By Nora McDougall-Collins
NNFP Director of Web Services

The problem with taking your ball out of play and going home is that now you don’t have anyone to play with. This is especially a problem on the web where everything is interconnected, and a big part of your traffic is a result of links to your web site.

Last week, I discussed using information from newspaper and magazine articles about you. This week, I had two opposite experiences in that area.

A story on the positive side: the newspaper, The Daily Interlake, from Kalispell, Montana carried an article about me in 2004. I needed a copy of that article to add to the NNFP web site; so, I emailed the editor and asked if I could have a copy. The editor’s response was prompt and very positive. He took the time to search out the article, even though I couldn’t even remember whether it was 2004 or 2005. Then he sent me a digital copy, which is posted on the upcoming, new NNFP web site. When I asked if there was a charge to use the article, he just asked that we give them credit.

On the negative side is an incident that I read about in my favorite technical news and forum site: Web Pro News. I’d like to suggest here that you take a few minutes to click the link in the previous sentence and read the article, and especially the comments. However, a brief summary sentence is,
“GateHouse Media Inc., which owns 125 Massachusetts newspapers as well as web properties like WickedLocal.com, sued the New York Times Co. because its Boston.com-run website “Your Town Newton” was posting headlines and small article snippets from WickedLocal.com.”

The New York Times wasn’t copying the articles, just linking to them with the snippets to tell the reader what the content of the article was. Reading the responses to this article is all the comment needed, but my favorite reader response was,
“Submitted by Laurie Manny (WPN reader) on Wed, 01/28/2009 – 18:18.
Hilarious!!!
This is so funny I have to comment. Tell them to link to me PLeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease. hahahahahahaha

Some people are just to dumb to exist!”

Judging by the responses, these publications will have a very lonely time with their ball! The really sad thing is that so many print publications are fighting to exist. They can’t afford to make mistakes like that one. A year ago, the Albuquerque Journal wanted to charge $30.00/mo for the use of an article on a web site. And they wanted to charge it to the people who the article was about. That’s more than the site hosting charges – for one article! Although a web advertising campaign should be part of your advertising budget, I wouldn’t advertise on a site that wasn’t doing everything it could to drive traffic to the articles – and my ads!

Here in Montana our newspapers are cutting back employees. The Albuquerque Tribune, an 86 year old publication is shutting its doors. Newspapers are having quite a struggle with the new culture of the internet. I have already recommended to one excellent reporter, who is losing her job to cutbacks, that she write great articles for web site content. There will always be a need for great content!

So, I’d suggest that you have great, interesting content on your web site, and share, share, share. Just do like the editor of the Daily Interlake and expect a link back to your web site!

By Nora McDougall-Collins
NNFP Director of Web Services

A newspaper or magazine just wrote a fantastic article about your business. They may have also added the article to their web site. Hopefully, they have also listed or linked to your web site. The publicity is great for your business, but the benefits will continue indefinitely, if you will look at all articles written about you or your product as a resource for your web site.

BENEFITS OF ADDING ARTICLES TO YOUR WEBSITE
First, the article has value as content. People use your web site who may not ever see the original publication. These viewers will enjoy the professionally written articles and photos. The content also has value for your search engine optimization (SEO); although, as “duplicate content” the SEO value isn’t as great as the original content you write.

Second, the article gives your company and product credibility. Web sites are impersonal (and often suspect.) Newspaper and magazine articles let your viewers know that you are for real and worthy of recognition.

Third, adding articles to your web site helps keep your site alive with updates. People like to see new material added regularly on your web site – so do the search engines. (Join the Web Marketing forum for regular tips on search engine optimization.)

HOW TO ADD ARTICLES TO YOUR WEBSITE
Plan a section of your web site for media that is linked from your home page.Some examples are:
Flying AJ Ranch
Pimentel Guitars

Before you add someone else’s article or photo to your web site, you should have their permission. A good time to ask is when they make arrangements for the interview or photo session. After the article or photo is in print, the content is in the hands of the administration and might not be easy to obtain. Be sure to tell the reporter or write that you would be happy to give them credit and link to their web site. Your link to their web site is good for their SEO.

