 Well, I'm turning it over to Eric Leland, our presenter for today. Thank you so much. Alright, excellent. Thanks everybody for making the time today. Got a great webinar, a great conversation I hope we'll have today on some technology topics and some trends and how they affect the legal services community. So looking forward to it. Let's start some introductions here. First of all, on a technical note, I'm not going to do full screen presentation. I'm going to do most screen presentations. So you will see some navigation items on the left and right. That just allows me to do a little bit more quicker without bothering you with a lot of painful waiting time. So if you want to just focus in on the slides themselves, that's great. That'll help me out a lot. Just some introductions quickly who I am. This is my blurry picture. My name is Eric Leland. I'm an expert trainer of Idealware. I'm also a principal with FivePads LLC. I've been with Idealware for more than 10 years, doing a lot of work on webinars, a lot of these presentations, a lot of research on web software, trends, donor software. I'm happy to be here. At FivePads, we do a lot of consulting with nonprofit organizations on technology strategy, websites, and databases. So that's me. More importantly, I would say we have two folks here that are quite expert in the legal services area and will be offering a lot of commentary on the various topics we have today. First is Angela. Angela Tripp, I'm wondering if Angela, you could introduce yourself. Sure. I'm the project manager of the Michigan Legal Health Program, which is Michigan's website and self-help center resources for people representing themselves in civil legal matters. I've been with legal services of some kind or another for 12 years, and I've been working exclusively on Michigan Legal Health for about the last four years. Great. Thanks, Angela. And we also have Brian Rowe here. That will be offering a lot of commentary as well on the various slide. You can introduce yourself. Yes, I'm the project manager at LS NTAP, the National Technology Assistance Project. I've also worked in web design for about 10 years. Before going to law school, I was a coder doing mostly web design work. Awesome. Very good. Well, what we have today is a good format. There's three of us here today to talk about various topics, trends, and web technologies. And specifically what we're going to be focusing on today is some storytelling topics specifically through images. We want to look at some trends around using images on websites. And I want to look to Angela and Brian to help fill in, you know, where that's working well and poorly in legal services communities and provide some commentary there from their direct experience. We'll also be covering more on the technical side, looking at mobile, some of the trends in mobile happening on the web, and see, you know, how folks are using mobile and approaching that through websites, how that affects the legal services community as well. And then a focus on content, strategies and strengths and techniques around using content on the web. And we can talk through a little bit about how that applies specifically to legal services communities in getting better, stronger content and getting it out there in front of folks. The format, basically, I'd like to sort of take the high level and introduce some of the slides as we go through it, and then ask Brian and Angela, ask both of you to sort of comment and provide some insight underneath that. And I'll help try to regulate time as well. So if you see me interrupting or moving us forward, that's one of my roles, so I'll be doing that as well. And then all of us can kind of monitor your questions, folks, on this call so you can chat them in. And Brian, I believe folks can unmute themselves as well and talk if they need to. Is that correct? I think that's correct. Brian, maybe unmute himself. That's definitely correct. I'm trying to help somebody else get on the audio. Definitely correct. If you're on a landline, star six will mute or unmute yourself. Otherwise, there's an unmute button for the voiceover IP. If we get background noise, we'll have to mute everyone and you can use the chat channel to speak up if you're on voiceover IP. Thanks. Very good. So feel free to use the chat option. That'll be easiest, but you can also ask your questions audibly as well as long as you use star six to unmute or unmute your own phone. Excellent. We're ready to dive in here. Let's look at the first area here, images for storytelling. First of all, one of the big trends that I'm sure we've all seen, having navigated sites in the last couple of years especially, is this trend around big central images. This is a great example, classic example. What we're talking about here are trans or websites, especially the homepage, but often and more often inside pages have a substantial amount of real estate, often more than half, three quarters in this case. Real estate devoted to a single image. It's meant to provide sort of a visceral, immediate communication of a central message. It's meant to be emotive and be motivating and captivating. So the game of course with websites is to try to get not only understanding around a message, but to get some action. And these kinds of images are purporting to do that. Now there's some debate. I'm curious what folks would say, Brian and Angela, especially what you'd say about this debate. Is it good to take up all your screen real estate with a big image? Where has that been used successfully? Is maybe too big too much? How about this idea of having images that rotate on the page? What if we had two, three or four or five images that kind of scroll through? Is that a good idea? Is that a way to compromise and say I can have more messages or is that not a good idea? There's some debate and usability studies on both sides of that. But I'd be curious to understand from Angela or Brian what your sense is on using big images on pages. Where has that been used well in legal services communities? How can legal services benefit from this trend? I think that it works best when your website really wants to catch people's attention first and convey information as sort of secondary. One of the websites that I work on is our website that's all about legal information for people representing themselves. We don't have big images on there because it is more focused on just a lot of education and text. We have other websites in our program. For instance, we have a welcoming Michigan campaign that's part of the nationwide Welcoming America campaign. That website has a different purpose to really attract attention and educate people. They use a lot more central images in that website. I think it depends on the main purpose of the website. The way that I've seen it used effectively is if you have a particular event, fundraising campaign, something else that you really want highlighted. If it's a more informational, utilitarian site where there's many different things that people will come there for, I think it's less effective. But if you have an annual campaign or an upcoming community outreach event you really want to focus on, then that can be a strong presentation style. Good point. One point is that it depends on the kind of content you're putting out and it's an overlap on what both of you said. In particular, if you're trying to really focus on a particular campaign or message, this is a great way to do it. On the other hand, if you're more of a clearinghouse with a lot of different kinds of information that could end up taking prominence away from other pieces, that makes a lot of sense. I did mention that there's some discussion about whether this is a good idea from a usability point of view. It turns out that in more cases, as more folks are doing usability studies, the idea of a big central image for that sort of campaign-style promotion does work in the sense that folks are clicking on them and moving to that message and then also taking action. So the studies that are showing that, what studies are also showing is the folks that do slide shows tend to assume that the slides that, as they slide by, that the second and third and fourth slide is also getting a lot of traffic because it's taking up substantial real estate on the homepage, but it turns out there's this rule that basically says you have about three seconds to five seconds to impress somebody on any given page, and by the time they've seen the second slide, three to five seconds may have already passed, and they're not clicking on it. So the slide show concept has proven not to be so effective in terms of, you know, the first slide gets a lot of traffic, but the rest of them don't. Something to think