 Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar today, 27 Ways to Improve Your Website Immediately. Before we get started, I just want to go over a few housekeeping items. If you have questions during the webinar, feel free to send us questions using the chat box that you should see on the left-hand side of your screen. All callers will be muted, so again, we'll be monitoring the Q&A portion and asking questions at the end. If you lose your Internet connection, try refreshing your browser or reconnecting using the link that was emailed to you earlier today. If you have to leave early or if you want to watch the webinar again, it will be hosted on our website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. We'll also be sending an email with the presentation linked to the recording and any relevant links that were mentioned today. If you're on social media, feel free to send us a tweet at TechSoup and using hashtag TSWebinars. But like I said earlier, we'll be monitoring the chat box that you see here on the left-hand side. So just a little bit about TechSoup. We're in 236 countries and territories, and we serve over a million organizations offering either donated or discounted software and hardware products. We partner with several technology organizations like Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Intuit, Microsoft, Symantec, and several others that you see here. If you're interested in knowing what we offer in terms of our product donations, feel free to visit our website at techsoup.org slash get dash product dash donations. And also just to kind of understand who is on the call today and to make sure that the chat button is working, I'd love to hear from you guys about what organization you're representing today, and I can read a few of them out. So please feel free to chat me the name of your organization. All right, we have full of global, hope global, Boulder City Library, Appalachian Regional Library, I see an opera. Okay, so we have a lot of cool organizations on the line today, and we're excited to share some wisdom about improving your website. So I will go ahead and introduce who's on the call today. So my name is Seema Tucker. I'm the online learning producer here at TechSoup. We have Lashika Phillips who's the Associate Program Manager, and you probably saw her name in the chat box, so she's available to help us on the back end. And then we have our speaker today, Adam Walker. So Adam Walker is the co-founder of Digital Agency Sideways 8 and nonprofit co-founder 48 and 48. His goal is to build 48 websites for 48 nonprofits in 48 hours by hosting hackathons in various cities around the world. He's a digital marketing strategist at heart, though he has a background in design and development. He hosts two podcasts, writes for his blog, and trains for go-rock tough events. Adam loves a challenge and extreme productivity. So Adam, I will go ahead and turn it over to you. Hey, thanks Seema. I really appreciate it. So I'm really excited to be here and talk about how to improve your website. My goal is to make this actionable. Hence the 27 ways to improve your website immediately. Just a supplement, one or two things from the bio. Yes, I do have five kids. No, I'm not entirely crazy, though I would probably consider myself to be partially crazy at this point. I do have two podcasts, one blog, which if anybody wanted to check it out is adamjawalker.com. And 48 and 48 are a long-term vision for the organization just so that you're aware is to host 48 events worldwide in one year in 2025. And at every single event we would build 48 websites for 48 nonprofits in 48 hours. So that's a whole lot of websites in a very short amount of time. If you do the math, and we're on our way there. We're in six cities this year, and we've held now to date 10 48 and 48 events from 2015 until now. So we've got a lot of really good stuff happening and more coming. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dig in. Oh, by the way, right there, that slide I should have moved there is where you can find me if you'd like to on Twitter. That's my Twitter handle and the 48 and 48 Twitter handle. And now we'll go ahead and get started. So first, we've got a poll question. Everybody would not mind letting us know your answers to this question. We appreciate it. Okay. As you're continuing to fill that out, I see a pretty even distribution actually about it's not limited access to software. It's the problem. It's the lack of resources, time, money. It seems to be the biggest problem. It's followed by a lack of dedicated staff member which is really just a lack of resources. And we see that a lot in the nonprofits that we serve for 48 and 48 where they just don't have the resources. And that's why we created 48 and 48 to try to help them with professional websites. So that's fantastic. I like that question. How about all of the above? That's a really good question and probably a good answer. All right, let's see what we can do to streamline some of these problems and if time or knowledge is a problem that you answered for, hopefully this talk will help with that. So let's start with why. Why do you need a website? Why should you care about improving your website? And I hear a lot of nonprofits sort of say, well, we don't need a website. We can't improve our website. We just don't have time. We're too busy doing good. We don't have time to look good. And I get that thinking. I get where that's coming from. I get the heart behind that. But the problem is that when your digital marketing does not look good, when you're not presenting your best foot forward, what ends up happening is you end up losing momentum and you lose connection with people and it actually ends up hurting your vision overall in the long run. So I think it's really important to connect with all of this because it may not be – maybe you're not gaining ground as much with a good website, but a bad website will certainly make you lose ground along the way. So I like to think about a website that either validates or invalidates your organization. So I think you need to think of it as a validation tool. When people go to your website, do they immediately see you as a leader in your field? Do they see you as a professional? Do they see you as someone that they can trust and that they want to be involved with? Or are they turned off by your website? Does it sort of frighten them? Are they seeing something that's very outdated and it sort of makes them think, oh man, maybe they don't have their act together. Maybe I should take my dollars and my time and my experience somewhere else. And so the way I always think about websites is they either validate or invalidate your organization as a whole. And so hopefully through this talk you'll be able to improve your website and it will help to validate your organization. So let's go ahead and start with branding. So first consider your message. Now I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you the story. So there is a nonprofit here in Atlanta that I had spent some time volunteering for actually as a child. Then I spent some time volunteering for an adult and I worked with them on a committee for about a year. And finally I sat down one day in the marketing director's office and said, hey, can you just do me a favor? Can you just tell me what your nonprofit does? I mean I volunteered as a kid. I'm volunteering here now as an adult. I've actually been on one of your marketing committees for a year and I still