Blog

When non-profit organizations are young and bootstrapping, they generally don't have any budget to pay for a professional website.  Fortunately there's almost always a volunteer around who will take on the job of making your organization a site.

We work with a lot of non-profits who are making the big leap from "free volunteer-maintained website" to "cold hard cash money website".  It's rarely as smooth a transition as we'd like, and a lot of that grief comes from the way the free sites were set up.  Some tips to save heartache:

Register your own domain.

Register your domain name(s) under an account set up specifically for your organization.  Pay for it in your organization's name -- it's cheap at the big places like NameCheap.com or GoDaddy.com.

Why? 
Transferring domain registrations is a hassle at the best of times, so start right and make sure that your organization (which uses the domain) actually owns the domain.  Having it registered by a well-meaning volunteer in their own name might seem simpler right now, but trust me on this one.  If someone wants to cover the cost of the registration, that's brilliant. Have them donate $20 to your org to cover the costs rather than paying for it themselves.

Use email addresses @yournewdomain.com.

If you are running PaisleysForPeace.org, use info@paisleysforpeace.org, not sweetpaisleylover@yahoo.com.  You just bought a domain!  Use it.

Why?
If I was feeling snippy, I would say "Because no one should ever give money to someone using a free @yahoo address".  The more salient business point is that using an address at your own domain builds brand recognition, is more professional, and is just plain easier for people to remember.  Even if your organization is 2 people working on a card table in your dining room, you can set up info@, marketing@, donations@ and so on.  Mail sent to those addresses may all end up in the same inbox, but when you're small it can help make your org seem big, and when you're big it will help keep you organized.

Your site needs to be built in a Content Management System (CMS).

A CMS will allow you (or someone else in your organization, including your plucky volunteer) to easily change the content of your site.  You don't need to know how to program or how to read code.  The skill level you'll need is right around "can write a letter in a word processor", which is great because, hello, you have no free time. You are busy trying to save the world!

Why?
The first years of your organization are probably when it will undergo the most change.  At the simplest level, a service that you currently offer only to "cats and dogs" may soon expand to "cats, dogs, small rodentia, and ferrets".  You may outgrow your dining room and move into your own office, or a shared non-profit space.  You may grow or adjust your mission radically, and you should be able to update your site to reflect the changes.

The CMS should be popular.

Some of the simplest and most popular are Wordpress, Tumblr, and Blogger*.  Insist that your volunteer use one of these services (or another that you're comfortable with).  Your intrepid volunteer may be a student or otherwise eager to use this project to explore a new system, or maybe they want to build the site from scratch to teach themselves how to do it.  Whee!  We're all for learning!  But not at the expense of your website.  Be firm.

* "But this is a website, not a blog!" you might point out.  That's OK.  A blog is just an organizational structure, and your volunteer should be perfectly capable of using the CMS to make informational pages instead of a blog.

Why?
Popular services mean tons of support available (sometimes from the company itself, or from other users), and lots of people who are familiar with using the service.  If your volunteer moves away or gets poisoned by a platypus spur, who's going to make changes to your site?  It's like buying a Ford instead of a Lada -- there are lots of mechanics around who know their way around a Ford.  What's a Lada, you ask?  Exactly. 

Your site should hosted by a 3rd party, not the volunteer.

Do not under any circumstances allow the hosting of your site to be on anyone's private server.  Do not let your volunteer "just tuck the hosting in under their own account" in order to save money.

Why?
Whoever controls the hosting controls your site. They're like your site's landlord, and you want to be your own landlord.  If you're using Tumblr or Blogger or Wordpress.com, you're golden because hosting is part of the whole package with those accounts. If you are using a Wordpress installation [WP can be run on WP servers, or off your own server] or some other CMS, insist on controlling and paying for the hosting yourself.  It doesn't have to be expensive, and having complete control over your site is worth the expense. 

Summary

It is worth the small amount of extra work and money to make sure that you have full control of your domain and site. Hopefully this advice will help you and your organization build a solid first website and put you in a good position for an upgrade when the time comes.

One of my favorite Dilbert cartoons of all time [am I dating myself?  Do the kids these days still like the Dilbert?] is this one from way back in 1995:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is today's mauve-RAM-database: you can't peruse a magazine or business website without reading about how important SEO is, and how you need to spend lots of moolah and energy working on it.

