“Responsive” websites are web sites that are designed to be viewed and interacted with flawlessly on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone. Your users will be able to switch seamlessly between devices, maintaining a familiar user experience.

The benefits of a responsive website are particularly felt by mobile users, so let’s start off by discussing why this demographic is important to consider if you are designing a site for your association.

Image WikiMedia/Tooroot

Why mobile?

Mobile devices are taking off across the globe. 300,000 babies are born every day around the world, but recent research shows that 1.3 million mobile devices are activated every day. In some countries, there are more mobile devices than people.  Some of our clients think their audience is not mobile. These opinions are usually based on outdated data, so let’s bust some myths:

Myth: Mobile users do not come to your website

Fact: Our customers see between 25-30% users visiting from mobile browsers. Worldwide, mobile browsing accounts for 15% of all traffic (not counting tablets). If you don’t want those members, I’m fairly sure your competitors will be glad to serve them. (And yes, even associations have competition.)

If you are not seeing mobile users on your site, it’s because your site is not easy for them to use and those users are going to your competition.

Myth: Mobile users are young users and you don’t want them.

Fact: 24% of tablet users are 35-54, and 17% sare 55 or older.

Myth: you can go mobile later.

Fact: Ignoring mobile platforms was a losing proposition four years ago and it remains so today. Ask Bill Gates:  in 2009, Microsoft had 90% of the operating system market share. In 2012 they have just 23% of the market share when including mobile devices.).

Users are no longer tied to a single screen. Users will visit a site from their work desktop, again on the train home via their mobile, and curl up with it in bed with their tablet. For more than a year now, more email is read on mobiles than desktops, so that email campaign you just launched had better be accessible via a mobile browser.

Responsive design for multi-device websites

By applying responsive design principles, we can create a single website that will be optimized on all devices. This means a single website for all users. The initial design may be more expensive than just designing for a single type of device, but for the cost-conscious there are great responsive WordPress themes available commercially so it is not necessary to build from scratch. The incremental cost of building a responsive design is minor compared to building a separate mobile-only website or mobile app.

Responsive designs look fresh and contemporary and are often coupled with other modern design techniques. A clean, up-to-date website will reflect your association’s value and expertise. If you think a clean design doesn’t matter, think again: Users will judge you by your website, and you have 1/20th of a second to make a great first impression.

In summary, responsive design:

• is cost-effective;
• is user-friendly on all devices;
• depicts your organization as trustworthy and authoritative.

Alternatives

Lastly, a few words on alternatives to responsive design:

• A custom mobile website may be a great option if your primary website is “big.” Or it may not be. There is a great debate going on between usability guru Jakob Nielsen and more than a few other experts on what’s better: a custom mobile site, or a single website with responsive design. The bottom line is often price: creating and maintaining a separate website may be cost-prohibitive, or that money may be better spent creating an app.
• A mobile app can be more useful than a mobile website. Also, research shows that apps are used more often, and for more interactions, than websites. The downside is the barrier to entry is greater, since users will have to download and install an app.
• A non-responsive modern design is also possible. For most simple sites without complex content, mobile browsers can do a good job of presenting a modern design. For best results, the design should use modern techniques such as progressive enhancement and CSS3. And of course, if you must use mobile un-friendly technologies such as Adobe Flash, always serve mobile-friendly alternatives to mobile users.

What’s your experience with responsive design or mobile users? Tell us in the comments.

When you hear “WordPress” you probably think of blogs. That’s not unusual:  WordPress is the most popular blogging platform out there. But it isn’t just for blogging anymore. Did you know WordPress is also the most popular CMS platform? Nowadays, WordPress can be used as a complete content management system for your association or institute. There’s practically no limit to the customizations that are possible with WordPress. If you can dream it up, it probably can be done.

A Brief History

When it was first developed in 2003, WordPress was intended as an open source platform for blogging, then a trendy new way of communicating one’s thoughts publicly online in a diary-like format.

In 2005, the WordPress developers introduced three new features: Pages, Themes and Post Types. These opened up vast new possibilities that allow WordPress users to break out of the blog mold. Since then, WordPress has been a full-fledged content management system able to deploy the kind of content that many associations and institutes need with advanced functionality.

Pages

By default, a WordPress blog by default displays content in reverse chronological order. Every time you make a new blog post, it appears on top. You have little control over where it is displayed in the hierarchy of your site. However, this format is great when your organization wants to display its latest news prominently. For one of our clients that publishes a daily online magazine, the Globalist, this was essential.

