Archive for content management

Use a Blog as a News Feed

blog-rss

When I say “blog” to some church folks, what they seem to think that means is either “opinionated editorials” or “narcissistic what-I ate-for-breakfast-reports”.  But blogs can be a great tool for non-profits.

A blog can be editorial or inane, but more basically, a blog is a special kind of website (or a specific function on a website), usually managed by blog software like WordPress (what this blog uses), Blogger, or others.  Articles (aka “posts”) on a blog are arranged on the blog home page in chronological order, with the most recent on top.  Each post also has it’s own stand-alone page too (usually accessed by clicking the title of the post).  Most blogs also allow readers to comment or question in response to the post, but this feature can be turned off.

Develop a “Feed”

I regularly coach churches and faith communities to develop a “News Feed” by using a blog for all their dated, time-bound content.  Most blogs allow multiple authors, so several staff or leaders can contribute.  Posts can be:

  • news about the organization (“We’ve just received an award”)
  • educational (“Here’s what we do to help”)
  • promotional (“Attend our big event”)
  • seeking help (“We need furniture donations for a family”)
  • prompting action (“Come serve at the soup kitchen on Saturday”)
  • and probably a dozen other ideas!

Each piece of news needs to have it’s own separate post.  Don’t aggregate all your news into one big post.  This way you can send people to specific articles or pieces of news.

The real power of the blog as News Feed is when you link it to your other media.  The blog posts can be longer and have more detailed information than is really practical in a single email, an email newsletter or in social media like Facebook.  With the News Feed, you have a location for that longer info and you can put links to it in those other medias.  For example, a short “teaser” couple of sentences in an email newsletter, concluding with a “Click here for more info” that is a link back to the specific stand-alone post page of that topic.

A best practice would be to use the URL of the stand-alone post page in your link (instead of the chronological-order home page of the blog), since by the time your reader gets to the home page, you may have made other posts, so what they are looking for won’t be on top any more.

Simplifies Content Management

This strategy of using a blog for a news feed greatly simplifies dated content management on your website:

  1. The person putting content on the site doesn’t have to think about which page of the site it goes on — they just create a new post for each piece of news, and it goes into the chronological structure of the blog/news feed.
  2. The person managing content never has to take old news down, only put new news up!

Number two is an important plus: You don’t want to have past-dated content on your site, but you also want to let potential visitors have an idea of what kinds of things your faith community has been doing.  With a news feed, the date-stamped posts give you the best of both worlds– as long as you keep making new posts at least every other week.

Space out Facebook Auto-Posts

If you have set up your blog-as-a-news-feed to post automatically over onto your Facebook Page, then be sure to schedule your posts so that they don’t all publish at one time and “overwhelm” your fans’ FB newsfeed.  Not only might they “unlike” your page, part of the power of the posts onto the FB page is that they will appear sporadically in your fans’ news, and keep reminding them of the things that you are doing.  In this case, a drip is a lot more effective than a flood.

A blog may already be a part of your established website, or you may be able to easily add a blog.  Having your news feed be a part of your larger site is ideal, but if it’s not feasible, WordPress.com and Blogger and other blogging sites offer free (but limited feature) blogs.  Most of those services also allow you to buy a domain name to use with that free blog (this can be less than $25 per year).

Categories Uncategorized
Comments (0)

Annual Content Review

website contentOnce a year you should review the content on your site to make sure it is up to date.  If your site is very active – for instance, more than six posts per week – you might want to do this twice or even four times per year.  This post contains some things to look for.

First of all, note that you do not need to make any edits or changes to your old blog or news feed posts. Because these posts live within a dated structure, people will understand that they are potentially out of date.

