Check out our latest project launch at www.infocomm.org.  InfoComm is the leading international association of audiovisual professionals. Their new Web site (built on the RedDot CMS) gives them a spiffy new design, a well organized info architecture, and all sorts of new features designed especially for members.  Our favorite parts of the project:  working with the great team at InfoComm, spending a week at their trade show doing usability testing with their members, and figuring out how the heck to fit all the important stuff on the home page without it looking like a jumble sale.  Check it out!

Web analytics is usually left to marketers looking to fine-tune shopping carts, hone in on AdWords, track campaigns, and conduct a whole bevy of marketing tasks. Creative-types and IA folks don’t always dive into this kind of data. But when a site is undergoing a creative or architectural facelift, it is the perfect time to dive into analytics and make the right decisions.

Creative Decisions:

Analytics packages can tell you a lot about the technology your audience uses. Some stats worth looking at include:

• Resolution;
• Browser;
• Flash Version;
• Java.

Are 75% of your users at 1024×768? Then maybe it’s time to break out of that limiting 800×600 design. Do 30% of your users still in IE6? Avoid transparent images. 5% of your users don’t have Flash or Java? Make sure you offer alternatives to that nifty Slideshow on the homepage (which you should do anyway, but that is another post for another day).

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Part of my role of late has been working with clients on Software Evaluations for CMS software. Sometimes we are hired as a stand alone project to make a CMS recommendation. Sometimes we evaluate and recommend CMSs as part of redesign of the client’s Website. Sometimes we use a formal process where  we gather and prioritize key client needs, identify key decision criteria,  then match requirements to product offerings narrowing the list from 8 to 4 to a final 2 vendors to demo to the client. Or alternatively, we use a more informal/faster/less costly approach, that leverages the  knowledge we’ve accumulated on past projects and simply matches the tools we know with their requirements and circumstances.

While many things vary from project to project — the client’s needs, budgets, technology preferences, interest in Open Source, the decision making team — our role is to lead clients to the point where they can make a decisions (yes this is the leading the horse to water part of the metaphor). However, there are some things happen on each project that amaze me including that sometimes you just can’t get the horse to drink from the right pond (have I extended the metaphor too far?). Read about the things that amaze me again and again, after the jump. (more…)

On June 24th, I will be speaking about a topic that I could wax rhapsodic about for DAYS: Killer design. So sign up now for One World’s “Web design for non-profits” 2 day workshop on June 24-25 and hear what we have to say on the topic. Just don’t heckle me from the peanut gallery. That always throws me. :)

Hope to see you there!

When you run a search engine marketing campaign using Google AdWords, much of your success is based on your reputation, measured by “quality scores” that Google assigns.  The quality score rewards advertisers for what Google considers “good behavior”: if your ads are relevant to searchers, you’ll be rewarded with better placements at lower cost.  Each keyword you run has its own quality score, which is affected primarily by its relevancy to your ads and landing pages – you can view the score for each keyword, and should try to eliminate any with a score of “poor”, meaning 4 or lower.

You also have an  account-wide quality score.  This score is not shared with you, but it affects your ad placements and your keyword quality scores.  It is primarily based on historical clickthrough rate and keyword performance, along with a slew of other factors.  The exact calculations behind quality scores are a guarded Google secret – Google has formally shared the major factors that affect your score, but not the details.  (What would be the fun in that?)

In real life, when your reputation is damaged, it can take a lot of hard work to restore it.  The same goes for your AdWords quality score – but it can be done!  Our client, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) learned this when they discovered a big problem with their own quality score.  They had applied for a Google Grant about 6 months prior, and were waiting for their account to be activated. Due to a communications error, NPCA never learned when their grant was approved – Google set up their account, and their ads started running unattended.  By the time they discovered what had happened (6 months later), the damage was done.  As you’d expect for an account with no monitoring, their initial campaign performed badly, and their quality score plummeted.

After the jump, learn how NPCA boosted their quality score and saved their AdWords campaign. (more…)

I just sat through the second in a series of N10 webinars, Google Grants Advanced Series: Maximizing Your Google Grant To Meet Your Organization’s Goals. The seminar explained how to integrate Google Analytics with Google Grants to achieve better results. I found it helpful because the reporting tools in Google Grants really only tell you part of what you need to know about your existing campaign and won’t help you at all with setting it up in the first place.

Go to the main dashboard of Google Analytics for example and drill down within the visitors tab to the map overlay report. Here you can see which regions people who visit your site are coming from which can help guide your decision on which regions to focus your campaign on.

Under the traffic sources section go to keywords and then non-paid, to find the keywords people are entering in organic search to find your site. Look at the ones that seem valuable and corporate them into your Adwords campaign to gain even more visitors.

To find information about your existing campaigns, again go to traffic sources and click on the Adwords link. Under site usage you can drill down and examine each campaign, ad group and keyword to see how many pages per visitor, time on your site, visits, and bounce rate (site abandonment) each one leads to.
It’s easy to identify poor performers by comparing each campaign’s bounce rate to the site average and then making necessary adjustments at the ad group or keyword level.

Using the dimension pull down menu under site usage you can segment on other criteria as well. Which campaign for example is performing the best for a particular region you are targeting? Armed with this information you may decide to devote more advertising dollars to this campaign if that region is important to you.

Under the goals tab you can also drill down to the ad group and keyword level to determine which aspects of your campaign are leading to conversions such as a newsletter sign-up or a donation and which ones may need to be tweaked or eliminated.

Part three of this four part series continues this Friday with Optimizing Your Google Grants Ads and Keywords.