I think that's crap, and I'm really happy to read so many blog posts recently who share my view.  Here are some snippets from my favorites:

51Bits: Why I Don't Care about SEO

...There are two contributing factors to a search-friendly product: good, readable content [and] clean, semantic markup. [...] Almost every site I’ve worked on has reached a PageRank of 5 or higher over a relatively short period of time simply by following these two fundamental principles of producing and presenting good content for the web. You can’t fake good content and you can only exploit the search engines for so long before they and their users catch up to you.

LeahCreates: Let's Give Them Something to Talk About (or, Why I don't care about SEO)

...Small business owners (among others) too often fall victim to a rather charming sales pitch about how their website traffic can be improved with a little bit of SEO therapy. [...] But let’s face it: nothing has ever been as awesome as making a genuine connection with your audience.

Matt Gemmel: SEO for Non-dicks

The key thing to understand is that the rules of SEO aren’t magic or arbitrary. They’re based on the goals of a search engine, which is to find relevant results. Relevance implies genuineness, and genuineness implies trust. So, shockingly, you should try to make your site’s content trustworthy, genuine and relevant. All of the rules have come about due to their utility in detecting those three positive metrics. Good SEO is a by-product of not being a dick on the internet.

I love that all three articles come from different perspectives but arrive at basically the same conclusions -- which are, incidentally, the same things that we tell our clients when they ask us about SEO:

• There's a bit of structural code-level stuff that makes sure your site is search-engine friendly and google-bot-readable.  We take care of that; we wouldn't even really know how to build a site that *didn't* take care of that stuff.
   
• Write good content so that people want to come back and read more and share it with their friends.  If your site does not have a blog or other often-updated content, that's OK.  Write content that answers the questions your users are asking -- what are your store hours?  What kind of services do you perform?  How do I get ahold of you?

Thanks to Matt & Leah & 51Bits (AKA Chris) for their great articles!

Many people will tell you that turkeys are not that bright.  I am here to tell you that those people are absolutely correct.  Last week one of our baby turkeys got a scratch on her foot.  A tiny little scratch, not even a single drop of blood.  But a scratched foot is sort of itchy, and sort of red.  So what's a baby bird to do but peck at it relentlessly until the whole foot is gross and bloody and raw?  Ew.

So we brought said baby turkey inside for the morning and wrapped up her foot (feet, actually, because by this time she had started attacking both) for protection.  We don't usually name our birds, but sometimes they name themselves.  Meet BandAids:

BandAids picks at the bandaids, but the ones we have are crazy sticky so she's staying protected.  We had to keep her inside for a few hours to make sure she hadn't managed to pick up an infection, and the only time she stays quiet is when she is sitting on a lap or a shoulder [Note:  turkey on shoulder + earrings == DANGER].

Given her druthers, BandAids prefers to sleep inside my armpit.  Ideally inside my shirt, but she has scratchy little claws so I put the kibosh on that right quick.  Apparently it is just like sleeping under a mom turkey's wing.

This is my life: Drupal, PHP, CSS, mom to small poultry.

We're raising turkeys this year (instead of chickens), and we have a hodgepodge of heritage breeds.  From squinting at pictures on breeder websites, I think we might have some Black Spanish and some Narragansetts?  Who knows!  We'll figure it out when they're older.

Baby turkeys are really great because they do everything very intensely.  If they are hungry, they are STARVING.  If they are sleepy, they will fall asleep right where they're standing.  Including in the food dish.

They are officially 9 days old right now and have just about doubled in size since we got them.  When it's sunny out we put them outside (inside a chicken-wire fence) and they spend the entire time twirtling happily and eating grass.  They also play a fair amount of turkey football, which looks like this: "I have a dead leaf!" "Gimme!  Now I have a dead leaf! I will run around like a crazypants." "Oh HO now where is your leaf?  In my mouth is where!"  and so on.

This morning one of them learned that if he flaps juuuuuust right he'll end up standing on top of the food jar.  From there it is only a short leap to freedom (AKA "the living room floor"), and no good can come of that. Stay inside your brooder, little guys! You'll be banished to the duck house soon enough!

