Stuff goes on at your organization, and you need to tell people about it. That’s frequently the level of consideration people give their website calendar. That’s selling yourself short. Calendar tools, especially those that work on content management systems like Drupal, are full of features that can help you engage more people at your site and your events.

1. Automatically publish and expire events.

Sometimes you want to add events that don’t show up until they’re relevant. Maybe there’s a special launch you don’t want anyone to know about until a particular date, but you don’t want to have to remember to add it later. By scheduling your event to appear on a certain date, you don’t have to. You can also similarly set events to expire.

2. Subscribe to new events via RSS feeds.

If you have an RSS-using audience, they can subscribe to your calendar’s automatic RSS feed to find out what’s happening as soon as you add it.

3. Feature special events on your homepage.

Some events are really special, and you want them to show up on a particular page of your website, such as the homepage. You can have a Featured check box that lets you highlight events without having to redundantly enter them in two places.

4. Export events in iCalendar format.

ICalendar format allows you to share event information and display events in different programs, such as Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. You can have a tool that lets people automatically convert your website’s events in iCal format so they can easily add it to their personal calendars.

5. Add a date-picker to the homepage.

Rather than a plain link that says Calendar, add a little date-picker that lets people choose a date in the month and see what’s happening then.

6. Highlight what’s happening this hour, this day or this week.

Websites can look much more active if you can see what’s going on in the immediate future. Your website can automatically create lists to show what’s happening in set timeframes.

7. Set regular events to recur.

If you have a training session that happens every Tuesday of every month, you can add it once and have it appear on every Tuesday thereafter.

8. Create event categories.

Some of your events may appeal only to staff members, some may relate to holidays. You can create categories on each of your events to create classifications that show events that match only those categories.

9. RSVP.

If you have an event coming up that you need people to RSVP to, you can do it directly from your calendar.

10. Sign-up.

Similarly, you might need people to register for an event. Why not include the sign-up form directly in the event itself?

[Photo credit: Vintage Wedding Postcard ~ Bride & Groom, on Flickr]

So you’ve decided to start a blog – good for you! Blogs are important ways for you to build a faithful following and enrich your site with valuable content.

But before you open up your first free Blogger or Wordpress account, think about how that blog will integrate with your overall communications strategy and online presence. Websites and blogs should support each other, not compete. Too many efforts are siloed, the blog hanging off the side like an extra appendage, or vice versa.

A few ideas for integrating them more closely:

Publish blog entries directly into your website. If what you’re writing in the blog relates to your site, make it show up there. Vice versa, if you’re creating content within your main website that could be useful for your blog readers, republish.

Share tags. Tags, or categories, can be shown on both website material and blog entries. Link them together.

Make the blog appear within the framework of your website. The Talance blog is actually on Wordpress while our website is on Drupal. But we’ve made them look the same so you never really feel like you’re leaving our website.

Create a related links section at the bottom of blog entries that refer back to related material on your main website.

Create a Feedback page on your blog that links back to your website feedback page.

Many nonprofit organizations that are beginning to adopt Web 2.0 technologies consider them the “cool” part of their online communication. They look at them as a way to engage younger or larger audiences or to project an image of hipness.

But the reason social tools such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr have become so popular is that they make it incredibly easy for people to work together. Yet, if you look at the internal structure of many organizations, you’ll see that they communicate with one another through phone calls, printed notes and in-person meetings. True, there’s no substitue for face-to-face communication, but social tools can make it much easier to share information among your workmates.

For example, every time we have a meeting at Talance HQ, we have our intranet chat open to facilitate sending links or snippets of documents back and forth. We open a bulletin board for every project so the whole team can communicate about it, and we have a record of everything that was said. Our wiki keeps track of standard procedures and methodologies so we can access them any time, and make revisions when necessary. We use these tools in the office and with our team members who live across the country, and we do it because it’s entirely practical.

The majority of our social tools are built into our website (you do have a CMS, don’t you?). It’s the perfect place to build out a business, because everybody knows your web address, and it’s all centrally stored and accessible online.

Think about what you can do to make it easier for your employees to communicate with one another, and then give them the tools they need. You’ll very well find your organization runs better just by opening up new avenues of communication.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page to submit it. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

Last week, I mentioned one of the most frequently asked questions we receive is: “What is Drupal?” A close second is: “What’s the difference between Drupal and Wordpress?” This is closely related to the frequently asked, “Which is better: Drupal or Wordpress?”

Drupal, which you learned last week, is a content management system (CMS) that you can use as your website. It’s also great at handling big gobs of information, like contact databases, or handling things like online shopping. It can also have a blog in it.

Wordpress, on the other hand, is a CMS that’s purpose-built for blogging. There are some pretty sophisticated Wordpress sites that can do a lot, but it really excels at blogs. It handles new posts (like the one you’re reading right now) and comments excellent. It also has really great SEO.

