From the category archives:
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.
After talking about tools like content management systems (CMS), customer relations management (CRM) software, bulk emailers, social networks, 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.
For a small non-profit, it’s impossible to beat SalesForce.com at a customer relations management (CRM) solution. Through SalesForce.com Foundation, this revolutionary web-based database is available for up to 10 users at absolutely no cost and additional users can be added at incredibly discounted rates. SalesForce.com comes with all the advantages web-based software like enhanced security, managed backup, accessibility from any web browser, and SalesForce.com is regularly updated three times per year—updates which require no involvement from customers and are guaranteed never to break customizations.
SalesForce.com serves as the central database for non-profits in the public policy world like the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Atlas Foundation, and International Policy Network. The Center for American Progress has described its deployment of SalesForce.com as “outrageously successful.”
Price: $0 for up to 10 users.
Many non-profits may resist the notion of switching to Google Apps because its productivity software—Docs & Spreadsheets—lacks many of the features that Microsoft’s Office suite contains. However, a transition to Google Apps doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposal. Adopting Google Apps to replace your Microsoft Exchange email server can save your organization a heap of cash without having to abandon your Microsoft Office desktop-based applications.
The primary reason to switch from Exchange to Google Apps is price. In January, I wrote a head-to-head comparison of Exchange & Google Apps which noted a study showing that adopting Google Apps Premium could cut the average company’s email hosting costs by about 65% when compared to Microsoft Exchange and by about 55% when compared with Microsoft’s own cloud-based email service.
But the premium addition of Google’s email offering is likely overkill more most non-profits. Google Apps Standard Edition offers a whopping 7.4GB per inbox, offers full POP3 and IMAP email compatibility, and boasts bevy of free applications for the Blackberry, iPhone, and Android.
Finally, Google Apps integrates seamlessly with SalesForce, allowing you to instantly add notes to customer contact records whenever you send an email. No more clunky copy/paste needed!
Price: $0 for unlimited users.
Your website needs to be flexible keep up with the pace of technology. That’s the primary reason why ReadyMadeWeb recommend WordPress and Drupal, the only self-hosted CMS solutions used in our portfolio.
According to Water & Stone’s 2009 Open-Source CMS Report, Drupal and WordPress weekly downloads clock in at 62,500 and 433,767 respectively, making them gargantuan in comparison to their competitors. These thriving communities of users and developers are the driving forces behind the flexibility of these platforms.
As both WordPress and Drupal are open-source, additions to the projects are also shared amongst the community of users. This means that rather than paying a developer to add social networking features to your website—a job that could cost tens of thousands of dollars on a proprietary platform—you can pay a developer to simply implement one of the many freely available add-ons that’s just sitting on the (virtual) shelf.
Too many non-profits are spending their donors hard-earned money making web design companies rich when they could be embracing open-source solutions.
Price: $0 for either software package.
Google Analytics integrates with Drupal and WordPress to measure your website’s performance and also integrates with SalesForce and MailChimp to track customer conversion rates and traffic from email campaigns.
Price: $0
Once you have people interested in your cause, you need to stay on their radar. You can keep that presence of mind by sending regular emails updating your supporters, contacts in the media, and colleagues at other organizations. Using a bulk email solutions like MailChimp will ensure that your emails aren’t blocked by spam filters and will also allow you to measure how frequently your emails are opened and what links your recipients are clicking on.
MailChimp also features out-of-the-box integration with Google Apps and SalesFoce, allowing you populate lists with the contacts you’ve gathered using either platform.
Price: $0 per month for up to 500 subscribers. Pay plans vary from $10 for to $240 per month based on your number of subscribers.
To easily gather information about donors, process donations, and automatically populate your database and email lists, check out FormSpring. SalesForce, MailChimp, and Google Apps integrations make this web form creation service a no-brainer for non-profits following the ReadyMadeWeb approach to web software.
Price: $0 for up to 10 forms and 50 sign-ups a month. Pay plans vary from $14 to $159 per month based on number of forms and entries.
There are all sorts of other great ReadyMade services and open-source software platforms out there that also integrate with many of the platforms we’ve talked about here. Keep reading ReadyMadeWeb to learn about more and feel free to email us at info@readymadeweb.com if you ever want advice choosing the right solutions form your non-profit. We’re glad to help.
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.
So what’s eAccelerator? Here’s the official description from eAccelerator.net:
eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator & optimizer. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.
I’ve found the 1-10 times speed increase to be a conservative estimate as many PHP sites will gain even more speed—even more reason to install this awesome software package.
Below I’ve outlined the process which I followed to install eAccelerator on a Media Temple dedicated virtual (dv) server version 3.5 running CentOS 5 and Plesk Control Panel version 8.6. Your setup my differ substantially, so please read through the documentation on the eAccelerator website and consult your hosting provider before proceeding.
