Posts Tagged ‘resources’
Friday, February 19th, 2010
This is basically the same as my comment on my Idealware post about Sprout Builder shutting down.
Something of an update via Facebook fan pages, which I suppose is a sign of the times.
First, in the group Jeff Wassermen started and mentions in the comments on my first post and Johanna mentions on Idealware “Spurned Sproutbuilders Unite!” Carnet did indeed say that all existing Sprout subscribers that are members of the group can get the half price discount ($1500 a year) by emailing info@sproutinc.com with subject line “early adopter discount” . You’ll need to give the email address you used for your Sprout account , if different your paypal email so they can send you a manual invoice. This is because you will need to pay the for the full year up front and they are discontinuing Pay Pal billing.
Also on Beth Kanter’s Facebook fan page there is a reply to Jon Dunn’s post about Sprout’s discontinuation from Michelle Wohl at Sprout saying that they “..are working with existing Sprout non-profit clients on pricing. Please email support@sproutinc.com for info. ” And Beth’s indication that it will be on an individual basis.
The company has expressed their concern for nonprofits and intentions to do all they can to support them in the past, so its likely they will offer some sort of discount for 5013c organizations.
In any case, all nonprofits using Sprout would be wise to contact them soon and see what can be done for your organization.
Monday, February 15th, 2010
The do-it-yourself widget maker so many nonprofits grew to know and love, Sprout Builder, announced today that they are shutting down all subscription service to concentrate on their enterprise ($3000 a year +) offerings. This is sad news for nonprofits using the service and if you are one of them you’ll want to read the Sprout FAQ right away. You’ll have a little lead time to find a solution though - until the end of March to be precise.
Just about a year ago the service went from free to fee and although there are probably more alternatives now, my post about what else is out there may come in handy again.
[Update: I posted more on this topic at Idealware's blog and am hoping that post becomes a place for sharing alternatives and what's to do for those losing their Sprouts - please check it out and contribute your solutions and ideas]
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
More Fun with Open Source Content Management
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
I’m really thrilled that the Idealware report comparing 4 top-notch open source content management systems is now available. I think it will prove invaluable to nonprofits of all shapes and sizes for a long time to come and know I will be recommended reading for many friends and potential and future clients.
Even if you have already seen the CMS Showdown and the competition sites implemented on WordPress, Drupal and Joomla now that the report is out they are worth another look.
If you didn’t make it to SXSW conference or haven’t heard about this brilliant project - here is an excerpt from the site:
Originally presented at South By Southwest Interactive in March, 2009, the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny is an “Iron Chef”-style competition pitting three teams of all-star Web developers from the Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress communities against each other to develop the same Web site in each of their chosen open source content management platforms.
In addition to a fascinating look behind the scenes at each teams decision-making process, there are lots of productive insights to be gained by looking at the finished products of their labors. Many of the key points in the Idealware report are evident on the demo sites and by reading the team notes.
Despite (or maybe because of) the 100 hour total development time limit, each site demonstrates its system’s strengths and weakness fairly accurately or I should say in keeping with my own experiences of them. Not all of them managed to accomplish all the requirements, which points out what takes more time or work to implement for that particular system.
One thing that can be confusing is that the specifications for the site required that most of the content be available only to authenticated users. The sites for Drupal and Joomla, who were able to achieve this, seem a bit bare, especially Drupal where they didn’t create any publicly viewable items in some areas. So you can’t access the galleries, blogs or member listings and its a pity that there doesn’t seem to be a demo user/password available anywhere to see the full sites. If anyone knows of one, I would love to take a look.
Also, sadly there was no invitation for a Plone team this time around, but if you want to see it included next time I’d suggest you contact the organizers.
Check out the CMS Showdown as a handy companion piece to the Idealware CMS report for a real world apples to apples demonstration (sort of) of how each system looks at some familiar features. And read the team notes on cmsshowdown.com for some helpful hints and tricks the they used on the sites.
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Great Resources on Vendor Websites
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
One of the great things about working in the nonprofit sector is the spirit of sharing and helping one another succeed that I continue to find among organizations and consultants for online technologies. Many resources on how to choose technology and how to use it wisely are available from great nonprofit and consulting companies. But the hungry mind wants more so, although it might be obvious, I wanted to share another great way to find metrics, best practices and how to guides - technology vendors resource sections.
Over the years I have found that many vendors of both nonprofit and for profit technology and services offer a wealth of high quality information on their sites that cover far more than just their own products. I see it as enlightened self-interest, since successful customers are happy customers and the basics apply no matter what platform you are using for your web site, fundraising or bulk email.
Here are just few that I have found worth checking in on regularly, but be sure to check for a resources section on your own vendor’s websites.
