Blog

This quote from an article I read recently by Peyton Lindley made me think of a few of our clients lately who are struggling with their website organization. Instead of worrying about their user experience, they forced their web content to align with their mission-oriented areas (of course, we advised them not to do this but sometimes when 'the customer is always right,' our advice gets overruled). The problem is, while "Engagement" or "Empowerment" and "Think" may seem like very active and exciting words that you have spent many hours discussing in a board or staff meeting with your particular vision of how these words might help you achieve your goals, they are usually not at all intuitive or helpful to your user. 

Your website, although it content-wise about you and your organization, is only effective if it really is all about your user.  It might seem obvious to label something "Get Involved." And it's supposed to be, you know, obvious. You want your user to "get involved", right?

"The end user doesn't care how your company is structured." 

User interface matters, and therefore, labeling and the words you choose matter. And they matter a lot. Combined with intuitive design, they are your best hope to move your donors/patrons/constituents toward a committed action -- donating online, registering for a class, buying your product, etc. Don't make them work so hard.

The further extension of this, as Lindley points out in his article, "The Key To A Unified Brand: A Consistent UI," is to bring your design and messaging into one consistent voice. Be mindful that your web presence should speak the same language as your design and brochures and all of the other things that help you express a clear and united message.

One of the first questions we often get when talking to potential clients is “Why Joomla?” 

In modern web development a content management system of some sort is essential.  Web design firms take different approaches to this reality - some build their own, others use commercial solutions, and others utilize open-source software.  

When we first went into this web design business, building static HTML sites worked for a while.  However, we soon realized our clients needed a way to update their sites themselves, and for most people using Dreamweaver or editing HTML wasn’t practical.  So we looked at our options for  content management systems.  For us, building our own wasn’t practical, we didn’t have the time or resources, and soon realized there was no reason, since many solid solutions already existed.  We also focused on open-source software since many of clients are nonprofit and appreciate being as cost effective as possible.  

After evaluating many of the open source we settled on Joomla! which at the time was a relatively new CMS.  What we found:

• Although Joomla! was a new project, it was a fork of Mambo, which was a stable and mature CMS.
• Joomla! seemed to have a engaged and active developer community.  Over the years this proved to be true, as Joomla has continued to make vast improvements.  With the release of Joomla 1.7 this year, Joomla took another giant leap in quality. 
• Joomla had a good balance of ease of use and flexibility.   Some CMSs are much simpler and streamlined, however at the price of being rigid in their structure and setup.
• Many extensions were already available.  Over the years the extensions and add-ons available for Joomla have increased in quality immensely - there are now excellent extensions for calendars, e-commerce, galleries, multimedia, online donations and much more.  These add-ons create features and functionality on a website that only a few years ago would have been cost-prohibitive. 

Five years later, we are very pleased with our choice.  We now have over 120 clients using Joomla and managing their websites, some on a daily basis.   We are able to offer robust and feature rich websites for clients on a budget that otherwise wouldn’t allow it.  Joomla has become a leader in Open Source software, and is used by millions of people throughout the world.   This large community of users insures a bright future for Joomla

Our friends at Local First Utah have developed a short video about how important it is to the ecomomic impact on communities to support local businesses.

Several times a week, we talk to clients about how to prepare and think about written content on the web. As a writer, I have created pieces for a variety of situations from grant applications to personal essays. I've discovered that writing for the web is its own animal.

I tell my clients:

• People scan.
• They don't read.
• News cycles are short.
• Tweets teach us to say what we mean in 140 characters.
• You may not even be reading this as you scan this page for something you're really interested in.

You get the idea. Writing for the web takes some strategy about how words become visual cues. These ideas are presented succinctly by Pamela Wilson at Copyblogger with her entry, "8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content."

My advice?

• Read the article.
• Acquire a new style of writing.

Outcome?

You will be more successful at communicating with People Who Scan (which is most of us these days on the web).