Alex White » Wordpress

Case study: Union website redeveloped using WordPress

Alex — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:08:09 +0000

I recently stumbled across the website of Illinois Education Association (Regions 14 & 62) which I think is an excellent example of a union using an inexpensive Premium WordPress Theme to create a professional, feature rich website.

It’s worth highlighting this website to give union communicators and officials an example of what can be achieved using WordPress, a free, open-source content management system, combined with an off-the-shelf professional template.

As you can see, the site has a nice, modern professional appearance. It includes a scrolling carousel for featured content, and further down, there are social media links, a way to sign up to the union’s email updates, and an event calendar. What’s more, because it is built using WordPress, and the theme has been developed by a professional design firm (Studio Press), it will continue to get security updates for the foreseeable future (and Studio Press also provides ongoing, free support). It also comes with built-in search engine optimisation (from WordPress, and the theme), which is an important feature.

If I were to make any recommendations for improvement, it would be: get a custom favicon, and include an online joining page. I also hope that the email subscription uses MailChimp or another professional email marketing service, and that they have Google Analytics installed.

On the right, you can see the screenshot of the original, generic theme (and here’s the link to where you can buy it). Clearly, the IEA haven’t customised the theme much, but let’s be honest: they don’t need to. The default theme looks nice and professional — so all the union needed to do was add their own content and plonk on their logo.

Choosing to go the WordPress road is good for a lot of things, but isn’t necessarily the answer for every union website.

WordPress is excellent for getting up professional websites that are inexpensive and fast. WordPress can be deployed in just a few days or a weeks (depending on how much content is needed). It is very flexible, and in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, it will look great and have a lot of useful features. New content can be easily added, including pages, blogs, and with proper plugins, events and more. Many of the “features” spruiked by design agencies and in-house CMSs come standard with WordPress, like drop down menus, customisable URLs/permalinks, blogs, page templates, comments and threaded comments, built-in SEO, built-in RSS feeds, and so on.

However, it does have limitations. For very complex websites, or unions with a desire to integrate their membership database with their website, WordPress may not be the best solution. Most of the reasons that you wouldn’t choose WordPress are technical ones relating to your specific needs or existing infrastructure. Other reasons include the federated/local/branch nature of unions, creating expansive hierarchies of editors and users (for example, layers of editorial control across state, national and local levels, etc), something that WordPress doesn’t handle very well out of the box.

Your choice of CMS for union website should be based on the goals of the website, and your union’s budget.

Why using free web services for your union campaign website is a bad move

Alex — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 13:28:03 +0000

It is a bad idea for your union campaign to use a free website service like Blogspot, WordPress or Typepad, for four reasons. Unfortunately, I see a lot of union campaign websites using WordPress.com or Blogspot.com websites for small campaigns (and not just unions, but other non-profits, like environment groups).

Avoid using the free web services Blogger and WordPress for your union campaign website.

Firstly, the website doesn’t belong to you

Most free services like Blogspot or WordPress are owned by for-profit companies. Even if they are run by non-profit organisations, they are not necessarily friends of unions. You are effectively handing the online infrastructure and data of your union campaign to a third party.

Secondly, the SEO doesn’t benefit you

Similarly, on the technical side, you don’t own the URLs and search engine optimisation (SEO) – a developed website is an important asset. Not just the hyperlinks you have created, but all of the links that others have created to point to your site, are owned by the service you are using. None of this benefits your main union website, or you in the long run.

Thirdly, they have limited feature-sets

Services like WordPress and Blogger are limited in their features, so as to maintain their consistency across millions of blogs. There are many fantastic pieces of software that integrate into websites using Joomla, WordPress or other fully-featured content management systems. By using a hosted third-party service, you are campaigning online with one hand behind your back.

Fourthly, transferring or moving the site is difficult

While both Blogger and WordPress have export data features, if you decide at a later date to transfer your site to one you host yourself, it can be time consuming and technically difficult. Similarly, all those links to your site from other peoples’ sites won’t necessarily follow you to your new site (for example, Blogger won’t let you use a 301 redirect to your new site), meaning that your SEO will be compromised.

Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean it’s good

In the case of your union campaign website, free can be bad. Building your own union campaign site is inexpensive and easy – and can be done without a great deal of technical knowledge or design skills (having those skills will of course make your “good enough” site much, much better).