After you have permission, you will need a copy of the article and/or photos that is compatible with your web technology – unless you plan to type the whole article! Many web magazines have a format that is not easy – or possible – to copy and paste from. If you can’t get the article, permission to copy and paste it doesn’t help you.

Examples of online magazines without copy and paste functionality:
Posh New Mexico
Wood Products
PDF files appear to have copy and paste, but the copy often skips letters here and there and the format will cause other issues.

Ideally, receiving the text in a Word document and the images in .jpg format will give you the most options for use on your web site. The problem is that magazine and newspaper staff aren’t necessarily web savvy enough to know that. Many times they will offer you a PDF file. However, the author of the article and photographer may be able to send you copies in Word and .jpg, if you make your request before they turn everything over for publication. However, I have had to resort to typing an article and doing a screenshot for images. Screenshot instructions.

No matter when you receive your digital version of the article and photos, be sure that it goes on your web site after the originating publication has had their exposure for good relations with the publication. And, again, give them credit and a link.

However, you may find that the publication locks all their articles behind a passworded subscription. Then you can’t link to the articles. If the publication doesn’t take advertising and depends entirely on subscriptions, you might do them the courtesy of mentioning that at the bottom of the article. However, if it’s a publication that takes advertising, they may have policies that are quite restrictive, including asking you to pay to use the article on your web site.

I experienced this type of unfriendly policy when I tried to add an article from one Southwestern newspaper. They wanted more payment to carry the article for a month than my client’s monthly web hosting! Of course, we didn’t want the article for a month – we wanted to carry it permanently – with a link back to the newspaper web site, of course. My client was able to beg the article from them, but that policy doesn’t make any sense from a SEO perspective. Having their content online and available is a huge SEO benefit – and an opportunity to charge more for advertising through increased circulation. If I were a business that had advertising on their site, I would cancel it because they aren’t doing everything they can to make sure that their article – and therefore my advertising – has as wide an audience as possible!

By the way, if they include your phone number in the article, be sure they add the area code. It’s incredible how many local newspapers assume that the world knows all the area codes in the US!

By Nora McDougall-Collins
NNFP Director of Web Services

Gathering photos for your cooperative website may be one of the most difficult tasks in starting your site. It could take more time than the actual construction of the site itself. Here are some suggestions for photos that represent your co-op well on your website.

Ways to do it Wrong

• Get a shoebox of snapshots and hand it to your developer.
• Give your developer some photo CDs, which have been laying around the office – especially, if no one knows what photos are on the CDS.
• Email photos to your web developer one at a time over several weeks; so, that he or she has to go back through hundreds of emails to find them.
• Expect your developer to intuitively know what each photo means, the event in each photo and the names of the people in each photo.
• Expect any old snapshot to do – no matter how fuzzy or bad it is.
• Expect your developer to take the photos for you.
• Don’t ask the people in the photos for permission to put them on your website. It will be a nice surprise!

Ways to do it Right

• Make a list of appropriate photos for each of your web pages.
• Plan your photos to support a specific message for each page. Maybe, you will have to decide what your message is first!
• Make a spreadsheet of the pages on your website and which photos you will use on each page. Make one column for the date the photos were actually added to the pages.
• Hire a professional photographer. If you can’t afford a professional, take photos at events and meetings and visits every chance you get. Take hundreds of photos – at least one will be good! Many of the rest will have pieces that are good and can be cut out for accents on pages.
• If you don’t have a professional photographer or a great amateur photographer, send someone to a digital photography class at your local adult education center.
• Be aware of what is in the background when you take photos. A busy background is just confusion on the web.
• Take the photos at a high resolution. The higher the resolution of the photo, the better it will be after manipulation for the web.
• Put all your photos in folders that identify the event or date – before you forget what they are!
• If you have access to Photoshop or some other photo manipulation program, you may be able to lock a caption in the photo properties – do it.
• Do not accept photos from a co-op member unless they are willing to give them good file names.
• Give each photo file a descriptive file name. “Photo 1.jpg” and “Product 1.jpg” and “DCMI122308.jpg” are not descriptive file names.
• Write out a caption and an alt tag for each photo. Remember that these will 1) help the viewer understand more about your messages, 2) help your search engine ranking, and 3) help people with visual disabilities use your website.
• Stock photography is great for ambiance, but not so great for specifics. Your viewers want to see YOUR people and YOUR products!
• Remember that your website is a tool to market the businesses of your members. Photograph them as much as possible!
• Even after you have photos, take new photos now and then. Photos from 5 years ago are great to show a history, but not so great to show that these folks are still in business – or even alive.
• Give your web developer a CD with the renamed photo files and a spreadsheet with the file name, caption and alt tag.