about there in terms of this trend. Angela and Brian, any other thoughts or comments on this? Great. So that's a big trend, something to consider for your websites. Another trend is this trend of what's called an infographic, a branding of, you know, a diagram. An infographic is essentially a visual presentation of data. They've come in a lot of forms. What you see here is different infographics. This one on the right is a pretty common one, the ACLU, where you have a very long page that has messages, you know, that lead to data, and the idea behind an infographic is to try to simplify some complex data using powerful visuals to prove a point, right? So it's meant to selectively choose data to prove a point, spread it down the page, get it presented visually so that you can understand what's going on. Something that might have lots of numbers becomes suddenly understandable. You know, as someone more famous than me said, I'm not sure who. A novel is a tricky thing to map. So when we're trying to tell stories on the web, and we're trying to use sort of one infographic to tell a complex story, you need to be careful that you're going to be forced to pick and choose how much information you can really show in order to prove a point and which pieces of the story are you leaving behind in order to simplify your message. It's true across all content, very much true of infographics, which tries to do both stuff a lot of data into a screen, but also get some powerful visuals. So with that said and that caveat, I'm wondering, Angela and Brian, what's your experience in the legal services community in using infographics? Where have you seen this, or where do you think this might be effective? We've definitely noticed... Go for it. No, no, no. You go ahead, Brian. We've definitely noticed that if we can take this type of information and use it for social media sharing specifically, it works much better than blocks of text. Anything that has this real visual appeal will get three to five times as many clicks, likes, shares as we would get from a similar amount of information and text. Great. Angela? What I was going to add is that I've seen this used very effectively in fundraising. Illinois Legal Aid Online does a lot of infographics for their fundraising, and I think it's a great way to explain the benefit of our services quickly and easily to people who aren't familiar with them or aren't familiar with what we do or why it matters. So it's a great way to convey that quickly. Right, and I think that makes a lot of sense. What's been powerful about infographics are the ones that do go viral, and what Brian said is absolutely true when you have a strong enough infographic and you spread it out through social media, you tend to get a lot of people spreading that more than other kinds of content. It's more compelling, and so that can be a useful way to drive traffic. They can be harder than you think to make. They're escaping me at the moment, but there's utilities out there for making infographics kind of easy. There's certainly graphic design programs that are fairly easy to use, but when you start sitting down to do this kind of work, it can take a more thought than you can imagine to just figure out what exactly am I going to present and then how am I going to depict it. I was wondering, Brian, in your experience of having done these and saw the traffic, did you find that to be true? Did you find utilities that actually made it quite easy to produce these? How hard is it to pull off one of these infographics? It's definitely a skill, having a staff member with either an artistic background or some specific training in this area is very helpful. We have found that getting students through University of Washington's Information School has helped us create graphics like this. We did one related to dashboards and what was possible while we were designing dashboards for our case management system, but they are not easy to create. You can't just tell somebody, hey, head to this site and punch in the information and it will create one automatically. There are some sites designed to do that, but the quality is not there unless you've got the skills. Right, that makes sense. Anja, in your experience of any strategies or techniques, you would recommend when you're trying to approach making your own infographics for legal services? I have never made my own, so I have no idea. It looks very challenging. Yeah, I would say so. In my experience, I would do it to start at the end and say this is sort of the truth that I want to convey in simple terms and sort of build a graphic that shows that truth is clearly and concisely and compelling as possible. That's on a napkin, some kind of black-and-white drawing. And then from there, figure out what data you have, you know, because it's the truth, you know, supports that goal. If you start from the other direction where you have a whole bunch of data and you're wondering how to depict it, what you tend to get are data-heavy solutions. It's really hard to get a bunch of stuff and say, oh, I've got 48 things I really want to say. They all have numbers. And then to try to, you know, eliminate all that through the process of making infographic can be kind of torturous and meetings and decision-making. So it's just something to think about. Go ahead. I would probably follow Brian's direction and try to work with a student from the University of Michigan School of Information. Sounds like a good advice. Very good. So that's the infographic trend. That's proven useful. You know, in general, images are more important and sort of what we're seeing and across the web and social media are more and more tools adopting images as sort of a standard to communicate. I mean, you've got your Pinterest here. You've got Instagram. You've got Twitter with Twitter pics. You've got Facebook where many, many, many more posts than in the early days are image posts or video-based posts. And you see that you've got a variety of kinds of images that are being used. Images that are more infographic-y. There's lots of information on them. Images that are sort of, you know, simple quotes or statements. You'll often have maybe an image of a political figure or some kind of visceral image with a quote on it. There's also the sort of standard where you have a story and an action to tell and a visceral, you know, sort of image on top. One of the things we're finding more and more is that, you know, some groups are stumbling on choosing images that are not necessarily culturally sensitive to the communities. So we need to be a little bit careful that our images do make it really easy to quickly convey a point. But depending on who you're talking to, they may take it away that you don't expect. This image on the right is a good example of that. To some cultures and communities, depending on who you're working with in legal services, this could be seen as poverty porn. It could also be seen as a very compelling thing that, you know, a situation that I want to help out. So we run into this all the time. I'm curious, in your experiences, Angela and Brian, how have, you know, sort of images in general been used effectively in legal services? Have you run into situations where images, you know, had a very strong positive effect or perhaps a negative effect? With regard to outreach events, we've definitely seen that the flyers that we put together that target a community and are developed by a community partner who is familiar with what will work in that particular community are significantly better. So for example, when we were doing outreach to the local Chinese community, we partnered with another nonprofit that helped that community specifically to design the flyer that we then shared on Facebook, put up on our website, and the turnout for that was standing or lonely. But we did not have the expertise in-house to know what type of graphics would have worked best for that community. Right, that's a good example. Angela, what are your thoughts? Again, we don't, you know, I personally don't have a lot of experience using images. I know that we need to use them more in our outreach. I think because we are still a relatively new program, we just don't have much experience. But I like what Brian has to say about seeking out experts within the community that you're trying to reach. Right, I think it's a good point. It's nice to also, if you're worried about that issue, and we all should be ultimately, we all should be trying hard to really understand who we're working with, and that goes through for building new websites or having a new campaign that's going to involve images. It's nice to get a selection of those folks, just a few to look at some models of what you're