In summary, Drupal is great if you want a scalable, easy-to-use, super-powerful website. Wordpress is nice if your primary goal is to publish blog articles and develop some conversation around those.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page to submit it. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

One of the most common questions we’re asked here at Talance is: What is Drupal? It’s the technology that envelopes our every single day, but that doesn’t mean that everyone – or the common Web user – knows what it is. But it’s worth understanding, because a website built on Drupal can make your life a lot easier.

First off, let’s get the name out of the way. “Drupal” is a non-grammatical variation of the Dutch word “druppel,” which means “droplet.” It was invented by Dries Buytaert, who is Dutch, in 2001. It’s pronounced “DREW-pull.” Rumor has it he tried to call it “dorp,” which means “village” in Dutch, but made a typo when he registered it.

Drupal, in a phrase, is an open-source content management system. Now hold on, all of you now thinking, “But what do ‘open source’ and ‘content management system’ mean?” I’ll decompress that phrase.

Content management system

A content management system (CMS) is a used to manage the content of a website. It allows someone who may not know anything about how to create or edit webpages with languages like HTML, to manage the creation, modification, and removal of content from a website without needing the expertise of a Webmaster. Most CMSs include publishing, format management, revision control, indexing, search and retrieval.
(From SearchSOA.com Definitions)

Open source

Open source software is usually developed as a public collaboration and made freely available. It is intended to be freely shared and possibly improved and redistributed by others.
(From SearchEnterpriseLinux.com Definitions)

Those two definitions get to the core of what Drupal is. It’s a free piece of software that anybody can use to build and manage a website without being a technical genius.

The “free” part means that you don’t have to pay for license fees, as you would with a system built by a company like Microsoft. You only pay development costs, which boils down to much more powerful websites for much less money.

Websites built with Drupal aren’t any old brochure websites – you can really build on to these. Drupal websites incorporate blogs, forums, e-commerce functionality, contact management, donation management, social networking tools and a whole lot more. Here’s a sample of the things we regularly put into the websites we build.

Too many of the non-profits and religious organizations that come to us think of their communications strategies as one-way streets that never intersect. While they may send messages through their website, Twitter account or Facebook Page, many never ask for feedback or take steps to build a conversation. Instead, they’re focused on one-way announcements of ticket sales or special initiatives.

Usually, those messages never intersect with a blended communications strategy. You may see that a church has a Facebook account – but only if you happen to come across it on Facebook.

The important thing to remember is that someone who might be really interested in what you do might not be a Facebook or Twitter user. So that means that if you put all your energy into Facebook or Twitter or any other singular thing, they’ll never find you. Spread it around.

Here are a few good examples of how to blend different communications initiative:

Detailed Twitter Background

Add a custom background on your Twitter page that has information on how to find your website or subscribe to your blog. Check out ours.

Double-Duty Tweets

Send messages on Twitter that point people to useful information on your website or blog. Rather than, “Did you know we have a blog?” try something compelling like a snippet from a recent blog post or initiative, “We’ve placed a bounty on Michael Vick. You read that right. Get details.”

Use Facebook Connect

This plug-in, which works with Drupal and Wordpress, in addition to other websites, lets members log onto your website using their Facebook login and share information in both places at once.

[This little gem is the text of issue our e-mail newsletter subscribers just received. Want a slice of this foryourself? Sign up now.]

Hi, Friends.

Websites, you know, are never done. They’re as close as you can get to living and breathing for something made of lines of code stored on computers around the globe. Trends change, organizations’ missions change and outside forces change too.

One big outside force recently changed, namely Internet Explorer 8. Any time a Web browser receives a major upgrade, and people are encouraged to switch over, it means that old websites may no longer work properly. Even if you have chosen to let IE8 (which has its own host of problems) drift by without you, not all the people who are coming to your website have.

It’s important to take the time on a regular basis to make sure your website is keeping up with the technology around it. It’s a job that requires regular tending, but we’ve made it easier for you by assembling the Healthy Website Checklist you can follow.

http://talance.com/healthy-website-checklist

Bookmark it or print it out so you remember to keep making sure your website still works.

Of course, keeping websites ship-shape and Bristol fashion is one of our specialties at Talance, so give us a holler (888-810-9109 or use this form) if we can help breathe new life into your website.

Your Internet pal,

Monique

The Rachel Coalition provides services for victims of domestic violence, but its website was limited to a few informational pages and uninspiring design. Here’s how we helped.

»Read more

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Talance has helped clients launch scores of projects, ranging from websites to online newsletters to CRM projects. Please click here to schedule a time to talk about your next project or to request a proposal.

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Don’t keep this good stuff all to yourself. Click that Forward button and send to a friend.