Always keep in mind that you know what your photos mean. Look at your photos with the eyes of someone who doesn’t. I once saw a photo on the front page of a website that looked like a game warden giving a guy a ticket. It turns out it was a forest ranger giving a talk. Your viewers won’t necessarily get the same message from your photos that you do!
This article was first published on the NNFP Ning site.

By Nora McDougall-Collins
NNFP Director of Web Services

One of the elements to plan for your website is the text. Website text is much more than the paragraphs in the middle of the page. Planning ahead for each of the text areas of your website will help your readers’ experience and your search engine optimization.

Title Tags
Title tags are the words in the blue bar at the top of your browser window. These are one of the most important text areas that Google will use for your keyword cataloging. The title tag is also used as the line that people click to go to your website from Google. For example, if the title tag for the home page of http://nnfp.org is NNFP only, that doesn’t tell anyone much about the site. So, viewers are likely to choose to go to a different site.

Each page should have its own unique title tag that reflects the content of that page. Each title tag should take the following into consideration:
1. It should be true and accurate for that page, unless you want to be marked as a spammer by the search engines.
2. Keep it to 10 – 12 words. More than that won’t display well.
3. Don’t just make a list of keywords with commas. Make it interesting.
4. Don’t use words people will not type into a search engine. Reserve words like “biggest selection”, or “best deal” or “fantastic” for your used car ads.

Page Titles
A page title is different from the title tag in that it actually shows on the web page. A page title is shorter than a title tag because it’s one of the elements that helps people make sure they are on the page they want to visit. So, you have to be sure that people can read it in a glance. If your page titles are graphics, search engines won’t be able to get the words.

Text Links
Those clever buttons you want to use on your website don’t help your site be cataloged in Google. Google can’t read images, neither can people with visual disabilities. As often as possible use plain old text links and reserve your images for other areas of your web pages.

Page Copy
People won’t read a lot of words on your home page. Do you read all the words on every home page you go to? However, you should have brief text areas that lead people to click into your site. Think sound bites and headlines.

However, you should have great text on the inside pages. Once your viewers have reached the page they have chosen, they want some real content. They don’t want marketing mish-mash, they want meaty information. The search engines want the same thing.

This is another area where your keywords come in. Make a list of the words you want people to find you under and make sure that those words are in your content.

Alt Tags
These are coded captions for each of your inserted images. (For more information about inserted images go to http://www.thecomputergal.com/WebDesign/Tips/MisuseOfBackgroundImages.htm.) While the search engines can’t get or catalog any information from your images, they can get and catalog information from alt tags. When you give your developer images, each image should have a one sentence alt tag that describes the content and significance of the image.

File Names
Each web page on your site is at least one file. Each image is a file. Great file names will help your search engine optimization. Instead of homepagephoto.jpg, use HorseLogging.jpg or FourShelfBookcase.jpg. Notice that each word is capitalized to make it possible for a search engine computer program to pick out the words!

Conclusion
Go through your website, or your website plans, systematically for each of these items. It is very easy to think you did it, if you don’t document your work!

This article was first published on the NNFP Ning site.