Email Vendors
http://mailchimp.com/resources/
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/
http://www.emaillabs.com/best_practices/ (Lyris)
Websites and Fundraising
http://www.wildapricot.com/resources.aspx
http://www.convio.com/resources/
and some older but still useful items at Kintera/Blackbaud
Network for Good has a whole site about fundraising:
http://www.fundraising123.org/
But wait there’s more!
Don’t forget that most of the time resources for profit companies are equally useful in the nonprofit sector or can be with a little adaptation. Check out sites offering general best practices like Marketing Sherpa and Copyblogger. You can find good advice and information that applies equally to any type of communications strategy.
Please share your own favorite vendor or for profit resources in the comments and we can all learn a little more.
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
Minimum Usability Testing: Now there’s no excuse not to do it.
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
According to the author of the web usability bible “Don’t Make Me Think” Steve Krug, testing one user is 100% better than testing none and testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end. To that end, I’d like to suggest testing 5 or 10 more often and found a couple of services that make it possible.
While I am afraid that too many of my Idealware blog posts have been focusing on cheap or free resources, I do believe that the easier it is for nonprofits to do usability testing regularly the better their sites will be - so here is one more post about a couple of low cost options.
Feedback Army:
Strictly a quick an dirty sort of testing, I stumbled across this crowd-sourced usability service on a blog and had to check it out. For $10 you get to set up your own questions or scenario and receive responses from 10 reviewers.
The results are, as you might expect for that sort of money, a mixed bag from a wide generic set of users. Although I really don’t believe any site should be targeting anything so broad as “general public” it can be helpful to have this kind of input. I would see this as useful for organizations doing a redesign to try out a couple of different directions or make a specific design choice (red or orange for that donate button?).
The site provides a bit of guidance for how to get the best and most useful responses and I have to say, man, is it fast - less than a day turnaround time to collect 10.
The reviewers come from a service called Mechanical Turk which, although I have been around the web a while, I had never heard of before. Its an Amazon program where users offer and accept small tasks best done by humans for small fees. Its feels a little creepy, and I do have some doubts about ethics and ramifications, but apparently it has a big following and fan base on both sides. Feedback Army acts as oversight and interface in order to maintain quality control, so only reviews they judge to fulfill your requirements filter back to you.
Overall I found the feedback to be helpful in my test case and will probably use this again when I need an “outside perspective” on design decisions.
Usertesting.com
A comment from the original blog post pointed me to Usertesting.com, which is a bit more expensive ($20 per tester) but which blew me away with what you get for your money. I submitted my site for a trial and received an incredibly well thought out and thorough review video in which you see the user’s screen and mouse movements while listening to a narrative of what they are thinking as they complete your request and answer your questions. It gave me a lot of new ideas and insight about where I was missing the mark by being too close to the subject. In addition you get a standard written report answering basic usability questions that is also useful.
Jakob Nielsen, the godfather of usability testing, makes a good case that testing 5 users will yield the highest value of information in the most economic way - so for $100, a nonprofit could conduct some of the worthwhile usability testing that seems to always fall through the cracks.
And of course if you ask the right questions you can also test new ideas and designs with your own supporters using a survey tool like Survey Monkey for free, so there really is no excuse not to do usability testing at this point.
More on quick and dirty usability testing and why you need it, as well as what to test and how, can be found on Jakob Nielsen’s site:
Fast, Good and Cheap:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fast-methods.html
Usability for $200
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030602.html
Usability on Nonprofit Web sites
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/government-nonprofit.html
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
Sproutbuilder Update and Alternatives
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
Last month nifty WYSIWYG online flash widget maker Sproutbuilder announced its plan to move to all pay accounts by March and like a lot of organizations I was pretty concerned about what this meant for my nonprofit clients. Assurances that Sprout Inc. is committed to the sector turned into the news that there would be limited free accounts and some discount for official organizations. Last week a modified pricing structure was announced and some solid information about what is available for nonprofits became available.
The short story is that verified nonprofits can create up to 5 widgets (sprouts) with 100MB Storage and 10GB bandwidth available with a free account. Other pricing tiers will be half price or $30/mo for 5-15 sprouts and $150/mo for 15-30.
While this is decidedly good news, I did feel the need in the interim to see what alternatives exist and if any are worth exploring in more depth. The caveats about any free application or software service still apply of course and the original Idealware post on these developments by Michelle Murrain is well worth reading.
At first it looks like there are more options and decisions to make than on a new cell phone plan. But when I narrowed down the field with the following criteria some likely candidates emerged.
1. Offers a free version and looks to remain so
2. Interface to build widgets doesn’t require HTML, javascript or programming knowledge
3. Interface is relatively easy to use
4. Ability to have many types of content on several pages or tabs - photos, video, feeds, text areas
5. Ability to customize formatting and style elements, background, text etc.
Alternatives I plan to check out in more depth include Wix, PopFly (from Microsoft) and iWidgets. I have just done a little preliminary investigation and playing around at this point, but here are my notes on each and a longer list of the other options I found.
