I just got back from WordCamp US where I spoke about the seemingly little things that I think contributed to our growing a vibrant, active WordPress community in Atlanta.

Remember when you didn’t know anyone else doing WordPress?

I sure do!

Like most of you who work with WordPress now, I didn’t start out doing WordPress.

I am actually a Clinical Psychologist and I practiced for years and then started a Medical Records software company, which I sold after ten years.

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Last week I wrote about an event where we built 48 nonprofit websites in 48 hours. I promised I would share with you some of the of the plugins we used. Although this is geared towards nonprofits, these plugins will supercharge any website.

Nonprofit websites have to serve a mission that is broader than a typical business, and this means they must have more functionality. This need can seem overwhelming for a small nonprofit organization struggling to make ends meet with no technical skills or website design skills. It’s no wonder that most of these organizations make do with a basic site and a few PayPal buttons and call it a day.

But here’s what they are missing. Any organization will be more successful at raising money with a website designed with user experience (UX) principals in mind. If the website collects money and information about their donors in a professional way, potential donors will more inclined to open their wallets. The website can automate basic functions like adding donors to a mailing list, so a human employee doesn’t have to. There is so much to gain with a website that looks professional, works well and is designed to draw people in to donate, volunteer or help in some other way.

How do you bridge that gap, between all that your website could/should do and your nonprofit’s limited resources?

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When my friend, Adam Walker told me about his buddy Jeff Hilmire’s  plan to build 48 websites in 48 hours for nonprofits, calling it 48 in 48. I wanted in. From Friday 6pm to Sunday 6 pm, a mass of volunteer designers, developers, writers and WordPress ninjas would crank out websites to help nonprofits.

When the call for developers went out, I signed up right away. But as the 48 in 48 weekend neared, ambivalence crept in. Three days before, it wasn’t sounding like such a great idea.  I had a litany of excuses, real excuses, but excuses nonetheless. My husband would be at a triathlon in Florida and I would have to manage the dogs, the birds and a full house of bed and breakfast guests.

A hackathon was impossible. I hated to write Adam to tell him I couldn’t make it.

Adam pushed back ever so perfectly. He called and told me he really wanted me to be there. Could I just come to the start on Friday night? That seemed doable, but I remained so ambivalent that when I showed up I had “forgotten” my laptop.

So what happened? Within the first 30 minutes, I knew I was going to stay for the duration. Not spend the night, but definitely to stay and play. I got my laptop delivered and joined up with two random guys I had just met, to build a website for the Georgia Farmers Market Association (GFMA). Enrique Ramirez was our designer, Patrick Brock a developer and I was the team WordPress ninja. [Read more…]

I love arming myself with data about when and why to make website design decisions. I was able to pick up some new ammo while at WordCamp Asheville from Melissa Eggleston’s presentation, Website Design with UX in Mind.

Melissa says that great user experience (UX) gives a business a competitive advantage and I see evidence of that everyday.

We’ve all experienced the feeling of frustration of searching online, choosing a site and then watching it load … and load … and never get there. Or it might come up but we have no idea how to find what we’re seeking. Or the text is too light or too small to read. One of my big pet peeves is a site with so many moving parts that it should come with a Dramamine tablet.

What do we do when those things happen? We [Read more…]

I have never had much of a problem pulling the trigger on major decisions after an evaluation of the situation. In fact, one of my favorite sayings is,  “production rather than perfection”.

We’ve been working on our New Tricks website redesign since last fall, and I can’t believe it is still not quite ready to launch.

Here’s how the process has unfolded. We thought about the redesign for three months. Before the holidays, we set up and completed a photo-shoot so we’d have images to work while I recovered from knee surgery in January. I didn’t have time to work on the site since I was on drugs and after I got off them in two weeks,  I was back to work. Over the next few months, we did get some designs done, in between client work and organizing WordCamp.  By April we actually had three different versions of our new design, using different theme frameworks . Although obsessive, that was progress.

A month ago, we showed our test site to people at a WordPress Meetup for preliminary feedback. They gave us the  [Read more…]

Last weekend I was invited to speak on a panel critiquing B2B marketers’ websites for a session called, Your Baby is Ugly with Eric Martin and Stacy Williams.

Since the conference was for marketing people, I was a little worried no one would volunteer their sites for review or, that if they did, we wouldn’t have much advice for them since one would hope marketers would have great home pages.  But, as the saying goes, “The shoemaker’s children has no shoes.”

This was validated, when surprisingly, we found plenty to critique. [Read more…]