Monthly Archives: January 2014

1 How to Avoid Website Catastrophes

[This post has aged somewhat but the material about website catastrophes is still relevant.  You can sign up at the foot of this post and details of my consultancy offer can be found in the navigation under “Services”.]

I leave Fridays free to respond to things that come up during the week.  Sometimes I write about how I’m developing my website.  The aim is to develop the site into a hub for people interested in community development online and I shall write about some of the changes as I make them and the issues I encounter.

Today I shall describe how something went wrong to illustrate the need to pay attention to your site.

Back in December I had a problem on my blog pages.  Material from the main left hand blog column was duplicated in the right hand sidebar.  Stumped, I asked WordPress for help. It turned out to be a rogue bit of code in one of my posts.  I set it right by rebuilding the post and everything was fine – or so I thought!  One lesson here is check your blog every time you post.  If a post causes a problem, you can identify it by taking it down to see whether the problem disappears.  If the post is the problem, creating a new post and copying the content should do the trick!

A Second Problem!

One thing that has puzzled me was the small number of people signing up for my blog.  A large number of people had said they would and absolutely no-one was following through.  Whilst I can be a bit paranoid from time to time, I was sure my blog wasn’t so awful that absolutely no-one was signing up for it.

Earlier this week, I spotted the problem.  It was one of those things that is so obvious, I couldn’t see it.  When I set the previous problem right, I had not noticed the sign-up form had disappeared from the sidebar.  The form still existed and appeared on a page buried deep in the site but had somehow become uncoupled from the sidebar.  I have no idea how this happened or, more to the point, that it could happen. So, WordPress can move stuff about without telling you.  Presumably it was another effect of the problem with the post I rebuilt.

So, I hadn’t been offering the option to sign up to the blog for over a month!  Arrrgh!!

How to Avoid Website Catastrophes?

First, by paying attention to your site!  It is not static.  Things change, sometimes at random!  Keep an eye on things and if you’re puzzled about anything, look for the reason on your site.  If people are not signing up, check over your system for getting them to sign up and check everything’s working!

Second, sign up for my blog!  The form is at the top of the right hand sidebar.  The blog will offer lots of guidance specially designed for small groups and businesses looking after their own websites.  Read it to learn how to avoid catastrophes and get your site working for you.

If there is something you’d like me to write about, leave a comment on any post. (I provide general info on the blog and charge for helping you with your site.)  Everything should be working now, so please sign up if you have wanted to and couldn’t work out how to do it.  (And sign up even if you haven’t!)  And please let me know if there are any problems when you sign up!

2 Finding Your Site Using Search Engine Optimisation

Apologies!  I included search engine optimisation (SEO) in my original article “How to Help the Right People Find Your Site” and then managed to omit it!   I missed what is possibly the most important way of increasing traffic to your site!

However, the other methods I’ve covered show seo is one of several approaches.  The key to seo is good content that people will link to from their sites, blogs and forums.  The other approaches feed into your seo strategy, so perhaps it helps for seo to come last.

I shall explain what seo is and some basic things you can do to optimise your site.  If you want me to write about anything at greater length, then ask.  There’s loads of material online about seo, so it’s also worth searching but beware; bad advice is probably as common as good.

What is seo?  When you search for information about a topic, you enter a query into the box on your browser, usually but not always labelled Google, and in a few seconds a page downloads with, among other things, the top ten websites the search engine calculates best match your query.  (There are actually more than ten but they’re on later pages and most people rarely visit them.)  The purpose of seo is to make sure your website features among those first ten sites for particular queries, ranking as high as possible.  Statistics show that the higher you rank, the more visits you get.

At the time of writing if I enter “Community Web Consultant” as a Google query, my site ranks at 6, 7 and 8.  It’s a new site and so this is not a bad result.  I could seek to improve this ranking.  I might do that, should I believe lots of people are entering “Community Web Consultant” into search engines.  But I don’t believe many people would search for that exact term, unless they have heard about my site and are seeking it.

