BuildSite The March 2011 meeting of Public Policy Communicators NYC focused on Website Impact Without Redesign – What are some of the most important functional elements you need to have on your website to drive traffic and increase audience interaction, but that don’t require an expensive, all-consuming site make-over? Jai Sen led our discussion.  He is a digital communications consultant with deep experience in interactive media, website and application development, and user experience design. He has led a wide variety of projects in the commercial and nonprofit sectors, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation site redesign, and has most recently been an integral part of the team that relaunched the Atlantic Philanthropies website. He is currently working on the digital presence for the D5 coalition, an organization formed by grantmakers promoting diversity and inclusion in philanthropy. Add-ons Not a Substitute for Design Sen began by differentiating the elements we would be talking about from an actual redesign, saying that a redesign constitutes a total re-think of how you present and structure information online, it is usually time-consuming and budget-intensive and it addresses goals larger than simply driving traffic and increasing user interaction. I have to admit that I thought the assembled participants would largely comprise communicators who simply didn’t have the money to do a redesign and were looking for some low-cost methods of sprucing sites up a bit.  But when Sen polled the room to ask how many had recently or were currently involved in total redesign, almost all hands went up.  So clearly folks interested in this topic aren’t looking to avoid a redesign, but are really looking for the latest tools and extra functionality to build upon existing sites. Three Ways to Add Impact Sen next listed three categories of add-ons that he would be helping the group to explore:
  1. “Basics” that build on content already on a site or assets (like images) owned by an organization but not in use
  2. Functional elements that can be “embedded” from outside sources
  3. Plug-ins and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, a way of bringing outside sites’ feature sets into one’s own site)
Before getting into the first area of add-ons, Sen made the case that it is important for nonprofits and foundations to have a clear understanding of who is currently coming to the site, what they are coming for and what types of elements appeal to them.  He strongly advocated using Google Analytics and other measurement tools available on Facebook and YouTube to get a snapshot of existing traffic and an accurate starting point to build your add-on plans and then to measure the results of your experiments in adding functionality. In the “Basics” area, Sen focused on blog functionality, which he made clear is not necessarily about producing lots of editorial content, but really about serialized and timely presentation of content of many varieties. He said the blog function is “easy publishing with lots of impact.” Serialized publishing (blogs functions) are easily installed at little cost. They also vastly improve organizations’ abilities to optimize social networking capacity. Any timely content can be presented in blog format, from events to news, and users are familiar and comfortable with it. Sen showed an example of the Japan Society, whose home page appears to be based on a serial publishing (blog) function.  He noted how the page, despite its unusually large number of navigation options, appears visually dynamic and always fresh.  He said it also nicely demonstrates the next area of “basics” that he intended to discuss: adding lots of big-impact pictures. While he didn’t put forth the platitude that a picture tells a thousand words, he certainly demonstrated that this is an eternal truth as he showed examples of the Robert Wood Johnson home page that makes good use of pictures that show the implications of its work to help draw in visitors and navigate the vast array of information on the site. Sen discussed how the Robert Wood Johnson redesign project was about moving from a text-heavy, dry look and feel to one that made the foundation’s work and mission immediately clear and apparent through the use of compelling photos of the organization’s work. Sen says that images are easy to manage and insert into online content and instantly enhance the “reading” experience.  You can use free services like Flickr and Picassa to host images, but such services can provide many other tools that he would discuss later. He then showed a screen shot of the Rainforest Alliance home page, which, like the Robert Wood Johnson site, makes good use of high-impact photos to make the experience of using the site not only more appealing, but also easier to relate to. Audience members added from their own experience that you can obtain images through your own work or through sites like iStockPhoto and Creative Commons licenses. Sen commented that Creative Commons licenses (which allow anyone to use copyrighted material, as long ans the owner or creator of the material is acknowledged) can be a great way to raise awareness about your organization and even drive traffic. Just make sure that you do indeed get permission to use any image you use on your site and clearly indicate ownership of images you put online by using a copyright notice or Creative Commons statement. Sen moved next to the category of “embeddables.” Among the most common and essential for nonprofits and foundations are “social shares” that create easy links to Facebook, Twitter and other social media, and allow users to easily share your content through those mechanisms.  He said these embeddables are very easy to add to a site and are really just image links.  He showed an example on The Atlantic Philanthropies site that has prominent embedded social media icons and talked about some of the successes that organization has had with them. The next type of “embeddable” he discussed was video.  He made the case that using a service like YouTube or Vimeo is better than hosting video on your site for a number of reasons, mostly because you don’t have to worry about hosting considerations like bandwidth since the videos are housed on (and streamed from) the outside service. Audience members raised questions about whether YouTube or Vimeo is preferable. Sen has recommended YouTube to most of his clients because it allows you to customize the video playing page to look like your own branded site and has more users that may find your organization through keyword searches.  Still, he said, Vimeo is a good option that many nonprofits are finding useful.  Either is very easy to incorporate into your organization’s site.  They also allow for statistical analysis of traffic and easy sharing. Slide shows are also increasingly popular and easy-to-deploy tools that lots of nonprofits are using.  And, users are much more likely to click on a link to a slide show than to view a video.  Sen said that Flickr and PictoBrowser provide two excellent, easily embeddable tools to create and display slide shows.  The shows can be simple pictures with captions, or they can be created with timed advancement and voiceover and music. It just depends on how much time and effort you want to put in. He showed another example from The Atlantic Philanthropies site where a slideshow was seamlessly integrated into the site.  He also showed an example of a YouTube video embedded on The Atlantic Philanthropies website, which uses YouTube to house all its video. He said that, because Atlantic used YouTube to host the video and had tagged the video with lots of keywords, it had driven traffic to the organization’s website, thanks to YouTube’s large user base. There are other embeddables that allow organizations to give site visitors audio and podcasts.  The group talked a bit about embeddables that allow a site to display publications in a magazine format with flipping pages and stunning graphics.  One of the best, and easiest to use formats for doing that is Issuu. Like YouTube, Issuu hosts the publication and can drive more users to your site when people search its site on keywords. Sen then moved our discussion into the third category of add-on: Plug-ins and APIs.  Many are familiar with APIs like Twitter feeds that show up-to-the-second display of how your organization or key topics are being discussed on Twitter. Also in the API category are Facebook Connect features like showing on your site Facebook members who have “liked” your organization so that viewers can see their friends that also follow you on Facebook, or allowing visitors to sign in to your site with their Facebook logins. The group spent a generous amount of time talking the many great attributes of Google Maps and the related APIs that nonprofits and foundations can use with it to display information in geographic form – for example showing where projects are located, the reach of an organization’s membership, or the prevalence of certain social conditions. Sen also touched upon the Google Charts API, which generates charts and graphs instantly and can be used to dynamically display data. He said the main plug-in features nonprofits and foundations should be aware of are those that facilitate community and social features for popular content management systems like Drupal and WordPress, two platforms that are extremely popular with foundations and nonprofits. As is nearly always the case with PPC, the conversation continued on past the conversation leader’s presentation and brought up specific challenges and questions from assembled members.  A good deal of the conversation looped back to the idea of doing good analytics to know what your audience uses and likes and providing more of it.  Sen said, “you want to give the audience more of what they want, make it useful, accessible and shareable.” Sen’s presentation is available online in pdf format at: www.sen-associates.com/ppc Additionally, The Communications Network’s Bruce Trachtenberg later shared this very helpful and extensive list of “57 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Website” http://www.dhcommunications.com/2011/03/57-things-you-can-do-right-now-to-improve-your-website/ Check it out.  It has lots of great ideas.