The site uses WordPress as its content management system (CMS) plus a WordPress plugin called Shopp to handle the store’s catalogue and payments. To begin with I found Shopp difficult to get to grips with: some of its problems were due to using an older version but upgrading didn’t go smoothly; and we had a problem with the payment page getting stuck in a loop. All that’s now been sorted out and the latest version of Shopp seems a lot less buggy. It’s actually not a bad product, with about the right mix of features and simplicity, and well worth considering if you want to sell merchandise and your site uses WordPress.

Getting drop-down navigation menus to work across browsers can be troublesome, but it now works ok thanks to the Multi-level Navigation plugin which turns WordPress’s very basic menu into a drop-down, slide-out version. That was a necessity for the ARISE website because it has a lot of content to navigate.

One of the unfinished features was the slideshow on the home page. I used a jCarousel horizontal carousel to enable lots of content to fit into a smaller area on-screen; clicking on next/previous buttons lets you cycle through the items. I love these carousels, they can be a great way to display news or tell a story.

To make managing your website easier, consider using an online project management tool like Basecamp. What can it do?

Share documents with colleagues and your web designer

Basecamp has a Files section where you can upload all the documents relevant to your website.  These might include:

• Draft and final project briefs;
• Invitations to tender;
• Quotes from web designers;
• Contracts;
• Draft images of the visual design;
• JPEGS and GIFS: your logo, photos, backgrounds etc;
• The text content for various pages on the site.

What if you have a lot of documents? Won’t that get confusing? Not really, because you can create your own categories (content, images, invoices etc) and choose to see only relevant files.

Leave  comments and give opinions

You could upload your new logo design and send your colleages a message to ask them to look at it and leave their comments.

Make To-Do lists

These I use a lot, sometimes hundreds of items for a single project. Again, they can be categorised, and ticked off one by one as they are completed. You can associate your to-do lists with milestones which you set to help you keep the work on track and on time. You can make to-do lists for yourself or allocate work to someone else.

Collaborate with your colleagues to write content

Basecamp offers whiteboards which you can use to collaboratively write a web page, a contract or a project brief. Create a new whiteboard for your home page and start typing in text; then send a message to your colleagues inviting them to make amendments. Every time someone makes changes to the whiteboard it’s saved as a new version: you can then compare the various versions until you’re happy with the result.

Use email or a project management tool, or both?

The email correspondence that takes place between various parties can build up fast and it becomes difficult to find the attachment you need! But I’ve found the solution is to almost completely stop using email and correspond by leaving messages in Basecamp instead.

When you upload a file or leave a message in Basecamp you can choose to send an email notification to as many other users as you want. Plus, you can subscribe by RSS feed to get notifications of new comments, files and messages as they happen.

Other project management tools

Microsoft Project is the best-know project management software and you might already have it on your computer. I don’t like it one bit, I find it confusing because there are too many features – it’s not simple enough for me or for my clients!

There’s an excellent article on the TechSoup website called Six Views of Project-Management Software.

There are now so many good, mature and reliable CMS available now that I would echo the advice by Laura Quinn that you should use the CMS that your trusted web developer knows. A great CMS in the hands of someone who doesn’t know it well enough won’t deliver the goods!

Email newsletters, how hard can they be? Well, I just set up an HTML e-newsletter campaign and it’s been a sometimes frustrating experience, but worthwhile because email is a great marketing tool. A great online application called MailChimp has made it much simpler.

Why would your charity want to have an email newsletter?

Email is a lot cheaper than posting out printed newsletters, perhaps 1/20th of the cost. Emails can be easily forwarded to other people by recipients. An email can link directly to a news item on your website – or to your donations page. Your supporters can subscribe and unsubscribe themselves so you don’t have to manage a contacts list. No more stuffing envelopes!

Emails can be sent out more quickly more regularly than your print newsletter. For example, e-newsletters were a vital tool of nonprofits here in Australia when the bushfires hit and the public wanted to donate and give their support and wanted to do so immediately.

Why can’t I just write it in Outlook and send it to all my contacts?

