 Well, hi there friends. Welcome to basically the first of the relaunch series of NetSquared Atlanta Meetups. My name is Eli and I'm the NetSquared Community Manager, which means I'm the cheerleader for the 120 similar groups in other cities who are hosting these kinds of tech for good meetups for the nonprofit community. This NetSquared program is actually a part of TechSoup, which is a nonprofit like yourselves that helps other nonprofits get and implement technology in their organizations. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a moment. As I said, this beast is global. So there are groups like this in Atlanta. There's currently not one in New Haven. So if you're coming from a city where there isn't a local group, put something into the chat. I'd love to chat with you about bringing your own group in here, but you'll see in most major cities except sadly, you know, it looks like right now in South and Central America, you'll have less coverage. But we're there for you in most places. So welcome to this new community and like every community, we have rules. Um, ours are, I think, reasonable and fair. So first of all, we welcome everyone. And secondly, we put community first, which means we're here to support each other. Third, we build stronger nonprofits. And so technology is, is the lens, the tool we use for these meetings, but ultimately it's about nonprofit organizational success and technology is just the nice way we get there. Fourth, most importantly, we invite participation. So we think everyone has something to contribute to these groups. And it also means that if you've got some brilliant idea or want to contribute to this group, maybe you want to be an event producer, maybe you want to take blog posts, make blog posts and do notes to these events. Please reach out and the organizing team would love to put you to work. And then of course, finally, we treat each other with kindness and respect. So we have an open chat window today, but before you put anything into that chat window just ask yourself very quickly, am I bringing my kindest, most empathetic self to that chat and if you are chat away, we'd love to hear from you. As we said, we need your help and there's a number of different roles. So if you want to get involved, please reach out to us. We do a quick tour of TechSoup. So as I said, a nonprofit that helps nonprofits get access to technology that's hardware that software that services. We've partnered with about 120 of the major technology companies, everyone from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft to Google to zoom the tool we're using right now. And with these partners we bring either totally free or deeply discounted services to nonprofits. Here's an example of what that could look like. So say you're a nonprofit with 10 staff. This is a bundle that would be quite commonly used and this gives you a bit of a sense of the savings that you can get as a TechSoup member. And by the way, Debbie mentioned that TechSoup account is totally free, but only about half of us nonprofits currently have an account so if you're not sure, go to techsoup.org and start saving a bit of money. This brand new group has got some more events planned. As you see, there's one plan for April, another for August. But again, if you've got a great idea and want to do something in March, maybe you can, you know, twist their arm a little bit into doing something fun with you. And now I want to actually send it over to the local organizing team who are going to be the public base and make sure this community thrives. So we've got Irene here and Matt, and we've also got a third organizer named Margaret who may show up a little bit later. But with that, I want to send it over to your local organizing team. Thank you so much, Eli. I want to welcome everybody and I hope Margaret does jump on because she's sort of the one responsible for getting me, myself and Matt involved. I'm the executive director of the Cobb Collaborative and we're the Georgia family connection partner serving Cobb County. I dropped that in the chat. Pretty early on, that's a private public ecosystem throughout the state that's working to improve outcomes for children and families across our state. And so each county and there's 159 counties in Georgia has a partner. And one of the things that we do in Cobb County is provide capacity building programs services and activities for nonprofits. So we'll host workshops on grant writing program how to design effective programs measurement, that sort of thing and so this is a nice alignment with what our current menu offering is particularly as we have all since last March had to rely on technology to continue to engage our stakeholders whether those are our board members or clients or volunteers or what have you. So we're just delighted to be a part of this and it just so happens to kind of restart the Atlanta chapter which with Atlanta being the tech hub that it is I think it's kind of sad that we had to do a reboot but 2021 is the perfect time to do that. I've had the pleasure of meeting Matt, one time in person I think it was almost a year ago, and then we've connected at various times. We've been working virtually since then, and Matt has a wonderful nonprofit in addition to his job that pays the bills and keeps the roof over his family said that protects nonprofits from it and risk management services so Matt hopefully you have dropped that in the chat as well. Without further ado, I'm going to welcome Mickey melon our presenter to the group. Mickey is the co founder of green melon, which is a full service PR media relations and technology firm. Full disclosure here, they host the cove collaboratives website and help us. We received a grant from 48 and 48. About two years ago, I guess it was Mickey maybe two and a half time flies when you're in a pandemic right and they did a wonderful job our tech did a wonderful job and got our revamped website to about the 90% of the way there, and then these teams swooped in they worked with our budget and our technology knowledge at the time, and helped get us all the way there and then they continued to guide us with refresh and things that we need to do so they're just wonderful partners to us and we couldn't do what we do in terms of engaging our community of 760,000 plus residents in Cob without the support of Mickey and his team. So, Matt, unless you want to say anything I'm just going to let Mickey take it away. Go for Mickey. Alright cool thanks both you. Let me share my screen here. And we'll dig in chat. Okay, so thank you. Excited to be here and walk through this. As I was thinking about what Irene had asked for me to do here I thought the easiest way might be just kind of walk through the process of building a new site so if you're looking at building a new site you can see that process. There's a lot of pieces along the way if you're existing sites that we could tighten that piece up we could work on that. So hopefully this would be pretty helpful regardless of where you are in the process. For