really don't understand what you do. And she sat down with me and she started drawing on the swipe word and she talked for about 15 minutes. And at the end of 15 minutes I still didn't understand what they did and I'm not totally sure she did either. And what I'm getting at is that if you can't describe what your organization does in a very simple way that even a child can understand, then you're losing opportunities. And so like a great example is when we first started 48 and 48, we started with the messaging that nonprofits spend all their time doing good so they often don't look good. And we want to help them look good as well. And I happened to say that in a video and that was kind of on message for us. I showed it to my 8-year-old at the time. And then some months later when my 8-year-old came to our event, he regurgitated that exact phrasing back when I just did a random video and said, hey, tell me what 48 and 48 is about. He regurgitated that exact messaging because it was simple and it was something that he could identify with. The nonprofits spend all their time doing good, not looking good. How much better could they do if they looked good as well? So it's really important that you've got a really simple, clear message that you're pushing out to your users. Next you want to consider your user themselves because a lot of times the person that we are speaking to is not the person – sorry, the message that we're pushing is not always the message that the user wants to hear. And so as an organization, I've got certain things that I want to speak to on the website. I want to push this, and this, and this, and this. But as a user, a user is coming to my website and they might have a completely different agenda and they might have a completely different reason for coming to my website. And so a lot of times what happens with nonprofits is they don't really consider the user themselves instead what they consider are themselves and what they want, and they're pushing what they want to push instead of really understanding what the user needs. By the way, I also see your questions that are popping up, and I'll do the best that I can to answer some of those questions along the way. If I can, and I get too derailed and then we'll certainly answer some at the end. So one person did ask, what if your mission is multifaceted and the needs are too broad? And that's fine because organizations are often very multifaceted. However, even in a multifaceted organization, even in a very complex nonprofit that has hundreds of employees, you still can typically boil down what you're doing to some very simple phrases that somebody can understand. And this particular nonprofit that I volunteered with, for example, had like five different things they were doing that were all very, very different and all very complex. But really if you boiled every single one of them down, what they were really trying to do was enable volunteerism within the community. That's all they were doing. And all of their complex things really boiled down into that one thing. So I think if you work with somebody that really does branding, you'll begin to realize that yes, these things are complex, but yes, they can be boiled down into other things. Another question was, what platform do you use? I use WordPress. My agency uses WordPress, and 4848 we also use WordPress there. And somebody else mentioned that defining your user is difficult in an academic library environment. I would absolutely agree with you there, though I cannot say that I have any firsthand knowledge. However, I would say this, that defining your user, you can have a variety of different users and you just have to understand why someone is coming to your website. So is one user coming to your website because they want to volunteer versus another user that's coming to your website because they want to donate? Is one user coming to your website because they want specific information versus another user that's really just coming to your website to see if you're valid and real and they should show up on Saturday morning to shovel some dirt. So you just have to understand the different types of users, why they're coming to your website, and what's important to communicate to them, and you have to think in terms of how they're thinking, right? So next let's talk about images. Images on websites are important. I suggest real images. So there is definitely a tendency and has been for a long time to use stock images and there's a couple of problems with stock images. The first problem is they look like stock images. The second problem is they look like stock images. And the third problem is they look like stock images. So I would say if you can, even if you have to just use an iPhone, get an iPhone on portrait mode and take some good images and then you can even add some filters pretty easily, doctor those images a little bit and get those on your website. Real images tell a much better story than fake ones do. And so I would say get real images. If you're not going to get real images, at the very least get some really good stock images. So one site that I love to use for stock images are Unsplash, the unsplash.com has really, really good stock images. And they're often not very stocky looking. They are sometimes very artistic looking. And I find that those work really well in websites in terms of telling a story. Also, side note, if you're doing video, I love there's an app definitely for the iPhone. I think they've got one for Android 2 called Quick, QIK. It allows you to do some really, really amazing video stuff as well. So let's see, somebody asked about what I think of testimonials and quotes on websites. I think those are great. I'm a big fan of testimonials. I'm a big fan of video testimonials and I'm a big fan of quotes. I'm also a big fan of vetting those, unsplash.com, s-p-l-a-s-h, unsplash.com. And you also ask, do I have another preferred CMS? Unfortunately, I do not. I've only worked with WordPress since about 2003. So I'm really not familiar with any other CMSs, unfortunately. There may be a couple out. I'm sure there are several out there that are great. So as far as stock images go, let's look at these stock images right here. So you've got number one, to me this looks like a classic stock business image that I really would never want to use on a website. It just looks staged and funny and weird to me. Number two, the handshake. That's like the infamous handshake. It's like the stock image to end all stock images. So I would just avoid that. Number three, that's the kind that I like. It's artistic. Somebody's smiling. It's a little more candid. Yes, it's a stock image. It's kind of obvious that it's a stock image but at least it looks nice and it draws your eye to it. It's bright warm tones and it really works well. Also, go higher resolution. You need to be aware that people are going to be looking at your website on retina displays, on high resolution displays. And you want to make sure that your images are high enough resolution to where they don't look fuzzy. At the same time, they can't be too big because you want your site to load fast but just kind of be aware of that. And then also, crop and place your image as well. There's nothing worse than an image that just dominates the page and it's just way too big, or an image that's way too small, or an image that's kind of awkwardly and weirdly placed. And so, you know, a good example right now on the left, you see those graphs are really pushed to the