When selecting your content management software, it’s important to select the right tool for the job. For most of our projects, we lean towards two popular content management packages, WordPress and Expression Engine. WordPress is a free open-source software that started as blogging software and quickly developed into a full-featured CMS with a huge user base, a.. read more

Once you’ve launched your website, you’ll eventually need to make updates. Perhaps you have a small informational site and only make a few changes a year. In that case, you might just send changes to your web developer, who can make them for you. For more complex sites, and mor frequent updates, you’re going to.. read more

Is your website successful? To answer that, you need to compare your website’s goals to your website’s performance. And for that, you need analytics. Most hosting companies offer a basic analytics software, like WebTrends or Urchin, that can get you some baseline numbers like number of visitors or time spent on site. (Note, sometimes these need to be manually activated.. read more

Like web hosting, there are a variety of options for hosting your organization’s email accounts. Your Hosting Company - in many cases, your web hosting plan will include x number of email accounts. This is a great option for smaller organizations, as your hosting company becomes a one-stop shop. But there are downsides. For example, i.. read more

The website host is the physical computer on which your website lives. Site visitors access the server by way of your domain name, and the hosting server provides access to your pages and files. There are numerous variations of hosting servers and hosting plans, and your choice is dependent on numerous factors: Shared Server, Virtual.. read more

In its simplest terms, domain names are purchased from a domain registrar, an accredited organization that manages domain registration. They will then park the domain or point it to your hosting server (more on this next week). As the public-facing address for your website, it is important that your organization maintains complete ownership of your domain.. read more

So, now that’s you’ve figured out your target audience and decided what you want them to do, let’s put it all together. By combining your audience and your conversion goal, you can come up with a one sentence summary – a website thesis statement, if you will – that can help you make informed decisions about your site. So.. read more

So, now that you know your target audience, what is it that you want them to do? It is ideal to think of one action you want your website’s visitors users to take. That way, you can design and build your website to facilitate that action, and you can determine success by measuring how many.. read more

The first step in planning your website is knowing your audience. We went into more depth in an earlier post, but in a nutshell… who is your ideal customer?  Pull together as much information as you can about this ideal customer… gender, income, education level, tech-savviness, and so on. What do they like? Where do they hang out?.. read more