[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.

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

Hi, Friends.

Synagogues, congregations and tiny organizations, hold on to your socks. Big news here at Talance. We’ve just launched a super-sweet deal for you. In addition to our excellent custom websites, for only $1999, you can have a fabulous Drupal website that can grow and evolve with you.

»Click here to get started!

Here’s how it works:

1. Pick your favorite design

Get started with a clean, super-powered website hosted on the Drupal content management system (CMS). It includes tools for improving search engine optimization, a Microsoft Word-like text editor and six months free Web hosting. Yep, free.

2. Customize

Send us your logo (if you have one – we can help if you don’t), your two favorite colors and a couple pictures to include on the homepage. You can also pick from any of these Web tools for free:

E-Newsletter
Interactive Calendar
Blog
Advanced site search
File storage
Listserv
Membership forms
Members-only section
Photo album
Registration form
Shabbat times calendar
Weekly Torah Portion (from MyJewishLearning)

You can keep updating from an extensive list of advanced Web tools.

3. Relax

We do all the set-up and configuration to get you up online fast – in just five working days. You read that right. Five.

» Get started right now!

And make sure to tell your friends about this stellar offer! We’re at (888) 810-9109 or use this form.

Your Internet pal,

Monique

Spotlight on Mass Mentoring Partnership

We’re really glad to have worked with this stellar organization on a few projects, the most recent being a redesigned website. Check out the new and improved Mass Mentors, including it’s snappy new slideshow, colors and upgraded design.

»See it

Two Learning Opps for Organizations

Please join Talance for two special in-person appearances in Massachusetts:

Online Tools – How Can They Help Your Business Grow
eBiz 2009, sponsored by the Arlington Chamber of Commerce
Oct. 23, 2009
8 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

It’s your chance to pick up advice and tips on free and nearly-free online tools from Talance’s CEO Monique Cuvelier at this panel discussion hosted by the Arlington Chamber of Commerce. Sign up for a full day of e-business tips.

»Sign up for eBiz 2009!

Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and More: Creating Relationships with Volunteers and the Public through Social Media, sponsored by the Massachusetts Service Alliance
Nov. 10, 2009
8:30 a.m. – 12:00 noon.

During this 3-hour in-person workshop, Monique Cuvelier will cover 1) How to maximize your reach to existing and potential volunteers; 2) Strategies for putting together a social media plan; and 3) The essential tools and services, including tips on streamlining your social media practice.

»Sign up for Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and More!

Blog Favorites

In honor of our new offering for congregations, here are some highlights from the Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog. Make sure you’re reading http://talance.com/blog and get automatic updates of new articles.

10 Things To Include on Your Synagogue Site – Now!

30 Ideas on How Congregations Can Use Twitter

Five Great Takeaways from Church Websites

Killer Church Websites

Nonprofit Tech Tips from a Wired Rabbi

Need Some Help?

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.

[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.

You’re a busy person. You don’t have oodles of time, money and technical expertise to put into your synagogue website.

And now you don’t have to.

Talance is launching a new service called Synagogue Sites 1-2-3 that makes it a breeze to have a website that truly communicates with your congregation. This is no electronic brochure.

>> Get more details and pricing here.

Here’s how it works:

1. Pick your favorite design

Get started with a clean, super-powered website hosted on the Drupal content management system (CMS). It includes tools for improving search engine optimization, a Microsoft Word-like text editor and six months free Web hosting.

2. Customize

Send us your logo (if you have one – we can help if you don’t), your two favorite colors and a couple pictures to include on the homepage. You can also pick from any of these Web tools for free:

• E-Newsletter
• Interactive Calendar
• Blog
• Advanced site search
• File storage
• Listserv
• Membership forms
• Members-only section
• Photo album
• Registration form
• Shabbat times calendar
• Weekly Torah Portion (from MyJewishLearning)

You can keep updating from an extensive list of advanced Web tools.

3. Relax

We do all the set-up and configuration to get you up online fast – in just five working days.

Special Bonus: Are you a Synaplex synagogue? Mention it when you sign up, and receive 20% off through September!

Learn more and sign up today!

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.

This Halloween I might dress as the economy. I can’t think of any scarier. You’re right to be scared too, especially if you’re a nonprofit and beholden to funders, because you’ve got to make the case why you need a good website.