I need to find the keywords people might be seeking that my site directly addresses.  So, if my site ranks for those keywords and someone clicks on the link, they’ll arrive at a site that meets their needs.  You will note my site needs to have good content as well as being optimised for those keywords.  There is no point getting visitors who immediately leave because they do not find what they are seeking.

So, you need to:

1. Identify keywords and make sure your website provides high quality content that directly addresses those keywords.  This is not a one-off activity.  As you develop your site and receive feedback you will need to re-write it to find a better fit to your visitor’s expectations.
2. You need to include the keywords in a variety of strategic places on your site.  There is a lot of debate about how important this is.  The way I look at it is this.  What your site says about itself may not be the most important thing in persuading search engines to rank your site, but if you don’t do it, the search engines won’t even consider ranking your site.  This is your entry ticket to the ranking contest!
3. Back-links are more important and I’ve already covered them.  Their main purpose besides seo is for visitors to follow them to your site.  Search engines take a number of things into consideration.  The two main ones seem to be the authority of the site that links to yours and the link’s anchor text.  So, if you have a lot of links from rubbish sites this will not do you much good.  But a link from a site with good content will of itself increase traffic and be counted by search engines.  The anchor text is the text in the link on the other site.  If it says what your site is about, that will count.

If you’re just starting out it helps to understand some of this stuff but I wouldn’t worry too much until you have experienced how your site works in practice.  Certainly, be careful about the seo advice you receive.  A lot of it is poor because just about everyone has theories about how you can fool the search engines.  The best way to think about it is this:

Search engines are very clever programs.  The chances are they are much cleverer than anything you come up with.  So, focus on getting good content online and then optimise your website over time.  I can help you do that, let me know if you need any help.

What advice have you had about seo?  Would you say it was good or bad advice?

1 Introduction to Consultancy

Do not trust consultants!  Too often consultancy is about out-sourcing responsibilities that used to be done in-house.  The argument goes, don’t employ someone as it will be cheaper to pay a consultant.  Such an approach breeds dependency on external support and can hollow out an organisation.  I’m sure consultants of this type can take advantage of organisations, charging thousands of pounds for work that should be done in-house.

This is unfortunate because consultancy can offer far more than simply substituting for staff you cannot afford.  So, here is why you should consider taking on a consultant:

Broadly there are two types of consultant:

Expert Consultants

The expert consultant augments the skills in your team.  Sometimes they have skills specific to consultancy, they understand you need help with a particular problem and you want to be able to manage the problem into the future.  However, they don’t necessarily do this.  Some simply do something for you and then leave.

Web design is a good example.  As an expert consultant your designer offers skills you lack and uses them to design a website for you.  But if their expertise is entirely in coding they are not likely to be good designers.  Real design demands some understanding of the needs of the client organisation.  The web designer who can do this uses  consultancy skills.

You may think I’m being unfair but in the community and voluntary sector, groups often take on a consultant to design their website, who simply supplies the expertise for a small fee or even as a volunteer.  I suppose this can work and would like to hear from you if it has worked for you, especially if it has worked at little or no cost.

However, an expert consultant may not be what you need.

Non-Directive Consultants

The alternative is non-directive consultancy.  Unlike the expert consultant they may bring no specialist knowledge to the table.  Now you are the expert!  The role of the non-directive consultant is to boost your thinking, to challenge you to think about your tasks and issues in new ways.

For a web designer non-directive skills can be valuable, especially where the client organisation wants to run its own website.  Coding the site is only part of what needs to be done, the clients’ organisation will need to review its practices to accommodate supporting their website.  Diagnosing and resolving the issues preventing your organisation from developing and maintaining your website is as essential to the success of the website as the technical stuff, sometimes more so.

Most web designers fall somewhere between these two approaches.  If they are successful they need to be an expert in the technical stuff but also able to guide and support their client organisation.  I am going to make the case in future posts for non-directive consultancy as an essential part of web design.

Why not share your experiences of consultancy?  It can be effective but often fails to support the client organisation and so fails to provide sustainable solutions.  Examples of successes and failures would be interesting.  (They don’t have to be examples of web design!)

9 The Co-operative Movement

It’s worth visiting the Co-operative Museum on Toad Lane, Rochdale.  The layout of the building is the same as the original co-op, when founded in 1844.