our team and this is typically like a six month process to go through all these steps but really depends on you know what pieces people need what they don't. So I think along the way, do put them in the chat. I like to take questions as we go. It's easier in context you have a question about something I'm talking about at the time, especially since I'll tend to go fairly quickly at times do slow me down and asking questions we'll, we'll jump in now to be keeping an eye on that I'll keep an eye open to as best I can. So digging in. Yeah I re mentioned our team we're team of seven I don't have Robert in here yet our new marketing manager but we've been around like 11 years just off Mary at a square for any of you in the Atlanta area. And websites and help with related marketing stuff. So talking about processes though before we dig into our process. A couple years ago we're talking to a prospective client and we went through our process with them and he he bailed out he said I can't do this I don't want to be boxed in. And I can appreciate people wanting freedom but wide open freedom can lead to easily prevented problems so this process that we have allows for a ton of freedom at each step along the way but with the steps themselves helping to keep things on the rails so we can sort of how we approach this and we'll walk through it and again, see how this works out here. So starting your project we kind of work through you know discovery and collecting assets and things of that nature. The goals are kind of the important part see what people want from a website and you should all be thinking about that too because none of you need a website website you know isn't what you want you want the things that website can do for you so, you know donations and volunteers raising awareness, things like that websites away to get you there so that's that's the important part of what the goals are so you can build build it with that in mind. And the interesting thing building a website with this kind of process is that design comes pretty far down the road we're two or three months before you do any design it's. So a tribute to Abraham Lincoln says give me six hours to chop down a tree I'll spend the first four sharpening the axe. And that's kind of our idea here is it's the website is going to be graphical outcome the end of the day is to produce graphics and stuff but we spend a couple months before we even get to that we spend a few months sharpening things up and figure out the message and going through that and I'll walk you through those pieces. As we go here so the first place we started messaging and I imagine some of you have done this and some of you may have not. We generally follow a version of the story brand framework which may be familiar to some of you, really to dig into who the audience is and how to talk to them. And the key is you want to tell the audience about their own problem so they know that you understand it. The best you can then show them how you can overcome it, and then show them what their life will be like when you're done. There's a lot of story brand certified guides around the world you can hire we are not one of those we hire them from time to time people can go to Nashville to take the course there for, like 20 grand to take his course then you're certified and can lead it and those people are amazing so if you're going to need help with story brand specifically. You can search for a guide but the book itself will get you get you a long way down the road for you know 10 bucks versus a whole lot more. It's pretty great and so that's kind of a good place to start to figure out that message. And again that the struggles you've been through before the reasons you started your nonprofit or whatever your business is, if you can share those struggles you had in the day that can help really relate to folks. Rory Vaden has a quote, it says your powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. So if you can reach out to the people that are like in the shoes you were in before you got things started before you figured out the solution you're working toward, they're the ones that you can empathize with the most and hopefully can serve the best as you go because they will. Yeah, they'll relate to the closest Rory has a lot of good stuff out there too. Once you have the message figured out, we move on to keyword research in a lot of places you may or may not need it but ranking well in Google is an important thing for most all of us. We use a tool called Mars but there's a lot of great choices out there that's not necessarily the best it's the one, the one we prefer. And with figuring what keywords to go after we go through a five step process so this can be something useful again if you have an existing site you can kind of retrofit with keywords. Obviously you do it before you start building but you can always go back and make changes that's the beauty of the web. Nothing is printed out and distributed in final, like other things used to be. So our process we go through with Mars is, you know, we build an initial list of prayer or we have the client build a list of 20 or 30 keywords they think they want to rank for just off the top of your head what might be good to rank for. We then build that new list of perhaps 200 looking at synonyms and other companies and other nonprofits and you know whatever we can come up with just a glob of keywords that might work. We rank, we have the client and rank each of those for relevancy. How well it matches what they do when we come up with a glob of keywords we're going to come up with some bad ones that don't really fit and that's okay. So they can rank those. Then we do some pretty heavy research on those and then figure out where they should go on the site. And so the things that Mars helps us uncover and again other other tools can as well. You can see the spreadsheet we end up with but that exploded view at the bottom there. We look at the volume of searches how often do people search for these keywords that's kind of an important one. The difficulty is how difficult will be to rank for that you know there may be some great things you want to rank for but it's just going to be too difficult because it's too broad of a word there's too much competition near you. So the opportunities are unique one that not a lot of tools have and this is where Mars will look and say okay some searches you run there's a there's four ads at the top and then there's a big map and then there's you know, image carousel below that the number one result is actually like two screens down so even if you're number one you're still kind of buried the opportunities not as good so which keywords have better opportunities where if you rank high, you should show up high literally on the page. And then the importance factor that the client gave us and Mars will kind of give us a score priority score on top of that. And then our team will actually dig in further and say okay their score is pretty good. But like in this first case the information