trying to do. You're trying to choose some pretty compelling images for a campaign or something. Just check it out and see what you're choosing. It's resonating if it falls flat, if it's actually negative. It's a nice thing to do. You can go to places like their stock photo sites to get images. Those can be challenging because they have lots of flat, boring images that everyone's seen. But if you kind of hunt around in them, you can find ones that are more unusual or more towards your mission and your goals. And they have a big plus of if you don't have very good images and are hard to come by or you're trying to hire photographers, you can get images. So I stock photo and morgue file because one that's kind of neat called deathtostockphoto.com. But there's tons of them out there that will offer free or inexpensive photos that you can choose from and fill out your sites and make sure that you have something compelling. With all photo choices or all kinds of graphics, it's really important to center in on the story you're trying to tell. What we're finding more and more is that there's more images being used on the web overall. There tends to be more of a, because there's a great variety now of images being used mixed with text and mixed with storytelling, what we're finding is that there's a lot of mismatches. You'll find images that are being used because someone thought it looked great and that probably does, but the story context is odd next to it. And in some cases where it really meshes well. So think about the story you're trying to tell. So building a well is the easy part. When you look at the photo, are you getting the sense that we're positively making change? Is that what you're trying to convey? Are you getting the sense that there's a disaster and we need your help? Think about what you're trying to convey and how you're getting it across. I'm wondering if there's any thoughts, Brian, from your side about using images in terms of matching that to the story. Do you have any examples of maybe legal services sites where this has been done effectively to share? I mean, this is really a new trend. We're starting to try to come up with very visual icons that will appeal across cultures. We're trying to come up with some images, but traditionally we've been a very text heavy group of websites. So there are a lot of examples where there's very few images so far. Right. And Angela, and as I think you mentioned sort of a newer program, how have you guys started to approach, you know, figuring out what story you're going to tell and then how you might sort of imagine those or detect those and using images? Have you started that process yet? Has that been something that's taken a lot of time or thinking or were you at with that? Well, I mean, on some level, when we designed the website, we selected a class of icons to sort of use throughout the website, which are, I mean, they're not really images, but we use those and we use that throughout all of our marketing materials. But as Brian said, we're very information heavy. The real images that we use are through our videos. And one way that we've, you know, when we've done our videos, we've gone with all animation style videos. And so we've kind of not had to deal with the issues around selecting good images because we've, you know, made our own that are very not real. So as we move forward with our PR and our marketing, you know, our marketing materials, we definitely need images. And we haven't really begun that process yet. Right. And there's a great question here in the comments. Okay. Oh, which is asking about the accessibility of the images for individuals with screen readers. And this is definitely something that people want to approach at the beginning of their design process. When you add images, it's important to have alternative text that explains or lets an individual with a screen reader know what the image is trying to convey. A common mistake is to take something like what we see on the screen where there is important text on there and not have that in the alternative text. Most content management systems will make it very easy so you no longer need a programmer to add that alternative text. The WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get editor has an option there to put that text in. But that's very important to do. Yeah. And that's a good point. So, you know, folks with visual and cognitive and other kinds of disabilities that are visiting that website often use a screen reader, which is just a utility that will read the screen in some way for them. And because it's reading the screen, it's relying on the text and definitions that you put into your web pages to help that be read intelligently. And so having these alternative tags behind your images allow the screen reader to read something smart about the image. And too many sites have ignored that piece. So there's a nice image that's supposed to convey a message, and it literally says nothing to the screen reader. So that's really important. And then to Angela's point, what we haven't seen in these slides is this idea of on an information-heavy website that you might be using more iconic representations, you know, icons that have symbols or that sort of thing to sort of set aside, especially in content-heavy sites. So content-heavy sites typically have categories of content, collections of content, and you might have to wade through, you know, some or several pages to understand that content. So having sort of common icons or colors or that sort of thing can help the user understand where they're at, what they're seeing to get the point across. Great question. Okay, good. So that covers a lot of ground around sort of image use and trends around images on the website. I wanted to move to kind of more of the technical side specifically looking at some things, mobile and some other technical challenges. Let's take a look at mobile. Mobile meaning it's becoming increasingly critical, and that's because many, many, many more people, the percentage of growing dramatically year over year are accessing sites primarily through their mobile device. So that doesn't mean there's some time accessing it, but they're most often accessing it websites through their mobile device. And mobile devices, as you see here, there's two of them on the screen, but there's actually many sizes. There's iPads, there's iPad minis, there's phones that are big and small, and there's phones that can go landscape, you mean flip them to the side, stand them up and down. So as you can see, the screens can be in all kinds of sizes. So websites, it used to be that you could, in order to effectively put a website on a mobile device, you pretty much had to build an application specific to that device. So you'd have to build a website and build an application. That's sort of quickly falling aside for many, many applications, general applications, where we have a website, we would just like it to look good on mobile devices. So you can build websites that are mobile ready, meaning that their screens essentially change size appropriately to fit other screen sizes. So big screens, small screens, medium screens, whatever they are, it intelligently changes the screen so that content is stacked nicely and can be read appropriately. What's your experience, Brian and Angela, with working with mobile sites, some of the challenges, techniques you may have used, sites you've seen that do this well? This is one way in which we were lucky to be a relatively new site, because when we built our site in 2012, we built it on a mobile ready platform. And we still had a lot of work to do cleaning up the CSS to make it look really pretty and work perfectly. But, you know, we launched the website, we launched Michigan Legal Help in 2012, and we realized pretty early on that about 30% of our users were accessing it by mobile. And I looked at our stats this morning, and we're actually up to 53% of our users, view it on a tablet or a mobile phone. We've crossed over the 50% mark. We did use the mobile ready Drupal theme, but like I said, we still had a lot of work to do reordering, figuring out how to fit the menus in and make those look nice. We have a full screen county select box on our big site that doesn't work at all on the mobile site, so we had to make that a dropdown menu in the counties alphabetically. There were a lot of other, like I said, CSS things that we had to do, but in the end, it didn't take that much work. It was a summer project for one of our School of Information interns, and he did it mostly on his own with help from our staff. So it was cost-effective to do and really had a huge impact. I think that's partly why our mobile numbers did go up so