Here's our first morning glory of the season.  You might think, isn't it late July?  And to you I would say:  we are way up north.   Our plants don't get that whole "April showers" thing; instead they get late-April snow.  So a lovely blue flower like this one is nice sign of summer. 

We are also full-up on bee balm (pretty!), oregano (tasty!), and so so many peas and green beans.  Curiously, not very much of our peppermint and spearmint came back this year, but we do have an overflowingly large patch of catnip.  Which would be great if we were (or had) cats.  Alas, instead it is just pretty and not so tasty to humans tongues.  Yeah for gardens and growing things!

The nice folks from Independent Power were here yesterday installing our new inverter, after the old one was killed by lightning.  It was cloudy when they arrived, and then it started pouring.  There is something funny about solar guys working in the rain.

Our inverter is made by Solectria, and in the course of the rain yesterday, our new warranty card got all wet.  We have to let it dry out and then send it in, because it says right on there "Warranty not valid until this card is sent in". 

Really, Solectria?  Is it 1985 down in Massachusetts?  You're known for your fancy web-based solar monitoring systems; it's crazy that I have to fill out this little paper card just so someone at HQ can type my info into a database.  This is what webforms were made for!  (In fact, Solectria, please contact us if you need help setting that up).

In other news, the rain is scheduled to continue for another few days.  Good things that love the rain:  the beans, peas, carrots and other tastiness in the garden!  Bad things that love the rain:  the weeds in the garden! 

In my desire to overextend this website-as-house metaphor, today I'm writing about Drupal and timberframing.

Timberframing and Drupal:  Heavy and Adaptable

There are more ways to construct a house than you can shake a yardstick at:  adobe, concrete, steel, stick-built, SIPs, and tons more.  We think of Drupal as the post-and-beam construction of web development:  there's a steep learning curve for the builders, but when done correctly, it is powerful, extensible, and awesome.

(Totally not our chicken house).

Is Drupal overkill for a small website?  Probably. 

A 4-5 page site could easily be built in Wordpress or Dreamweaver, but what looks like overkill now will look like foresight next year when you want to expand your site.

Website-as-House Metaphor:  Our Poultry House

Here at webmeadow HQ, we keep a flock of poultry.  When we moved here, our birds had no place to live, so we built them a house.  Poultry shelter needs are pretty undemanding:  a dry, safe space out of the wind (and electric fencing to keep away the more toothy and hungry visitors).  We could have bought one of those wee garden sheds you see in the parking lot of the Home Depot, or we could have cobbled together something out of conventional lumber and plywood.

Instead, we built a timberframe structure.  We called the lumbermill down the road (Poulsens we loooooove you!) and they delivered our materials the next week, cut-to-order: 6"x6" hemlock posts and beams, with 3"x6" rafters.  The bird house ended up being 8'x16', which was also way overkill for a flock of (at the time) 11 ducks.  It's a hefty house!

A year later, when we decided to raise 35 chickens, there was plenty of space for all the birds together.  When we decided to put on a living green roof rather than shingles, the beams and rafters were plenty strong enough to handle it.  When we decided to extend out the rafters so we could keep more tools out of the weather, we didn't need to do anything to the underlying structure of the house.  And when we move, the house can hold goats, dogs, lawnmowers, or whatever the next owner needs.

Those beams and rafters seemed comically large when we built the bird house, but now we think we were being very clever and ahead of our time.

The future is never as far away as it seems.

That's why we build sites with Drupal, even the small ones.  Sure, sometimes it might seem a bit extravagant to use such a powerful system for a smaller site, but you'll be happy when you need to add a custom photo gallery / shopping cart / turkey roost and your site says, "Yes, please!"

----
Beautiful post-and-beam picture from Vermont Timber Works; sometimes I go to their gallery just to drool.

Want to learn post-and-beam construction?  Or how to build a canoe with your bare hands? Check out Yestermorrow Design/Build School; if you take a class you can come visit us nearby!

Whenever I chat with people about websites, I always come back to the idea that building a website is like building a house.  This will be the first post in a series designed to explain some basic concepts about building websites while making you sick of my house metaphor.