side. They almost feel like an afterthought on that page as if they're just sort of very, very separate from the content of the page itself. On the right hand side, the image is accenting the text. It's adding to the text. It's kind of a nice artistic stock looking image and that's fine like we already talked about but it's improving upon what's already there and it's placed with intention. And I really, really like that a lot. So let me say one or two more things about images and then I'm going to look at your image question. So the last thing is stop using image sliders. And here's what I mean by that. I think image sliders are okay if you're doing a couple of things. So if you're just trying to show, hey, here's what happened in an event, right? An image slider is a fine thing for that. For example, I built a ballet site for a local ballet studio recently and they wanted an image slider and it's showing images of the different performances. I think that's very appropriate. But if you're trying to use an image slider to showcase the vision of your organization or to tell a story, it's a terrible way to do it because people aren't actually going to read through or see or view all of the slides. And so really image sliders really need to go away as a medium for that. And instead what needs to happen is we need to strategically place things throughout our site that we really want people to see the most. And so when I built our new company site for my agency, we really didn't use image sliders. Instead we just used really clean nicely placed images that we wanted to drop people's eye and help us tell the story. But we didn't want to have this kind of forever sort of scrolling thing there. Let's see. So a couple of your image questions, should you brand your organization's name on your images? You can. I don't necessarily think you have to, but you certainly can if you wanted to do like a watermark or something in the bottom right corner. I never do personally because I'm not really worried about somebody stealing my images but it certainly is possible. Somebody asked if I know a good program to format images. There are a couple of good programs out there. One is Adobe Spark is great. I think TechSoup probably would be the people to talk to about that actually more than myself. So I'll maybe leave that particular question in their hands. Somebody asked what is an image slider? An image slider is just rotating images across a home page. So when you land on a top screen, opt-in at the top of the screen and they'll be images sliding through. And he said, what about sliders for upcoming events? I think that's actually okay as long as it does not slide too quickly. And personally if I was going to do that I would have it show two or three events of the next ones coming and have that stop stay there for about 10 seconds and then slide to the next two or three events and that sort of thing. And I think that's okay because it shows there's more stuff happening in your organization. You have to be very cautious to make sure that it's not moving too fast so that you end up losing the people that you're trying to tell the story to. So next let's move on to copy. So we're going to talk about your website copy. That's your words, your text on your website. Use clear headings. A lot of websites really don't use headings at all. And the problem with that is that people like to skim content. We don't read websites like we read books. So we don't read every word. We don't read every paragraph. We really just scan and look for headings to find where we want to be and identify our place in the page there. And then we quickly read based on that. So I would say always use clear headings so that you can really differentiate the different parts of your content so people know where they're at. Next, write 350 to 600 words. And so this is just kind of good practice because if your web pages are less than 350 words, it's very likely that you're leaving out some details that may be important to a user. It's also very likely that you're not providing enough context around something so that the user has a full understanding of what you're trying to describe. And if the page is more than 600 words, it's likely you're going to go a bit too much depth and that you're going to overload a reader. You have to bear in mind that digital users really have very limited attention spans. I think we can all sort of admit to that at this point. And we want to get there to the page we want to read and understand what we want to read and understand and then we want to get on to the next thing. And so to kind of keep the general 350 to 600 words, that will help you with that. Additionally, Google is going to reward you for having more than 350 words and so that's going to help your Google rankings as well. So that's just something to keep in mind. Also, check grammar and spelling. This is pretty critical and pretty often overlooked, but you've got to check the grammar and spelling for sure because, well, if you have misspelled words or bad grammar, that's not good. I personally am a huge, huge, huge fan of Grammarly. I don't know if any of you have checked that out, but Grammarly, it has a free option. They also have a premium option. And it's just a really easy way to check your grammar because my grammar is kind of terrible. So it really helps me to sort of stay on top of all of that. And make use of lists. I'm a really big fan of lists in terms of copy. Again, for the same reason of having good headings because people love lists. And how often are we reading, like scrolling through different news sites and we see a top 10 list or a top 8 list or 5 reasons you should do this or whatever. And then as soon as you go to that article, all you really do is look for those 5 reasons. And you look for number 1 in a bold statement, number 2 in a bold, and you forget all the other stuff because all the other stuff really doesn't matter unless it really captivates your attention and then you read all the detail. It's the same way with users on your website. They're going to come to your website. They're often looking for specific things. If you can show them a list of things, they can then just kind of scroll through relatively quickly and hone in on their specific detail, their specific need. Then it really helps them to navigate your site better. It will improve your engagement with them. It will improve their time on your site. And they'll just have better interactions all around. So next, general content. Let's talk about just sort of general site content for a moment. Take a look at number 12 of 27. So we're moving pretty good here. So unlink to social media, and here's what I mean by that. If you have social media that you're active on, that you're paying attention to, that you're using, that you're engaged with, then you should absolutely link to that social media and you should do it in a prominent way so that people can get there. Because if people are on your website and they like what you do, they're very naturally going to click on that Facebook link or Twitter or Instagram or YouTube and they're going to see what other content you have available to you. Or what other content you have available to them, I should say. However, if you are linking to an old profile, if you're linking to a Twitter account that hasn't been tweeted at in two years, you should unlink that. And you should unlink that today because it makes you look bad. I mean, it's just not good to show, hey, here's what we're