The SEO dance

A buddy of mine just launched Gale Force Sailing and when I first checked his page rankings, he didn't even make the first couple of pages (but his wikipedia entry did).

Then he got an email from a keen supporter and Search Engine Optimization/Marketing guy who did a few quick maneuvers on a sailing directory and he jumped to the top of Google. See the communication thread here.

That was pretty fast and there were immediate results. But it's not always that easy...or is it? I just chatted with the Social Media Group and they'd make you think it was pretty simple. And it may be. For us, the first step is to actually utilize our Google grants (I'm to blame here). Though our page ranking is decent and our backlinks is not bad (820), we could do a lot more.

Hopefully the Social Media Group can assist us, but until I can create a little more time prior to the launch of our national site as well as afterwards, I don't see us taking a significant step forward to increase our relatively low search engine driven traffic of 15%.

I was talking to a friend the other day about this stuff and as a joke (right?) he sent this interesting post. The video was amusing too, couldn't resist. See below:

Snapping Snap in half: no more (annoying) page views

I should have listened to my gut. When I wrote about Snap in December, I thought I found a win for the user (they get a preview of the site) and for us (one more attempt to keep them on our site).

Well, it's only been a couple of months, but I'm less concerned these days about driving folks off our site and more interested in our redesign building a relationship that fosters trust around the notion that we are the premier source of river conservation, news, and action. Ideally, I'd like our new site to serve as a platform for communities to share, learn, and act on river issues on a federal and a local level.

With our focus on trust as we move forward, users should want to return to our site. There is no need for trickery, annoying pop ups, and opening new windows (ok, haven't totally let go of this one - I'm trying though). If we build a solid, easily navigable, and useful site for our audiences, they will come back.

I was already leaning toward this thinking, but after two unrelated reads, Scobleizer and Lifehacker, I've decided to snap Snap in half from future pop ups on this blog.

Out with the old, press conference...in with webcasts?

We're exploring the idea of a webcast for the release of our annual report on America's Most Endangered Rivers and I've gone to the usual suspects (here, here, and here) for info, but can't find many organizations who've utilized this tool.

There is a lot of cool potential (and hopefully savings too) for maximizing our opportunity to highlight this year's 10 most endangered rivers. I've found one in the area, but they won't return my calls. When was the last time you couldn't get a sales rep to call you back? I've left three messages too!

Basically, we're looking for a turnkey package that includes hosting, some interaction (live chat?), and is PowerPoint compatible. This is a test for us as we look to create a little added excitement surrounding the new website (planning on launching the first week of April) as well as this year's listing of 10 Most Endangered Rivers.

Anyone have experience with streaming live video? Thanks.

Organizing information for web design

Last week Beth pointed me to a great read, Non-Profit Tech Blog: Confessions of a Non-Profit IT Director. On Sunday, Allan's blog post gave me a great call out and had some good questions for me to ponder as we move forward with our redesign(s). He wrote:

What I would like Chas to show is his toolset for web information architecture design. Does he use Visio? Does he brainstorm on paper? Does he use index cards? However, he certainly he gives out enough information for people to eventually replicate his work methods for themselves. Hint, hint, I’ll be doing some of that myself.

First of all, I’ve never heard of Visio, so that was cool. And, index cards? I’ve never thought of that, but if it worked for me in elementary school and for my wife as she went through law school, then by golly it should work for me at the office.

I'm not sure if this completely addresses the question, but my preferred method (I use ‘preferred’ loosely as I haven’t dabbled with much else) is whiteboard, note taking, and meetings - a little old fashion wouldn't you say?

Whiteboard – Every Thursday, the web team meets and discusses web work completed, web work that needs to be scheduled, and upcoming week’s email schedule. Shortly, we will be including an editorial calendar to the mix (any successful models would be appreciated).

Note taking – I write a lot and cross out even more. I also carry a little ‘dorkpad’ around with me to capture tidbits outside of the office, e.g. sites to visit, folks to contact, shower-moment-thoughts, etc.

Meetings – For us, the web has been a huge patch quilt over the years absorbing lots and lots of information. So, my task early on (and hasn't stopped) has been meeting with folks to learn more about what they do, how our site(s) can reinforce/promote their work, and learn what we can do to integrate our work more efficiently and effectively.

Why am I going through this? Well, basically, Allan has me thinking about my 'toolset' as well as how I organize the information architecture, balance needs vs. wants, and better integrate our work online. And how I bring people into the process, that's also key. I will also look into Visio, but I’d like to hear what works for others. Editorial calendars? Wikis? Intranets?