high. It went from about 30% in 2013 to 53% today. Great. One of the big reasons that we ended up moving our video content from a proprietary player on LSMTAP to YouTube was mobile accessibility. About 30% to 40% of our users access our videos via either a tablet or a smart phone, and YouTube just does everything to reshape, resize, and percent that to where it will work on any platform, something that we just didn't have the technical expertise to do in-house. So they're much easier to find there and they're mobile accessible. That's great. And the trend is continuing that these, what we've mentioned on a few sites, content management systems. These are systems that help you easily build websites and maintain websites without having to know technical HTML so much. These content management systems, one was mentioned Drupal. There's WordPress. There's a variety of others. Building more and more mobile-ready themes, meaning themes that you can look of websites that you can choose and replace out your images in your own colors and they're built so that they can react to different screen sizes. As Angela said, it's not quite as easy as that. That gets you a long way, but you still, as you start looking at mobile devices, start to wander and want to move things around a slightly differently or maybe substantially differently than the theme has it set up. So those, you know, getting your site mobile-ready in some ways that at least isn't broken into mobile devices can be a fairly easy thing to do with modern content management systems. Getting it to look the way you want it to on different mobile devices can take a lot more sort of coding and decision-making. Which devices are you targeting? What are you trying to do? But as we've seen already in this conversation, as sites are getting more than 50% in some cases mobile traffic, that trend line is going to continue to go up. So you definitely want to be there and be on mobile. Good. Let's take a look at another trend happening. MicroSites. This is sort of a fancy name for having another website besides your main website. Really a MicroSite is this trend where an organization may have some specific resource or campaign, and they'd really like to target people to that resource or campaign, have control of branding to really showcase what it's about, separate it from the main site, maybe quite often to keep it from being so organizational or so buried, and they have really a singular focus on what's going on. So Covenant House here has abolished child trafficking, and there's this Legal Defense Fund has this focus here. And the idea is that by building these MicroSites, maybe we can drive more and more traffic to our particular cause because of the time and attention we put into branding it to marketing it, the very focused message. On the other hand, it's another site in some way, or even if it's not another site, it's some kind of more complicated area of your existing site that has a fully different look and feel. In either case, it takes some time and effort to think through what the MicroSite would be, what the pages are, what exactly the picture, the action is going to be. Again, it's another smaller site. Angela and Brian, in your experience, have you seen or used MicroSites in your experience? And if you have, have you seen them be successful, do you find them too much work? Where does this work well or poorly for you? So at Northwest Justice Project, we're experimenting with it for our veterans project specifically. We're highlighting some of the things that we have that are most used by veterans from our larger Washington Law Help site on this sub-site. We currently have several lawyers dedicated to the veterans project, and we've got the ability to maintain, update that. It really does bring up some concerns over staffing, updating, making sure that these are currently supported sites. We've had other parts of our program asked for them, but didn't have the resources to really maintain it. It does definitely work for a targeted audience where you've got the resources to keep it up to date and alive. That makes sense. Angela, what's your, have you done any work on the site that you've built around MicroSites, or any thinking around that, or any examples that pop up that are good or bad models? We have not done any for Michigan Legal Help, but another program in our office, I'm affiliated with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, and they created a separate website solely dedicated to this welcoming Michigan project, which is part of the nationwide welcoming America that I mentioned earlier. They decided to break that out into its own separate site, and it's separately branded. You wouldn't necessarily know that it's affiliated with Merck. So it's, you know, and we had concern about the resources for that, and I don't think it gets a lot of updating, and I think it does suffer for lack of attention because it is just a subset of what the Immigrant Rights Center does. So I think it definitely, you have to really think about whether it's worth making it a completely separate website. Right, and I think that's good caution, and Caroline asks as well in the chat. I wonder if it isn't more confusing because so many of our people have multiple issues. They come with one issue, but in fact, many, and therefore might be better off keeping away from a microsite, integrating into a larger website. This is exactly the challenge. If you have a lot of issues and, you know, they have kind of relatively equal weight, you know, it becomes difficult to imagine, really, am I going to build, like, five or six or seven or ten microsites? You know, that becomes quite a big burden. If you have budget and staffing, that might be really valuable, but these are separate sites. They become tougher to integrate and manage, and their lifespan, especially when campaigns sort of end, what you do with all that traffic, and how you reroute them back to your site. You know, there's just lots of decisions to make there. You know, on the other hand, some nonprofits and services communities have used microsites well, especially if the campaign is singular and kind of big. It's the biggest thing going on, and it's going to last a while. It's not a month, but, you know, if it's substantial, maybe it's an annual campaign where you're really driving to some goal for that particular year. A microsite might be a good investment because everyone, everywhere, can kind of push on that site and kind of get people a little bit away from the organizational sort of structure of the main site. Toss it around as pros and cons there. Yeah, Eric thinks a really good point that the timeframe of which the site is going to be up matters. As you put up a new site, it's going to take a while before Google is able to notice it, and if you don't have enough links from the rest of the community, that microsite may get ignored where your main site is already well established and has the search engine optimization and page rank to be seen. One other, that's good information, and that made me think of one other way that folks have sort of quasi pulled off microsites that may be interesting is if you're using a content management system such as Drupal or WordPress, you know, this Plone, Jumlat, or the whole variety of them. They allow you, again, to have a theme that you've built. It's a look and feel, a structure to your website. So they, you know, make sure that their header and a footer are the same across all your pages. Well, that theme can be altered somewhat. So that certain pages, you know, like in Drupal, for instance, certain page types might have a different theme. So that theme might have a different great big graphic at the top or something. And that's not a microsite per se, but it's a way to have some pages have a substantially different look without doing too much work that a microsite might cause. You know, you're still one site you're working with. Yes, you're doing some modifications to the theme, but all the pages are still centrally managed. So if you're using one of those systems or planning on it and do want to have kind of a unique display for some kind of a campaign, you might consider that as a stopgap. Okay, so that's a lot about microsites. It can really push forward a message as long as it's something you can invest in and it's something your organization is really sort of hammering on as a priority. I think it's a good idea. You know, another trend that's happening is there's more and more use of page motion. You know, I would actually argue that for years and years and years, motion on a page on a website. So when you've loaded a page, without you moving them, has been going on for years, quite some time. There's