Buying your own domain name, or creating a subdomain on your existing site (such as http://campaignname.yourunion.org) is inexpensive (around $30 for 2 years) or free (in the case of a subdomain). Hosting can cost (from Digital Pacific for example) costs around $150 for a year. The self-hosted WordPress software is free, and high quality web design templates cost less than $100.

In summary, though Blogger and WordPress are free – they’re not really free. The value of your time is much more important. If you’re looking to build a successful union campaign site that will help you contact as many supporters and members and achieve your online campaign goals, you should use a professional blogging or CMS platform that is designed for your needs.

Read about good content management systems for union campaign sites here.

(This is not to suggest that WordPress or Blogger aren’t good blogging software services – they are. They are just not suitable for your union’s campaign websites.)

Setting up a website for your union campaign

Alex — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 12:05:52 +0000

I see a lot of union campaign websites. Some are good, some are not so good. One of the things I consistently hear is concern about the cost, the difficulty and the time.

This article is about how to simply, quickly and cheaply set up a website for your campaign. There are lots of resources out there on how to create a website that are useful for people with few technical skills. I personally don’t have advanced HTML or coding skills, but I have set up several campaign websites for my union, and for other groups.

For me, there are three steps to setting up a campaign site:

Decide on your content management system
Get a template design
Customise your design

Decide on your content management system

The WordPress CMS Dashboard.

Most campaign websites have a relatively short life-span and don’t have complicated structures. There are a lot of content management systems that are very powerful, with loads of features – most of them are quite technical and complicated. I’ve written about content management systems for unions here.

In my view, for most union campaign websites either need a simple CMS or, even just plain HTML (i.e. no CMS at all).

WordPress is an excellent CMS that is feature-rich and simple. It is very user-friendly, especially for people without technical IT skills. Using WordPress, you can create more than just a blog. In addition to managing images and media, handling comments, and categories and tags, there are literally thousands of excellent plug-ins – many of which are free – that extend WordPress. There are also loads of great design themes.

WordPress is also relatively simple to install – and it comes with a clear, easy to follow guide on how to do it. Loads of Web Hosts include free services that will automatically install WordPress. I personally recommend Digital Pacific – an Australian web-host that is both carbon neutral and very reliable. I have also found their technical support to be very

Alternatively, you could look at doing a plain HTML site. A HTML site is one that just uses files that end with pagename.html and has no built in management structure. If your campaign site only has one or two pages and no special features, HTML may be appropriate

Get a template design

Woothemes and Themeforest are great places to get high quality website templates.

Seth Godin, a best-selling online entrepreneur and marketer, has some good advice on creating websites that is applicable for union campaign websites:

For most people, that’s all you need. A website that’s good enough. Not that breaks new ground, establishes a new identity, discovers new ways for people to interact online. Just a good enough website that didn’t kill you to launch. … There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there’s one that you can start with?

For this reason, most union campaign sites should be content with any number of literally 100s of high quality templates. Good places to start include Themeforest or Woothemes – both of which are sources of excellent WordPress themes (as well as Drupal, Joomla, Expression Engine or HTML themes). Themeforest or Woothemes templates are fairly inexpensive – between $10 to $80 depending on the themes.

If you use an external designer for your online campaigns, using a template can cut costs significantly, as you don’t need to pay for development of a unique site. And to be honest – does your union campaign really need a unique design?

Customise your design

Using a template makes customising the design faster and cheaper.

I recommend using templates because you can use one to launch a website in just a day or so – most premium themes can be used “out of the box”, meaning they don’t need lots of coding or design work to be presentable or usable.

In fact, unless there is a strong reason to spend a lot of time customising your theme, a template theme will probably just need the theme colours changed to your campaign colours, and the campaign logo added.

During the customisation of your site, it’s a good idea to test for usability. The design you’ve chosen may look neat, but if it doesn’t do what you need it to, then it should be scrapped. Checking your website with just five people will find most of the “problems” with usability of your site.

Should your union invest in a proprietary CMS?

Alex — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 07:02:02 +0000

I’ve been having a few conversations with people around the traps about content management systems for websites.