Focus on the static pages of your site, which your users will assume our current information for your organization. Go through each page looking for the following:

  1. Outdated Content.  This is content that is past-date or otherwise no longer valid. An example might be a page that says the youth group meets on Wednesday nights, when they now meet on Thursday nights.
  2. Outdated Images.  This is not so important for your newcomer/potential visitor site users, but you want your organization members to feel like the site is being kept up and has valuable information on it – which can be hard to do when the pictures on the site show young kids who are now teenagers.
  3. Eyes of the Newcomer. Look through each page trying to view it through the eyes of a newcomer. Are there mysterious acronyms or insider language?  Remember that you want your website (especially the homepage) to be a “welcome mat” that offers newcomers hospitality and invites them to visit your faith community.
  4. How Content is Displayed. Look through the site not only for whether information is up-to-date, but also how the information is displayed. Is it easy to skim through? Is it organized well? Are there ways that you can use fewer words and more images?
Categories Uncategorized
Comments (0)

Change the Order Posts Appear in WP

If you use the blog function of your WordPress site as a news feed, or if you are using the Recent Posts widget (like we do in the sidebar, below signups), you might occasionally want to change the order of the posts – either in the blog or the widget.

The ordering of the posts in both of these locations is automatically controlled, and determined solely by the date of publication. Older posts automatically appear at the bottom, while the newest post automatically appears at the top – a “reverse chronological” structure.

To change the order where a post appears, you need to change the date of publication for that post – making it earlier in date than the posts you would like it to appear below, and later in date than the posts you would like it to appear above.

Published on

To change the date of publication for post, go to the post editing page, and on the right sidebar, immediately above the blue “Update” button, look for the “Published on:” line.  Right beside that will be a blue link to “Edit”.  Click this link, then select a new publication date.  Be aware that you may have to select a time as well as a date of publish to get your post exactly where you want it.

While changing the order of the posts in the blog or widget might be something you need to do once in a while, you don’t want to end up micromanaging this order too much.  Changing the order more than once a month or so might mean that you need to take a look at creating a publishing schedule to be more organized in the order you originally publish posts.

Categories Uncategorized
Comments (0)

Open Links to Other Sites in a New Tab/Window

chainWhen you add a link to your website to another OUTSIDE website, it’s best practice to have that link open in another tab/window. This allows YOUR site to stay open for the user, increasing the likelihood that they will continue looking around on your site after they finish with the link that opened.

Keeping people on your website will not only increase the chance that they will learn more about you and perhaps connect with you in the future – it also has a positive impact on your search engine (Google) rankings.

For links that are WITHIN your website – say, from the Home page to the About page – you should leave the link in its default state, opening in the same browser tab and window. You want to encourage a user to click around from page to page in your site, and opening a new tab or window for every click would be incredibly annoying!

Whether a link opens in a new tab or a new window is determined by the settings that an individual user has made to their browser. Website managers can set links to open in what ever “new” option the user has chosen.

How to set a link in WordPress to open in a new tab or window:

WP Link popupSetting a link to open in a new tab/window in WordPress is easy!  When you are creating a new link, simply tick the check box under the title bar titled “Open link in a new window/tab”.  That’s it!

The hardest part is that the next time you open the Insert/edit link popup, the “Open link a new window/tab” will be checked by default.  You will want to develop the habit of making sure this box is checked/unchecked as needed.  Staying on your own site: unchecked; taking the user to another website: checked.

Categories Uncategorized
Comments (0)

Send Posts Automatically to Facebook (and other social media)

facebook logoIf you are using the blog of your WP site as a news feed for dated content, you might want to set up having your posts go over onto your FB page automatically.  There are a number of plugins to help with this, but you can take the load off your website by using IFTTT, a handy service that integrates two separate online apps or services.

On IFTTT, any action that happens on one app/service can trigger an action on another/service. These triggered actions are called “recipes”. Here’s how to set up WP posts showing up automatically on your FB page.