Retail co-ops addressed more than one issue, eg food adulteration; the Rochdale Pioneers wanted to sell food that could be trusted at affordable prices (honest food at honest prices).  Note how the issue of how we regulate the market place recurs throughout history.

Above the shop there was and still is a library that was also used for lectures.  Education and self-development were integral to the co-operative ideal from the start.

The customers owned the shop and who received a dividend; a share of the profits.  As the movement spread across the country, many people joined hundreds of small retail co-ops and certainly my parents’ generation were able to quote their divi number as late as the early 2000s.

The business did not expand from Toad Lane; the idea spread and hundreds of similar retail co-ops started all over the UK.  In Sheffield, there were 2 co-ops during my childhood.  Brightside and Carbrook (B&C) started with the signing of a document around the anvil at Jessop’s Mill, following an inspirational visit from a retail co-op in Keighley.  The other was the Ecclesall Co-op on the other side if the city.

The movement developed the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) in 1863 to supply the many retail co-ops.  They were the first nationwide wholesalers anywhere in the world, developing warehousing and shipping, railway lines to bring goods to local co-ops.  The large supermarkets that sprang up from the 1960s onwards copied the co-operative movement.

The building that housed the first ever department store is next door to the Toad Lane museum and yes, it was a co-op.

Co-operative principles spread like wildfire and inspired many other ventures.  Almost all the financial institutions available to the public today have their origins in co-operation.  Very little started as politicians’ initiatives, they all grew from the bottom up.  Insurance, building societies, penny banks, friendly societies, educational and scientific institutions, educational associations, libraries, they all originated out of mutual movements.

I mention this history to underline there is precedence for building the economy from below, indeed from below is the only way to do it!

Why do you think we have forgotten about mutuals in the last 50 years?  Or do you know of places where mutuals are still strong?

1 Burngreave New Deal: Strategic Overview

This post covers the final lesson learned from the January 2012 evaluation of Burngreave New Deal for Communities.  Previous posts covered these lessons learned:

What went wrong?

Everyone misconceived the programme from the outset.  Grant money always creates an artificial market.  The delivery organisations, who received grants from New Deal, were not rooted in any market.  They were not trading and so when the grants ran out they had no customers and so had to wind up.  This happens time and again with much smaller funding programmes.   Grants (and sometimes loans) are readily available and this undermines community businesses because the grant-aid short cut is so seductive.

Furthermore the people administering New Deal had no interest in its success.  An entrepreneur must succeed because the business is their livelihood.  The project officer when a project runs out of money simply moves onto the next project.  They’re rewarded for the grants they raise and their outputs and not for the survival of their initiatives.

I don’t think there ever was a strategic overview.  The professionals who manage grants took over and did what they do.  An entrepreneur with £50K would do more than the teams of professionals who ran this £50 million programme.

Governments do not build communities.  Governments regulate market behaviour (or they should do) but they can easily wreck neighbourhoods through poor policies. They do not bring the economic skills to the table needed to regenerate our communities.

The business people I’ve worked with in community contexts usually stay on the periphery and then walk away because neither  government officers nor local people know how to conduct business.  Thus we act to marginalise the very people who can regenerate our communities.

Can you name any project that started with grant aid and has become sustainable through mainstream funding or trading?  There must be some, it would be brilliant to know how they did it.

0 Two Ways We Understand Wealth

I’ve decided to hold back the answers to the Christmas Puzzles until a few more people have attempted them.

Today I shall follow-up an earlier post about Spirituality in Marketing.  In that post, I mention progress with a book, and I want to capture a part of the conversation. Many people in the voluntary and community sectors have reservations about marketing and accumulation of wealth.  Such scepticism is admirable!  We should be suspicious of any sales pitch.

But if we are going to re-build our communities we need to explore all the options available to us.  Given the failure of grants as an approach to community development, a failure I’ve written about elsewhere, see the posts in the position category, we don’t have too many other options.