Project Budgets, and Why You Need One

People get squirrely when we talk about money.  I think the assumption is that if they tell us they have a budget of $10,000, we will come back with a proposal for $9990, even if it is only $4000 worth of work*.  Realistically, though, budgets simply help us determine which solutions will work for the project and your organization.

* We don't do that.  Honest.  If you have $10k to spend and only $4k worth of work, we will charge you $4k, and then spend a bunch of time figuring out what other awesome project you could pay us to build with your extra $$.  We're thinking long-term relationship here, not take-the-money-and-run.

Website-as-House Metaphor:  The Kitchen

Let's talk about kitchens.  When you're building a house, you need a kitchen.  What do you do in your kitchen? 

• Make food
• Make drinks
• Store food
• Cleanup
• Socialize
• Eat food

These functions can all be addressed in many great ways, and below are a couple examples.

1. Small space + small budget:

   

   Nice, huh?  Streamlined, simple, pretty plants!  Maybe you're not going to socialize in there, but it does everything else that a kitchen needs to do with a minimum of fuss.

2. Large space + large budget:

   

   Woo!  U-shaped island, open shelves, tons of storage, built-in seating, the works!   This kitchen meets all the needs listed above, too, but with a bit more oomph and luxury.  I bet you didn't even know you wanted a wall-mounted oven.  (Tip:  you do!  They're awesome.)

The Right Kitchen

When you're looking for the small, functional kitchen for yourself, the first solution is fantastic.  Similarly, the giant kitchen is a lovely solution for a larger house with family members cooking, eating, and socializing at the same time.  The key is getting the kitchen that's right for you, and not the large kitchen in your tiny New York apartment (or vice versa).

That's it.  A budget helps us create a solution that works for your needs.  Are we talking galley-kitchen, with 18sq.ft. of counter space and reusing existing appliances?  Or are we talking giant island, granite countertops, brand new cooktop and hood fan?  Both will meet the need of "place to cook meals and clean up" and both will be beautiful and a pleasure to work in, but neither one is right for everyone.

[Pictures shamelessy stolen from Ikea.com]

We came away unscathed last week, while large swaths of New Hampshire and Vermont were closed due ridiculously high rivers and roads sliding into the nothingness.

Or so we thought.

David Palumbo, our great solar installer from Independent Power, just left with our inverter in hand.  It turns out that one of last week's lightning strikes fried the inverter just by touching down nearby.  Amazingly enough, the panels are completely fine -- the lightning arrester on the pole didn't even trigger.

The unit is now on it's way to Solectria for repair, and we have no way to convert sunlight into energy that we can use, so hopefully we'll get it back all pretty and working.

Now for the joke:  what does a fried power inverter look like?  Exactly the same!  Except that the tiny, hard-to-read, dark display screen becomes completely black.

We look forward to There and Back Again, An Inverter's Tale.

Up where we are located, commonly called the "North Country" or "North of the Notch" in New Hampshire, or the "Northeast Kingdom" if you look across the river to Vermont, broadband service is.... well, let's just say limited.   Public-access computers are few and far between:  our local libraries have a couple each, but libraries are generally open during business hours and, at least in our town, bear the brunt of budget and cost-cutting measures.  One thing we do have lots of is volunteer fire departments.  Within 30 minutes of webmeadow HQ there are 3 small town libraries, but 16 fire stations.

Turns out that West Virginia is in pretty much the same situation as rural New England.  So the creative-thinkers at non-profit Future Generations got a federal grant to put public-access computers into the volunteer fire stations in WV.   Volunteer fire stations often serve as de-facto community centers (the picture at right is our local fire station, right in the center of town and sharing a parking lot with the church and grange hall), and bringing broadband to fire stations is a good plan in its own right -- these are people in charge of emergency services.  They need to be able to give and get information quickly.  Our own fire station didn't even have phone service until a few years ago.

Read the whole story of the WV Fire Station computer centers at PC World.

And the computers are running Linux!  (Because it's cheaper, and for basics like web browsing and word processing there's no learning curve.)

And in an age of moving-to-the-big-city this helps bring young people back in direct contact with their Volunteer Fire crews.

Win-win, win-win-win!  A really cool project, and one that could be awesomely implemented on a broader scale.