technology the score that Mars said is pretty good but we know that difficulty at 65 is still going to be too tough to do so we go through then and look at it but that tool helps helps get a long way. And then you can use these keywords throughout your site, we're not going to get into the the technical SEO too much because that's a whole different animal but really if you write content about the keywords that's 99% of what you need not 95%. You know, it gets you a long way if you just have the words on your page that's what that's what Google into the picture, you know, 20 years ago was other ones had you know meta keywords and stuff you can hide behind the page and Google said what's on the site what's really there and that's one of the main things they look at so you can write about the words that matter. That'll get you a long way. But in the case of a new site so we have the messaging and the keywords figured out. We work in navigation we work on that site map figuring out the navigation, including not just the pages in the navigation itself but other pages that might be, you know, lower level than navigation but on the site we want to figure out every page that needs to be created, both from a copywriting and a design perspective, just kind of figure out what they are very short description for each page, you know, a sentence or two on what's going to be on each page with some idea, because the next step. We really blow that up a bit more and write a content outline for every page and this gets this takes a little more time. But you can see on the right some examples of content outlines just a list of all the stuff that's going to need to go on a page every little element needs to go on there. A call to action to search, maybe you have a video, maybe you have, you know, some texts on the side, maybe you pull in some reviews, all that kind of stuff figure out all the pieces that go on every page just kind of list them all out, including the goal for every page we talked about goals earlier but every page should have a goal, you know the goal of contact page or, you know, an ecommerce page is pretty easy, you know, but there's other pages there's still a goal if someone reads this blog post of yours what's the goal you want them to click through that link there you want them to contact you what do you want to do at the end. It's every page you have some goal to move forward to something else. And so think about what that is for every single page. And so once you have this piece done you can start writing some of those pages. I will get into design in a moment. Someone asked we can share PDF copy the presentation yes well I'll send that over to them and they will be sharing that out later to. So yeah so you will get a copy of the presentation so don't worry about that. As you get writing though, another quote I like to pull in from blaze Pascal says if I had more time it would have written a shorter letter, you know, it takes time to be concise and you've seen that my website for people just say, I'm going to write the about me page and it's you know, stupid long and not worth reading So as so it's okay to start there, then you have time you should be kind of crunching it down and getting it more to the essence of what you want to say. It's the time you spend the better keeping you know that messaging we talked about early in mind how you want to talk about yourself, and maybe some keywords on some of the pages, all that sort of thing. There's a study technique called progressive summarization that Tiago forte is big on it's the same kind of idea where if you take notes on a book you're going to end up with a ton of notes, but kind of progressively work through and get it, you know boil it down to really what matters and if you can, if you can do that with the content on your site that's always a good thing. It's very verbose and it's, yeah doesn't doesn't serve them well generally for website content pages where people have a relatively short attention span. So as the contents being written or perhaps after depending on what's going on, we can get into a little bit of design now we're finally getting to some, some visual stuff. We start with wireframes for number of pages blueprints essentially the page of black and white outline. The content outline with a list of all the stuff in every page. And there's some more things that we'd like to consider we see on the left there the search bar maybe some breadcrumbs maybe a call to action, some contact info social icons and email sign up box lots of different things so between that and your content you have a ton of stuff you want to fit on each page. And so it's easier to put it in here just in black and white, you can sketch this on a napkin you don't have to be any special tool there's tons of great tools to let you draw this kind of stuff, but just figure out where things are going to go before you start designing. I think it was Frank Lloyd Wright said, we own building homes he said it's easy you can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledgehammer the construction site. So the idea here is, it's so much easier to add things in and move things around when it's just black and white boxes versus having a fully developed built out site and then trying to move things around. Not that it's impossible but it's a bit more of a sledgehammer whereas here it's it's pretty simple so taking the time just to think through all your pages with those goals in mind with your content outline, thinking about what you want to do can save you a lot of time in the future. And again this can work even if you have an existing site if you want to add another page think about it first before you just start building just take a few minutes think what you want to the page would make more sense for the video to be on top on the bottom. I say I re-asked what are breadcrumbs yes good question I did glaze over that I don't have a visual example here but it's the links at the top of page that show you where you are on the site like this home about us and our team and navigation trails. So yeah, just links at the top that sometimes you want sometimes you don't. You know they can add a little clutter to a page but they can make it easier for users so it's you know it can be kind of good for SEO so it's generally a good thing but it also again it's one more thing to add some clutter to the page that may distract the user so it's yeah situational. And I think really depends how deep your site goes if you have a lot of sections and subsections and subsections if you useful people to see how they can get back up the trail versus if you're relatively flat. It's important so good question again that's why we consider it in here and decide whether we're going to going to do that or not. So we have some wireframes built now we can finally design and so design is just taking those wireframes and making them, you know, design design graphic you know in our case it's still a flat graphic in Photoshop, wherever you can kind of see how, you know, some things change