Tips we can use from "The 59 Smartest Orgs Online"

We’d like to be smart too, so I’ve reviewed The 59 Smartest Orgs Online and came up with the top 10 things we can do in preparation for our website redesign. Or look to do in the coming year(s)—I’m trying to be realistic. But some very cool ideas to strive for in the weeks, months, and years ahead. The order below is of no particular interest.

Hats off to all of the organizations mentioned in The 59 Smartest Orgs Online (why 59 though?) and their good work incorporating a sense of community in their day-to-day efforts.

1. Engage constituents through a Google interactive map. New York City Coalition Against Hunger
2. Encourage small donations through MySpace, YouTube, message boards. ASPCA
3. Utilize blogs and videos as recruitment tools for volunteers and interns. Doctors without Borders
4. Incorporate Google Earth video tours. NRDC
5. Tell stories to keep visitors connected to your work. Interplast
6. Create a transparent tell-a-friend feature. Bookcrossing
   
7. Entice use of e-cards through user-generated photos. TNC
8. Showcase use of RSS for Radio, podcasts, and blogs (staff field journals). World Vision
9. Create volunteer-led special events across the country and online. Share Our Strength
10. Reach new audiences through mobile activism (cool wiki too). Mobile Activism
    

* One little note in regards to The 59 Smartest Orgs Online: what a pain to find the highlighted tool online since all of the links went to the homepage. For some, it required a bit of searching once I got to the site, but nonetheless, identifying 59 orgs is awesome! And a great benchmark for us.

New homepage wireframe developments

Greater discussion on the homepage has produced two new drafts. The big difference from our first round is that we've added a few extra bells and whistles.

In round two, we addressed the following:

• A quick link drop down menu for our "In Your Region' section.
• Changed 'River Basics' to something a little more clever, 'Riverpedia'.
• A direct link to our signature campaign, 'America's Most Endangered Rivers'.
• Added 'What You Can Do' to already existing 'Donate Now.'
• Changed 'Hot Topics' to 'Outer Banks' (the proposed name for the blog).
  

In the third round of edits, we made a couple of additional changes after a few more meetings and a little more discussion with our team leading the design build out. The biggest question for us was whether or not we include a big 'Donate Now' link on the top left navigation. If we did, that would make four separate entry points to 'giving' on the home page.

Grant it, we want to make giving a very simple thing for people to do, but paired with 'What You Can Do' in the left navigation, it seemed to be a little overkill (one of the things you can do is donate to us). I felt that having a clown nose donate button on the homepage (remember that there are 3 other entry points) wasn't necessary because:

1. Already reinforced on the header, top bar, and what you can do link on the homepage.
2. Does not specifically speak to community leaders, first time visitors, and river partners. Greater emphasis is on developing a relationship with our users, building rapport that encourages them to return to the site, learn more, and get involved—not just give.
   
3. Online donors are younger (avg age is 40: network for good study) than offline (tend to be 60+) and are becoming increasingly more savvy with link placements, i.e. clown noses are less needed now than before.
   

So, for now, the 'Donate Now' link on the homepage left navigation has been removed, but I sense this will not be the end of the discussion. Other changes included:

• Name of our blog 'Outer Banks' to 'Water Log' or Water Blog'.
• Changed 'Free Stuff' to 'Fun Stuff'
• Added 'Shop' to the bottom of the left navigation.
• Moved 'Contact Us' from the header navigation to the footer.
  
• Changed 'Riverpedia' back to 'River Basics' - a little too cute.
  

It ain't pretty, but hopefully it's effective

I feel like we're spending a lot of time on the site map/wireframe phase (see the first draft here and here), but I can't help to think that unless we have a rock solid foundation for moving forward our work online may get lost in the shuffle (lots of cooks, revamped focus online, and lots of old, old pages on existing site).

I think developing a sound platform (remember I'm new to the organization) is one reason why I feel so strongly about vetting this process to our focus group, field offices, executive staff, and online community. We're at the crossroads (this project can go many different ways) and I feel the more eyes on the prize the stronger our efforts will be.

Some of my notes are below:


Regarding the image above and below, here's what I've learned (good to keep in mind our objectives) from my interactions:

• We need better representation of our field offices, i.e. 'In Your Region'.
  