Don’t forget these gems from a year ago, June 2008, on the Talance Web Tools Blog:

Technologically Impaired
How many of the nonprofits we come into contact with are struggling to keep up with technology

CMS Surveys
A few good ways to find out how and why other organizations are using CMSs

Meet AskMeFi – My Favorite Forum
Nothing says “huge brain” to me more than MetaFilter

This week I’m writing about how you can clean up your website for spring (click here to see all spring cleaning stories), and one of the most important tasks you can do is sweep out the dust bunnies. In digital terms, that means find and remove your dead links.

Nothing kills the success of a website faster than the reek of links that lead only to Page Not Found errors. Whether the link goes to somewhere in your site or to someone else’s site, it only takes one before a website visitor assumes the website is untended and inaccurate and never comes again.

That’s why cleaning up these pages should be an ongoing task – always stay vigilant against dead spaces on a daily basis or on an as-it-happens basis. You should still do a careful analysis at least twice a year to identify pages you may have missed or locate pages that are not technically dead, but that are no longer accurate. Those you can tag for a content cleanup as the next step of your spring cleaning.

Here’s how to go through your link check:

1. Get Clicking. If your site is small, just a few pages, then you can simply systematically go to every page and click on every link. This method is a great opportunity to evaluate where those links go and make sure they’re still appropriate.

2. Use a link-checking service. You can use these as an online service, or you can download software that does this for you. Here’s a website with several options. This method is most useful when you have many pages or links to many other websites and it’s impractical to check every single page on your own. These services will not evaluate your content, however, so you may have to check most pages at some point to make sure your copy is still up to date.

3. Move to a content management system. A content management system won’t save you from dead links, but it will make the job of maintenance easier. With a CMS as your platform, you can do things like set up a cron job, which can automatically seek out internal dead links. And you have power to create an alias, so you can easily redirect links to new pages or new content.

4. Set up a Report a Dead Link page where your website visitors and staff can do the reporting for you. You can include a form in the website footer that people can use to notify you of a dead link. Or if your site contains many links, create a button next to each one that leads to the link-reporting page (see what we did on the www.jesnapdc.org website for an example).

5. Rewrite your Page Not Found page. No matter how vigilant you are at keeping your links up to date, they’ll still change. You might move a page, delete a page or someone else’s website might go down at any time. So make sure that when someone clicks an inactive link within your site, they come to a friendly message directing them to your search tool or your homepage.

Make sure you perform a link-check for all your web presences, from your website to your blog to your Facebook page – anywhere you have links. Of all spring cleaning tasks, this one has the biggest payoff, and skipping it can be the most detrimental.

Check back tomorrow to pick up the next article in our series on spring cleaning your website. Make sure you don’t miss anything by subscribing to the RSS news feed. Not sure what an RSS feed is? Click here.

A publisher asked me the other day for advice on how to pare down the number of programs, software and tools his company uses. He is using a graphics program, a workflow program, a listserv and websites – that’s just what I know about. There’s probably more, including programs that handle subscriber databases, mailing lists, invoicing, purchasing and heaven knows what else. He’s desperately looking for a way to streamline the number of programs he has to deal with in a day.

It’s a problem that we’re seeing more and more often with our clients: there are so many free and useful tools out there that it’s easy to be sold on every one of them. Before you know it, you’ve got a million little programs with a million different users and one big mess.

Three things you can do to streamline your system:

Get yourself a CMS. A content management system (go, Drupal!) is the first step anybody should take when trying to figure out how to streamline. Imagine building a house out of Legos, but without the flat foundation piece to stick the bricks to. I always try to tell people to stop thinking of CMSs as websites and to start thinking of them as company platforms. It’s the thing you build from.

Get a whiteboard and markers to sketch out a production flow. And then reproduce that flow in your CMS. CMSs are master of ushering content where it needs to be, that’s why they’re called content management systems. These things are made for you to move pages from writer to editor to publisher in a regulated way. Once you figure out how your content should travel, you can come up with a production/editorial flow and permission settings that can bypass any outside software that does this. This also goes for CRM systems, where you might be tracking how people donate or subscribe or attend events. It should all fold into the CMS.

Ditch the listserv/newsletter service. Look at getting a newsletter plug-in for your site. That way you can build up a web archive of content, do some site-specific branding on your missives and eliminate one tool from the arsenal. The newsletter tool we use lets you do unlimited newsletters with unlimited issues, so you can have a quarterly update, a weekly blast and a monthly newsletter and they can all look different or the same. It also synchs up your site visitors with subscriptions, which is useful. (If you want to see it in action, sign up for the Talance newsletter, and you can see flexible it is.)

Lemme know how your streamlining goes. Use the comments form below to ask questions and report back.