we took the text here made it centered and this picture got a bit bigger but for the most part it lines up we're not rethinking at the design phase how are we going to lay this out we know the basic way. out we know the basic layout and then can take some take some time to design things out there. And really this kind of brings the one kind of downside to this process is design becomes very anticlimactic step it's not like the big like, here it is the big reveal like it's already kind of known where you're getting to which is a good thing. Certainly I think but there's not the big surprising reveal which, again, is good because there's no bad surprises either people know what it's going to look like they know the colors it's, you know, it's anticlimactic which is disappointing but it's, trust me it's a good thing here. So at this point, and no move that bus, not so much. So this point you're going to start building the site but a few things to remember sort of with design and with development I kind of wedged it in between here. accessibility and that's becoming a much bigger thing as time goes on so just some thoughts for keeping your site accessible for all users to be able to access it. So the themes, talking about WordPress themes specifically here but any place you get a theme from. In general, themes should be dumb and pretty is what I like to say I like to find great looking themes they shouldn't do much, you should have the doing from plugins and other extension so you can manage them separate. The theme has a lot of baked in features that you can't remove that's generally going to cause issues for a lot of things but including accessibility and trying to unpack what's going on whereas if you have say a slide around your site or something that's accessible you can swap it out for a different one if it was a plugin was an extension but it's kind of built into what you have and you're stuck with it that's that's not good. When it comes to images, you can use alt you should always use alt text on your images that just describes what the image is so someone can't see it. They can hear you know through the screen reader what that image was supposed to be just be descriptive of what the image is. That's also a big thing for search engine optimization so people like to abuse that and stick a lot of keywords in but that just makes life worse for your readers or your visitors that have have needs so yeah do try to be short and descriptive on what the images are. Don't use pictures of text use pictures of pictures and text of text. If you need to put text on a picture there's ways to do that with CSS you can kind of layer things in. It's easy just to kind of drop the text in on the picture itself but generally found upon. I don't like well but don't have links open in new tabs and everyone likes to say when they click on this I wanted to open a new window so they stay in my site, but now you've kind of messed them up in a few ways depending on you know certain certain users. I'm an example I like to use as my mom who doesn't have any impairments per se but if you open a new tab she's going to try the back button to go back to your site that's not going to work anymore she won't know why she's going to close it all you know versus. And then you've broken the back button you've broken normal things so it's very tempting to say when they go to my Facebook page open a new tab but you accessibility wise you really shouldn't do that that is a ding they can easily detect and if someone wants to come after you for you know for something they can look at that a minor thing to be sure but a thing nonetheless. Accessibility all this I guess I really should say is there's no specific rules there's guidelines but it's all it comes a lot of it comes under judgments and so these are you know no one's going to say I had a link open a new window that's a deduction and we can sue you now you know it's it's softer than that so just the more you can do the better. Then a few other things at the bottom here, your forms probably should be uglier than they often are with very verbose like here's what the names of the fields are and people like to do the faded text inside the field this is email but it gets hard again if someone can't see there's going through the screen reader they can't tell what the fields are supposed to be so there's a proper label it could read that label to use headings going down the screen of course that's always a good thing to do just for to be in general to break up your text using proper proper bold headings and stuff throughout the page so people can jump as needed as good. The accessibility statements and interesting thing a lot of a lot of sites have this now at the bottom, and it's really a CYA kind of thing to have an accessibility statement, you know accessibility itself is, you know about making sure users can see your content that's the main idea of accessibility accessibility statements though are really to handle the second part which is avoiding getting sued. And a lot of lawyers now are going out specifically to find websites that are not accessible so they can sue them and I've heard from lawyers that that's what they do they literally go out to find them that are not accessible so they can sue them and you know, make some business which is not good accessibility statement doesn't protect you necessarily but I think scares them off a bit. If they see three sites they might want to go after and one has a statement like these people have thought about accessibility at least. So maybe they've done some more I'm not going to waste my time I'm going to go to this easier prey over here that's not considered this stuff and maybe easier to go after so. If nothing else I think that's kind of the best thing there just to show you're thinking about this stuff and you're working on it and again no one's ever perfect but you're trying your best. So maybe use camel case hashtags camel case meaning you know the capital letters inside the sentence. If you do it all lowercase a screen reader is going to try to read that as one long word, you know and doesn't doesn't work well with most hashtags out there. If you use camel case most screen readers will read it properly they'll see the capitals as a new word and read as camel case versus come all to see or whatever that might be all lowercase, and it doesn't mess up the effectiveness of hashtags it goes to the same hashtag as everyone else and you'll see a lot of folks are doing this now anyhow so just little things there. And then PDFs. I actually just added a few days ago to this presentation because in the UK they've now passed guidelines I think I'm not sure the legality that if you post a PDF you need to have an accessible quote accessible version to go along with it so that that's going to be tricky for a lot of folks. I'm working on packing that myself on my blog I'll share the link later I'm posting about tomorrow I'm still trying to finish my thoughts there but. The idea is if you have a PDF you need to have a separate