  1. Start by creating an account at ifttt.com.
  2. The different services that can be integrated are each called “channels”. Search the channels for “WordPress”, And click the big blue “Connect” button.
  3. Set up the WordPress channel by putting in the requested information. “Blog URL” is a link to your domain name, including the HTTP part at the beginning, something like: http://mychurch.org.  (Only include “www” if that’s how your site appears on the web.)
  4. Search the channels again, and choose Facebook pages (not just Facebook). You must be an administrator on the Facebook Page you want posts to be published on. Enter the requested information for your personal Facebook page. Facebook will ask you to give some permissions, and you can feel free to check everything except the top option, which will be required.
  5. On the second FB persmissions page, it will ask you “IFTTT would like to post to Facebook for you. Who do you want to share these posts with?”  It’s ok to leave this setting as “Friends”.
  6. The next page will ask to manage your Pages, simply click through with an “Okay”.
  7. If you are an administrator on more than one Facebook Page, the next screen will ask you to choose which page you would like to let IFTTT manage. Be sure to choose the correct one.
  8. Now create a recipe with two channels: click first on “My Recipes” at the top of the page, then on the blue button for “Create a recipe”.
  9. Click on the link for “This”, to add the trigger channel – in this case WordPress, and choose “Any new post”.
  10. Click on “Create Trigger”, then on the “that” link, and choose Facebook Pages.
  11. Choose “Create a link post”.
  12. A new page will open where you have some options about how to configure what you want to display. By default, the FB link URL will be set as the “PostUrl”, and you won’t want to leave this as is so that your post has a link back to the website.
  13. The “Message” box is what you want to display in the FB area ABOVE the link.  Click on the blue flask to see some options, but to start with, we recommend you leave the Message box blank. This will post the link to your Facebook page, along with any image in the post, without a message above the post.
  14. If you would like to have a bit of the content showing on FB, then in the “Link URL” section, click the blue flask, and add “PostContent” after “PostURL”.

Once you get into IFTTT, you will see that you can use it to share your organization’s content automatically in a variety of ways.  Let us know in the comments if you find or create a helpful recipe for faith communities or nonprofits!

Categories Uncategorized
Comments (0)

Content Should be “Forward-facing”

calendarEffective websites keep their site content “forward-facing” – that is, any dated content should only be dealing with the present and the future.

Keeping past-dated content on your website makes it seem like you’re not keeping your website maintained, which conveys that you don’t have much interest about informing newcomers. Old, past-dated content just does not convey hospitality.

Certainly, if your church or ministry just won an award earlier this week, that’s present-tense news.  Put that up on your site! But in another couple of weeks, this information is old news, and should be taken down.

On church websites, the information on static (not changed very often) pages should be current. The days and times for regular group meetings or info for contact persons may be posted on these pages, but should be updated whenever there are changes – even if that means changing this information at the beginning of the summer (when groups might be taking a break), and then changing it back when the fall programs kick off again.

There are two exceptions to this:

The first is that you don’t need to take down any past dated information from a grid-style calendar on your site. Most of our ACWP participants use Google calendar. Leaving up your old events on Google calendar is fine because users will intuitively know that old events are already over.

The second exception is similar: you don’t need to take down old content is if you are using the blog function of your site as a newsfeed. Because these blog posts normally have a “posted on” date, they don’t convey the same inattention to hospitality that content on static pages can convey. The key however, is that you have to keep making new blog posts, so that your most recent news feed post is always within the last week or two.

The added benefit to leaving these “old-news” items up in these two locations is that the website user can scroll back through your news feed posts or calendar to see what your church has been up to in the recent past.

Categories Uncategorized
Comments (0)

“Chunk” your Content

Don’t add too much content to any one page.  A user should only have to use two or three scrolls to get to the bottom of most website pages.

There are two reasons for this:

  1. Users don’t “read” web-sites— they scan content for relevant information.
  2. Users on mobile devices find long pages difficult to manage and give up quickly.

“Chunking” content makes it easier to scan. Make your paragraphs short— 3 sentences.  These paragraphs may not be the “coherent idea” type that you learned in high school English, but they will make it easier for your users to scan.

Use bold and italic text to highlight things you want your users to pay attention to, but never use underlined text, which will look like links to another web page.

When it seems reasonable, use bullet points or numbered lists to organize your content.  These, along with bold & italic text give quick, visual clues that aid in scanning.

 

Categories Uncategorized
Comments (0)
Next Page »
Affordable Church Website Program
Copyright © 2021 All Rights Reserved

Site built with Affordable Church Website Program