These days most web designers know they should write standards-compliant HTML and CSS code. But unlike websites, there are no standards for email. There are so many different software programs and web-based email applications and they all display emails differently from one another. Many of them strip out html code; some don’t display pictures by default; some won’t show background images; and some ignore CSS altogether.

Creating an HTML email newsletter is like a trip back in time to the dark ages of web design: tables for layout, repetitive style attributes within the HTML, and lots and lots of font tags.

There are pitfalls ahead. For example, if too many recipients hit the spam button you could get your organisation blacklisted as a spammer. And legally you are supposed to ask people to opt-in to receive your email newsletters and provide them with a means to unsubscribe.

You can’t use Outlook and your usual email address to send off your e-newsletters. If you’re going to do the job properly you need the proper tools. That’s why I’ve started using MailChimp. You might have heard of its older brother, SurveyMonkey. MailChimp has the cuter logo.

Here’s a summary of what you have to do:

1) design an HTML email using antiquated coding methods.

This is the difficult step and you may need help from a web designer. Your code has to be correctly coded but differently than you might be probably used to. Read MailChimp’s very readable guide to Designing, Coding and Delivering HTML email. Or use MailChimp’s newsletter design tools which work quite well.

You also need to provide a plain text version. That’s much easier.

2) provide the correct information

If your message contains too many of the wrong sorts of words it’s likely to be given the boot by recipients’ spam filters. I had to remove the words ‘free’, ‘funding’ and ‘grants’ from the text before I could be confident of anyone actually receiving it. Which was a bit annoying because the whole point of the email campaign was to offer organisations free funding grants.

Your email must give your organisation’s address, offer an unsubscribe link, and explain to recipients why they’re receiving the email. If you don’t do this properly someone at MailChimp writes you a very polite email to tell you off and offers you advice.

3) test it in dozens of different email clients

You could send test emails to people you know who use Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Eudora, Thunderbird etc etc and ask them if it looks ok. No seriously, use Inbox Inspector instead. That’s MailChimp’s testing tool – you have to pay extra but it’s worth it.

4) compile a list of people to send the email to

You can either put a subscribe link on your website, or import a list of recipients’ emails (but you must have asked their permission first). Be careful when doing this as MailChimp, quite rightly, are very strict about what you can and can’t do with people’s emails. You’ll get one of those lovely tellings-off if you transgress the rules so figure out what the rules are before you send your e-newsletter.

5) send the campaign

Click a button to send ‘em all off. By this stage you’ll be giving a huge sigh of relief but it’s not over yet.

6) check your stats

Now you’ll find out how successful your email campaign was. Find out how many people opened the email and if they forwarded it to anyone else. Track how many of them clicked on a link to visit your website.

If there are too many bounced emails you should check the quality of your email address list. If too many recipients hit their spam report button you could get banned.

Figure out what worked well and what didn’t and use this information to improve your next email campaign.

Why do I use MailChimp?

The MailChimp application’s interface is clear and intuitive. There’s a lot of functionality in there should you need it but it’s simple enough to get started. It’s inexpensive (I spent $30 to send 1,000 emails). The customer support is fast, firm but friendly. The documentation is helpful.

Most of all, it’s such a cheerful tool. Whenever I got frustrated with the whole confusing business of trying to send bulk emails, the friendly little monkey face in its cute-looking postman’s hat looked back at me, giving me encouragement. And a little encouragement goes a long way.

More advice on email newsletters for nonprofits

Try these two articles for the basics: bring your e-newsletter from snoring to soaring and why do email newsletters? And find out about email subject lines that work for your nonprofit.

What else is happening at the Making Links 2008 conference? Read people’s comments here and look at photos here.

I just checked the stats and discovered that Baptcare’s jobs feed has five times as many subscribers as the news feed. What’s more, plenty of people are clicking the link to visit the page on our website where they can download the position description. Methinks a job feed could be a really useful recruitment tool.

We use FeedBurner to optimise and republish our feeds. That way we can offer our feed by either RSS or email and get detailed statistics. Almost all of our subscribers chose to receive updates by email rather than use a feed reader application. The average nurse/social worker/personal carer is not a techie, they all use email but few of them will get the concept of an RSS feed. If we hadn’t offered the option of email they probably wouldn’t have subscribed.