version that people can actually read in HTML or some kind of accessible format which is good advice anyhow, not to say PDFs are bad. There should be more of here's this great piece if you want to print it nicely here's the PDF for it but not if you want to read what we have to say here's the PDF it should be here's what we have to say if you want to print it here's a PDF and it's. It'll add more work in a PDFs have made people lazy I think to some degree they can say hey I want to put this on the site just chuck the PDF up there and let people download it and. 95% of your visitors maybe more but you know not for people that that have issues because PDFs have a lot of shortcomings where you know screen readers often struggle with them. You can't increase font sizes easily it's harder to move around there's just a lot of a lot of bad things. They are great for printing I mean if you want someone to print something precisely a PDF is phenomenal so not saying don't use them but just make sure. You have a good way to let them see your content. And then kind of a bonus with all this as we talk about ranking one search engines pretty much all this stuff is going to help you right better to having that all text having headings. You know, using a solid theme not having the bacon stuff is all going to help you right better and Google, as well as make things more accessible so it's kind of a win when you take the time to do it. If you search for ADA accessibility testing or checking different words in search for there's a lot of tools out there that will scan your site and kind of give you an automated report on what they see. And even those sites say this is not comprehensive please consult a professional but you can only see like it dinged us on these five things at least fix those five things or the four we can fix the one that's baked in we can't at least make things as good as we can. So anyhow, so we designed the site now and with these sorts of things in mind we we start building in our case we use WordPress but again it's not necessarily any better worse than others we like it for a lot of reasons but you don't have to be there. At the end of the day they all spit out HTML for people to view and you know doesn't really matter what's behind it. We like WordPress just because it tends to leave you in a better position for growth going forward with the ecosystem they have with other plugins and things you know, if Irene came to us later said I really want to be able to have you know ecommerce on my site and we could add some ecommerce plugins and do that versus if you run a different platform you have to kind of bail and start over which is not good but that's up to you guys. The piece here and I can share this out as well as we launch we tell folks launching a site is really a five minute thing you know it's just, you know either copying the files over changing where the domain points, but we have a huge checklist we go through to make sure things are perfect make sure Google can see the site and make sure the forums work and all that kind of stuff so I can share that checklist of any of you are launching a site soon just that day off stuff can be so important there's a few little gotchas that can can really kill you. The one I see a lot is in WordPress there's a checkbox it says discourage search engines from visiting this site which when you're developing a site that's good you don't want Google to see it. But if you leave that on your live Google would literally stop coming to your site and you won't show up anywhere and it's so easy to miss that tiny checkbox and it's brutal because you're not you can't be found anywhere so that's on our checklist I think twice just to make sure it's we really don't want to leave that check it'd be very bad. And Dallas has to share it so yeah I will I'll find that checklist and get that shirt as well. Of course, sadly, you're never ever done with the site, never never. So lots of ways to grow you know we train our clients and how to do it and we, you know, keep up with updates and monitoring and that kind of stuff and you can always get into email marketing social media and ongoing blogging and lots of different directions to go I'm not going to get too much into that because that varies so much depending on what you're doing and who your audience is. But a quote I like to keep in mind with this kind of thing from Seth Godin. He says the people you most want to engage with don't want to be hustled. And I think with the election season just behind us we saw what it looks like when people try to hustle you with, you know, unsolicited text messages and all that kind of stuff and that's that's what he's talking about here don't text add people to a text message list without their authorization don't add them your email list I think that's more common people say I had these 20 contacts I'm going to put them on my email email list. And I think the boring line illegal, depending on you define illegal but certainly unethical and things you shouldn't do there's ways to do it the right way, ways to build all your channels without resorting to cheap tactics so. And really, to Seth's point, you're not going to gain many clients that we have this me mad at you, you know back to the election thing how many you got a text saying vote for so and so it's a great idea. Not I hate them even more now, you know, because they're harassing me these texts so you'll come across the same way I think with that sort of thing. And then the last little section to dig into here is tracking, you know, as you go forward you want to see what you're doing so you can, you know, you can only manage what you can measure so lots of ways to track things for big ones we like to look at our Google search console it's a free free tool from Google you can log into it kind of show things shows things from Google's perspective and say oh your site looks okay we see these pages. And that's one of the words you've come up for, you know, kind of from Google's eye in the sky perspective. What's great about that is you can give you some great opportunities for if you're doing keyword research to try to rank better, because you can see things Google say oh you're ranking generally about 20 seconds for this phrase to huh. If I'm already 22nd that's a lot easier to go from 22nd to second than it is from blank brand new to second so you can see some opportunities where you're ranking decently well for if you weren't aware of do a little more content around that and maybe rank even better. More importantly though if Google sees a problem with your site that's where they tell you about it they're not going to call you. If anyone calls you saying they're from Google they're really from India. They're not from Google. But Google will post things here they think you've been hacked or if they can't access some of your files or stuff they're going to post it to your Google search console account, whether you're there or not so again it's free and relatively easy to set up. It's good if nothing else just you