Two Ways to Understand Wealth

One problem is, when we talk about wealth we confuse two different ways of understanding it.  So, here they are:

1. Personal wealth is where the focus is on the amount of money I have accumulated and the power I have using it.  The issue here is accountability.  We can all think of examples of (usually new) millionaires who lose all their money in a few years, through gambling or similar.  There are also those who salt away their wealth in off-shore tax havens.  They move their money out of the community, into places where it is no longer accessible.  The immensely wealthy, the 1% targeted by the Occupy movement, use their wealth to buy assets and lend them back to businesses at very high interest rates.  We don’t normally see this happening because it happens out of sight.  But we see its effects in low wages and unsustainable behaviour, damaging to the environment.
2. Social wealth is where there is some degree of accountability.  The focus is on money as it circulates in the local economy.  If I purchase from local traders and do not spend money in large chains and if local people do the same, then many people benefit from the same pound as it circulates.  Furthermore, I might find opportunities to invest my profit in other enterprises, thus growing the local economy.

Obviously the same person can experience both approaches to wealth but at least by being clear there are these two approaches, we can all be aware of how we spend and accumulate income.

Perhaps we could re-examine John Wesley’s three point economic plan.  In the eighteenth century, he traveled the UK, preaching to the new industrial poor.  His advice to entrepreneurs was “earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can”.  By save he meant not accumulation in bank accounts but spending money wisely, so that you have an excess than can be given to people in need.

This approach allows the wealthy scope to grow successful and ethical businesses.  Is it something we need to revisit?

0 Finding Your Site Using Pay Per Click

This is the fifth Thursday post about how to encourage visitors to your site; pay per click.  The full list of approaches to increasing traffic is in the post “How to Help the Right People Find Your Site”.  (You may spot I’ve not covered search engines.  My mistake!  I shall correct it in the near future!)

I’m writing about Pay Per Click (PPC) so that you have a complete picture.  I don’t necessarily endorse using paid advertising and I would maximise traffic through free sources before I considered paying.  Indeed, if you’re not getting traffic through free sources it is usually a bad idea to try paid sources.

So, why use paid advertising?  PPC is usually for commercial sites, and so would normally be used for a social enterprise or other neighbourhood trading project.  There is no reason you couldn’t advertise a cause, to increase traffic to your site.  However, a cause that doesn’t pay would be a net cost to your organisation.  If you can afford it, fine.

Some Things to Consider

Two Places Where You Can Advertise

This almost completes the list of ways to increase traffic to your site.  Have I missed any (apart from search engines!)?

0 Donations: Alternative Approaches

In the previous 6 Wednesday posts I have shown you how to make a case for donations to your cause online. This post considers some alternative approaches to designing your site.

This is a standard approach, which may work for many organisations:

This sequence is a model.  How you develop it is up to you.  You could build a website with six pages, each mirroring a step in this sequence.  But the sequence is really a guide and so long as each step is present, how you present them depends upon your creativity.

Purpose of Your Site

Towards the end of the sequence, I considered some issues worthy of further thought.  What is the purpose of your site?  To receive a single donation is not the most effective approach.  Your aim is to build a relationship with your donors.  That way they can offer you more value than a one-off donation.

It may sometimes make sense to ask for a donation immediately, for example if there is a crisis and you need large sums immediately, but building a relationship is a better investment for your effort.

Someone on your email list may donate several times during their relationship with your charity.  They may also offer you other opportunities, for example

The key to developing a good relationship is to offer good content.  So, offer information about how you use donations and be more ambitious!

You can produce educational material to give away or sell to your donors.  This may equip donors with the knowledge they need to promote your cause more effectively or it could be something of value to the donor personally, eg a charity that promotes health may offer advice about personal health.

Whatever you do, think carefully about the purpose of your site.  It is not always what you might think.  You need to plan for the long haul.  If you make contact with people who are keen supporters, and help them deepen their commitment to your cause, they may be willing supporters of your work for years to come.

 

0 The Marketplace Online

You can see many of the functions of the traditional marketplace online.  It is not possible to take a bath online but you can order a meal and have it delivered.  You can share news, express opinions  and whilst law courts continue in real life, you can express your views about anything.