Media Temple customers should visit their servers admin menu within the Media Temple Account Center in order to install the developer tools on your server as several of the software packages included in the developer tools will be needed for this installation, including “make” and “gcc.” This process will take a few minutes, so go grab a cup of coffee.
To begin the actual install process, login to your server via SSH using Terminal if you’re using a Mac or an SSH client like Putty if you’re using a PC. Here’s a quick guide to linux command-line commands if you need a reference.
Once you’re logged, drop back to the root directory:
cd /
Next, you’ll need to create a directory for eAccelerator, and then navigate into that directory:
mkdir /ea/
cd /ea/
Download and unzip the installer:
wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.5.3/eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar.bz2
bzip2 -d eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar.bz2
tar xvf eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar
Set your current directory to the unzipped file:
cd eaccelerator-0.9.5.3
When you have only one php install (check your server settings), it’s safe to run these commands in the source directory. This next series of commands will configure and install eAccelerator:
phpize
./configure
make
make test
make install
After compilation, there should be a “eaccelerator.so” file in the modules subdirectory of the eAccelerator source directory. Check to make sure this is present.
Next, copy the eaccelerator.ini file into the /etc/php.d/ directory:
cd /
cp /ea/eaccelerator-0.9.5.3/eaccelerator.ini /etc/php.d/eaccelerator.ini
Edit eaccelerator.ini using the text editor:
vi /etc/php.d/eaccelerator.ini
Now change this uncommented line:
zend_extension=”/usr/lib/php4/eaccelerator.so”
To this :
zend_extension=”/usr/lib/php/modules/eaccelerator.so”
Now, restart Apache:
service httpd restart
To Verify that this installation worked, first check out PHP:
php -v
You should see these lines somewhere in the mix:
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2008 Zend Technologies
with eAccelerator v0.9.5.3, Copyright (c) 2004-2006 eAccelerator, by eAccelerator
Finally, you can create a php file, and drop this line into it:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
When you load this php file in your browser you should see the configuration information from your installing of PHP and eAccelerator will have added its own block of information. It will show the configuration, but also the amount of allocated memory, cached scripts and so on. When this says that eaccelerator is enabled and any number of scripts are cached, eAccelerator is working.
If you have any questions about eAccelerator or anything else we’ve covered on ReadyMadeWeb, please leave a comment or email us at info@readymadeweb.com.
Create an XML Sitemap – Giving Google a clear map of every post on the site can mean that Google indexes the site much more frequently. After completing a recent relaunch of an already long-established site that previously had no sitemap, it indexing rate skyrocketed from only a few hundred to well over 3,000 pages per day. This site has only 2,500 pages, meaning that Google is indexing portions of the site multiple times day. The result was a doubling in search traffic—and this was in December, usually one of the slowest web traffic times of year. Most widely-used, open-source CMS systems have built-in or plug-in sitemap generators available.
Promote Your RSS Feed – Placing an RSS icon in a prominent location along with a few other popular subscription service options can do wonders for traffic. Thankfully all of this can be done easily using FeedBurner, which offers dozens of subscription options for your blog readers. By making it easy to subscribe to your blog or website, you’ll keep your content in front of users, keeping them interested and generating repeat traffic. You should also explore adding FeedBurner’s “Subscribe via Email” function. One of the sites I manage has over 5,000 subscribers who get daily emails via FeedBurner’s service.
Twitter Syndication – For the same reason that promoting RSS helps to keep your name in front of people, syndicating content through Twitter is a good idea. Twitter is increasingly used as a substitute for RSS readers, so automating an RSS-to-Twitter feed helps you keep up with your audience. TwitterFeed.com is a great stand-alone tool for turning your RSS feed into tweets. Hootsuite also has an RSS to Twitter syndication function built-in.
Though all of these tools can help your site to succeed, remember that nothing replaces high-quality, original content produced on a regular basis. So keep focusing on creating great writing, photos, video, or whatever you created your website to promote.
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 advertising space on your site, buy ad space from others, or just learn more about the folks visiting your site.
To install the tracking code, just follow along with this video:
As I explained in my last post, Tumblr is a light-weight hosted blogging platform that can be more than enough for many web projects. One thing that users accustomed to more full-featured content management systems miss when they use Tumblr is the ability to create static pages–for example, for an About page or a FAQs page. Luckily, there’s an easy way around that.
The trick I’ve used is to create subdomains for each static page. My personal blog is at jerrybrito.org, but my about page is at about.jerrybrito.org. That “about” subdomain is not hosted by Tumblr; it’s hosted on my own server. I simply took the HTML for my Tumblr template and replaced the dynamic content (the code that calls for the blog posts) with the static text of my about page. Voila, a static page for Tumblr.