can hear if Google thinks there's something wrong you can then address that before it becomes a big problem, you know, if Google thinks you've been hacked to let you know there. And then a few days later they'll put the big red screen up for everyone else to know so if you can get to it first. That's always a good thing. Google analytics I suspect most of you use already just for tracking traffic on your site. The main four categories they have now are for audience acquisition behavior and conversions. So audience meaning who came to the site where do they come from what kind of computer they are they have a mobile device just to be about the people coming. Acquisition tells you where they came from they came from that Facebook post they came from a search. They came from a link on another site, you know what happened in the behavior and conversions dig into. What do they do on the site what pages did they look at you know what pages they lead at how many which people filled out the form you can set up all kinds of things in there. And I'll talk more about analytics and a little bit but there's a lot you can get out of there and again that's another free tool. Almost all of you probably should have it's worth having and then the other two that we we often do are heat maps to see where people click and I'll show an example of that in a minute and then a dashboard there's different ways to set up dashboards because analytics is great for you know nerds like me but it can be overwhelming to try to just find a few key things if you need to from time to time so these ways to set up dashboards just say hey here's a quick look at some of the things that matter without having to dig in and click around and stuff. We use a tool called fresh marketer. I think there's other ones like crazy egg and hot jar, great names. But basically it shows where literally where people are clicking on your site, you know, analytics will tell you what pages they look at this will show you a visual of where people are clicking. And it takes some time because ad blockers will block it in, you know, cookies and stuff, you only get a handful of, you know, doesn't visitors that this works on so you have to have a few thousand visitors to your site before you get much data in here. So it can take a few weeks but it's still pretty valuable. A great example of how we use this we built the website for first United Methodist Church Marietta three years ago. And when we were building the site that said we want our PDF bulletin on the homepage and I was like guys it's 2017 no you really don't. And they said no no we do we promise people want it's okay we'll put it on there you know you know your audience better so we put it on there. Put the heat nap on it as well and that PDF bulletin glowed like the sun people click that thing all the time. And so one they were right you know I like to have the data to support my decisions and I didn't and they were right so it happens, but also let us change things around a little bit too. We kind of slid the PDF bulletin further down the page kind of putting the milk at the back of the grocery store to make people see all their events and all the stuff going on before they got to the bulletin and they were there for in the first place so you can do some neat things with that. And really this is more important to see what people are not clicking on you know if you have a big call to action and people are skipping it to go click on something else. You can look at rewarding it changing the color. You know just think of you know at least you know what's going on you can make some decisions from there the results are different. And a lot of these will let you do what they call a B testing as well. I know fresh marketer does I think hot jar does I'm not quite sure. But it lets you say hey show half the people where it says get my free offer and the other half where it says trying now and you know just show different people to see which one attracts more clicks and then after a while and say okay that one one. Let's go with that. And maybe testing can be tricky but a few things like that make it pretty powerful and pretty easy MailChimp I know if any of you guys use MailChimp for emails they make it pretty easy to where you can test out two different subject lines. Hey MailChimp send 10% of the people this subject line send 10% this subject line, whichever one opens more send that one to everyone else and so there's ways you can kind of test things and make make use of some data in almost real time with that and this is a good example. And then for the dashboard example. This is one called data box, D A T A B O X all one word. It's not cheap, but it's very good. It's very easy. Google Google as a product called Google Google Data Studio, which frankly I think is free and more powerful. It's a better product in every way but it's a lot more complex it's, it's very complex and you have to be kind of a designer to lay things out You want data box you say hey pulling some analytics here and pulling my MailChimp numbers here to just kind of build a little dashboard so we do this for some of our clients where they'll say hey I want to see I want to see how many people came to the site and how many people filled out the form and how much they spent my store and how many people are on my email list so we build a little dashboard that shows just those things in one screen and they can see it without having to log in analytics or get some PDF reports or you know do whatever they want to do so again a lot of great tools for this as well not saying data box is the best but it's it's for us it's a great powerful at a reasonable price and it looks great without much effort on my end because I'm not the one to make things look great, we have designers for that I don't want to bug them with data organizing. And what's neat with data box to is it connects natively to, I don't know 100 different platforms so you say hey just hit hit a button to connect with your MailChimp with your active campaign with your Google Analytics with your Facebook with your Twitter with your LinkedIn. It's all built in with little icons you just connect them up and they have some examples and you can make it run and does well. Data Studio connects to again more things but it's more of a hassle to kind of get all of it working but it's free so if you have the time that may be worth doing. And then kind of my closing thought here with all this stuff is there's a lot of things in here we try to do things the right way. I always want to do things as good we can but Voltaire said the best is the enemy of the good. You know I've seen too many people spend so long trying to make things picture perfect and never actually publishing and that's, that's not good you want to get things out there. I actually just looked yesterday to make sure this was still the case and sadly it is but we met with the gentleman about three years ago that had just a dreadful website. He had a new one someone to develop those almost done but he just couldn't he