been more fluidity happening with some of the new technologies. So what's happening is sort of two things, essentially. When you load a screen, maybe, you know, content marketing for nonprofits sort of pulls up and reveals the 86% figure below, you know, as you're staring at the screen, which is a way to sort of, you know, visually communicate that, you know, we do content marketing for nonprofits, here's why, by moving the screen up and down and showing and hiding sort of a message. Another thing that's happening are what are called these single page scroll websites, which is sort of a page that's mostly designed for a mobile viewing. As you might know, if you have an iPad, you're using your fingers and you're kind of swiping the screen up and down to move it, you know, through all the content. So these single page websites are actually quite long pages, but as you swipe your fingers up and down, it sort of flips from section to section. It kind of looks like you're moving between pages. What the single page scroll websites are also doing is as you're scrolling up and down, things can change on the screen. This happens with some pretty fancy groups like NASA and the Space Shuttle Site or Tesla, the big electric car company. They've done some pretty fancy stuff, which as a page moves, you know, parts to the shuttle come together or fly apart or have explanations about what they do. And so the idea that people are trying to do with page motion is to say, you know, get your eye to focus on something moving and then provide a message. Now, what's also been happening for years is still happening now, which is that there's a lot of people putting page motion on a website that just basically is distracting. I think people thought it was cool. But really what it has done is taken the eye away from the message to look at the pretty thing moving. So we want to be very careful that when we're doing page motion that we're not, you know, breaking the experience of people coming to the site, that we're not sort of having them look at the motion and not look at the message. It needs to be an enhancement to what you're trying to convey and not the star itself. You know, with that said, I'm wondering, Angela and Brian have either of you have seen or used this or considered using these techniques in your work? I have not. Yeah, I haven't either. You've definitely had people who have been very scared of using any type of motion or action as part of the design process. I would like to give it a try, but it is definitely not for the use of tradition. Right. You know, I think the most approachable way to think about or to consider using motion is not so much pages that as you're staring at them move for you. I mean, people are doing this with the most common thing is to have that slide show that kind of scrolls, you know, from right to left. But, you know, there's other kinds of things where windows can fade in and fade out. That can be more annoying to users because they kind of have to wait for that to happen before they can do something. The nicer thing is to start looking at these single-page scroll websites because what those are really doing is building a website mostly for a mobile audience, but they also work well on a big screen because you can still use your mouse on a big screen to kind of pull the scroll bar down or just click links on the page that move you down the page. And basically, it's revealing another page. Maybe it looks different, but it's really just pulling it up. It's like scrolling through the pages. But it's a design strategy that can look very well on big screens as well as mobile, and it also doesn't change shape much. So one of the things that happens a lot with mobile design is that you build a site for a bigger screen and you have, like, a menu bar on the right. You have different columns going on. And then when it gets to the mobile, you end up having to flip those columns. So instead of having them side to side, you have them all stack on top of each other. And that starts to have a whole different experience for people on mobile. And the idea of the single page scroll is that you don't change it much. No matter if it's on a big screen or a tiny screen, as you move fluidly through, it looks the same pretty much for everybody on every device. So I think that's a more approachable way to look at it. So page motion is possible. It's trendy. Make sure that it's not the star of the show, but it's enhancing your message if you're going to deploy on page motion. Another kind of technique that's becoming more and more popular is this thing called popovers. You know, on a critical note, we might call these roadblocks. What these do is when you get to a website, it may ask you for important information to use the website. So, for instance, confirm your local station is this idea that if you confirm your local station and you go to this sort of radio site, we can make sure we present you with information that's going to be relevant to you because you're much, much more likely to be looking for your local station. Another kind of popover is more roadblocky in the sense that it's saying, you know, sign up to receive critical updates. It's basically saying, well, before you get to this page, we'd like to invite you to be friendly about it, to sign up. And then once you do that, you can go to the page or click the X if you don't like it. So, I use the word roadblock because it's blocking the user from getting to the page. They're expecting to get to a web page. They weren't told that, oh, when you click this link, there's going to be an ask for an email address. That's not what they were told. They were told we're going to get to a website that I think I want to go to. I click the link and a pop-up appears instead of the website. So you have to keep that in mind that a roadblock can be really effective for gathering information because it's right in front. It's the first thing they see when they get to a certain page. But it can also have a negative experience in the sense that people aren't getting to what they want. They might leave the site. They might otherwise just think that the site isn't as valuable as they were hoping. So those are some drawbacks. Brian or Angela, do you use these in your work or have you seen these used out there in the legal services community? We don't use them right now. When we started our live help, which is a chat-based function, a lot of statewide websites have it that we can chat with users and help them navigate the website or answer questions that don't require legal advice. When we started that process, we live engaged, asked us if we wanted to pop-up. To any time people looked at a piece of content to have a pop-up come on and say, hey, would you like to chat with us? And we decided not to because I didn't want to assume that people couldn't use the website or needed help. We were afraid that it would block important information. They go to the website to read the information because they have a legal problem that they need to learn about. So we decided not to use those in any way. But we were hoping to start a statewide triage program that would help you know, link sort of direct people to resources that would sort of be separate from just browsing the website. And so we're going to be thinking about how we might want to use something like this to let people know that there's another option besides just browsing the website that they can be directed to specific resources. That seems like a wide strategy to go forward. Brian, have you seen these used in your work effectively or ineffectively? The technical support or the chat option is something that we used to use on LSMTAP. It definitely would get people to interact with us, although it wasn't always individuals who understood the site that they were even on. It was a lot more time to monitor than the results that we got out of it. We try to avoid anything that forces people to give us personal information before getting too legal information on our websites so that they can be there as close to anonymously with as little clicks as possible in the privacy policies and stuff that we've suggested for some legal aid organizations. We've even added sections in how they can turn off cookies or other tracking mechanism if they don't want that there. That type of data collection is something that we've moved away from, unless it's very voluntary where they're opting in and it's something that they would be going after. I think that's good information. Going along with that in the chat, the better use of popover they've seen is when they pop up when you hit the end of an article. This is true. There's a sense of maybe we want to put something in front of