doing on Twitter, but we're really not doing anything. Here's what we're doing on Facebook, but we're really not doing anything. Here's what we're doing on YouTube, but our videos are five years old. So just be careful about that and be aware that sometimes if we're linking to old social media accounts, it can really have a negative effect from our users. Now we've got another poll, so just take a moment here and let us know where you're at here. These numbers are super encouraging right here. I'm loving this. The vast majority have updated their website within the last month. That is fantastic. Anybody else want to respond here? Wow, that's great. So it looks like most of you are actively updating your websites, which I'm very, very, very happy to hear about. So maybe this won't be an issue for you, but the next thing is keep your content current. Obviously we need to keep our content up to date. There's nothing worse than when you go to a website and the content is not current. I would ask this question, right? How many of you when you are searching the Internet for anything you're going to buy as an individual or do as an organization, you land on a website, you realize, oh, this website is really outdated. The design is very outdated and the content is very outdated. Then you immediately make a snap decision about that organization and you move on to the next site. I think we all do that on a pretty regular basis. So we have to make sure that we don't do that to other people. So what we have to do is we have to keep our content current. We have to make sure that all the upcoming events on our website are current. We have to make sure that the news on our website is current. We don't want to have news from three years ago that's still on our home page. For example, we want to make sure that if you have a blog, great, it's current. By the way, if you have a blog and it's not current, just hide the dates. Just don't have the published dates on there. You can keep the blog there. And it's probably content that's valuable to your organization, but you can just hide the dates. So if you have a blog post, if your last blog post was a year ago, okay, just hide the date and then move on along and try to get back to blogging if you can. Next, make sure there's a call to action on each page. And so what I mean by that is you need to ask your users to do something when they're on a page. If you are not asking a user to do something, it's very likely they're going to do exactly that, which is nothing. And so every page needs to have a call to action. Do you want the user to fill out a contact form? Do you want the user to fill out a volunteer form? Do you want the user to give $5? Do you want the user to give $500? Like what are you asking for them to do? How do they take the next step to engage you? If we don't walk users step-by-step through that process and showing them, hey, come over here. Here's the next step to engage the organization. Then they will just get completely lost and be completely unable to interact with our site, and then they're losing and we're losing. Quick backpedal just for one second. Somebody asked what do I mean by update. What I mean by update is just keeping the content on the site correct. That's really all I mean. And then somebody else asked about content. Are these total words per page or per section? I prefer personally, 350 to 600 words per page to keep things simple. There are instances where doing them per section actually makes more sense. Some more good questions about content. How important is it to have a blog site? That's a really difficult question to answer. For some organizations it's critical. For other organizations it's not. It really depends on how you want to engage your users and what your availability is to actually pump out content. Because if you're going to have a blog, you've got to write for it. So it's really important. How many calls to action are too many? Oh Charles, that's a magic question. Thank you so much. My personal school of thought on how many calls to action are too many is that you usually have a primary and a secondary. So I like to think of it as what's the main thing you absolutely want this person to do on this page? And if they are unwilling to do that, what is your alternate? So here's what I mean. So let's say it's a home page for your nonprofit. And the most important thing that you want someone to do is volunteer. And they've got this volunteer now button. Well what if that person is not ready to volunteer but they're still interested in the organization? What's the secondary win there? The secondary win in that situation is to get them on your mailing list because then you can get them engaged. And so if they're not going to volunteer, so if the volunteer now button fails, then further down the page, make sure you have a button that says sign up for our newsletter so that ideally if they don't choose one call to action, they can choose the lesser commitment of the call to action, get on your newsletter, and at least that way you've got their information and you can follow up with them later. And then hopefully you can get them looped in to volunteer down the road. So I see some other specific questions which I'm not really able to get into in terms of minimum resolution. Just do some Googling on that, taking dates off the blog. That is sometimes easy and sometimes hard depending on what you're using. So I would not unfortunately be able to answer that at this time. And then see how many times do you repeat the call to action on a page? I like to have one or two opt-ins for a call to action personally on a page and then I don't want to beat somebody to death. So maybe I'd have a volunteer now at the top and a volunteer now at the bottom, but that's probably where I would leave it. And where should the call to action be? It absolutely can be in the footer, but bear this in mind when you're thinking about a call to action. The further down a page you go, the more people are going to drop off your website. So the way to think about that is at the very top of the page, very, very top 100% of people are going to see the very top of your page because that's the first thing that loads. 100% of people see that. By the time you get to the footer, you're probably looking at 20% of people that have landed on your page are actually going to see the footer. So what that means if your call to action is in the footer is that only 20% of the people on your site are going to see that call to action. And so you can have call to action down there, but they should definitely be secondary call to action. You want the primary one near the top so that as people begin to drop off they at least see that there are options that you want them to engage with. Okay, let's see. All right, we'll keep moving here. I think I've answered at least some of the questions. I'm trying to answer the ones that are obvious to me. So next code. So let's do another quick poll. Do you monitor traffic on your website? I'm going to fill that out. Somebody asked a great question. What are your thoughts on creating content on third party sites like Medium or Exposure as an alternative to hosting on a blog? I would in all cases 100% of the time host it on my own blog and then repost on those sites. Those sites do support reposting. My problem with places like Medium is that you don't own and control your content there. Somebody else owns and controls it. And for me personally that is dangerous and I don't ever like