wasn't happy with a few things with it but it was so much better than what he had just wasn't quite happy with it. We offered some advice and it kind of fizzled out and I looked yesterday he still has his old site three years later because he hasn't quite made the new one perfect and it's we're not talking like a marginally better site it's dreadful. But he just he wants it to be perfect before he launches and as a result he's got three more years of presumably lost clients and lost business and. So I'm not saying to hustle again this is a six month process for us we do it right but you can always get to to deepen the details and and not actually get get where you need to get. I mentioned Seth go nearly I follow a lot of his stuff he's big on just get it out there man you know just publish if it's better than what you have publish and move on and keep iterating and keep making it better and. I encourage you to do the same so. That's all I have certainly have time for more questions if you want. You can find me you find a company Green Melon calm careful how you spell melon very specific on that I'm at McMell have a handful of courses in there. I've won about setting up a blog kind of a call a technical course for non technical people so if you want to set up the right way. I use a code nonprofit web to get half off that. I mentioned it because this this month on the 21st is all about Google Analytics so Google Analytics has a new one called Google Analytics 4.0 which is wildly different. And frankly part of the reason I'm doing it in our meetup is because I don't fully understand the new one yet and so by teaching it I'm going to have to teach myself to be able to teach it so I'm digging into that and so that should be worth worth looking at so. It's an online meetup like everyone else is now so you're all certainly welcome to attend there so. That's what I've got yeah happy to answer any other questions or thoughts from there. Wow well thank you so much, Nikki. Welcome. Eli, Matt has Matt's commenting that as soon as he hangs up here I guess he's going to make some changes. Eli with this being our first time do you invite people to unmute if they have a question or just continue to drop in the chat. Well, I guess we can do whatever we'd like to do please. We have a couple more minutes if anybody has questions or comments for Nikki. Please be added as a co host. Yeah, I see that. Please go ahead and drop those in the chat or you are more than welcome to unmute yourself and ask. I will share the slides and the checklist afterward Eli will post that out in the next couple days. Lovely I lost all my permissions but I'm back and so yeah I just also gave people the ability to take themselves off mute so you'll know how that ability which you didn't before. Gotcha. Big brother. Well don't be shy after we went through all of that. So Nikki, I think I see Elena has one here. Okay, great. Hi, my name is Elena I volunteer and work for a nonprofit in music education, and we serve primarily Spanish speaking students and families, though we are based here in Columbus, Georgia. So our first website was all in English, and the person who volunteers to do web design for us made a connecting website that's also in Spanish but I'm wondering if you would have any suggestions on how to efficiently build a bilingual website that is correct and high quality in both languages, not just using like translate on every page. One we use in WordPress is called WPML WordPress multi lingual. And it lets you on every page you basically have two editors or three how many languages you have you type the English version here in the Spanish version here for every page you kind of go through and do that. So people switch the translation on the site it doesn't actually change the address of the site is just shows the entire site then in their language with the words you used to translate it. There's other tools that will do kind of an automatic translation like you talked about, but that's probably the easiest I think it may be free or it's certainly under 100 bucks is not not expensive. And gives you the way to do that yourself if you have a person that can do a proper translation for you so. Okay, thank you. Hey, you're welcome. And it's on the chat Joe asked if we're strictly WordPress shop and we are at this point. I'm always trying out new tools and seeing what's new. I suspect I'm sure at some point we won't be, you know strictly WordPress but I think they're just about hit 40% of the entire Internet now so I don't see that changing anytime real soon it's a huge percentage and WordPress is interesting I love the community around at the communities kind of like this where we're just kind of you know shares ideas and thoughts and gives away all their secrets to each other and they all give it back and it's it's beautiful. The advantage that community though is there's thousands of people, literally helping to develop WordPress, all the time make it better and add plugins and to free free plugins and pay plugins and themes it's just so easy with that ecosystem around it to build things. You mentioned I have not used. I like it in general again I like open source software that you know again people can contribute to and share and use you're not stuck somewhere. That's kind of kind of my issue with Squarespace and nothing against Squarespace it's a great platform if you build your site there's not bad, but you're stuck, like if their server gets slow or if they don't like you anymore or if they don't have to feature, you're out of luck like you if you want to move and start from scratch elsewhere with WordPress. If you're in a host that's too slow or they don't like you whatever you can move your site somewhere else relatively easily and same with jumlah and that kind of stuff so I like I like keeping my options open to make things best and that's part of the reason we're still there. Okay Irene, you could have just said it but yeah, any thoughts on budgeting for hosting plugins etc hosting I like to my favorite host lately is one called flywheel there's certainly lots of good hosts out there. Not to spend $1.95 a month on hosting you know flywheel is 15 bucks a month which is a whole lot more than others but it's 15 bucks a month to make sure you have a fast, you know reliable site I think it's worth that. Certainly other good ones out there WP engine actually bought them but a little more expensive but a good one lots of good host but I would say plan to spend 1520 bucks a month on hosting at least just to get a decent host out there. And then plugins is so hard to say what the budget for that you know most of what we have in the site is free. Other than perhaps some backup plugins and stuff but yeah, I say maybe you have a lot going on maybe 100 bucks a year just to buy. If you want a better form plug in or different things but it's that that's a trickier one to say I mean even hosting is really give a lot of traffic certainly that changes the game but if you're under a couple hundred visits today that the cheapest