Wix: http://www.wix.com/
Probably the closest match to Sproutbuilder’s ease of use and functionality but definitely geared more towards the MySpace style and audience. This shows in the widget building interface making it a bit jumbled and not that efficient for building tasks. They do have some nice add in elements like Google maps and a contact form. Free version includes a self-promotional footer when the widget is embedded.
Popfly : http://www.popfly.com/
I haven’t made it far into actually producing a widget yet because it requires Microsoft Silverlight browser plug in to be installed on my computer and I am not sure I want to make that kind of commitment yet to something I may never use. The orientation here is on flash games and mash-ups, but it does seem possible to create content+feed type widgets as well. I would love to hear from anyone that has tried or is using this since the idea of easy-to-make, shareable game widgets seems appealing for some nonprofits.
iWidget: http://www.iwidgets.com/
Advertising is added to widgets that don’t contain any of their own, so the fit for the nonprofit community isn’t great. The interface required an initial set up that included URL links to images hosted elsewhere, which might be a slight technology barrier but the actual content addition and customization interface seems solid.
The others
Widgetbox: http://www.widgetbox.com/
Seems powerful but requires pretty solid coding knowledge it looks like.
Yahoo Widgets: http://widgets.yahoo.com/widgets/widget-maker
Also a probably a pretty powerful tool for those with tech chops.
Blist Widgets: http://www.blist.com/what-is-blist/blist-widgets
Pretty sweet looking excel spreadsheet type data display widgets with interactive possiblities but limited to data input/output as far as I can tell.
Dapper widgets: http://www.dapper.net
Offers the ability to generate a wide variety of output types (google gadgets for example) from data collected from a web site - static or RSS feed and might be worth another look.
KickApps: http://www.kickapps.com/widgets
Seems like widget creation is part of a larger package that requires a $100 minimum fee.
Clearspring: http://www.clearspring.com/services/widgetmedia
A forerunner in the widget field but it doesn’t look like they have any free or nonprofit plans available.
These notes were the result of a very quick look around and I would be happy for any additions or corrections to my brief survey and initial thoughts. There are a lot of neat services out there and I know I didn’t find all of them or look at all of the functionalities they offer. None of the ones I summarized seems to have the same combination of ease of use and power found in Sproutbuilder though, so for now their 5 widgets for free plan still looks like a good starting place for nonprofits wanting to create their first widgets.
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
Although every project is unique, I have found that sometimes its helpful to get a sense of the common steps involved in a visual way. I decided to post the generic project plan I share with my clients here in the hopes that it will help someone just diving into their Web site or redesign project get a handle on what to consider.
Download the Sample Project Plan PDF (385k) here.
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
My Top 10 Super Handy Links
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
Inspired by Eric Leland’s post Wonderful Tools for Web Developers, here are some of the links I use all the time and keep close to the top of my bookmarks. If you work on a web or communications team I think you will find them useful too. If you have a favorite free online tool you can’t live without, share it in the comments.
Need to know if you are the only one that can’t get to a web site? http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
Free tool to check out how your site looks on a variety of browsers and platforms (Full disclosure: I use browswercam.com now)
http://browsershots.org/
Really cool way to preview screen fonts and compare how they will look online
http://typetester.maratz.com/
How do you figure out what that font is on a graphic someone found deep in the archives?
http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
Check your writing against several readability scoring methods and get suggestions on making it more reader friendly.
http://www.editcentral.com/gwt/com.editcentral.EC/EC.html
Just a simple word count tool - nothing fancy, but handy
http://www.wordcounttool.com/
Lorem Ipsum Generator - when you need some greeking fast
http://www.lipsum.com/
Its always good to know if your code will pass HTML muster
http://validator.w3.org/
And your if your fancy new styles are legit according to the CSS validator
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
One more for fun:
For all your twitter and social networking needs - nifty copy-paste symbols
http://thenextweb.com/TwitterKeys/
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Testing how your Email to supporters will look when sent from your bulk Email vendor is all important. As we try to keep up with the “improvements” that Microsoft keeps making and all the various ways Web Email services can render your HTML, I have found this Excel file is pretty useful of keeping track of it all. It contains a sheet for the main programs and items to test for and another to help keep track of all your email accounts and log ins. Hope this helps someone out.
Download the Excel spreadsheet (16k)
Monday, November 10th, 2008
Take the pain out of WYSIWYG
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
Many website content management systems use something called WYSIWYG (“What you see is what you get”) editors to make entering and formatting content easier for non technical administrators. While these embedded editors can save time and allow organizations to distribute the workload of maintaining the site, there tend to be some points of pain involved for people that expect them to work just like Microsoft Word, which they are built to resemble.