someone else controlling my content. So I'm good with reposting there. It sort of scares me for that to be my only place for content. Somebody also related to Call of Action. What's your feeling about pop-ups? Pop-ups are a little dangerous and you have to be really, really cautious about them for Google. Google does not like pop-ups. There are certain ways to do them that are less obtrusive and you can sort of get by with them. However, you need to be very, very careful about pop-ups. So for example, if your secondary call to action is getting people to sign up through the newsletter, you could do MailChimp supports a script at the bot where people scroll all the way down your page. I think when they get 2-thirds down the page then something will slide in from the bottom and say, do you want to sign up for the newsletter? I think that's a really good, unobtrusive way for people to sign up versus a true pop-up that sort of obstructs the entire screen. I think it's just a little more user-friendly. So would I include Welcome Maths? I think that's actually what I just discussed, but I'm not entirely sure I've heard them call Welcome Maths before. But yes, I think so. All right, so half and half on the analytics which I get. So let's talk about that for just a second. First thing you want to do is add analytics to your site. Google Analytics is free. You can sign up on I think Google.com forward slash analytics and then you can add some code to your site which is usually pretty easy and they walk you through. It just gives you a lot of input about where are people coming from? What's the most popular pages on your site? And really the nice thing about analytics are you can begin to gauge what's successful and what's not on your site. So it's really interesting because when you log into your site and you look at your analytics it could be that you think your services page is just critical to the existence of your nonprofit, but in reality people are really just landing on your home page and your contact page and maybe 5% are going to your services page and maybe that's because they don't need to. Or it could be the opposite. It could be that everybody is going to your services page and nobody cares about your contact page. But you don't know that if you're not taking the time to analyze those things and you can do that very easily through Google Analytics. So I would say definitely set up Google Analytics. It's easy. Google walks you through it. Next, you want to make sure that you get your site indexed with Google. I think most of them are already going to be indexed by default but you can also use Google Search Console just to check for any errors in your site. You can find where there are 4 or 4 errors. You can find any issues that Google has with your site. You can use Google Search Console to check for and then you can fix those issues on your site. And Google Search Console again, it's free. Just search for Google Search Console and you can sign up right there. All you need is an Gmail account. And it just gives you a lot of options in terms of how to improve your site. And if Google likes your site then obviously it's going to rank your site more highly in their search engine. Next, this is pretty critical. I think it's relatively common knowledge at this point, but I just want to – you can't talk about websites and not talk about this. It's got to be mobile friendly. It's got to be responsive. And so just looking at some very rough numbers here and maybe actually some older numbers since 2017, if you look at the numbers for the smartphone versus tablet versus laptop versus desktop, the smartphone numbers are actually higher. I would venture to say that on the majority of your sites, half or more of your website users are coming from a smartphone. And what that means is that if you're not looking at the site on a smartphone, if your site is not ready for a smartphone, then that site that you think looks good really doesn't look good and is really probably causing you some headaches. Here's another really interesting graph. And this is actually from 2015. So these numbers are really old. But the two things I want to show you on this graph in particular are if you look under age 18 to 34, you'll see that 18, 21, and 20% at the very top, those are the people that use mobile only for their Internet surfing. That means in December of 2015 of the age group, 18 to 34, 20% of them use mobile only, like zero other devices for surfing the Internet. That is crazy. And the numbers are significantly, significantly, significantly higher now. And so you can go down, look at age 55 plus, and at the bottom there you see 40%, 26%, 26%. Those are people using desktop only. So they're not really using mobile. But the point is that there's a big group of users out there that are only mobile. And we've got to make sure that we are really, really paying attention to those. And we're serving them correct information. We're serving them a good, complete website. Back to Google Search Console. Google found errors on your site. How do you use Google Console to fix them? You cannot use Google Console to fix errors. You'll have to fix the errors on your site yourself. So you'd have to work with whoever is your webmaster for that. How important are SEO titles and SEO descriptions? I think that they are helpful. It's very hard to say how important they are from an SEO perspective. They are definitely helpful. And I do them, and it's a good practice. I'm just not sure what degree of impact they make, because people don't really tell us what degree of impact they make. So we don't actually know. So next, number 18, plan for social sharing. So when somebody goes to share your organization on a social network, there's information that gets auto-populated in that network. And if we're not intentional about what auto-populates, then we're missing an opportunity. So here's a great example. I did this yesterday. I typed in 48and48.org, which is the 48 and 48 website. And you'll see what pops up is a picture of one of our nonprofit testimonials. So it gives a nice human face. That's a real person. It's not a document. And it's actually from a video that she did for us, video testimonial. And then it walks through. It's got the website. It's got the name. And it's got what our goal is to deliver $1,200,000 worth of value to nonprofits within this span of 48 hours. And you can help and hear talent. So it's got our messaging. And you're able to create that information inside of your website in the meta descriptions. And I wouldn't be able to get into the details of that. You can certainly Google it, but that's beyond the purview of this particular talk. But you can get all that into your website so that when people do share, it shares the right things, not the wrong things. Because if we're trusting other people to put the right messages up for us in social media, we're likely to be disappointed. So if we can guide them on what those right messages should be, then that's certainly a win for us. Next, I'm going to make sure your site has a favicon. So a favicon, so look right here. That middle one right there, this is actually my old Sideways 8 agency website. We just launched a new one recently. But you can see right here the favicon with the orange arrow pointing to it is our company logo. To the left, you have a generic favicon for the hosting company there. So it just kind of looks generic and uncared for. And on the right, you actually see what exists when there's not a