CEDC Workers Make the News...for Flooded Basement

CEDC's Executive Director and Assistant Director made the local news yesterday. Unfortunately it was because of a flooded basement and not something more positive. The video and transcript excerpts come from ABC-7 News.

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 7: Use 301 redirects after a redesign

When you redesign a site, chances are that your structure may change and your URLs may change. If you don't plan ahead, you could throw away a lot of the search engine optimization you may have already achieved. When a search engine comes back to index your site again after a redesign, it will find that many (or all) of the old URLs no longer function and it will drop them and then reindex your new pages as new pages instead of as new versions of existing pages (which already have some ranking).

Nonprofit online fundraising campaign in a box

Network for Good & Firefly Partners have released a free planning resource for non-profit organizations that are working on fundraising campaigns. If you are planning or just beginning a campaign, it might be worthwhile to flip through the PDF and see if it is helpful.

New non-profit web report from ForeSee

ForeSee Results has released a new report entitled "Trends in Constituent Satisfaction with Nonprofit Websites: Building Membership, Donations, and Loyalty through the Web Channel" and it looks like it has some interesting information. One of the key findings that caught my eye: "Key areas of improvement for nonprofit websites, in general, are sites’ functionality and the expression of the organization’s image online." (Side note: Ask us if you need some help with your non-profit website!)

Lunch hour: Joint action on the "new green economy"

I hopped on my bike for an extended lunch hour today and I joined a group of folks who were calling for building a green economy and a binding global treaty, new green jobs, carbon caps and the like.

How to Write an RFP for a Non-profit Website

One of the questions we are frequently asked is “How much does it cost for a website?” Our usual answer is “It depends.” (It's kind of like asking “How much is a new car?” It depends on a lot of factors, such as which options you want to include, whether it's a hybrid and so on). Your best bet is to put together a strong RFP (Request for Proposal) that you can send around to give an accurate idea of the scope of the new site and get an accurate estimate of what it will cost to build it.

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 6: Submit your site to directories

This is actually a subset of the third part in our non-profit SEO series, building external links, but I thought it deserved its own entry. If you've got patience, it's a good idea to submit your site to the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and perhaps other directories -- human edited compilations of categorized sites.

Comparison report: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone (by Idealware)

If you're considering a site revision or complete site redo, you may be interested in this recent report by Idealware, comparing four major CMS systems: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone. (We implement sites in Joomla and Drupal at present, depending on the functional requirements of the site at hand).

Friendship school students meet President Obama

On March 24th, President Obama placed a phone call to the astronauts on the International Space Station and Friendship School students were there! Friendship Public Charter School has been a long-time parter with CEDC and we were excited to read that some middle school students from Friendship were invited to be present during the phone call.

The Basics of Non-Profit SEO, Part 5: Accessibility and clean code

As you design your site and add content, you should be considering best practices for users who are visually impaired or who browse with screen readers. It is fortunate that much of the basic advice regarding accessibility can also help with search engine optimization. "Google is blind" is a phrase you hear a lot in introductory SEO circles.

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