http://www.pdfhammer.com/ – Good idea. Needs more features.

Bison Bison is no expert web designer, but I have spent a few years running a couple of non-profit websites now, and so I thought I’d share some thoughts on a few things that folk could consider when they set-up a website. My thoughts are specifically directed at people who are considering setting up a website for a small non-profit organisation but they’re probably applicable to lots of other folk too. This post may duplicate lots of other info on the web, but it never ceases to amaze me how many folk still won’t go near the web simply because it all seems too complicated and scary. So the purpose of this post is to encourage folk to stick a toe in the water.

You don’t need to have a degree in programming to put together a useful website.

If you can use MS Word then you can build and maintain a basic website. Also, you don’t need specialist software. You could spend a long time teaching yourself HTML, CSS, Java and then spend time figuring out web building software like dreamweaver and so on, but if all you need to do is communicate what your group is doing to your members you don’t need to worry about any of this.

My advice is to go for some form of web based hosting and ‘Content Management System’ or CMS, for short. Google’s Blogger or WordPress are both good places to start for simple, free services. There’s no harm in signing up for an account and playing around with it, because it’s free.

However, the truth is – you get what you pay for. For the Greener Leith website, I use Squarespace because it has features that blow the free services out of the water – not to mention much better design templates. Crucially it allows me to build a much more sophisticated structure to the website, including extra static pages, discussion boards and so on. It takes a while to get used to their interface, but it’s well worth it, and they give you a free month to start off with, so once again it doesn’t do any harm to play around with it to see if you like it. Lastly, it can grow with the organisation, so as we get bigger and better resourced, then we can afford to pay for more features.

The best thing about web-based CMS and hosting services is that you can edit your website from anywhere with a web connection. You’re not tied to a specific computer, or specific software. Also, the CMS sorts out a whole lot of stuff I can’t be bothered to work out how to do myself. Stuff like optimising the pages so that search engines can easily index the pages, and ensuring that the RSS feeds work properly.

Content is more important that a flash design.

If your organisation is working on a limited budget – don’t blow the budget paying someone to come up with a fancy design for your site, that you will then struggle to update without paying for more professional help further down the line. It’s much more important that you can quickly, and easily and confidently add updates to the site yourself, without having to rely on the goodwill of anyone else. Remember as well that non-profit volunteers can come and go. You need a simple system that anyone can use, and can easily be shared amongst different editors over time. Telling someone the log-in details for a web-based CMS system simplifies that process greatly.

Your aim is to build a relationship with your members and supporters so that they keep coming back to your site. Short, regular updates (at least 2 a month) is the way to go.

Do you need your own domain name?

In short, yes, but it’s not essential. Paid for hosting/CMS services like Blogger or squarespace will provide you with an address for free. Really small non-profit groups like a residents association may seek to minimise their regular fixed costs, and although the cost of buying and keeping a domain name can be pretty cheap, it’s not absolutely vital.

For example, Greener Leith did fine for it’s first year as www.greenerleith.squarespace.com although now that we’ve bought www.greenerleith.org we feel much happier about ourselves. The fact is most new visitors find the site using search engines and they don’t really care what your domain name is – they care more about the value of the content on your site.

Promotion Tools

When you get started, you’ll need to think about how you can get the word out about your new site. It may seem obvious, but don’t start promoting it whilst there’s no content on it. If there’s nothing worth reading when viewers get there, they probably won’t come back. Below, here’s a quick list of ways you can promote your site for free.

Feedblitz provides a free blog to email service which your subsribers can manage themselves. This means that everytime you post an update to your website, your subscribers recieve the update as an email to their inbox. The advantage is of course that your supporters don’t have to remember to go back and visit your website for updates – the updates come to them. For small organisations, managing their contacts lists is a hard task: Feedblitz automates this process, and puts your subscribers in control. If you can get local journalists to subscribe to your Feedblitz newsletter, you may find local traditional media cover news from your group with very little extra effort on your part. Now, every time we post to Greener Leith, quite often the Evening News writes an article about our news, new people find our site, and ometimes they even subscribe to our newsletter. This creates a bit of a virtuous circle that grows over time.

Next you should think about exchanging links with other sites relevent to your community of readers. If you can get a link from more established sites that are relevent to your content, they’ll do a fantastic job of driving relevent traffic to your site.

Over time, there are a variety of other free ways to promote using your site and content on the web – List your site on Technorati, post your content to Del.icio.us, and create a Facebook group for your organisation, highlighting your webpage. We’ve found Facebook is particularly good for promoting local events that our organisation runs, as it organises members into networks that are linked by a place, or city.

It helps to know who’s visting your site.

Feedblitz gives you a bit of limited information about who’s subscribed to your site. Paid for CMS/hosting usually incorporates some sort of method for monitoring who is accessing your site, how often they come, where they come from and so on. However, Google Analytics is free, and provides the most detailed infomation on all this. You could integrate it with Blogger for free too. How do I know that I get loads more hits every time the Evening News publishes an article about Greener Leith? Google Analytics told me. Similarly, you can evaluate the impact of any other promotion work you do for your group, using Google Analytics. Very handy.

To Be Continued….

OK, so I’ve got a geeky fascination with the way local politics and decision making happens, and especially the way organisations use the web to communicate on quite local issues. If you have a look at the way political parties are working in Edinburgh, it’s pretty clear that some ‘get it’ more than others. It seems clear to me that in an age where increasing numbers of folk don’t know who lives in their tenement stair, but spend more time on-line than watching TV – there’s a real opportunity for local politics to happen on-line, rather than in committee meetings or street protests.

Whilst, the recent protests over the SNP/Lib Dem school closures clearly show that physical protest is vital – you can bet for sure that parents organised through emails and on the web. Here’s an example of a schools closures protest site. When you turn to see which political parties are making the most of this, I have to say it looks like Edinburgh Labour are the most organised on this front. An increasing number of their local councilors are on-line and they obviously understand the medium – as it says on Cllr Andrew Burns blog – ‘very brief comments as often as possible’. Something this blog can only aspire too. It’s interesting too that the Labour group seem quite at ease wih linking both to their elected colleagues ‘official blogs’ as well as other Labour leaning blogs which aren’t run by elected folk. Importantly, it would seem that people are given a free hand – individual people’s personalities, and political interests come through pretty well. This is refreshing, in that the local elecotorate is being spoon fed a transparently uniform party line.

If only the other local political parties were as organised as Labour. The SNP have a dedicated bunch of on-line supporters – but none that really seem to focus on Edinburgh issues. There is of course sites like North to Leith but these sites have a far broader perspective.

Similarly, the Greens really only have one local party page. It’s a shame, as a well run blog could really amplify the impact of their local councillors in the city. It’s also surprising given that a local Green blog ties in nicely to the ‘radical localisation’ that Greens are in favour of. The current site is horrible to navigate, impersonal in tone, and looks cheap and nasty. Given how easy it is to put together a decent looking site – the Greens need to sort it out – and I say this as a Green voter!

Given the poor profile of local SNP and Green politicians on-line it makes me wonder if this is anything to do with political experience. Could it be that the hardened politicians like Cllr Aitken and so on are more comfortable putting their innermost thoughts into the public domain – because they’ve been on the soap box for so long, and developed a correscpondingly thick skin? Going on-line as a politician isn’t always easy – the spat between Edinburgh sucks and Cllr Aitkens blog shows how nasty things can be…

Right time to get off the train now – so no time to look at the tories or the Lib Dems but who cares about them anyway?

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