• Our organizational campaigns are different than our 'outreach' campaigns.
• We have four campaigns (Healthy Water, River Renewal, and Water for Life, and River Heritage) compared to a number of suppporting campaigns (Act for Healthy Rivers, National River Cleanup Week, Snake River 20/20, Most Endangered Rivers).
• We want dynamic content, e.g. blogs.
  
• We want RSS capabilities.
• We want to utilize existing engagement tools for our 'River Basics' section.
  
• We want to give our programs/campaign work a voice in the community.
• Given the response to our survey, we want to prominently display our action alerts.
  

In response to the homepage draft above, we've eliminated the clown nose 'Donate Now' button, our signature Most Endangered Rivers campaign, and redundant page links from the left navigation bar.

This is a fairly typical C-frame creation, but I like the direction of where we're going and what we can do online. We have quick links to 'In Your Region' and 'Research Tools' as well as added 'What You Can Do' to the left navigation.

The showdown: feeds vs. email

This redesign process has made me hungry for feeds. I eat them in the morning, at lunch time, and at night. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has definitely changed the I receive my information, attempt to stay on top of my field, and enjoy my momentary breaks at work. My appetite ranges from BBC world news to techcrunch to ZeFrank. And the more feeds I devour, the less I read the paper stuff: Washington Post, Newsweek, The Economist, etc.

I've even evangelized the use around the office, at home (it's a sore point now, don't ask), and with friends. As we're going through the redesign, I'm constantly thinking about how we can RSS-ize the experience. But how much is too much?

When I search our partners, there aren't many who are using them. But even those who are, I wonder how many readers are even subscribing to the feed. And does that matter? The eNonprofit Benchmark Study reported in March 2006 a 10% drop in email open rates for non-profits; could the growing use of RSS and desire to control flow of information be one factor for the drop?

I'd like to think, but I don't believe email communication will ever be replaced by RSS (shucks). I know Feedburner has the option of tracking feeds, but we don't pay for that service. I would however, like to see some statistics on the use (Anyone, anyone?). For us, 12% of our audience surveyed said they'd like more dynamic content/RSS and another 26% said they would like more frequent updates.

If 38% of our audience wants regular updates, I will assume the same 38% also wants a way to manage those regular updates. I'll consider these folks as our prospective RSS audience. Not a bad size, but then again 62% still want our emails. Jacob Nielsen wrote:

Feeds are a cold medium in comparison with email newsletters. Feeds do not form the same relationship between company and customers that a good newsletter can build. We don't have data to calculate the relative business value of a newsletter subscriber compared to a feeds subscriber, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that companies make ten times as much money from each newsletter subscriber. Given that newsletters are a much more powerful and warm medium, it is probably best for most companies to encourage newsletter subscriptions and promote them over website feeds.

This make sense to me since I rarely remember where my information came from, but regardless of the source I still want the information. However, for those who continually provide me with the most targeted, relevant information, I will remember you, you, you, you, and you.

Yes, even this is part of a redesign

A good hard look at anything you do will produce some interesting questions. And some not so interesting (but necessary) questions, like how many spaces after a period—one space or two?

This was a fun discussion that split various members of our Outreach & Communication team into two (the week before the New Year was pretty slow).

For myself, I've always been a monospaced kind of guy, but many of our organization's publications have two spaces and it throws me off, so I did a little research and found that the two space-method is old school with the non-proportional typewriter typeset, courier.

But don't take it from me, Ask the English Teacher says:

In the long-gone days of the typewriter, we always put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. This was a usage more or less required because every letter took up the same amount of space--an i took as much space as an m. (If you ever use the Courier typeface, you know what it looked like.) So two spaces at the end helped to distinguish a sentence-ending period from a period in an abbreviation like Dr. or Mr.

Most computer typefaces, however, give each letter just the space it needs. So, like the text in books and magazines, we need only one space after a period at the end of the sentence. I confess it took me a couple of years to break myself of that two-space habit once I'd shifted from typewriter to computer.

There we have it, one space from here on out (at least for the web side of things!).

A yummy link roll to showcase media hits

Over the last few months, there have been some excellent opinion pieces and news stories published on our issues (result of some pretty savvy media maneuvering by the field and DC folks), but we haven't been able to capitalize on the moment as well as I think we would've liked online. Our method has been to post the links on internal pages, add to the homepage, and/or include in our monthly newsletter.