But under the hood they are very different and are creating HTML code for the web. And to make things even more confusing sometimes WYSIWYG editing screens are different than what you actually get when you save your page. Finding out how to get what you really want just takes practice with working your own system, so I have included some handy formatting to explore below.
While each set up may be unique, all WYSIWYG-using administrators can take advantage of a couple basic tips and by learning what the different buttons do on their system.
The Tips
Do Not paste directly from Microsoft Word
This is the single biggest piece of advice for avoiding pain and misery when dealing with a WYSIWYG editor in any system. Even though some will have “Paste from Word” buttons its still way safer to write in the WYSIWYG itself or paste plain text and format with the options available. Headings, text color, paragraphs, bulleted lists and spacing can all become a real nightmare to troubleshoot once Word styling sneaks into the WYSIWYG and if you are fighting with the same formatting over and over its probably best to start fresh rather than try to fix the content.
Why? Microsoft programs use their own logic and styles and they use a LOT of them. Sometimes the behind the scenes code conflicts with the styles set up in your system, sometime they override them and in any case it gets unpredictable and you end up with lots of unnecessary code that slows down your page loading time.
There are a couple ways to get around this unpleasant fact of life.
- The tried and true: copy from Word, pasting to Notepad or other plain text only editor, copying from Notepad and pasting to the CMS.
- Save a plain text version: Save the document as plaint text in Word and select “Allow Character Substitution” to remove curly quotes and other symbols that may not be translated into HTML correctly when pasted. You will need to reopen this which is safer again with Notepad.
- Just write in the WYSIWYG: If you can it might actually end up saving you some time. You can always copy and paste it into a Word doc later.
Make a Practice page and a Style Guide to get the basics down.
One of the best time investments for web editors is getting to know their tools. Training with real content can be incredibly valuable since you will find out what your real world needs are likely to be.
In addition though, I like to have a practice page and/or style guide which is not public so that administrators can get familiar with the editor and know what things will look like so they can use them easily. Often this page contains regularly needed formatting pieces that can be copied and pasted into a new page as a template. I have a template I use regularly that includes most common HTML styles that you can copy and paste into a private page on your site to get started.
Here are a few things I encourage new website administrators to do to make their life easier in the long run. Play around and add the types of content you use the most. Watch out though since once you start finding out how to do new things this can be a lot of fun and get addictive.
Learn what the Heading and other styles look like and when to use each - You should try to use them consistently across your site. There should be some sort of systematic approach based on hierarchy for the best reader experience.
If your web developer has provided CSS styles to use (available from a drop down in the tool bar) use them. They were designed specifically to match your site’s design.
Learn how your editor handles line breaks and paragraphs - Different systems do different things and you need to know what to expect when you hit the return key. Does it place a double space (paragraph) or single line break ?
If the return key gives a double space or paragraph and you only want one return, try clicking shift return to just move down one line (creating a single line break in many systems).
You can also try placing the cursor on the second line of the space and hitting delete.
Play around with this until you are able to get consistent results and post the information somewhere for others that are new to the system. Develop a convention for spacing between items so its easy to know what to use.
Learn how to work with images - If your WYSIWYG editor has a button to place images, learn how to use it when you don’t need it right away. If you aren’t familiar with HTML it might take a little while to learn how to get the most out of it.
Ideally you should learn how to control placement and alignment (right or left), spacing with text and develop a plan for how to incorporate images into a page in a way that is compatible with your overall site design such as a standard image size.
Of course a basic understanding of how to save high quality web images in appropriate sizes and formats is a good idea too. There are various resources on the web for learning how to do this but I wanted to put out a couple of all to common mistakes that can make placing images in your WYSIWYG editor not work well.
- Make sure you have the right file type - the web can only display jpg, gif or png images and your editor may only accept the first two which are more common.
- Don’t upload a full size digital camera image and shrink it down in the WYSIWYG. Not only will this make your web page take forever to load and will look fuzzy if it works, but trying to add very large images often strains or breaks the system. For this reason most CMS systems usually have restrictions on size - both dimensions (width and height) and file size. Make a note of yours on your practice page if its not readily apparent. Resize your images to the correct final size with graphics software before adding to your page.
Learn how to work with links - Each system has a different way of doing this and it can be different for linking to other pages on the site or to some other web site. Use your practice page to try adding all of the types of links you might need and keep notes there for others if it is not intuitive or takes several steps.
Long story short, you will get the most out of the convenience of a WYSIWYG editor in any system if you take a couple of hours to learn its particular ins and outs. By creating your own workflow and cheat sheet you will avoid a ton of ongoing aggravation. Then, you can use the time and energy recovered to stress out about writing the content itself.