people's eyes, but we also want to make sure that we're really getting our message to pop across and we're not annoying them. To your point, Brian, there's certain kinds of things that we're asking for, such as maybe you can contact us or make a call or something, but we're not monitoring that because, of course, if you ask people to do that and then you don't answer them, that can be a problem. There's some other ways to think about doing something like popovers where you're saying, hey, I just really want to make sure this options in front of people, but I might not necessarily want to roadblock them. There's CSS code. This is often deployed on, again, content management system websites where you can have certain elements of the page that are basically sitting on a layer. You might have your regular webpage, but there might be this additional layer that all it really has is a little block, a little square area on the right or left of the screen. Maybe it has Facebook and Twitter icons in it. Maybe it has sign up for our email newsletter, but it's this little block that as a person scrolls up and down the page, the block kind of stays on the page. It doesn't scroll away. It floats with the page. That's just a coding trick, but it's hard to do, and can make some elements of your page as long as they're subtle. They don't take over a large amount of the page. Kind of stay there no matter where the person is going. They never lose sight of that they can sign up or so forth, but it doesn't prevent them from reading the page itself. Right. There's a startup out of the Information School here at University of Washington that tries to embed a common frequently asked questions related to the page that an individual is on to try to cut down on the number of questions that they get asked. I think that that type of technology could be deployed efficiently when you look at related legal problems if someone is on a dissolution or divorce area of the website and then there's parenting plans or other related things that could be displayed in that sidebar. I think it could be very effective. I just haven't seen it done yet. Right. So just beware. Popovers, you can collect a lot of information because you're putting it right in front of folks' eyes, but there's some blowback potentially in not giving people what they were originally asking for. So think about that. Another big trend is social sign-on. This is this concept that if you have, let's say you have a blog or you have just articles on your website that allow people to comment, you may be asking people to submit their information in order to do that. They may need to log in so that they're a user on your site and therefore have the permission to post some messages. This is quite common. New sites, blog sites all do this. They most typically want you to log in so we know who it is in some way that's communicating. Well, the old method before social media really, really took off was that a lot of websites that have blogs and articles and these kinds of login systems just have their own separate login. So you might have a website, you have your own way for folks to log in. Those folks have to have an account on your site in order to access the services. The new trend is to use what's called social sign-on, which is instead folks would use something for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever the social media tool is and they use that to log into your site. It has a lot of benefits. Some of the benefits are the person, especially in these very, very popular tools like Facebook, it's quite commonly the case that the person immediately knows their login and password because that's just something that committed the memory because they're using it all the time. They're also very likely already logged in to Facebook in some browser window and they're visiting your site and they want to comment and you say, oh, you can sign on my Facebook. And by just clicking a button, they're logged in, right, because the browser already kind of knows they're logged in over at Facebook so they can log in on your site. If not, they can still log in with their Facebook account. Again, that's nice because they don't have to create another one with your site. They can use one they already know. It gives you a lot of information because once you know user names on Facebook, there's a wealth of information that's provided via Facebook to folks about who this person is on some level. So that's stuff that you can start mining and understanding who in fact is participating on your site. It's also a way to sort of outsource your user management. All the work that goes into sort of what these people are and whether or not they're machines that are just sort of making up logins and going to post a bunch of Viagra spam and so forth. A lot of that's being sort of handled through the Facebook sort of tools of becoming a user of Facebook and so forth. And so you're more likely to have real people actually commenting. I'm not saying that they're going to make nice comments. You still have to monitor what people are doing on your site. It makes that job a bit easier for your sites. Now, the drawback is of course that a lot of people don't necessarily want to share what's going on in their Facebook world with stuff they're doing elsewhere. And so if that's the only option and this happens to us a lot in my own work where sites will have the only option is a Facebook login and a lot of us will be unwilling to use that because we're not interested to share information. We're not quite sure what we're going to share with that site. So there can be some privacy concerns of that as well. So while there's a lot of these benefits that are easier to the user and easier and gives you a lot of information and less management, there can be some drawbacks too in terms of people's privacy concerns. Angela and Brian social sign on something that you're using or have seen used. What do you think of this sort of tradeoff between ease of use and privacy? So almost no one in the legal services area is using these because of the privacy concerns. I also blog in the gaming community and they're extremely popular there. They're great if people are voluntarily putting out their information that they want connected with those companies. But I understand why legal services has kind of avoided them entirely. It's the privacy concerns that you brought up. Right. Angela, are you using social sign in at all on the site that you guys built? No, we're not. We don't really take any information on our legal help website. It's all sort of outgoing. There's no way for anyone to leave comments or engage with us in that way. And as Brian said, it's sort of been the way it's been done. I'm very interested to see Illinois Legal Aid Online is doing a huge redevelopment of their site and they are going to allow for commenting and this type of interaction. So I think in a couple years in a year or two probably we'll be able to see what their experience is. When they mentioned this at the TIC conference they got a lot of people thinking that they were crazy for allowing the public to comment on their website and take feedback that way. It's going to be interesting to see how that goes. I'm excited to see how that project goes. I think there could be a lot of very valuable information that comes about from that process. A lot of when it comes to legal services so if we're and it's thinking about three examples actually. Two nonprofits that provide actually three nonprofits that provide legal services and one that provides actually sales. And in all three cases they have login opportunities but they're not meant for sharing services information. They're much more meant for rudimentary tasks such as completing a transaction like a sales transaction or getting some material. And what these sites have done instead is to say well we do want to capitalize on the social networks. We want to bring people in who are on these networks. And so what all three of these sites have done is focused on LinkedIn is just start some LinkedIn professional groups right on the LinkedIn site and just have conversations on LinkedIn with professionals in that environment entirely. So everyone's accustomed to what LinkedIn is. Nobody's trying to have privacy issues violated. You're more so trying to gather a group of like-minded people to talk more and to be more exposed to your website. So as opposed to just sort of pushing messages into your LinkedIn account or into your Facebook account actually managing a conversation and a network of people there instead of skipping the social sign-on piece all together but getting some of those benefits of just pulling the two communities closer. So just looking