Though this has worked, it's less than ideal as it potentially creates confusion online (link here, but why not there? What's the context?), false sense of expectations (users associate dates with dynamic content, think press releases, blog posts, etc.), and may even compromise the trust we work so hard to gain online (three pages in and I clicked on an external link that goes to an archived news story? Thanks).

This may be a stretch, but we just haven't had anything online to address the organizational need to link press hits with our campaigns. We, like all advocacy organizations, want to showcase our media efforts (which is greater validation of our work in public eyes) to our supporters, members, activists, and funders. At my previous job, generating media was huge to us and the work we did on behalf of public servants, so we created a press clips page for our audience to read the news story and then the press release that produced it (it just needs an RSS feed now).

Over the last six months, I've been trying to figuring out how we can do this through Convio, but every angle I took resulted in a pretty penny or two to customize the dynamic content pages (Storybuilder). And that just wasn't an option. In the end, we decided to stay with the status quo until we could address this during the redesign, but I think I have a temporary solution that may just work for us now as well as after the redesign: Del.icio.us.

I created a separate account for American Rivers and added three of the most recent press hits to our page which can then be pushed to our website through a link roll that will allow us to store, sort, and share our organizational news stories. Take a look down on the bottom of the blog bling to see the press hits and tags (the campaign that best connects us to the story). And it's subscribable!

It would be may even be cool to provide the rivers stories that we like and are relevant to our effort to protect rivers. And of course the blogs we like too, RiversandCreeks.

Too big to email? Upload, store, and share it instead

Anticipating the need to share large files in the near future, I thought DivShare was pretty cool. And it’s free…and no registration…and up to 100mb. I decided to test it out with the 8mb PowerPoint presentation that I put together for the RSS brown bag lunch last month. I’d rather have these pages live online, but didn't think it was worthy of space on our servers. So, I think DivShare will be useful for us to share high resolution photos and video clips with our design firm partners.

News to use: quantifying the online chatter

Last night I attended a Drupal meetup at the Science Club where Development Seed (the firm at the Act for Healthy Rivers helm) unveiled a team aggregator approach to quantifying the online chatter.

Following on The Cluetrain Manifesto’s market of conversations theme, Development Seed announced that they’ve finished the beta work on "Managing News"—a new tool that allows organizations to track, manage, analyze, and act on news.

Don’t understand? It took me a few rounds to follow the thought process, but think of it as a clipping service on steroids. Though conversations are already happening online about our work, it’s our choice whether or not we choose to have a seat at the table. The team aggregator approach allows an entire team to monitor news together.

Sponsored by the World Bank and World Resources Institute, “Managing News” appears to not only allow team members to capture the conversation as it’s happening, but process the information as it comes in and act on it appropriately. So, it's a communication as well as an outreach tool.

Though there seems to be greater significance for politics and international companies/large NGOs, there’s importance for even us as a relatively small, niche environmental non-profit.

Currently, I believe our press secretary searches Google, Yahoo! News, and Lexis Nexis for the latest organization news, but not the online chatter (hope to work on that in the near future). If Time’s person of the year is in fact you, shouldn’t we be listening to the “yous” out there?

For our work, I think it would behoove us to know bloggers as well as folks making videos, recording podcasts, and taking photos on or about rivers. If Time magazine is on the mark, quantifying as well as acting on the online chatter will inevitably allow us to strengthen our message: healthy rivers, healthy communities.

Greater public participation in redesign

I've been blogging about our website(s) redesign for the last couple of months and have shared it with several folks internally as well as friends in the community, but it will soon be linked from our homepage with a few additional engagement tools.

On Monday, we are planning on posting a link that invites our ‘traffic’ to be involved in the redesign process. By doing so, I hope we can:

1. Create a little excitement with the changes ahead;
2. Build on the great feedback that has been shared already; and
3. Learn from our supporters, activists, and members about how we can improve our communication with them.

On the menu for greater public participation: an online survey, an audio recorded (over the phone) feedback, and this blog. I’m curious how a user generated podcast will work out (btw, I’ve recently learned about audio discussion boards and have become quite intrigued).

This is our first public step announcing the website redesign as well as me blogging—only a handful of folks are aware of this effort...but that will change shortly. All of it should be interesting and hopefully a value-rich exercise that we’ll be able to learn more about our audience as well as better identify our niche in the marketplace.

Brown bag lunch #2: Creating & Using RSS

I continued my RSS tirade in the office last Friday with our second brown bag lunch (see the first), Creating & Using RSS. My push is probably getting annoying, but again, if we’re planning on offering this service on our website, I’d like for everyone to know how they work.