Admittedly, this is a bit of a hack. If you need more than one or two static pages for your project, you’re probably better off choosing another CMS. A more likely scenario that would call for Tumblr, though, is if you have a website composed mostly of static pages or pages generated by some application that does not include blogging capability and you want to add a simple blog for your site. In that case, you can do the reverse of what I just described an put your Tumblr blog on a subdomain.
For example, I run a site called OpenRegs.com, which is an easier-to-use alternative to the federal government’s official regulatory portal, Regulations.gov. All of the pages on the openregs.com domain are generated by a custom-built application hosted on my own server. When I needed a blog to add the latest news and announcements about the site, I created a new subdomain at blog.openregs.com. That’s where the Tumblr blog resides and all the pages of that subdomain are hosted by Tumblr. The subdomain’s look is the same as the main site because I took the main template and simply added Tumblr code to pull in the dynamic blog content.
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.
Because I can’t resist fiddling around with easy-to-use webware, I’ve begun the process of creating an iPhone version of ReadyMadeWeb in order to review iSites’s service and to give everyone another way to see what we’re up to.
The process of building out the applications was relatively simple as this app has only a few, basic options. The first step in the process is identifying your RSS feeds and your accounts at (micro)blogging, photo sharing, and video sites. Currently iSites supports Twitter, Wordpress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous on the blogging side of things; YouTube and Qik for video; and Flickr, Webshots, Smugmug, and Zooomr for photos. But, this “support” is really just a quick way of grabbing RSS feeds—in fact, there is no verification of ownership of any of these accounts—so the RSS feature really covers your bases.
I was impressed that the RSS function was able to grab the thumbnail images from the feed and turn them into great-looking icons for each post. This made the preview of the finished product look very professional—a lot like the New York Times mobile reader.
From the feeds screen you move on to the design and creative phases of the process. Have your site’s color palette handy for this as you’ll need to plug in some hexadecimal color values. You’ll also need a capable designer ready to crop, stretch and resize your logo into the rigidly defined dimensions required by the iPhone and the iTunes store.
Be sure to play close attention to the Menu section under the Design tab as your menu order will match the order in which you add your feeds to the menu. Hopefully GenWi updates this feature to allow users to drag and drop menu items around as I found myself having to delete items and re-enter them after seeing that the order couldn’t be changed post-entry.
Unfortunately, our app won’t be coming out very soon due to the incredible demand for these iSites-powered apps. A message at the publication screen as well as the front page of their site reads:
Currently we have been inundated with new app requests. Hence we have decided to temporarily stop activating and accepting payments for new apps until all currently paid apps are submitted to Apple for final review. Please note that you can continue to create new apps and publish – but will not be able to activate and submit it for review.
It’s not clear how long this embargo on new apps publication will last, which also makes the pricing scheme a bit murky. Because the publishing option is shutdown, I remain unclear if the $25 price tag will nab you an iPhone app or an Android app or if you get both as a package deal. Ben Parr of Mashable says that the Android apps won’t be available for publication until February, adding to the confusion.
Once the publication embargo is lifted and our app has made its way to the iTunes Stores, I’ll update this review. Until then I’ll just say so far, so good.
Like I’ve said in previous posts, which you can find below, sitemaps are a vital part of any site. Thankfully, like so many other things we talk about here at ReadyMadeWeb, generating a sitemap is easy.
Today, I want to take a look at creating a sitemap in WordPress, which should only take you a few minutes.
Check it out:
Feedburner—owned by Google and part of its suite of services—is the premier RSS feed tracking service. If you’re not using Feedburner, here’s five reasons why you should be:
So, login to your Google account, visit Feedburner and get started!
If you’re running a WordPress blog, you may not know that there’s a really simple way for you quickly generate more traffic without changing how much you’re writing, paying for advertising, or implementing some complicated SEO trickery. Instead, you can use “Update Services” a feature found in the “Writing” sub-menu under the “Settings” tab.
Update services are used by search engines to keep their directories up to date. By telling WordPress which update services it should be talking to—often referred to as “pinging”—you’ll ensure that search engines are aware of updates to your blog the instant they happen.
When you launch a WordPress site, the setup menu will ask if you want your blog visible to sites like Technorati or Google. If you selected “Yet” (which you should have), WordPress should already have one service listed in the Update Services box:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
ReadyMadeWeb has put together this list of 242 update services, listed below ( and also available at Google Documents), that your WordPress blog can ping. Though this is a long list, there is no significant reason not to use all of these services. The only downside you may encounter is an increased post time—as in the time in between clicking “Publish” or “Update Post” and have the update go through, will be a couple second longer.