at the chat one person mentions it's better to do CAPTCHA to slow down robots or moderate posts and require logins. This is the big problem with having community websites where you're managing conversations is how do you make sure that the people that are coming in are in fact people and if they are people that they're people that are going to contribute well. So a couple of ways that was mentioned by Caroline here. CAPTCHAs are ways where when folks log into a website before they hit submit they have to fill out some figure out a math problem or type in some characters that are displayed in kind of a fuzzy image. And that's a way to try to support robots and other code that's been written to try to get into your site. Not perfect but they're working better and better but people are always fighting them as well. And then definitely in any kind of community you have to moderate it because there's always going to be people that feel anonymous or don't violate the rules and make the conversation go from good to bad. And you want to weed those folks out and keep a strong command of what's going on in the community. So both moderation as well as making sure people coming in the gate are filtered in some way are both strong tools to use. Great. Any more thoughts Angela and Brian on this topic? Nope. All right. Let's move into content for our last area here. So content is king meaning that websites live and die and what kind of content you put out. It's important to really make sure that we're focused first and foremost on what's our message in terms of text as well as the images and videos. You know, the first principle is to have friendly human language. Like a site like this, there's this entire screen and there's about 50 words on the screen. A couple big powerful visuals, one in the background and three icons really and then there's a little shopping cart at the top. And this is just an example of a site that's trying to get a message across and has taken whatever acronyms and buzzwords and internal speak you might have. Legal services certainly has a lot of that, but every area sort of sector of nonprofits has their sort of internal language and you want to make sure that we're really communicating to that audience and for most of us that's some kind of an external audience that isn't working at our organizations may not be very familiar at all. We need to communicate to them and so this friendly and human language approach. I'm wondering Angela, as you built your website, was that all a struggle in terms of writing your own content to think start, you know, stop thinking you know, inward and sort of as an organization and think more about the friendly language approach? How did you guys deal with that? It was. We had a lot of time thinking about it. Our content developers did a language course that was offered through transcend. Through a TIG with legal aid from the New York. I think it was western New York. And that was really helpful. Especially when conveying difficult legal concepts and things that are just scary to people such as going to court or getting divorced or being evicted. I wanted to be very careful with our language both that it was plain and also that it was easy to understand and sort of welcoming language. And it took us a long time. I mean all my content developers are lawyers and we're used to talking to other lawyers writing for other lawyers and other and it is very much a success. I hear that in law schools they're trying to teach foreign language more so there's hope for the future. But really taking the time to do an in-depth training and paying attention to this at every moment of every day I think is really key. When we have content we have three levels of planned language review. We always try to have someone else do the plan. Someone besides the author does the plan language review and we also work with non-lawyers in our office help us a lot with the plan language review because their input they tell us when things don't make sense or sound right. So those are things that we've done. Yeah and that's actually what you've described is very typical. It can seem like oh my god that's a large project but it can be really hard to make language become friendly and very approachable. Brian what are your thoughts on this? How have you guys proceeded with this problem? We strongly agree that plan language is extremely important and transcend has done some great work there. We just went through the process of working with the court to review the family law forms in Washington State but it is so important that you get non-lawyers to give you feedback and not just screeners or somebody who deals with legal jargon on a daily basis. Users that know nothing about the law because they will point out pieces of text that seem intuitive to you that make no sense to them. The user testing is essential. Yeah those are great points. So just remember this may seem obvious. We do want to have friendly human language. Just remember that it can take a lot of time to think hard about that. When we build websites with folks mostly helping folks at the immigrant legal research center we are constantly challenging our clients to say well this is a great idea to write this stuff but are you really going to write it? Let's have an example of it. Let's see how long it really takes you to do it so that we can understand is it achievable just in terms of your time and staffing to get what you really want. And then if it is how much can you do on a weekly and monthly basis so that it's something that you can always write friendly human language and not drop the ball after the site is launched. I also want to point out that there is a good conversation in the chat over requiring login and allowing people or not requiring having optional login allows people to customize their view. If you have someone who is returning to your website and looking at specific resources and wants to collect those together that could be a very useful way to cut down their transactional cost so that they can get to the things that they need on a reoccurring basis. That's great information. Angela do you have another thought? I was going to say one more thing about the friendly languages but it's a job that's never done. We review all of our content once a year and plan language review is a review that we do every single year and I just challenge my staff that you can always improve on this and we use the tools to evaluate the grade level in the plan language and you can almost always continue to improve your language. That's a great point. It really is never done so this was work you'll be doing for a long time to make it sustainable. Good. There's this concept trendy these days as well up and coming if you will. It's been done for a long time since websites have begun but content marketing is a big thing. It's in quotes because it's a little strange to talk about content marketing in the nonprofit community generally because we are putting out content to market it. Now when we're talking about for-profit firms it tends to be that there's these message channels that they're trying to really push out and so they'll write a content piece and then spend lots of time getting it into other worlds and getting it seen in very specific and strategic ways. Non-profits can do this too basically the idea being there's some sort of focused content that we'd like to get folks engaged with and push it out into other networks such as maybe get some cross-posting of that on LinkedIn possibly running a Google ad campaign which by the way Google gives free ads to 501c3 non-profits and one can use those ads to promote certain content and get that to go market higher pay for placements in various places but content marketing is a strategy to push certain kinds of content into other worlds. Other kinds of tools you can use are techniques around search engine optimization which just makes sure it's not so much that you're marketing to a particular community more so you're making sure that you're more findable in search engines by building a site that has your headings are properly coded that you're using keywords and phrases and visible text on your site and there's a variety of techniques you can use when you're building a site to make sure that your content can be found and thus is more marketed. I'm wondering Brian or Angela are there any specific marketing strategies techniques tools or maybe worlds that you've approached with content to help push out messages in either of your work? I think the most important thing that I've definitely found in the community is that Google, Microsoft, any of the search engines place more validity on what somebody else says your content is than what you