On a recent vacation to New York, I was able to really take the time to visit the Bronx Zoo and see all the new baby animals in their glory. Normally when I visit the zoo it is for client meetings with the good folks at the Wildlife Conservation Society and I don’t get to see much besides the seals and a few deer on the way to their offices. (Yes there are deer at the zoo.)

Well, visiting the Zoo for real was quite impressive! I’m still wowed by how great it was and I had pretty good expectations having learned about the great work they do. Have you been? If not, the next time you find yourself in New York make it a priority (and be sure to plan your trip on the Web site, which we implemented last year).

If you can’t make it to New York, consider telling your friends and family who do live in New York to make sure they support efforts to keep funds from being cut for the Zoo as New York state deals with its budget shortfalls.

It’s nice to be able to see all the great work our clients do close. This client’s work is just a bit more cuddly than others. Keep up the good work.

Earlier this week, Facebook announced they will allow users to choose unique user names that can be used in vanity urls. For example, a user named Chaz Bono could choose the user name chaz.bono, and his new Facebook url would be facebook.com/chaz.bono.

Facebook users can lay claim to their ideal user name starting at 12:01 AM this Saturday, which is tonight! There is likely to be a bit of a rush around midnight, as many of the John Smiths on Facebook clamor for user names that resemble the one their parents gave them. Facebook is not requiring that users choose a handle that matches their actual name, so those with a sense of humor, political bent or perhaps just had too much to drink can choose to be recognized in any way they see fit (iheartthejonasbrothers, anyone?). The sticking point here is that Facebook won’t let you change your user name later, so it’s probably advisable to choose one that you won’t mind having for quite some time.

So how does this affect nonprofits? First, nonprofits with fan pages that don’t have friendly urls will want to snatch one up so it can be displayed all over home pages, emails, and marketing materials.

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Online video has become an increasingly popular tool used by non-profits to raise awareness. If you’re using video online and need some inspiration, or just want to see what others are doing, take a look at these non-profits who are educating and getting people involved through the use of video.

Interactive Campaigns

These campaigns encourage visitors to get involved by recording and contributing their own videos or photos:

• 24 Hours for Darfur has collected over 900 personal video appeals from celebrities, politicians, Darfurians, and citizens around the world. The campaign aims to strengthen Darfur advocacy and enable individuals to send their appeals to political leaders.
• Witness.org – The Hub is an interactive community for human rights, where you can upload your own content or watch, comment on and share content from others. They also provide a great Video Advocacy Toolkit.
• Stand Up 2 Cancer asked visitors to “Submit your own picture or video and tell the world what you stand for! Cancer affects all of us, what are you standing for?” and used the submissions to create this video.

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Recently, we relaunched an environmentally focused service learning program for the Wildlife Conservation Society on the Ning community platform. Teens for Planet Earth launched at the beginning of April (ok, I guess that isn’t so recent!) on Ning after beginning its life as a typical minisite some years ago. This project entailed migrating the existing site, enhancing the design and setting up the new community features.

For this client and project, Ning was a perfect choice, offering both the out of the box community features that a teen audience would expect with enough customization to satisfy the needs of the organization. Oh, and the price was right… just a few dollars to remove some ads and customize the domain name.

There have been discussions and comments about Ning’s value, ethics, and change in business model (this is just one of many posts out there). We’ve been monitoring this debate for a while, as we have a few clients on Ning. Ultimately the choice for this client was that Ning’s offering was more consistent with their needs, goals and situational realities. For another of our clients, the risks and impacts of working with Ning during their transition from social network platform provider to social network is more troubling.

Thankfully there are growing numbers of social networking tools sets – many free/open source, some commercial and costly, some good, and some bad. Seems like lately we’ve been asked to highlight the pros/cons of the various options, as more of our clients than ever consider whether to roll out their own social network. Products we’ve already reviewed include (in no particular order): Telligent Community Server, The Port, Higher Logic, Elgg, Grou.ps, KickApps, Collective X, and Pluck. Looks like the number of tools continues to grow and until a leader emerges, I have a feeling we’ll be asked to help clients make smart choices as part of our Software Evaluation service offering.

A few days ago, my colleague wrote about the effectiveness and Return on Investment (ROI) of adding social networking links to your site . Are your users clicking them? Are they driving traffic to your site? In reading his post, I could see years of frustration in implementing these kinds of share links. There’s so much to do – figuring out the link styles, getting the right icons, picking the right networks, changing out the networks when one becomes passe and another comes into vogue. It’s enough to make anyone ask, "are you sure you really want this?"

Luckily, the days of this kind of implementation being limited to the domain of the tech-savvy few are over. Thanks to services like AddThis and ShareThis , adding this kind of functionality on your site can be a simple half-hour operation. It’s important to consider the pros and cons of using these kinds of free services (their branding will appear on your site, limited customization and integration, the service getting your data, and the possibility that they could go out of business). But if you can stomach the cons, there’s no reason you can’t easily implement a social networking bar on your site.

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Take a look down at the bottom of this post.  See all those little icons?  You may know what they are for, you may not, but they are a feature that now appear on most blogs and an increasing number of Web sites.  The idea is that you can click one of those icons and, by doing so, submit a link to this post to the associated social networking site.  Why would you want to do this?  If you don’t know the answer to that question then I would suggest that there is no reason at all to do so.  But if the question you are pondering on is whether you should add these kinds of links to your Web site or blog, then by all means read on.

These icons are not merely shortcuts to the sites that the represent, they actually perform an action associated with the function of that site.  As such, they are more like little applications than links, per se.  I’d say that there are three main reasons to put an application-like shortcut to anything, social network or otherwise, on your website:

1. To give your visitors a quicker way to accomplish something they already do
2. To demonstrate that you are the kind of site that does this sort of thing
3. To educate your users and try to get them to start doing something about which didn’t already know

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