flywheel plan should be fine and that's that's where I would go but certainly again there's 1000 house hosts out there and at least a few dozen that are pretty good so yeah they're not the only ones. Okay Paula asking regards to ADA guidelines what are best practices for hearing impaired site visitors and video content and video content okay gotcha so you having a transcription of your video is kind of the key there and there's a few ways to do that one is to transcribe the entire video like as your post I've done that with some of our podcasts in the past when we post the podcast and then full transcription of it below. And then on top of that you should also go to YouTube will do the automatic transcription but you should fix that yourself and get a proper transcription there for YouTube or Vimeo wherever you host you can upload your own transcription and kind of match it up to make sure it's perfect. Yeah just to make sure they get they can see that you know closed caption as they're watching the video but that's that's certainly a big one to fix and can be a tricky one for a lot of folks to make compliant you know if they don't have that. A lot of these things like adding alt text images and stuff is really pretty easy but videos can be tricky for for vision impaired users and that's yeah that's kind of your best bet is to have that transcription so they can. Again I said read it but really so it can be read to them by their player or they're not listening yet can depends there's so many different situations you know. In our case if someone was vision impaired they can probably just listen to the video and get most of it but does that have the content. You know they may you may need more descriptive text in the transcription so it just try to try to put yourself in their shoes is your best bet for a lot of that see what would make the most sense and help them do it if they weren't able to see this content or hear the content or whatever the case maybe. So we probably have time for another question or two before we wrap up. If anybody has anything. Everybody's anxious to get to their blogs and start checking everything I think Mickey. There you go perfect. Eli do you want to give a teaser about our April meeting. We'll admit I'm no expert about the April meeting but what I would love to say is super excited that this group has come back. Thank you Mickey for for being the initial expert. Thank you Irene and Margaret for stepping up to lead a community because community doesn't happen by accident it happens because a trio of people say this must exist in the world so I'm super grateful to the three of you for stepping up to make this will happen. And the rest of you, if you've got clever ideas. Again, don't be shy let us know what you want if there are topics that you think need to be part of the mix here. Let us know and if you have a guest speaker in mind, even better of course. Hey, did you see the questions about discounts or Eli for nonprofit sites such as PayPal etc. I can, you can prove that you're a nonprofit for PayPal and qualify for reduced transaction fees, but Nikki and Eli and Matt if you want to weigh in on other things. So I think most plugins probably not just because they're one man shops just trying to collect their money they don't deal with that hosting sometimes but I don't know details for sure I can't say. I know some do I know some don't I just don't know which which off hand so. Yeah, and I think my recommendation there is you would be shocked if you basically search for the company you're about to sign a deal with and put the name, the word nonprofit in there as well. I think that there are 50% discounts for all kinds of interesting things including like you know WordPress forms. If you dig in, you'll find all kinds of interesting discounts for you as a nonprofit and of course, don't be shy about asking. And Eli somebody asked about if there is a group email or did you see, does this group have an email group. So let's not currently have a mailing list for people can communicate. I think that's a really interesting idea and I would encourage the organizing team to think through whether that's something they have the energy to maintain and steward of course, but I think that's a lovely suggestion so thank you Dallas for that. And if the team gets ambitious they'll definitely let you know and the message all the meetup members. And you know what happens when people have good ideas right. Exactly Dallas, you may be more told, careful. Like your board member that has a great idea for a fundraiser. Awesome. Well I do want to invite everybody to our next scheduled meeting which is in April, April 13. We're going to try to keep these consistent on a Tuesday at noon, and that's going to be about using technology to do fundraising and capacity building. And we have a great speaker Amy Crowell who has written a book about fundraising a disease she's really an expert and I think Matt has already dropped the information in the the group or Eli has about Amy and her track record that she brings to the nonprofit and fundraising and development. I can tell you she hosted a lunch and learn last June for the collaborative on virtual fundraisers which is pretty much early summers when everybody realized that other than maybe a golf tournament in late fall. And all the luncheons and the galas and the silent auctions and all of that when we used to just pack hundreds of people into spaces for our biggest fundraisers of the year. We're not going to happen at all in 2020 and Amy led us all through a great conversation on how to hold virtual casino nights and fundraise galas and five K's and that sort of thing and she'll take that and expound upon it for our April meeting. And I think Matt has been encouraging you, if you do have ideas I have dropped my email address in the chat and I think Matt has a couple of times as well please let us know. We're just two people and we also have full time jobs so we welcome the opportunity to collaborate and share names, and and resources, not only here for our neighbors in metro Atlanta but obviously, you know, if it's, if it is one benefit that the pandemic has caused us that we've been able to connect with friends far and wide right and we can all benefit from this information so Matt Eli I'll let you gentlemen close us out. That's right. Well if you actually are throwing it over to me. Thank you very much Mickey for the awesome presentation I literally have a notepad here of five different categories of things to go fix now they swiveling around in about 10 seconds to do that. So thank you very much, much appreciated fabulous and then with that, let's wrap this up again. I'm so grateful to our guest expert Mickey who let gave all this knowledge and and to our hosts to as, as they said like you know generously gave of their time to make this actually happen and keep in touch because they have schemed up several great new plans for the rest of the year. Otherwise have a great day and enjoy your lunch. Thank you. Thank you very much.