By Nora McDougall-Collins
NNFP Director of Web Services

As a cooperative or association dedicated to promoting the small wood businesses of your members, you will probably acquire hundreds or thousands of images, pdf’s, and other files. Your members will depend on you to have these resources organized and available immediately upon request. That means that you need some system for managing images and other files, but you may not have any training in the software or methods available. Here are some tips for you to be the amazingly, professional file manager they expect!

If you can afford expensive software, use a program like Adobe Bridge to manage your files. Adobe Bridge can do many things, such as show you what’s in your files by thumbnails, help you group your files, and manage your files in many other ways. However, Adobe Bridge cannot be purchased alone, but as part of an expensive software package. Also, for any other staff member to get to the image information, they will have to have Bridge too. So, whether you use image management software or not, here are some other ways you can manage your file libraries.

First: Do it NOW
If you already have hundreds or thousands of files, you – and your staff – have probably wasted a lot of time looking through the files, every single time you need something. Each of those minutes and hours could have been spent paying someone to organize those files. This is a job that can be done by an intern or a high school employee. Always try to minimize jobs you have to do over and over with one time expenses of organizing.

Second: WRITE a Category Plan and Naming Conventions
Your organization has some type of logical system that can be put into categories. You can categorize by members, projects, products, types of products, type of file, etc. Choose some logical organization of categories that can also flow to the organization of your website. The main thing is that you can’t organize the files or your website, until you decide what your categories and subcategories are.

Besides planning folders to store your files, you need to plan how you will name your files; so that even someone new to your organization can scan the list quickly and find the files they need. Remember that the reason you are doing all this is to reduce repetitious Search and Find time*.

File names should quickly and intuitively tell someone what the content of the file is. So, each file name should include location, people and what’s happening type of information. You should set some rules as to which item comes first. A file name like, ManMakingChair.jpg is not as helpful as GeorgeSmithBuildingRockingChairVermont.jpg. Besides making it easier to find the file internally, Google images and other programs can increase the visibility of your site by the names of your files.

Third: Make a Storage Plan
Don’t make a single folder to organize your files, until you decide where all your resources will be stored. A bunch of CD’s dumped in a drawer won’t do it! A thumb drive won’t do it. Four possibilities are 1) a specific computer that doesn’t get much use, 2) an external hard drive – buy one, if you need to – you can get one for under $100.00, 3) on your webserver in a password protected folder, 4) an online file storage service. Actually, you should use two of these to protect yourself, in case one goes down.

Fourth: Set up a Spreadsheet (or other digital system) to keep track of your Files
Even if all your files are well-named and in well-named folders, it could take someone more time than necessary to open all the folders looking for the file they want. It is possible to set your computer to show the contents of a folder in thumbnails, but you still have to open the folders to see the thumbnails. If you create a spreadsheet and list each filename, location, keywords, caption, etc in the file, you have a low tech version of what Bridge and similar programs do for you. Spreadsheets are searchable; so the user can do a find on a particular word and see what is available in the spreadsheet.

Fifth: Make Folders and Copy Files into Them
Take your time. You don’t have to do all this in one day. In fact, you could devote ½ hour each day to work on it and continue with your regular work the rest of each day. Or, you could make it the special project of an intern. Somehow, this seems to be a task that people plan to do and never get around to!

Sixth: Make Sure that Everyone Follows the Naming and Saving Rules
The value of a system lies in everyone understanding and following the system. All it take is one person organizing their own way, instead of by the plan, to increase everyone’s Search and Find time. Your system may become outdated and need revised, but that should be decided by a manager or the group, not ad hoc.

*Interesting Note:
The “Search and Find” idea in this article came from Frank and Lilian Gilbreth’s motion studies and the book “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

A therblig is the name for one of a set of fundamental motions required for a worker to perform a manual operation or task. The set consists of 18 elements, each describing a standardized activity. These are listed below.

• Search
• Find
• Select
• Grasp
• Hold
• Position
• Assemble
• Use
• Disassemble
• Inspect
• Transport loaded
• Transport unloaded
• Pre-position for next operation
• Release load
• Unavoidable delay
• Avoidable delay
• Plan
• Rest to overcome fatigue

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therblig