We hope to do some cool things online and staff involvement will be key. And, it’s not just necessary for program staff; I think it’s equally important for development and finance folks too. Sure, it’s relevant to our outward communications, but I’d also argue for the importance internally.

Streamlining our in house communication is a big issue, like many organizations, companies, associations, etc. How we manage documents, engage one another with our individual work, and collaborate on projects will greatly impact our success conserving rivers (um, so me think).

I guess that’s why this redesign is a big issue as we have the opportunity to expose the entire organization to a few new communication tools. If the redesign is phase 1, then the next step for us will be addressing how we as an organization communicate with one another. I’d love to know what non-profits have begun looking at their inward communications as well as dabbled with the idea of blogging, wikis, feeds, etc.

Anyhow, more on that later, back to the RSS brown bag. Eleven people showed up (one caller) to the brown bag lunch. We explored many aspects of feeds from what they look like to how they can make us more effective communicators—or the thought goes.

The biggest and best ‘ah, ha’ moment was the realization that one can subscribe to Google News tags which translates to no more visits to the site or hourly emails. The message of the day: information control—you get what you want, not what is sent.

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of confused looks…hopefully, it was a healthy amount of confusion. But sensing the 11 attendees as our new feed evangelists, I followed up with an email inviting them to a free lunch where I would come to their desk and create an account, identify feeds, and subscribe them to the feed(s) of their choice. I’m not above a food bribe, but beer may work a little be better (note to self).

I don’t have my 40-slide PowerPoint presentation in a web format, so if anyone is game for a read, just let me know and I’ll send it to you separately in an email.

I’m not sure what out next brown bag lunch will be, but thinking about wikis. Any ideas for our January brown bag lunch? Would blogs be a better topic as a follow up to RSS?

Group seeks public input in web redesign

A couple of colleagues forwarded me an email from Defenders of Wildlife who are opening up their website redesign to a select group in Washington, DC—very cool, I love this idea.

Creating a little anticipation to the process is key and asking folks in the neighborhood to participate in the process is great. I like the fact that Defenders, a group I’ve always turned to for guidance when designing donation page(s), creating our newsletter, or communicating with our activists, has extended an invitation to the public to be ‘in a focus group on our new website.’

I think setting the right mood for a redesign is essential for not only getting folks excited about next steps online, but getting them involved with the work. For us, I’m still toying with this idea and have been talking to folks internally about how we can best do this, but I certainly hope we can follow Defenders lead by opening our doors for community input on our national website redesign.

To get started, we’re launching next week our web redesign ‘cat out of the bag’ survey to capture input from our day-to-day website traffic. It may also be cool for folks to call in and leave their verbal suggestions. Anyhow, stay tuned, next week our photo contest goes back up on our homepage and we tackle the next phase of our redesign process: public exposure.

Discovering new online marketing sources

A by-product of this effort to date (kind of unexpected too) is that I’m being introduced to folks in the marketing field.

Okay, introduced may be a strong word, but I’m at least being guided toward notable individuals with significant marketing experience who will benefit my organization’s work online. One notable is Katya Andresen, author of Robin Hood Marketing and Non-Profit Marketing Blog, Getting to the Point. She, along with Alan last month, recently wrote about my effort in her blog, even posted my responses to a few questions. Fun stuff.

I’ve also been reading as of late Beth’s Blog and Getting Attention, two more resources in the field. If there are others, and I’m sure there are, please leave a comment below or in the new ‘Talk to me’ section in the blog bling area.

Creating face time with your audience

Robert Scoble, the guy who put a human face on Microsoft with his blog Scobleizer, may not have been the first, but he did make blogging popular. Especially since he was doing it from the belly of the beast, cool stuff.

And let’s just imagine that the word Microsoft is interchangeable with Bill Gates (stretch I'm sure), but to the techie audience, I would suspect Robert Scoble is close behind.

However, for the environmental field, not sure who it would be, Robert F. Kennedy or Al Gore? Regardless of the face, I’d like to nominate David Miliband.

Who is David Miliband? Well, he’s the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK and his blog, David Miliband, is right on.

What a great example of non-sexy, government website that seeks public input while putting a face (literally) on the work. And in David's words:

This blog is my attempt to help bridge the gap - the growing and potentially dangerous gap - between politicians and the public. It will show what I'm doing, what I'm thinking about, and what I've read, heard or seen for myself which has sparked interest or influenced my ideas. My focus will be on my ministerial priorities. This supplements the existing ways of doing day-to-day business with me and my department.