Let’s not be starry-eyed about this!  Big servers scrape data about our online habits and so offer massive multi-nationals power over local marketplaces.  For example, when a small bookshop advertises a special offer online, Amazon detects it and undercuts their offer.

The challenge to use the Internet to support local economies without handing the local economy over to big business.  We need to help money circulate locally, and not allow corporations to extract it into off-shore tax havens.

Online Content Should Not be Free

This means we need to surrender the delightful habits of these early years online, where content is free.  Free content allows large servers to collect information about us.  They have no obligation to pay us for our information.  And it means it is more difficult for artists to generate income from their work as copyright becomes more difficult to enforce.

Free content is attractive for obvious reasons but ultimately it impoverishes the market place because there is less money circulating and enriches the mega-wealthy elites.  The early vision of the Internet was something independent and open to all users.  For this to work we need to re-discover the principles of the local market place; a place governed by democratic consent, where we are all buyers and sellers.

To do this we need to build relationships and trust locally.  But is this even possible?

2 Burngreave New Deal: Community Engagement and Community Development

This first Monday after the Christmas break, continues with the fifth of 6 posts about the lessons learned in the January 2012 evaluation of Burngreave New Deal for Communities.  So far I have covered:

• community based partnerships,
• the accountable body,
• project management, and
• place related outcomes

The next lesson learned was

 ‘it is important to recognise that community engagement, and community development, are not the same, although community development occurs through a range of channels and does not need necessarily to entail the development of single organisation. However, demise of the BNDfC partnership has left a significant gap in the community infrastructure in Burngreave and there is a strong case for the development of community based partnership to take forward the regeneration of the area’

A Catastrophic Outcome

In other words, investing £50 million over ten years failed to develop a community based partnership.  This is a catastrophic outcome.  Prior to the start of New Deal we had our plan and delivery organisations, comparable to what you can still find in other similar neighbourhoods in Sheffield.

There was a strong case for developing a community based partnership at the beginning of the programme.  It would have been a logical development from the Forum and Trust, had New Deal not been imposed on Burngreave.   The New Deal programme developed a partnership.  It dissolved as soon as the money ran out.  It is hard not to believe the money became the reason for the partnership.  Instead of building a partnership naturally from the activities and relationships already in the area, the money became the reason for the partnership.

New Deal was an exercise in community engagement and not development.  Community engagement is where some organisation, usually local or national government seeks an endorsement for its plans.  This means consultation, which can be done well.  But ultimately decision-making takes place outside the neighbourhood.  Engagement does not develop community and can undermine a community’s ability to organise and plan for itself.

The purpose of New Deal was to spend £50 million over ten years.  With the money spent, the partners melted away.  They had to because they were dependent upon grant money and so had to prioritise finding it elsewhere.  Clearly there was no commitment or shared vision.  If there had been, the partnership would still exist.

Problems on Both Sides

I was not involved until the final 3 or 4 years of the programme, as my paid work took me out of the area.  What I found was  extraordinary conflict between the community Forum and New Deal.  The chair of the Forum had publicly attacked the New Deal staff at a Forum meeting.  So, New Deal refused to attend the meetings.  Quite how the chair thought this situation would benefit the community is beyond me but no-one had any idea how to remedy the situation.

The Trust collapsed because of financial irregularities, leaving the Forum to limp on for a few more years.  It is hard to believe anything other than that the last thing anyone had attempted during the programme was community development.  Many of us who set up the Forum and Trust are still around.  We put our heart and soul into developing them and now we no longer have the heart to go back and start over again.  It will need a new generation and there is no sign they are waiting in the wings.

It is not acceptable to take the time invested into our communities for granted.  Those who invest their time do so for the benefit of our neighbourhoods, not the politicians and organisations that thrive on grant aided projects.  If they are going to benefit from my contribution to community work, then so should I.  I’d like to see an end to the Big Society rhetoric and the expectation that many of us will work for nothing.  In the future, we should all be paid for our time.  Maybe that way, our views will be worthy of respect.

What have been your experiences of community engagement, good and bad?  Can engagement support development?  Must grant aided community work always result in exploitation?