As a best practice, as with any strategic item in business, you should define goals for your website. Defining goals will assist in determining if your site can meet these goals or if your site needs to be structured differently.

Goals for your website can include items such as:

• Increase Membership
• Increase Users
• Increase product sales
• Increase interest in your company
• Generate leads

The next step – how do you get there?  Proper planning and strategies are vital. Once you have established the overall goal,  determining strategies to meeting these goals is the next step.  As an example of this, if your goal is to increase membership, some of your strategies could include:

1. Ensuring your website design provides users who visit your site with an easy way to gain information on membership.  This should be clearly visible on your homepage and displayed in a way that is eye catching to the user;
2. Ensuring your website provides your current members with an easy way to access member information and update their information.  Member information changes and members need a way to easily update their information;
3. Reviewing current membership database, ensure that this is up-to-date and easily accessible to users who visit your site.  Offering your members with the ability to have their name seen/searched on your website is a great way to increasing membership and dues;
4. Review data on members who haven’t renewed in the past year or two.  Establish a cross-media campaign to reach out to these members to determine if they are interested in renewal.  Offer a discount if they renew within a certain period of time. Cross Media campaigns can include something as simple as an email with a PURL or delivery via print medium (a post card).  A PURL  (Personalized URL) for the member can allow them to access their personalized landing page and renew their membership or provide you with feedback that can be used for further discussions with that potential new member.

Once you have the strategies outlined review your website.  Will your current website design and structure allow you to meet these strategies? Will you need to alter your design in order to create a visually appealing membership area?  Does your site need to include a member search section to promote members and their abilities/specialties?

These are just a few examples, but defining your website goals and strategies will provide you with the starting point to examining your website and possible changes that are necessary to reach it’s fullest potential. 

Why is this so difficult? All I want to do is renew my membership.

We see our site every day, know where the information is located and how to navigate the site.  Due to this we take our site for granted and don’t realize that the information and message could be delivered in a different manner which could increase visitors and members.  For the most part, visitors will spend very little time on your site if they can’t find what they are looking for or determine why they should stay on your site vs. your competitor.

To know your site a little better, conduct a small test for 20 seconds.  Have five people who aren’t familiar with your web site visit your homepage and view your site for 20 seconds. Can they:

1. Tell the name of the company or association?
2. Tell what the company or association does?
3. Want to perform an action? (i.e., request more information, view item of interest, etc.)

In most cases, you will find that the majority of your test group will not be able to answer all three questions  with the correct responses.  Review the results, see where your biggest challenge lies.  It is with item number 2?  What does your company or association do?  Or is it with item number 3?  The content of the page didn’t make the user want to perform an action?  If the test group had any problems with answering any of these questions, targeting your design to addressing this area should be considered.

Your website is a valuable resource and keeping it up-to-date with a design that lends itself to your audience is the best way to ensure that your visitors and members support your organization.

Design standards should include:

1. Make the site purpose clear – explain who you are and what you do;
2. Help users find what they need – emphasize the sites top priorities, include a search box for the user to quickly search and access other information;
3. Site content – use your best content on the homepage, provide links that are SEO friendly, they make sense and include the title of the page content;
4. Use visual design to enhance, not detract, from the content and overall message of the design. Don’t clutter or have too many flashy images/pictures, etc. Clean and simple is best and visual elements can help bring focus to the most important elements of your web site design.

Your website is an important part of your company and organization.  It is your chance to make a first and lasting impression to new visitors, to potential new members, and returning members.  You want your visitors and members to be able to find your site and organization easily, determine the purpose of your company and perform an action that keeps them on the site.  Visitors need to know why your company or organization is better than your competitor and why they should stay on your site vs. visiting other sites.  A design that meets design usability standards will assist in ensuring that your visitors stay on your site and return to your site.