However, there’s some information that you always want your visitors to have immediate access to, such as your contact information, FAQs, case studies, and white papers. With pages, you can organize and display your content where you want it, with the ability to hierarchically organize content into pages and sub-pages, accessible from menus.

In fact, one of the best things about pages is that you can make one your homepage, rather than have your blog be the first thing a visitor sees. Instead, the blog can be displayed on a separate, less prominent page linked to from the homepage. You can even do away with having a blog altogether if it doesn’t meet your association’s objectives. One of our consultancy clients, Abile Group, simply uses WordPress as a content management system.

Themes

Themes allow you to customize the look and feel of your web site as well as introduce dynamic functionality wherever you need it. Themes from one site to the next can be so different that you won’t even realize that they were both built using WordPress.

Being able to customize the look and feel is important for the branding of your association or institute. Long associated with for-profit businesses, new research out of Harvard University suggests that branding is also important in the non-profit world, both internally within organizations and externally for advancing the mission of an organization and maximizing its impact. When we created a Web site for the new Citi Open Tennis tournament, we incorporated the traditional WTA branding elements along with a color scheme that matched the colors of the event sponsor, Citibank.

Themes also allow you to deploy widgets to different parts of your site. Widgets are areas on pages that contain static or dynamic content or fillable forms. Widgets can be deployed in the footer, header and sidebars of a WordPress site.  We customized the advocacy “take action” plugin for the NPCA to let users contact their congressional representatives about legislation of interest to them.

Custom Post Types

Post types, although introduced in 2005, did not become easy to customize until 2010. Custom post types increase the power of WordPress beyond a simple CMS. WordPress can be a fully customized web environment now. For example, we created a custom post type to accommodate job advertisements for former Peace Corps volunteers.

The sites we built that you have been introduced to above all have very different purposes, appearance and content. What they have in common is that they all were custom crafted using the powerful flexibility of WordPress.

Contact us or leave a comment below if you are interested in learning more about how we can put the power of WordPress to work for your institute or association.

]]> http://www.infamia.com/2013/05/wordpress-not-just-for-blogs/feed/ 0 http://www.infamia.com/2013/05/wordpress-not-just-for-blogs/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Infamia/~3/Lr410o8inps/ http://www.infamia.com/2013/05/choosing-the-best-cms-for-your-association-or-institute/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 06:51:39 +0000 Mickey Panayiotakis http://www.infamia.com/?p=1767

In our experience, three main content management systems (CMS) options are suitable for associations and institutes (and pretty much anybody else). Two are the biggest names in the CMS world: WordPress and Drupal. The third option is not really a CMS, it’s a “none of the above” option:  a framework. But which should you use and why?

“Use WordPress”

Surprisingly,  even Drupal users offer this suggestion in the Drupal forums, along with some thought-provoking discussion. Here’s how one commenter put it:

“If wordpress does what you need it to do [then] great, use wordpress”

CMS usage/
BuiltWith.com

The message is spot-on. We advise our clients to start by considering WordPress. WordPress is used by over 50% of the top 10,000 websites. It’s also the most migrated-to CMS by people who have decided their previous CMS isn’t meeting their needs. Does your website have such special design and functional requirements that the top CMS in the world (by far) is not capable of delivering what you need?

Probably not, so for most clients we recommend WordPress.

WordPress has an added benefit of allowing your association or institute near-infinite growth potential. No budget? You can start a free website at WordPress.com now, and “take it with you” when you graduate to a hosted WordPress.org website hosted on your own server.

Use Drupal

The requirements of your association or institute website may be special.

Some large institutes we have worked with have had complex requirements, such as very structured editorial workflows or the need to display diverse information in different ways on different parts of the site. This is the reason that Drupal is often the right answer for them.

To decide whether they need to invest the extra effort and expense involved in setting up a Drupal site, we work with our clients to identify the specific features they want for their websites. If these are beyond the capabilities of WordPress, then we ask:

• Does Drupal provide these? (or can we easily build them?)

• Do you have the expertise to implement these in-house using the advanced Drupal features?

• Do you have the budget to build, and maintain, a complex Drupal website?

A Drupal website can easily exceed $100,000 to create and more than that to maintain. Major Drupal upgrades can be as complex as the initial build-out.