favicon at all. And so that's a minor detail, but it does help people see that you care about details in particular and that you're trying to make your website to that it can be. So it's just generally helpful. Let's see. Somebody asked, do I have website accessibility as one of your requirements as well as no content? So website accessibility, I don't cover that in this talk because website accessibility really needs its own talk in particular, which actually would be really fun to talk about because there are different levels of it and different things you need to consider in website accessibility. I think it's really important, but that's not something that's very immediate a lot of times. And it's a little more complex unfortunately. So let's see. And now on to testing. Excuse me. So first, and this should be an obvious one that is actually really surprising to me, check your contact form. So you'd be surprised how many organizations have a contact form that does not work and they don't know because they don't ever check it. And so at one point in the past they set up a contact form and that contact form worked and then they just kind of forgot about it. And now it doesn't work. And so you've got to make sure to check your contact form on at least a semi-regular basis so that you know that it works and you're responding to things. Next, check your site on multiple devices. It's really important that you look at your site on laptops and on tablets and on phones and on friends phones and on friends tablets and different side laptops because sites respond differently. You can also use a site called responseinator.com if you'd like, which will give you some kind of view into that. It's not perfect but it will at least give you sort of a place to start. Also check your site load time. So if you're not sure what I mean by that, it's just how fast your site loads. You have to recognize that people tend to have a very short attention span and if your site doesn't load very, very quickly then you're going to lose them. And so you need to make sure to test your site load time. There are tools on pingdom.com that I think you're all tools.pingdom, P-I-N-G-D-O-M.com that will test your site speed and tell you how to improve it. Some of the improvements are going to be very technical so you may have to work with a webmaster or a coder to get those done. But still, it's good to think about. What can make a site load more slowly? Great question Deb. So really large images is the first thing by far. So if you have a page and it has 15 images on it and all those images are 4,000 pixels wide, then that site is going to load really, really, really slowly. So you need to make sure that your images are appropriately sized. You can even use some compression to save JPEGs in certain ways to get that down. That probably is going to get a little more technical than we can get right now but there are some good articles out there about it if you just Google a bit. But in general, just make sure you don't have too many large images. Also not too many videos or if you are loading videos, you need to load videos from YouTube or Vimeo or a service like that not directly on your site because that's going to slow things down significantly. Also you need to use browser caching if your site isn't already using browser caching. You can minify CSS and optimize HTML. That's going to be a little bit more on the code side but that is one way to do that. Otherwise you probably would just need to talk to somebody a little more geeky to see what other options there are but that's at least a good starting point. One question, what is the biggest picture should be to load quickly? I generally try to keep my pictures on a site in general. Just a rough rule of thumb is under a mag and ideally quite a bit smaller than that. Though there are several sort of arguments to make for different sizes depending on what you are doing so that's a little bit of a nuanced sort of question. But nonetheless, somebody else asked, what is browser caching? Browser caching is the website essentially storing part of itself on someone's computer so that it can pull up the site more quickly the next time. It's very, very common. There are different types of browser caching that are very common for that to be used for website speed. Pretty much any good website is going to do that. I should say all of the major websites that you visit is going to do that. So like all of the new websites and all of those types of websites are going to cache is what I mean. Next let's talk about security. So this should be straightforward, but we need to use a secure password. So no 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, no password, no your first initial, last name, no QWERTY, no baseball or dragon or football or anything like that has to go. I would very strongly recommend that you use a password manager. If you are not currently using a password manager, there are many, many, many good ones. Personally, I use LastPass, but there are probably five others that are really, really great that well basically I have to remember one password for LastPass, and then I get LastPass generates random passwords for everything else and then it logs them in for me. So it's really great. Another tip for creating passwords if you're not familiar with good ways to create passwords is sometimes we think that every password needs to be that crazy alphanumeric, uppercase, lowercase, scary number, weird letter sort of thing. And while that is helpful, you can also like another way to create a really solid password is to use four completely unrelated words, or even five completely unrelated words with a space in between them. So a great example would be like make a password, horse, space, car, space, folded, space, leaves. By the way, that is not my password for anything just so you're aware, but that would be a great password because it's a ton of characters long, it's got spaces in it, the words are completely unrelated. It would be very difficult for a brute force attack to crack that password because of the length of it, and it's not really guessable because it's so completely random. What does a horse have to do with folded leaves, right? So anyway, just something to think about there. Next, use good hosting. So I can talk about this for an entire webinar, but I will not bore you. So hosting, not all hosting is created equal, and good hosting does not, or cheap hosting does not necessarily equal good hosting. So personally, I think it's always, always, always worth it to pay more money for good solid hosting because of a few things. Number one, the server is going to run faster. It's going to deliver your site faster. It's going to improve your site speed, which is going to improve your Google ranking, which is going to improve your user's experience, which is going to improve their interaction on your site. Everything rises when you use good hosting. Also, it's not going to get hacked. It's the cheap, junky hosting that ends up getting hacked because your site is on a server with literally 200 other sites that may or may not be of ill repute or not, and one of those 200 sites gets hacked, and then by default your site ends up getting hacked. And so if you're on solid hosting, then you can avoid that by making sure you're on your own list of reputable sites, being maintained, everything's being maintained, and you're not going to get hacked. So for me personally, I always, always prefer to pay more for hosting. $30 to $50 a month is a completely reasonable sum to pay for hosting, more if there are other reasons to pay for hosting, for example. The $5 a month hosting in my mind in particular can be a little bit dangerous. That's a sub box. I'll just stop there, but maybe if we have questions we can talk about that a little later. All right, another poll, rate your comfort level with website maintenance. Okay, this is pretty encouraging, no enough to make simple updates, which is great because simple updates are fine. So making simple updates to a website are really important. Oh, before I move forward, somebody asked, what's my recommended hosting site? So it depends. For all of my hosting that's WordPress, I use WP Engine. Both of my companies, well actually one of the companies uses that, the other uses something on DigitalOcean. It's a whole different conversation there. But WP Engine is great for WordPress. There are other good sites. Bluehost is pretty great too, but WP Engine is my favorite. And then somebody asked how to add a favicon. That honestly probably best Google that one. It's been a long time since I had a favicon, if I'm being completely honest, probably two years. So back to website maintenance. So many of you know enough to make simple updates. That's great. So the next thing we need to do, and it depends on the content. So CMS is a content management system. One Press is a content management system. You can also, I think Wix would count as a content management system, Squarespace, Joomla would count Drupal as a content management system. And with many of those, you can keep the CMS current like for example Wix and Squarespace are going to automatically do that for you with WordPress. It may or may not be automated based on where you're hosting. So if you did host on WP Engine, then they would keep it updated for you. Otherwise, they may not. It just depends. And even with WordPress, an update to the CMS is pretty easy. So it's just a couple clicks of a button. But the bottom line is it's got to be updated on a regular basis. If your site is not regularly updated, if plugins are not regularly updated, then you're very likely vulnerable to hacks. And you need to be very, very aware of that so that you don't end up having a site that goes down for all kinds of bad reasons. Next, 26 on 27, almost done. We can do some Q&A. Install an SSL certificate. So this used to be an option, and now it's kind of a mandate that really Google penalizes sites that do not have an SSL certificate. So it's really kind of a given that every site should have one at this point. But if not, then you definitely need to talk to your hosting provider, or local geek, or whomever it is that works on your website, and make sure that you have an SSL certificate for your site because it is critical. There are even free places to get SSL certificates set up and installed as well. An SSL certificate is basically just a way of verifying that the site is who it says that it is, and that it is secure. So it's a security measure, essentially. So they have some thoughts on the Gutenberg WordPress update. Wow, that is a very, very, very complex question that I do not have a good answer to. So Jennifer, thanks for your question there. Just to give you some insight, Jennifer, we actually use Beaver Builder for both my companies, and we really like it. It will be interesting to see how Gutenberg affects that in particular. So that was 26 last. Number 27, make sure you have a good partner for your website. That's really what it boils down to. You need to be able to rely on yourself as your own partner, which is fine, or you need to at least have a go-to person, or agency, or organization that you look to for help that can give you insight into how to do things and how to grow things. So it could be YouTube channels, or a contractor, or whatever, but make sure you've got somebody that you can ask questions to. So now it's time for questions. I got through 27 things. Wow, 50 minutes, 49 minutes. Not too bad. Somebody asked, any non-wordpress hosting sites? Yeah, there are a bunch. I think hosting is really going to kind of depend on what you're using. So I think hosting for an HTML site is different from hosting from a Joomla site. It's different from Drupal. It's different from WordPress. And they're all going to have strengths. I would suggest doing some research and just seeing what's best for your particular type of site and my only expertise is in WordPress, so I would not be able to speak to that. Somebody asked, what do you mean by website maintenance? I just mean basically keeping the site up-to-date, making sure that the CMS is up-to-date in particular, ideally being sure that the PHP and those kind of back-end systems are up-to-date. If you have the ability to do that, some do and some do not. So that's what I think of Weebly. I think this would be Weebly, Wix, Squarespace. There's probably a couple of others. So here are my thoughts on those. I think they're really good starting places, and they're typically very cheap starting places. The thing I don't like about them is that you're locked in forever with them. The thing that I really like about other platforms that are open source, so open source being Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, or even just straight HTML, is that you can take your site and do anything you want with it. You can move it anywhere. You can host anywhere. You have full and complete control. You can expand as far as you want versus with Weebly, you can only expand as far as Weebly allows you to expand. I like the freedom of that personally, but I think there are situations where Weebly is a really, really good option. Somebody asked about thoughts on Lunar Pages. I do not have any thoughts on Lunar Pages because I'm not familiar enough with them to have thoughts, but I'll check that out now that you've told me that. Let's see, somebody has to do reputable CMS such as Wix, offer SSL, or is this something I'll need in the user's website? I would assume Wix offers an SSL option and it would honestly shock me a little bit if they did not offer a really easy solution. I guarantee they're going to charge you for it because that's just how that sort of thing works, but it's probably going to be pretty cheap. So I would log into Wix and you could probably take care of that very, very quickly if you're already using Wix. Do you think it's important to change the style of the website when lots of companies start doing that? Yeah, so that's a really good question Elizabeth. So I think that you need to consider changing the style of your website probably every two to five years depending on how outdated its style actually is. And so some styles sort of have a little bit more staying power. Some don't. So for example, there are sites that I designed six years ago that honestly still look pretty good, and they're probably passable at this moment if they're mobile-friendly. There are some sites I designed six years ago that maybe we ended up using some designs that were sort of at the tail end of that particular trend, and now they look extremely dated, and those sites absolutely should have been updated years ago. And so I think you've got to look at your site with a fresh pair of eyes and see is this site dated? Because the question is not how old is the site. The question is does the site look dated? And if the answer is yes, then it's time to do a redesign or at least an updated design. If the answer is no, then you're okay. But I think that's