For those who may not be familiar with the lingo, a content management system is the online software that runs websites. Most complicated websites use a content management system (CMS) to look after all the various pages and applications that a website may have. There are lots of CMSs out there – many of them are proprietary and cost a lot of money to license, while others are open source and free to license. It’s like the difference between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, or Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Almost every union has a website, and lots of them were originally created years ago before many of the open source CMSs were developed. Thus, many unions have proprietary CMSs that cost a lot of money to license, maintain and upgrade. An increasing number of unions are starting to redesign their websites to modern standards, and so the question is posed: should you license a proprietary CMS or use an open source one?

Proprietary CMS

There are lots of custom-made content management systems available. Most large web design companies have their own in-house system. These can offer integration with other union systems – usually as a package. For example, the website may integrate with the union’s membership database or accounting system. In this case, both the database and accounting software are also typically licensed and proprietary.

There are some very good examples of proprietary content management systems. The most famous of these is the Obama campaign’s website, which was a custom-designed system made by Blue State Digital. Another well regarded proprietary CMS is ExpressionEngine, which is a very powerful (and complicated) package – Senator John McCain’s website by FortyAgency uses ExpressionEngine.

The risks of using a proprietary system are fairly high however. The license fees are generally very high, and may have ongoing costs. For a union, this can be a significant factor. Furthermore, proprietary systems means that you are tied to the web design company and the programmer for a long period of time. You had better hope that your relationship remains good – or that the company doesn’t go bust, or the programmer doesn’t disappear. I have heard of several unions who’ve invested in a custom made CMS, only for the developer to vanish for months at a time, or for the company to go bankrupt. Needless to say, this left the unions in a difficult situation.

A further risk is that unless the CMS is under constant development, new features and upgrades are unlikely to come along unless you pay for them. This can leave your union’s website looking stale after a few years, and can put your data at risk from spammers. Old content management systems can have serious security flaws that only become apparent years later, as spammer/hacker technology develops.

Wordpress is a widely used open source CMS.

Open source CMS

As noted, there are many free, open source content management systems available, most of which are supported by large contingents of (mostly volunteer) software developers. The two most well-known open source CMSs are WordPress and Drupal.

WordPress is (according to Automattic, the organisation behind WordPress) used by over 6 percent of all websites – 100s of millions, and receives regular security updates and new features. There is a small army of programmers and designers who can provide almost any feature or design, either for free or for a small cost. WordPress is one of the simplest CMSs to install from scratch and start using straight away. This website and most of the sites I create for my work (such as these ones) use WordPress. The UK Prime Minister’s website No. 10 also uses WordPress.

There has been a view that WordPress is mainly a blogging platform. This certainly used to be the case, but the latest versions of WordPress in the last 12 months have made it almost equal to fully fledged content management systems. Another benefit is that it is very intuitive and simple to use. It does do blogs very well, but it also does other kinds of sites – and there are hundreds of (easy to install) plugins that expand on the core features. Certainly, as far as getting an inexpensive, good-looking, feature-rich campaign site up and running with minimal technical knowledge, you can’t go past WordPress.

The other major open source CMS worth discussing is Drupal. Drupal is a very powerful content management system, and is used by the Whitehouse to run its website. Like WordPress, Drupal has a large number of programmers and designers producing high quality designs and plugins, mostly for free. It is more complicated than WordPress to install and manage, but still possible for a non-expert.

For unions considering getting a campaign site up, there are many professionally designed Drupal themes to buy or download for free, as well as lots of plugins to add special features.

There are loads of other open source CMSs out there, like Joomla. For union sites, you probably want to stick to the well known, widely used ones, as these are the most stable and have the largest knowledge base to help you. They are also the most secure, as security updates occur fairly frequently, and vulnerabilies are discovered by the army of programmers.

Conclusion

If the Whitehouse can use an open source content management system, then why can’t your union? There are loads of benefits and few downsides – and what’s more, the price is fantastic.

I strongly recommend your union consider an open source CMS for its next campaign site or main website redevelopment.

Updated to WordPress 2.8

Alex — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 06:00:58 +0000

Just a quick note – I’ve updated to WordPress 2.8 and added a Twitter plugin to automatically notify Twitter of new posts. Still struggling with a few theme compatibility issues.