If, like Baptcare, you regularly put vacancies onto your website, why not set up an RSS feed and use a service like Feedburner to ensure that your potential employees can receive their updates by email?

This week I’ve been offered pet nail trimmers, tips on growing my lawn, a $7500 line of credit, a government grant and airline tickets. There was only one slightly naughty ad and it euphemistically suggested I needed a bigger canoe. That’s a far cry from the language of spam a few years ago.

The bad news is that appalling, horrible, offensive, disgusting spam is still prevalent online: it may not be in your inbox but if you’re not careful it’ll appear on your website. And you don’t want that, especially when your charity has a respectable image to uphold and clients and supporters who might be offended.

Comment spam on blogs is one of the biggest problem areas. Blogging has become very popular and most blogs encourage vistors to leave comments. That’s an open invitation for spammers. Email filtering software has improved greatly over the years but comment filtering is still in its infancy: so blogs are an easier target.

I’m not saying you should prevent visitors from leaving comments – it’s a useful way to interact with your audience - but you do need to take steps to prevent spam from appearing. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Change the settings for your blog to prevent people from immediately publish a comment live. Instead that comment should go into a queue for you to moderate.
2. Install a plugin to intercept the more obvious spam. For example WordPress comes pre-loaded with the reliable Akismet plugin. Turn it on and make sure it’s working. From time to time check that it’s blocking the bad stuff and not the decent comments.
3. Check for comments regularly. Daily is good. If you rarely get comments, rather than keep logging in to your blog’s dashboard, make sure that you get an automatic email when a new comment is queued for moderation.
4. Upgrade your blogging software when new releases are published – new versions often improve the security of your blog.
5. Don’t take it personally. Most spam is automated, sent out in bulk by software, so the messages aren’t usually being directed specifically at your charity. Delete it, block it, forget about it.

Here’s a useful link about combatting comment spam.

• Learn web design – takes ages to learn properly, not realistic for most busy charity employees;
• Look for funding – takes time and a measure of luck and patience;
• Find a volunteer – a sensible option to consider, maybe try IT4C;
• Use a free online tool to create a simple website – what are the benefits and drawbacks?

From the early days of the world wide web there have been online tools to help you create your own website. Remember when every other website was created with Geocities (not a recommendation) or a similar tool? Most of these services were frankly awful, both in terms of visual appeal and accessibility.

The free Google Sites might be better, enabling you to put together a cross between a website and a wiki. It won’t create the most impressive or original website – the templating seems very basic – but it will enable you to start up a basic website and create pages and upload documents, calendars, images etc.

One useful feature is that you can use various Google tools to collaborate with other people to build up your site content – in some ways Google Sites could be better suited to building a quick and uncomplicated Intranet than a website.

Want to find out more?

• The CodeKindness blog has a post about how PeaceGames, a small US nonprofit, used Google Sites.
• Why Google Sites isn’t a website builder.
• Take a quick look at what the Wild Apricot website had to say about Google Sites.
• Why Judi Sohn is disappointed with it.
• The example of a nonprofit that gave itself a Google Makeover.

My own opinion? I might recommend it to a cash-strapped nonprofit that couldn’t afford to hire a web designer or can’t find a volunteer, that wants a simple Intranet to share docs with their volunteers and trustees. I’m not sure whether it projects a professional enough image as a public-facing website.

Is anyone out there using Google Sites – how useful have you found it?

Slideshare is a website that allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations and share them with the world. You can then easily insert those presentations into your own website (just like I’ve done here) by pasting code that Slideshare provides into your web pages.

It’s heartening to see that many of the presentations on Slideshare have a social message, some are uploaded by nonprofits and many have a campaigning focus. Slideshare is a great resource to dip into when you’re looking for ideas for your next PowerPoint presentation.

And let’s face it, most PowerPoint presentations are bloody awful and we need all the inspiration we can get. They really don’t have to be just lists of bullet points. So here’s a slideshow that shows you how to avoid Death by Powerpoint and here’s a well-written and amusing free guide that tells you Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes.