Archive for September, 2005
September 22, 2005
Mambo Schism!
Looks like the open source content management system, Mambo, has had a split among its developers, resulting in a fork of the code. Here is a nice summary from Enter Content Here: Mambo, Joomla
This kind of split is one of the risks of open source projects. I think it can also be a healthy, long-term, survival mechanism as well although it certainly adds some chaos in the short run.
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September 21, 2005
Leading from the Middle
Here is a nice piece from CMS Newswire on how web professionals often have to take on a leadership role: Why Web Managers are Leaders.
You’re in a delicate situation. You need to show leadership for your website, while at the same time not being seen to usurp the leadership of your senior managers. How do you bring them along? How do you make them feel that they are still the ‘real’ leaders?
This is a common theme in association management to begin with: how to lead while appearing to be led. Usually it is about working with volunteer leadership but the same techniques can be used internally by mid-level web leaders who are trying to get their execs to get behind the best ideas for the site.
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September 20, 2005
Opera Web Browser Now Free
The Opera web browser is now available for free without embedded advertising. From the site:
Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera’s growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today’s milestone an achievable goal.
Hey, how about that. An actually competitive browser market has returned with more than 2 free options. Welcome back to the mid-to-late-90s!
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September 16, 2005
New Article: The Association Web Job Description
I have just posted an article I wrote that went out in ASAE’s Technoscope newsletter a while ago: The Association Web Job Description. The article identifies the major areas that should be considered when designing positions to support an association web site, including sample language.
You may also want to see the sample interview questions for content management positions that I posted a while ago.
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September 16, 2005
Online Directories Idea Swap Report
So there were about 10 people who attended the Idea Swap last night. Roughly equal mix of association staff and vendor/consultant types. I didn’t hear any revolutionary ideas but I did hear something interesting about what associations think about as they consider an online directory.
The biggest factors for associations creating online directories seemed to fall into one of two areas: preserving print-based advertising revenue or cutting costs by ceasing printing of the dead tree directory. What was missing from the conversation was discussion about creating value for members via an online directory. Revenue and cost are valid concerns but shouldn’t they really be secondary to what will create the most value for the association’s members?
Creating crippled online directories just to preserve some existing revenue streams doesn’t tell your members that you are keeping their interest front and center. Once they get that perception, you renewals will drop and then those other revenue streams will go away too. Then what?
I think associations are really going to have to get back to basics as the web continues to disrupt existing revenue models. It won’t be easy but they have to address value for members if they want to remain healthy organizations.
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September 15, 2005
Technology Idea Swap: Online Directories
I’ll be heading down to the Center today to attend the technology idea swap about online directories. This is my first Idea Swap, looking forward to seeing how it goes.
I’ll post any good ideas I pick up from the event.
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September 14, 2005
5 Ways to Improve the Online Dues Payment Process
Associations often make their online dues payment processes hard to navigate for their members. Given that dues still form a significant chunk of any association’s revenue, it’s shocking how hard some of them make it for their members to give them money. These five tips focus on how to make your online dues payment system ridiculously easy in order to gather as much dues online as possible.
- Remove all extraneous form fields from the payment process. Do not ask them to complete a survey or provide demo
ngraphic data before providing payment. You will lose people for each additional unnecessary element you make them complete which requires you to then gather dues payment through the much more expensive snail mail methods. - When possible, pre-populate any fields you do require them to complete. You know their mailing address. Don’t make them enter it again!
- Instead of posting dire warnings about not clicking submit twice (which can cause double payment depending upon your system), disable the submit button via javascript after the first click. Why threaten the user when you can easily disable the behavior that causes the problem? Threats like that make paying online scary. You will lose people who don’t want to risk it.
- Send an e-mail notification for paying dues online well in advance of mailing your paper invoices. Remove those who have already paid online from your later mailings to save money on printing and postage.
- Include an encrypted link in your e-mail notification that bypasses your login system to your online dues payment system. When the member clicks the link generated just for them it should automatically authenticate them and allow them to immediately pay for their dues without having to remember their login. This link should expire after a few days and it should only be applicable to paying dues, not to logging them in to the rest of the site.
The point of all these tips is to make it as easy as possible for your members to do the one action your renewal notice should spur: paying dues.
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September 12, 2005
Verity Ultraseek: Free Download
Verity’s Ultraseek, a search engine, is now available for download and free trial. This is the tool we used at ASHA when I was working there. Excellent ability to tune results and the interface can be customized relatively easily using Python and HTML (although the templates were rather incomprehensible spaghetti code, which is hard to do with Python, normally). Hopefully the spaghetti issue was improved with the latest release.
Spotted via SearchTools.
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September 2, 2005
Sue Pelletier on Meetings Impact of Katrina
Sue Pelletier of MeetingsNet is doing a great job of posting updates on the impact of Katrina on meetings and events scheduled for New Orleans and how the association and event community is responding. Thanks, Sue!
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September 2, 2005
Paging Robert Scoble: Tell msnbot to Calm Down
I’m posting this note with Robert Scoble’s name in it in order to get some attention from Microsoft about the behavior of their RSS bot, msnbot.
Over the past week, the bot has hit my site over 27k times for about 38mb of bandwidth. The bot is almost exclusively hitting RSS feeds. However, most of the feeds it is getting on my site are for individual entries, which allow people to track comments. Each feed is getting hit about 100x a week. I would think that is a big waste of effort for older entries that get few comments. Once a day should be plenty.
So, Robert, when you see this in one of your ego notifications, please pass the word to whoever manages msnbot to chill out a bit on the hits. I love to be indexed but not at such a heavy load which is wasting my bandwidth and MS’s. If the load goes much higher I might ban the bot for poor manners.
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