really a question to ask. Let's see. Hillary says, I'm working through redesign of a website with 600 pages. Do you have any recommendations on how to accomplish this, about getting overwhelmed with data? Wow. So I can tell you my team would have some ideas on that. I don't know that I personally have a lot. I would probably be using a lot of spreadsheets to be honest with you, to have at least an understanding of what are the 600 pages, what is the structure of both pages, how do they all map out. I would need to be able to see it all visually somehow. And I would probably use a spreadsheet to do that. And then I would have links off of that spreadsheet to those different pages and organize it that way. And I would probably use Google Docs for that most likely. There may be a better answer from somebody on my team that's done more of that recently, but hopefully that's helpful to you. Can you recommend some sites we can look at to see updated sites? Yeah, so any website award sites would be great. There's a site called Dribble that has for designers where they get their work that's really, really good. Honestly, you can also look at just agency websites and look at the sites that they're showcasing, and look at their sites. Ideally, you'd think an agency website would look good in and of its own right. So you could search for like digital web agency or something in your area and find some that look good. I think that's what I would do. I'd look for the award sites first and then probably look at digital agencies and just sort of see what trends are happening there. What are your recommendations for SEO and increasing web traffic? So Hilary, great question. SEO is really about content. More than anything else, SEO is always about content because you have to think about how Google thinks. Google's goal is to respond to any question or any search with the best possible content available, hands down. And so if your site is the best possible content for that search, you have a really high likelihood of Google ranking you well. If your website is not the best content, they're going to rank the site that's better. And so if you're going to go for a specific phrase, you need to look at all the other websites that are ranking that phrase. You need to look at their content and determine, okay, how do I answer this question? How do I answer this search better than those people are? And then how do I pump out more and more and more and more content around that central focus theme to really answer it more holistically? And then from there, Google will really love you and then you'll grow from there. So I would be thinking about it less in terms of like the SEO magic and more in terms of how do I create the best content, hands down, no matter what. What is the average number of web pages for a website? It varies dramatically based on organization. Though I would say typically it's going to be as low as 5. It's going to be as high as a couple hundred. 600 is a bit as our question-asker mentioned earlier, but I'd say honestly 5 to 20 is kind of your average rough estimate there. Should links open a new tab or just move to a new page on the same site so you can hit the back button? I think if you're moving within the site it should always open in the same page. Otherwise it's going to drive your user crazy, especially on mobile. So if you have every link, internal link opening in a new tab and it's open in the new tab on mobile, that's a terrible mobile experience. You're going to lose them almost immediately. But if you're linking them off-site, if you're taking them somewhere else, you need to take them in a new tab so that they don't lose where they're at on your site. Recommendations for donation sites that we can use to link to the website. Currently we use Network for Good. So 40 and 48 have partnered with a company called ActBlue for this. And I've been really impressed with their product in particular. We're just getting into it, and we're going to be talking more about that on the 48 and 48 website. So you can check that out and you can check out ActBlue. But that's the one that is most recently on my radar, and probably worth paying attention to. Let's see. Recommendations for decreasing bounce rates. So a bounce on a website is when they land on your page, usually your homepage, they get there, they do absolutely nothing, and then they bounce off. Though in all fairness they might do something more than nothing. They might scroll. But they don't actually click on anything that don't engage in any way. My recommendation for decreasing that is make sure your calls to actions are strong. Make sure that you're providing clear user paths to different parts of your site that matter. So for example, if your site is going to be targeted towards volunteers, donors, and people that you serve, which is very common for nonprofits, right, for those three categories. You've got to make sure that you've got very clear off-ramps for each one of those categories, very high in your site to take them to a section of their site that really genuinely matters to them so that they get the information that they want. If they can't find an off-ramp quickly enough, they're just going to bounce off your site and look at the next one. So I think that's kind of how I think. I think about content and off-ramps to make sure that you can do that. Let's see, recent styles. Yes, go ahead. We have about 2 minutes left, so do you want to take maybe one more question and then I can close out. Alright, we'll talk about the recent styles then. So recent styles have long pages that scroll and scroll and scroll is a good style. The answer is maybe. It really depends on what your organization does and how easy it is to tell a story. I think there's very powerful reasons to have a very short page with just 3 buttons and here's where you go to get to the next step. I think there are other reasons to have people scroll down. It's really about your story. How does the home page of your website need to be laid out in order to actually tell your story? And if you need 5 sections and a long home page, then that's fine. And if you have a video down there that people are going to be interested in, that's great. But if not, then keep it simple and move forward to the next thing. Alright, Seema, back to you. Great, thank you so much. That was super informative. So it's about 11.59. So I'm going to go ahead and close out the webinar today. Just so you guys know, we have a couple of webinars coming up in September. If you're interested in joining those, you'll find those on our website. Also, it's really fun for us to kind of see what you learned today. So if you have a second, I'm sure Adam would really appreciate if you want to chat one thing that you learned in today's webinar. We also have a post-event survey. It's really helpful if you guys don't mind taking a couple of minutes to answer that just so we can get some feedback. And then also, that helps us dictate future content. If you're on social media, feel free to give us a follow. We're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn. We also have a blog at blog.techsoup.org where we post a lot of helpful tips and tricks. So please feel free to follow us there as well. And I just want to say thank you again, Adam. That was really valuable information. We'll be sending it out to everybody once the webinar is over. And I'd also like to thank LaShica for helping on the back end, and then also to our sponsor ReadyTalk. So thank you.