Pushing the Limits

Every CMS has the potential to do pretty much anything you need it to do. In WordPress as in Drupal, you can do a lot through the administrator interface and with add-ons (such as plugins and modules).  In the end it’s not so much that the chosen system limits what you can do, it’s more about the abilities of the people who are using/administering it.

The Drupal administrative interface is a complex beast. It allows the administrator to go deeper with advanced tools such as Views; however these advanced tools are complicated and require a basic knowledge of database administration and programming. You can get the same results, probably more efficiently, by hand-coding a module, but that also requires similar knowledge.  Drupal has some capabilities that WordPress does not have, but you have to be a tech wiz or engage the services of someone who is one, to be able to realize the benefits.

On the other hand, the WordPress administrative interface is a lot simpler, and focuses more on content creation than on a large amount of flexibility on how to display content. Most users, with a brief introduction, can be up and running with it in little time. WordPress chooses to leave the complexities behind the scene to the developers: You can still create complex displays and constructs, but it has to be done by hand-coding a plug-in.

In short, how much you benefit from your CMS depends on having people who understand how to get the most out of it. That is where engaging the services of a company like ours makes sense for many associations and institutes.

Beyond CMS: Application Frameworks

Of course, you may find out that neither Drupal, WordPress nor any other CMS fit your requirements. This is seldom the case with websites, no matter how complex. More often than not, when WordPress or Drupal don’t fit, your association is looking for  a web application. The best tool to generate that is likely going to be an application framework. You may have heard of  Ruby on Rails. Others exist, each with strengths and weaknesses. An initial requirements-gathering project is necessary to make an informed decision.

Thinking of switching to (or from) WordPress or Drupal? Looking for some help to maximize the potential of an existing WordPress or Drupal installation? Drop us a line or leave a comment.

Our clients often ask us whether they should start a microsite (a cluster of pages under a separate domain name) or a separate blog hosted elsewhere. In most cases, we advise our clients against this. In this blog post, I’ll explain why your association shouldn’t, and a few exceptions when you should. I’ll also talk about how we used microsites when our clients’ needs were exceptional.

Why Not Build a Microsite?

Microsites represent a bad investment of resources. If you multiple sites, you not only have to manage the site, software, content, user interface, hosting, etc; you have to manage how the sites interact with each other.  Do you link from the main site to the microsite or from the microsite to the main site? How do you build authority on the microsite domain? How do you transfer that authority to the main domain? (Or would you want to transfer authority from the primary domain to a microsite, and how?). If a reporter calls, do you link to the main site or to the microsite? The upshot of all this is that resources are better spent on your own site.

It’s not that separate sites are bad: the Internet is built on a diversity of sites. A microsite is meant to be quick and dirty, easy to set up and tear down, small, and disposable. You know: “micro.” The problem is that small, quick, and easy does not translate into successful on the Web. There’s no substitute for blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Common pitfalls

Here are some common mistakes associated with the use of microsites and separate blogs that we share with our clients to explain why they are not the best strategy to use in most cases.

Ignoring the site’s full life-cycle

A website has a full life-cycle: inception, development, launch, maintenance, close-out/archive. The last two steps are universally ignored when thinking about launching a microsite. Usually a microsite is forgotten, the code stops working, and meets an ungraceful end. What’s worse is it is often hosted on the same server as other, active sites. As such, this presents a security risk not only to the microsite itself, but to all the other sites hosted on the server, because sites that are not updated may contain exploitable code that can lead to disastrous infections of the entire server.

Choosing a “better” domain name

There is a prevailing belief that a acquiring a “better,” specific, more relevant, domain name will somehow increase SEO. This is a poor argument, because the SEO value of a domain name alone is questionable at best. In fact, a domain may carry “dirty” SEO baggage from a previous incantation: your perfect domain may have been a link-farm last year. This will actually hurt the SEO value of the website. Lastly, a new domain name will not benefit from the established domain authority of your existing domain.

On the other hand, some domain names may have better inherent SEO value. Determining whether a domain name by itself is sufficiently better may cost upwards of a few thousand dollars in research, before a microsite is ever launched. If this is within the budget, then your microsite may be the exception.

Forgetting the Funnel

Another common pitfall we see is a microsite launched with no strategy for encouraging the desired user flow. Often times, the main site will include multiple high-value links to the microsite, in order to boost the microsite’s SEO. In this case, you are devaluing the main site in preference of the microsite: the tables have turned. Instead of a marketing channel that drives people from your microsite to your site, the microsite drives people away from your main site.