Great stuff and maybe one day we can have departmental blogs that give our program work a unique voice too. I’d love to learn of more folks blogging from within, any leads or ideas?

Spreading the 2.0 cheer

I just read Steve Bridger’s piece, You’ve been promoted to “Buzz Director” (what, you don’t have one?), and found it very relevant to our website(s) redesign process. The post reads like a checklist and I’d definitely agree that certain shake-ups from within are key to an organization’s growth online and off.

However, I know there is a balance, but at what rate does one push, encourage, and nudge folks. Staff can probably attest to my proselytizing from within, but how much is too much (and do I want to be that guy too)? Sure, I want to go in this direction, but are we ready for it?

All said and done, I guess you have to pick your battles with the tools you use and the messages you permit to…um, let go a bit. And like most folks in my position, I’m always looking for ways to inject into the conversation additional ideas to present information and create an online community, but the opportunities are not always clear. My response: fabricate these moments by hosting a few brown bag lunches around web 2.0 to push some of the issues to the surface. So shallow, I know.

Our first one was last month and we basically introduced web 2.0. The next one is Friday, December 1, on RSS feeds. This should be interesting as it’s a laptop friendly event and we’ll go through identifying a feed, setting up a news aggregator (we’re using bloglines), and subscribing to it. Since most of the office uses Internet Explorer, IE 7 has made subscribing to feeds a lot easier.

A not so exciting, but necessary exercise

Late last week, I started a content inventory project (shoot me now) for our national site and though my left pinky and forefinger are nearly numb from the continued banging of the ‘ctrl c’ and ‘ctrl v’ function, I have to admit this is a pretty good exercise (discovered a dam cool photo page too) to become intimate with your web content.

And, really, what better reminder than a content inventory that LESS IS MORE when it comes to web content.

As the new guy to the organization (less than 6 months), I definitely didn’t have an idea of the breadth of our footprint online. There is a lot of stuff that is floating around on our domain name and I just haven’t explored every nook and cranny. And honestly, kind of feared it, but knew it would have to happen one of these days.

In an attempt to escape the headache (and added work time), I had the idea of turning this project over to our supporters in a wiki-like format, but it seemed to be more work to set it up than it was worth it. I also attempted to recruit a couple of able bodies internally, but when we sat down and talked about it, I ran into a redundant link issue.

I was a little perplexed (and it’s not completely cleared up either) with the idea of capturing the same link twice—mainly, how it can be avoided. See, our site navigation has a mind of its own as each region/program can lead you to another section, which may eventually lead you back to the starting place—or not. In many cases, the trail simply dies (e.g. PDF wall, page with two external links, etc) and there are no breadcrumbs to return home. And, not that one has to return home, but I believe that regardless of the entry page, one should be able to easily tell where he/she is within the site.

So, I’m following the leads of each section, thinking by doing it myself, I will at least have an inkling of an idea if I’ve been on that page previously, and that way I can stop before I get too far ahead.

I read Jeff Veen’s article and took his advice. Basically, I started at the home page, jumped on the top navigation, and begun diving in…link, by link, by link...by link. Some of our pages have 30+ links on them! Oy.

Anyhow, I’m capturing all of our html/PDF links and to date have roughly 450 completed. And I think I’m a third of the way there too. One toolkit alone had over 150 pages! For the redesigned site, we're shooting for 500-700 total pages.

Hopefully, I’m capturing every thing, but if you have any ideas how to speed this process up or what else should be noted on the spreadsheet, please let me know.

This is the information I'm currently pulling from the site:

Link ID
Link Name
Link
Content Owner (department)
Document Type
General Notes

Wish me luck. If there any additional resources that you’ve come across or tips from having gone through this before, please let me know. Thx.

A call out to Designing Inward Out

Cool stuff. Alan Rosenblatt's blog, Dr. DigiPol: Caring for Politics in the Digital Age, had some nice things to say about what I'm attempting to do here. It was very much appreciated as well as his efforts in the advocacy field to bring folks together for roundtable discussions.

However, I do want to make it clear that though this blog addresses some of the changes within my organization, it is separate from the organization. My intention is to keep the focus on the process of a website redesign and not the organization. Thanks, had to say it again.

This is the stuff that I know about, but I'm sure there's more. Check out some of Alan's work here, here, and here.