say because you can put anything on there so creating an alliance of other organizations that deal with similar issues that can share your content when it's posted with links that really properly identify it so that those key search terms or phrases are pointing to your content helps bring that to the front of search results a lot faster and that external marketing portion with partners is often forgot as part of the SEO strategy. That's a very good point and a lot of the highest ranking factors in search engine optimization in terms of getting your site seen have something to do with whether your link to your page is being used somewhere else, social media or a whole variety of ways that it can be used but essentially that someone else has seen your stuff is important. That's a good point. Angela, on your website is there any specific content marketing that you've been pursuing that's maybe been helpful or maybe has been a learning experience in another way? I wouldn't say that we're very marketing that I've been able to do has been sort of around promoting specific pieces of content at different times of year. This is always a really good time for us to promote any information about free income tax assistance. Things like that that will get picked up by lots of other groups because of the timeliness tend to do best. That's a really good point and it's great low hanging fruit. Not only seasonal, if you know your own seasonal trends for what when people react to what kinds of messages, that's a great way to just sort of have sort of elemental marketing. More people will just basically find your materials. You can also tie messages to current trends, current news events. With some of the changes in immigration law, for instance Immigrant Legal Resource Center changed some of their language and words and offerings around that getting a lot more hits to their content as a result because a lot of people were focused on that issue. So seasonality and current events, basically jumping on the bandwagon of another popular thing is not an idea and can be low hanging fruit. So again, so content can take a lot of work. Content marketing is one piece of that work of just sort of how are we going to strategically get this stuff out after we figured out that we can write it. And then another trend, and this is especially a trend as content management systems like Drupal WordPress, Plone, Joomla, a lot of these tools we've mentioned have taken off. They've made it easier and easier to reuse content. This has done a lot of common ways, but one common way is you might write an article, maybe it's a press release and you write that article and you save it to your website, and your website because it's smart and it's a content management system has been programmed by you and your team to show that press release, maybe the top three on your homepage, maybe the some other page because the press release relates to a certain program, it's also on the side of that program page. It's all done automatically. The content is being reused in different parts of your site. You've done it once somewhere and the site knows to put it other places for you. And that's a very common way to get legs underneath your content. Another way to reuse content is to take a story that you've written in the past and simply bring it to the surface with an update. A lot of stories we write and a lot of information and services we provide are timeless in the sense that we're going to continue to provide them, but they become relevant based on some modern issue, some current trend or some season or something of that nature. So you can bring it back to the surface with maybe a little bit of text change to make it useful again. Are these strategies Angela that you've been using on the site that you built in terms of replicating and reusing content? We definitely do replicate and reuse content in a couple of different ways. Some simple ways many of our articles or common questions are applicable to different situations and there's a lot of crossover in the subject areas. So we reuse content in that way. In terms of sort of bringing things back to the front, whenever we update content due to changes in the law, we try to publicize that just as a way of educating people, you know, this law has changed. Letting them know that A, we're up to date but also B, reminding them that this is an area of law that they can get help with on the Michigan legal help website and C is a way of educating them about how laws change and the impact that it might have on their lives. Our expungement law recently changed in Michigan to broaden the category of people who are eligible to expunge convictions and so we just got all of our materials updated and we want to do a campaign even though it's not new content because it's newly revised, we can sort of bring it to the forefront again. Right, that makes a lot of sense. Those are good strategies. Brian, what do you see in the community in terms of reusing content? Are the other strategies folks are using or ones that you found compelling? I mean this is definitely something that I've seen people do after they create content for a site like YouTube is then take as there's relevant news issues or related topics and then bundle those together. So if there's a big case that covers unfair debt collecting practices and they've got a video that covers how consumers can protect themselves, they'll talk about the recent news article and then take that content evergreen content that relates and put those together as a way to really drive traffic to that content. I think it's a very good strategy. Agreed, and I've seen that work across sectors as well. Reusing content, you've spent so much time writing the content and getting it ready and marketing it. You definitely want to use it as much as you can. You don't want it to be stale but usually with a little bit of polish it can be used again, it can be replicated across sites and other sites as well. So think about that. Good, well that brings us to the end here. I just wanted to point out a couple of things. I'm an expert trainer with Idealware and idealware.org does have a lot of resources on it including we've mentioned some content management systems, we didn't get into the technical weeds but if folks get more interested in those systems and what they can do you can go to idealware.org to read more about what those systems are and how they might help you if you're thinking about building a site and there's other sort of more strategic pieces on web design development for nonprofits that's on idealware.org let me just chat that in here. And then one more thing I wanted to say before I pause for questions, this is my email address. You know I'm happy for anybody if I said something confusing or weird or you just had a question for you to email me. I'm happy to answer any questions that have come up. In the meanwhile, with about eight minutes we've got left, are there questions, thoughts that folks had on what's been said or things we haven't covered? Also just wanted to let people know that there is a survey link in the chat over on SurveyMonkey. If you've got any feedback for us on this training we'd be happy to hear that the training calendar is also posted for the rest of the year on lsntap.org and we have a Google calendar that individuals can subscribe to. Great, great, excellent. So feel free to chat in your questions if you've got a few here I'll hang out here. And or you can use star six to unmute if you'd like to speak it out. Give everybody a few minutes because sometimes the writing is like seriously writing a paragraph as you're trying to get into the chat box. All right. I think maybe we've perfectly answered all the questions. Well, maybe not, maybe so, but if you guys do have questions I put my email in there feel free to follow up after this. I wanted to thank Brian and Angela especially for all the input and insights how this stuff applies especially to the legal services community and I think that was really helpful and it was great to hear all that. And then thank everybody for attending today. Hope you guys got a lot out of it. Please do fill out that feedback form. And thank you so much Eric. Best of luck. Thank you Eric. Thank you for attending. Thank you Eric. Thank you Angela and thank you everybody who came out. If you have any questions also feel free to contact at lsmtap. I'll put my email address here in the chat but myself and lsmtap are happy to do research for people and get back to them on specific questions or we're happy to talk to people and give them feedback over their website and ways that we can help improve it. Thank you guys so much. Have a good afternoon. Thank you. Take care everybody.