solutions to the various requirements of the site when an organization doesn’t lock into a look or a technology as the primary gauge of a proposal. It can provide a wide range of costs.  So as much as an organization can tie that down in the RFP WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE CENTRAL QUESTION can help both the respondents and the RFP issuing organization.

For example – an organization may want their site to be able to accept credit card transactions.  Perhaps there’s an entire back-end system where the transaction data is going to be maintained for the organization that may be online or offline – but it’s not necessarily the website’s database(s). Provide some detail as to how you will need the data – format, process, data fields, frequency, etc.  Because the real goal isn’t just that the organization wants to be able to accept online transactions, but that it wants this to be as seamless as possible with their offline processes as well so that workflow is manageable and predictable.

Here’s a requirement from an RFP I see pretty regularly:

We want social media to be integrated into the website.

And that’s it.  This is boilerplate, pure and simple, and it means about as much.  Details matter, particularly when you are coordinating your site with other web sites for an appearance either on your site or their site.

What do we want the web site to do for us?  Answer that question in regards to social media and you’ll hone the RFP responses in a way you can use.

Another RFP requirement I see quite often is of design/layout nature.  For example, we want scrolling photos near the top of the front page.  Okay, fine, simple enough.  But real estate on the front page is so critical, shouldn’t design follow goals and functions rather than the other way around?  Appearance, layout, flexibility… these are goals, but once you really focus on what you want the site to do, these goals become more general (a crisp professional look, the ability to translate easily for mobile access, etc.) and are almost a parameter  for the other goals rather than a specific goal itself.

At the very least, an RFP ought to include something akin to a Goals list for the website and a Priorities list for the website.  The goals list should be what the organization wants the website to do for them.  It should be as specific to the functioning of the organization as the organization can be comfortable with.  It should be open to technology used when appropriate.  The priorities should be a focus on how IMPORTANT to the organization these goals are, because it may turn out that the best solution to the top priority may not really resolve the 13th priority adequately, and it’s important to the web developer to know what’s the most critical elements.

Finally, provide a cost range your organization is allocating to this project.  An RFP should be viewed as a chance to review the best ideas for your organization’s web site going forward, not as a way to find the lowest price.  That may be the result of an RFP process but should not be the goal. Provide an expected cost range allows the web developer to think about the project within a reasonable economic framework, and will keep your proposals more focused within the realm of what can be done.