An Analog Solution for Talking to Politicians

Alexis Ohanian: How to make a splash in social media

Plugin Monday: Customize Your WordPress Site with Advanced Excerpt

photo credit: trekkyandy Oftentimes in working with WordPress I find that I don’t want things to be as automatic as they are by default. Or, more precisely, I want things to be automatic in a very custom way to fit a certain theme and design. An example of this is excerpts, this WordPress function annoyed ...

11 Essentials of Writing a High-Quality RFP

photo credit: DeaPeaJay Requests for proposal for websites—or RFPs as they’re often called—can be difficult to write, especially for non-technical customers. So, I thought I’d draft a set of guidelines specifically geared toward non-profits working the public policy world—the core audience of ReadyMadeWeb.

How to Spend Next to Nothing on Your Non-Profit’s Web/IT Needs

After talking about tools like content management systems, databases, bulk emailers, measurement tools, web forms, and a bunch of other tools here on ReadyMadeWeb, it seemed like it was time to do an overview of these tools and outline how to run an entire organization using only ReadyMade tools.

Give Your PHP Code Even More Speed with eAccelerator

Many of today's best open-source CMS systems are written with PHP, an incredibly popular and powerful scripting language. PHP's power lies in its ability to dynamically generate pages, eliminating the need to code pages by hand in HTML. However, that same dynamism is one of the chief disadvantages of PHP because of the processor power needed to generate pages on the fly. Thankfully, that disadvantage can be easily mitigated by using caching programs like eAccelerator.

Three Sure-Fire Traffic Generators

These three simple things—creating a sitemap, promoting your feed, and taking advantage of automated twitter tools—will help to bring new visitors to your site and turn that organic traffic into more repeat visitors.

Learning About the Demographics of Your Visitors Using Quantcast

Unlike Google Analytics or other analytics packages, Quantcast combines direct measurement of your site's traffic with what's known as "panel data," which is data collected from surveys of Internet users. By combining these two data sets Quantcast is able to tell you not only how many people are visiting your site, but also things about those visitors like their income level, age, sex, educational attainment and other useful info. This information is useful to you if you want to sell advertisi ...

How to create static pages in Tumblr

One thing that users accustomed to a more full-featured CMS miss when they use Tumblr is the ability to create static pages. Luckily, there's an easy way around that.

Build Your Own iPhone & Andoid App with iSites

iPhone and Android apps are no longer the domain of developers now that tools like iSites.us by GenWi. This tool makes creating a mobile app version of your website as easy as clicking through a series of menus and forking over a modest $25.