Believing it is Good for SEO

This is the #1 excuse we hear in support of microsite. People think it will improve the ranking of their main site because it provides lots of links to it. But the mantra from Google and every other search engine is this: what’s good for SEO is what’s good for users. If you can’t express how the microsite itself helps your users, you should not develop a microsite.

Microsites that Work

Here is a list of questions we ask our clients who are considering developing a microsite:

• Is the subject matter of the new site considerably different from your main brand or message?
• Is the “voice” of the existing site inappropriate for the new content?
• Does your current website technology not support a blog?
• Do you have sufficient resources to fully support a new site?
• Is your microsite going to be short-lived, and do you have an exit strategy for it?

If the answers to these questions are “yes”, your business or organization may be a good candidate for a microsite

We have built successful microsites for our clients. Here is why the strategy worked in each of these cases:

BRGliving.com

One of our clients, BRG Communications, is a PR and Communications firm. The legacy content management system they used for their main

BRG Living logo inspires
social interaction

site BRGCommunications.com could not accommodate a blog. As part of their more informal social media marketing efforts that also included LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Flickr, we developed a WordPress-powered microsite hosted at BRGLiving.com.

theiphoneexpeditions.com

Cindi Hobgood spent 25 years traveling the world scouting film and television locations for major Hollywood studios before she decided to share her talent of finding the perfect shot for DC photographers,  DC Photography tours.  When she decided to expand her offerings to skills-based tours intended to help photographers get those most out of taking pictures with their iphones, we created a  microsite theiphoneexpeditions.com for her hosted at Blogger. It tapped into Blogger’s existing network to help showcase and build a message around iphoneography without overpowering and diluting the main message of the more theme-based expeditions featured on her main scoutphotoexpeditions.com. At the same time, the term “expeditions” used in both domain names helped tie it all together, while the microsite helped funnel traffic to the iphoneography sections of the main site.

peacecorpsconnect.org/50/

microsite logo uses
NPCA’s branding
elements

The 50^th anniversary of the Peace Corps took center stage for our client, the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA). During this time, nearly all organizational resources were devoted to the 50^th anniversary events. It made sense, therefore, to launch a microsite. Here’s how we got it right:

1. The microsite inherits the authority of the main NPCA site because it is hosted under the peacecorpsconnect.org domain.
2. We took care to ensure the design carries the look and feel of the main site.
3. Since the 50th was the main focus during this period, our strategy called for pushing traffic from the main website to the microsite, which was hip, new, energizing and motivating. We don’t generally recommend this, but it worked in this unique situation.
4. Nevertheless, when the site user was ready to make a commitment,  the final step in the funnel led back to the main NPCA site: to buy a ticket or make travel arrangements. In doing so, we reminded members that this was still an effort of the NPCA and they should remember to join and donate.
5. Our strategy planned for the full lifecycle of the website: the site is currently mothballed in plain HTML, which minimizes any security risk while not requiring regular CMS updates.

Additional Resources

Not convinced? If you’re interested in learning more about microsites, here are some resources:

• Google’s search and SEO guru, Matt Cutts, talks about microsites (video)
• Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz breaks down the microsite debate.
• Vanessa Fox explains in great detail why Microsites are a bad idea, mostly.

Sometimes our clients turn to us for a deeper understanding of how their Drupal or WordPress sites work so that they can do the work they do best in less time.  Educating our clients in getting the most out of their sites is one of our core strategies to help them meet their business or organizational objectives.

One of our Drupal clients was adding a press release to their web site. The press release concerned a joint event with another organization. They needed the PR person from that organization to review the press release and suggest changes before they notified media outlets about it. Time was of the essence in getting the final press release out. But they weren’t seeing the changes in real time due to caching.

How Caching Works

Pages on a Drupal or WordPress site aren’t static. They allow you to serve up custom content to site visitors based on an infinite number of variables that you customize. This means you can give a paying customer access to special content that an anonymous user can’t see, or you can display a calendar block that shows events sponsored by your organization in the coming week. To decide what content should be displayed, the server performs a series of computations.

Since we had redesigned their site, our clients had seen a significant increase in traffic. The required computations put a load on the server and can slow down the time it takes for the server to deliver the content to site visitors. To overcome these problems, it is standard practice to enable caching on the server. This performs the calculations once and then stores the computed results for a specific amount of time to be delivered on demand if requested again.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Caching

Using caching on a Drupal or WordPress site offers benefits both to your company or organization and your site visitors:

• It means faster page loads for visitors, optimizing their experience of your site.
• It decreases the load on your server, which decreases costs associated with hosting the site.

This is particularly useful with anonymous visitors to your site, often potential new customers or members you don’t want to lose due to a slow loading or unavailable pages.  Anonymous visitors are not likely to need to see a different version of a page from the last visitor. Displaying upcoming events for the next week is something that doesn’t need to change more than once a day, so a block like this can safely be cached for some time without risk of serving up stale information.

However, in the case of our client, they wanted to make repeated edits based on continuous feedback from the PR person from the partner organization while talking to her over the phone. The cache was keeping the same version of the press release for an entire hour, so she wasn’t able to see changes as they were made. Caching is not without such drawbacks:

• Time-sensitive content  may not be up-to-date
• Changes to content in the database may not appear to the visitor immediately

Flushing the Cache

Sometimes you need to flush
the cache. (fotografar/flickr)

Our client needed to display the latest version of their press release immediately for feedback. We suggested a couple  solutions. The viewer could simply log into the site. Within Drupal, different items are cached for different time periods, or not cached at all, depending on whether the visitor is anonymous or a registered user. Since logged-in viewers see content that is customized for them, only some content they see may be cached. By logging into the site, she would have seen the changes to the press release just by refreshing the page in their browser. But because she wasn’t from their organization, they could not give the PR person access this way.

Our client had been flushing the cache via the “Flush All Caches” feature in Drupal, but they were worried about how this might affect the site’s performance, so they asked us about the drawbacks of flushing. Here’s how we immediately responded:

Flushing would make the load time for the first visitor to a specific page longer. Caches  aren’t built until someone visits an area of the site, so the first visitor might notice some slowness. However,  the effect of flushing is unlikely to dissuade the first visitor and it won’t affect subsequent visitors to that page.

So for this particular problem, flushing the cache between edits allowed our client to quickly get their press release out to the major media outlets, which in turn drove more traffic to their website.

 Strategic Caching and Flushing

In some cases, such a surge in traffic can bring down the server. Sometimes the standard Drupal or WordPress caching mechanisms are not enough. While they allow you to selectively flush different types of content, this can be improved upon by using other plug-ins and services, such as CloudFlare.  It offers advanced features such as caching everything to handle a huge surge in visitors to a site. CloudFlare’s standard service caches its users’ content in 14 different locations around the globe, which means even faster access to site content than caching on one’s own server, and it can be highly customized to further boost efficiency.  We were able to increase site performance on infamia.com 40% using CloudFlare and we often install it on client’s servers and configure it for them.

If your site is slow or your hosting company is telling you the load on your server means you should upgrade to a more expensive hosting option, contact us.  We can help to tweak your caching and flushing protocols so that your site runs faster and can handle more visitors without the need to invest in a server upgrade.

Need help optimizing your site? Has caching improved your site’s performance? You can drop us a line, call us at 800.270.5170, or leave a comment below.

We haven’t been doing anything this week to protect our clients’ sites from the recent WordPress brute attack. We don’t need to. That’s because we take security seriously before anything bad happens. So far we’ve been able to sit back and watch while everybody panics. Here’s why.

Brute Force attacks are not fun.

A brute-force attack against WordPress sites.

A distributed denial of service attack on WordPress sites was first reported earlier this month. The attack is “huge”: over 90,000 computers are initiating the attack. Hackers are using these computers to target websites’ administrator panels using brute-force attack methods. The threat is so serious that the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) is advising administrators of WordPress sites to take immediate steps  to secure their installations.

How we protect WordPress against attacks.

We know our clients wouldn’t want to hire a security guard to protect their premises who didn’t bother to lock the doors of the building at night. Likewise, we take steps to make sure that our clients’ sites are “locked down” rather than wait for intruders to get inside their servers.

We take a proactive stance toward WordPress security. We have standard security procedures in place for all our maintenance clients that prevent their WordPress installations from falling victim to an attack in the first place.

 If you do not have a maintenance contract with us, we suggest you to take these steps immediately:

• Enable CloudFlare. CloudFlare is a performance and security service we enable on all our maintenance clients’ servers if possible. CloudFlare has been growing in popularity lately, but we’ve been using them since mid-2011, just 8 months after their launch.

• Ensure WordPress and the underlying server infrastructure are kept up to date with the latest releases.

• Continually monitor your site’s uptime and performance. We have set up an alert system for our clients that sends us a message immediately if their sites go down or performance metrics reach a certain threshold.

Also see our 10-point guide on WordPress security.

User-level steps to increase WordPress security

There are several user-level tasks that increase security that we recommend everyone using WordPress take immediately. We help all our clients with this.

• Change all passwords. Make sure you use a strong, and unique password. We recommend LastPass for storing passwords. We also have a password generator that will generate a strong random password for your convenience.

• Enable two-factor authentication. We can help you install the Google Authenticator plugin in your WordPress installation.

• Make a backup. (If you’re already a client, we’ve got you covered.)

Also check out our post on using 2-factor authentication and other security measures.

How can you tell if your WordPress site is compromised?

The experts believe this attack is intended to enlist hacked servers into a botnet. This means that it may not be obvious whether your site has been compromised or not. If you have not taken the precautions described above, it may have been. Even if it has not been hit by this attack, the experts are also warning this could be just the beginning of something much larger and more devastating.

If you believe your site has been compromised, if you’re unsure, or need help implementing these security measures to protect your WordPress site from future attacks, please get in touch.

You can drop us a line or call us at 800.270.5170.

Have your sites been compromised? What do you use to protect your site? Tell us in the comments.

Have you been thinking of new ways to reach your audience? Is your organization trying to build on its core following? Do you have information to share? Do you want to stay relevant and current in your client’s eyes? The answers to these questions should, of course, be yes. You have a message to share…and an audience to share it with. Create a newsletter and email it to your mailing list once a month.

Writing and publishing a newsletter is an easy way to stay in touch with your current and past clients, organizational stakeholders and an interested public. People want to learn from you- you are the expert. Share some knowledge. People want to trust and engage with you- keep them updated on your organization. People want to learn about new trends and success stories in your field- keep them current.  

Of course, once you have created a newsletter, it is important to build your readership. No organization can afford to just sit back and relax. Increase your visibility. Build your audience. Be seen as the expert that you are.

Wondering how to continue growing your following? Here are some helpful tips:

1) Make it easy for people to sign up for your newsletter. Have a link on your website’s homepage. If there are too many steps, people won’t follow through.

2) Use an online marketing site (we, at Infamia, like MailChimp) to manage your contacts and campaigns, as well as to track your user metrics. This will make it easier for you to write, send and follow your newsletter results.

3) Write for your audience. Your content should be informative and engaging. Make people want to open your email.

Take the time to reach out to your audience and, once you do, keep the audience growing. Newsletters are a great way to let people know what you are doing, where you are going and how you can help them.

According to the United States Small Business Administration, small businesses, with fewer than 500 employees, make up 99.7% of all employer firms in this country.  It is a huge part of our economy-in fact, over the last few decades, the majority of new jobs have come from small businesses.  That being said, with all the competition, it is difficult to succeed.  Only about a third of small businesses are open after ten years.

What can small businesses do to survive?  

Of course, a successful business needs successful people, a successful message and successful product. Yet so many businesses have all or a solid combination of these things—and they don’t make it. What sets one business apart from the competition?  How does your business beat the competition and gain those critical customers?  It seems fairly obvious, but, people need to know you exist.  In this day and age, you have to have a strong web presence to get recognized by new customers. And, without a strong web presence, you won’t retain your current client base- there is always someone new out there.   Simply put, customers need to know about you and they need to like you.  They can’t do either if they can’t find you on google.

Here are a few things that you can do to be found on Google and other search engines:

1) Think about and cultivate your message and purpose and state it clearly.

Don’t make it difficult for people to figure out who you are and what you stand for. Remember, you don’t have a new audience for long: just a few seconds. Make it easy for people to understand your company. No one wants to search to figure out your purpose. Moreover, no one will dig to find out your message. They will just turn to the competition.

2) Make your site user-friendly.

It is important that people can find your company. But, they are really searching for your information or products. Make it easy for visitors to navigate your site. What’s worse than being one step away from the information that you need and coming up short? If you make it difficult for people to maneuver around your site, they won’t come back. It won’t matter how smart, educated or talented you and your colleagues are: It is opportunity lost.

3) Organize your information.

For your site to be successful, you need to develop a strong Information Architecture.  Plan a site map and stick to it. Present your information in a way that makes sense. Don’t just be an information dump. Make your site intuitive and informative. People stay on websites for a very limited time. Help them make the most of the time that they invest. It is a key in attracting returning customers.

Make yourself stand out among your competition.  Develop a strong web presence.  Stick to your strategy.  Make it easy for people to find you and your information.  If you follow these rules, you will have a leg up on your competition.

Websites are often the public’s first glimpse into an association. In fact, websites are often referred to as today’s business card. Visitors will often form their first impression of your organization from what they see on your website. Because websites have such a big impact, it is important to take the opportunity to make a positive impression for your visitors, members, donors and customers.

Love your members.

Since websites are such a powerful tool, it is worth exploring the ways in which to improve your site.                   Associations consist of groups of people (members) who share something: an idea, a feeling, an object. The organization, itself, is responsible for retaining the members and growing the association. One of the most successful tools to grow and share is your website.

Here are some tips for creating a well-regarded site:

1) Associations are member driven. Your website gives you the chance to build membership. It is important to convey the point or purpose behind your association. But, you must do this in a way that is appealing and inviting to a visitor. Take time to draft content that is true to the purpose of your association but also encourages prospective members to want to learn more about your organization. What are the benefits of becoming a member of your association? Who is on your Board? Who are other members? What educational material do you offer?

2) Your website is your outreach tool. Do you have an upcoming meeting? Have your registration link accessible and easy to use. How about your newsletter? Is your sign up link in a prominent place? Think of your association’s events. Add them to an easy to find and easy to read calendar. When valuable information and links are easy to locate, people will follow them. Don’t bury this information- people will become frustrated. Good content is about what you members want to learn, not what you want to push.

3) Stay current. Maintain and update your site. Has there been new press? What about new legislation? Are you offering a new class? No one wants to log on to your site to learn more about your association to only find press releases that are three years old. Remember, your site is the first glimpse into your association. Make sure your impression is positive and upbeat. Show your audience that you care.

Websites should be user friendly tools that create positive experiences for visitors. It is these experiences that will build an association’s membership base, donor pool, and reputation as an industry resource.

I had planned to tighten up a few things on the security front since I didn’t want to become that guy. Tonight happened to be the night. So here are three things you should must do now to secure your online self. And how.

Google Authenticator enables two-step verification

This means that you have to sign up with our passwords as normal, plus a secure code that’s delivered to your phone.

1. Download android or iphone app (this is optional; if you don’t want an app you an have the code delivered via SMS)
2. Set up two-step verification
3. Learn to two-step while you don’t worry about someone hacking your google account and all linked accounts.

Authenticator is available for iOS and Android.

[Update 11/3/2011] Authenticator supports multiple accounts, so you can set up two-step authentication with any combination of tools that support it. Including:  LastPass,WordPress, Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Drupal,  plus more. Yahoo and Facebook offer

This is it for the basics. However, there are a few other steps you should take. To continue, log in to your google account security center and click on “edit” next to “two step authentication”. Then:

• Download and secure your “backup codes“. This will let you log in if you lose your phone or phone number.
• Create “application-specific passwords” for apps that do not support two-step, such as syncing with your mac.

TunnelBear: be secure in public

Open hot spots are a easy to hack. If your connection is secure end-to-end (your browser will say “https”), then you’re safe. However, a lot of services do not secure the connection. To stay safe, you can easily create a secure tunnel with TunnelBear. The free service should work for most users; the more paranoid among us may have to shell out $5/mo.

TunnelBear is available for most platforms: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android

What’s this? You don’t think privacy and security are worth a cup of coffee? That’s ok, we got you covered: If you already have your (linux) server and tend to the geeky, use shuttle to tunnel to your server in no time.

LastPass for unique passwords

How do you remember all unique secure?!  Well you don’t have to. We are big fans (some of us bigger than others) of how LastPass password manager integrates with your browser so you don’t have to remember any password. You can generate a password directly from LastPass or hop over to our home-grown random password generator.

LastPass is available for all modern browser as well as Android and iPhone. You can set up two-step authentication with Lastpass and Google Authenticator.

And remember: don’t link accounts. Now that you can keep unique passwords with LastPass, don’t link accounts unless you must.

Do you feel less insecure already? Leave us a note below.