Hold on. Reality check: you aren’t thinking of cutting funding for your own website, are you? That would be a grave mistake. Websites are not only the public face of your organization, but the best tool you have to information and create a community on a budget.

Now that we’ve got that straight, let’s look at the top 10 things your website should have so that it gives you a good return on your investment. And just hanging in there won’t cut it. People will stop visiting your site – and thinking about your organization – if they don’t see some worthwhile action happening online. This is one of those times you need to invest.

In no particular order (because they’re all important), here are 10 things your website simply must have and that will wind up saving you money.

1. Contact form. You can always post your e-mail address on your website, but be prepared to be overrun with spam. Avoid this by putting a contact form on your site to make it easy for your website visitors to reach you and to avoid spammers at the same time. You might also think of adding a Captcha to your form.

2. A place for feedback. This could be a contact form, but better yet, let your website visitors leave comments. This might be on your blog, on news postings or on articles. You can also allow ratings, which lets people cast their vote.

3. Consistent navigation. Make sure people know where to go on your site by putting your navigation in the same place everywhere.

4. Regularly updated information. Freshness keeps people coming back. At the very least, make sure you’re cycling through new content on the homepage on a weekly basis. Blogs and Twitter accounts make this an even easier way to create an online community through content.

5. Analytics. Try a tool such as GetClicky.com or Google Analytics to find out when people are coming to your site, where they’re from and a whole load of other stuff. Analytics tools are way more powerful than a counter.

6. Donate now button. If you’re a nonprofit that accepts donations from a constituency, make it clear and easy.

7. Address front and center. A street address. With a phone number. Do it.

8. Search tool – for your site, not someone else’s. A search box will help your visitors find exactly what they need. But don’t make the mistake of putting a Google search box or a search tool from another site on yours. You just make it easier for people to leave.

9. Really good URLs. This starts with your web address (I know nonprofits are swimming in alphabet soup, but don’t make everyone else guess your acronym). Then make sure you have Clean URLs installed throughout.

10. A CMS. A content management system will make these things a bajillion times easier to do if you have a publishing system in place. Here’s how we do it.

We just hosted a webinar with some friends of ours at Dinkum Interactive about search engine optimization. It was great and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback so far.

One of the biggest lessons we addressed during the presentation was the importance of looking beyond just the technology and just the marketing when it comes to coaxing people to find you on the Internet. It’s much more than having the right tools or writing the right copy. So-called search engine optimization is a full-on effort that ensures that you’re always promoting your company and making sure that people are always learning about you.

But there are a few things you can do to help coax search engines to move you up their web pages. One is clean URLs.

Every page on your website has its own address, or URL. Search engines, as do people, like to see these addresses when they make sense. So they’ll avoid cataloging those pages with such addresses as

http://www.talance.com/aspweb/ur123/do/results?firsttime=y&
set=search&referer=&edition=&sortResultsBy=TopicRelevance
=9644205E04CF9DBF1B850C0219204572_1188832070933&
urn=urn%3Abigchalk%3AUS%3BBCLib%3Bdocument%3B112707510

And prefer addresses that give a clear indication of the information on the page, such as:

http://www.talance.com/about-us

This can be done automatically if your CMS (content management system) has clean URLs installed. Then it will read the page’s title and make that the URL, rather than a mechanical string.
Try it out, and see if suddenly more people are able to find you online.

I’m always telling you that you should be using a web content management system (CMS), but what does everyone else think? A few good ways to find out how and why other organizations are using CMSs is to check out these useful surveys.

Here are some nice ones from …

UC Davis

Helpful take-aways:

• Over 60% of respondents are in institutions currently using a Web CMS
• Institutions were more likely to employ open source or custom-developed solutions over proprietary/commercial systems
• Most instances of Web CMS systems are small, centralized deployments of under 40 sites and 40 or fewer total users
• Over 75% of Web CMS adopters provide formal training to users
• Most Web CMS adopters would choose the same system if they had to do so again
• Overall, there were no clear-cut “market leaders” in the broad field of Web CMS solutions identified by the higher ed institutions that responded to the survey. However, Plone and Drupal – both open source solutions – are in relatively heavy use.

CMS Web Report from CMS Watch

The full version is almost $1000, but you can see a free excerpt.

Helpful take-aways:

• Most Web CMS customers face a greater risk of over-buying than under-buying

What CMS are you using? Take our survey – it’ll take five seconds. Promise.