To be successful in Social Media there is an investment of time.  Social Media is exactly as it sounds – being Social through media streams such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, blogs, etc.  What a lot of people & organizations forget and fail to recognize is that the main point in Social Media is being Social.  The definition of Social by Websters.com:

• relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society 
• tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others of one’s kind 

Investing time is how you will be successful and how you will learn and grow in the social media community.  There have been some great posts with information and suggestions on how best to handle the social media tools and tips to help organize the various social media items.  Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I’ve included a few of the most helpful to me below:

• A Quick ‘n Dirty Guide to Setting up Social Media Monitoring -http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/2009/02/18/a-quick-n-dirty-guide-to-setting-up-social-media-monitoring/
• Get More Comments with a Better Discussion Experience http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/get-more-comments-with-a-better-discussion-experience/
• Twitter tools for every one http://etsygreekstreetteam.blogspot.com/2009/02/twitter-tools-for-every-one-for.html
• Choosing Social Networks -http://mashable.com/2008/12/16/choosing-social-networks/

These are only a few tools that will provide you with ideas and information on how best to set your social media monitoring.  Try a few to find what works best for you then establish a schedule.  Don’t forget, social interaction is important and is the key to your overall success.

Let’s face it, we all know the situation with the economy and the need to cut costs internally as much as possible.  Last week layoffs surged to over 300,000 since late August 2008 (see Techcrunch article for specifics http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/17/tech-layoffs-surge-to-300000/) with more layoffs announced and in all probability, more coming.

With the need to reduce costs, How could outsourcing be a benefit to you and your organization?  

Depending on the type of vendor and contract period that you are considering, it could help to reduce your overall budget expense.  Outsourcing could also help to ensure that your project is delivered on-time, and in a smooth and efficient manner.

First, lets address budget. Vendor outsourcing would certainly be less costly than hiring and training new employees to address your web projects and/or updates/edits.  As mentioned above, layoffs are at a high right now and most companies have had to downsize in one way or another.  If you are lucky and can hire, hiring and training can run anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 just in ad placement, interviewing, background and drug checks and then the internal training (this doesn’t include salary compensation). Where, with a vendor there would be some expense in the research and proposal/interviewing stage, but then vendors are the experts and professionals. From that point on they should be able to take over and handle your project and web needs based upon the contract requirements.

Your website, in most cases, is your first impression to the general public, your members, your potential new members, your audience and your buyers. It is important to keep your website as up-to-date and fresh as possible.  Information/content needs to be updated timely and of relevance to keep users coming back to your site.  Functionality needs to be updated and user friendly. Technology is always changing and being updated, you need to stay in the forefront of your competition and ensure that you offer your website users with a good experience when they visit your site. You want them to keep coming back.

Vendor outsourcing is a viable solution to assisting you and your company with maintaining a good web presence, staying ahead of the competition through updated content and web strategies/technologies, and increasing users and traffic to your site. 

Timing of your project is important and your selected vendor is the expert in the web strategy, design and development field. They should be able to provide you with a schedule timeline with milestones and updates throughout the process. Your vendor is representing you and your company. A good project depends on a good project manager. Your selected vendor should be a good project manager and ensure that the project experience and outcome is a smooth one for you and your organization.  

I found a post that was done a few years ago regarding vendor consulting and still believe that this is relevant, the post was from the www.problogger.com site and does include good information and good comments that are definitely worth the time to review.  http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/11/27/hiring-a-web-consultant-pros-and-cons/

Today I came across a post by  Heidi Tolliver on The Digital Nirvana site called Guaranteeing the Success of Personalized URLs http://thedigitalnirvana.com/2009/02/guaranteeing-the-success-of-personalized-urls/comment-page-1#comment-723.  I thought the post was interesting and worth a follow up.  The article has good information as does the comments posted.

I’ve been involved in quite a few Cross Media Campaigns which included PURL’s as a phase during the touch campaign.  Some have been successful. The biggest challenge is the content that is delivered with the PURL.  The content has to be inviting and make the user want to go the extra step and click on the PURL. Offering someone a chance to win something just isn’t going to cut it most of the time.  Sure, it might get people to click on the URL and enter, but in most cases, this isn’t your goal.

Your goal is for people to show interest in your product or service.  You want to start a relationship with these people, start building your connections and contacts, build your business.  Having someone click the URL and only enter the giveaway isn’t a way to do this.  Your message with the PURL has to attract them to the site because they want to learn more about you and your company. 

Make sure your message is targeted to the contact. Make sure that you state your message clearly and the advantages if they contact and use you over other people. Give them something to make them think and look forward to hearing/learning about after they click on the PURL and contact you.  How can they save more money by contacting you, what are the benefits of your service over other similar services, etc.

PURL’s can work as a marketing tool and work well.  The success can be measured by the success of the content.