Best Practices Archives | Page 3 of 5

Consistent Branding Through Hex Color Codes

June 15, 2021

Let’s say you created an awesome logo. Something like this:

The color palette used in your logo can inform the entire brand story from websites to print materials to PowerPoint presentations. You could approximate the colors by eye, but the key to doing it right is knowing your hex color codes. Take a look at Hex color codes explained for info on what a color code is. Here we’ll talk about how to use them.

In the awesome logo above, we have three colors:

Yellow #FFD400
Purple #7F3B96
Pink #E9529D

These three codes should now be part of your brand book. They should be shared with all employees who might be making banners for an event or ordering T-shirts for your volunteers. Getting the color exactly right will tie together your brand even tighter.

In Microsoft Office products like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, you can choose custom font and background colors. In the color dialogue, choose More Colors > Custom. There you’ll have the option to choose a color, input RGB values, or paste the hex codes from your brand book.

You can save them as templates and distribute them to your team to help everyone stay on brand.

What is progressive profiling?

May 28, 2021

Progressive profiling is a method for building a robust and complete customer database. You may want to know lots of different bits of info about user, customer, donor, or volunteer. Examples are email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, interests, open schedule times, and more.

Imagine the first touch point you have with an organization. You like their message and would like to stay in touch. So you click to join their mailing list. Only, before you can click “submit” you have to fill out 2 pages of information about yourself. What’s the most likely outcome of that scenario? Your users will give up halfway through the process and you’ll miss out on a new email recipient. This could be considered friction in the process. Asking for too much data up front will result in you getting no data at all.

The only thing you need to know in order to add someone to your mailing list is their email address. If they are willing to give it, then take it and move on. You can then progressively profile them for the remaining information.

In order to sign up for an open volunteer position they need to provide their first and last name associated with their email address.
The first time they log into your Volunteer Management software, a pop up asks them for their cell phone number.
Send an email 3 weeks after they’ve signed up asking them to populate their physical address to receive snail mail.

The basic idea is to take what you can get. Require only what is absolutely necessary. And never miss an opportunity to ask for more while making it easy to add just one additional piece of data at each touch point. What you’ll find by asking for less is … you get more!

What are render-blocking resources?

April 24, 2021

If you’ve run a speed test on your website, you may find that one of the biggest contributors to slow load speed are render-blocking resources. But what are render-blocking resources? And more importantly, how can you minimize them to help speed up your website’s load times?

Which resources block rendering?

Any file that needs to load, but does so before the page has finished rendering is render-blocking. Rendering just means that the page becomes visible and is ready for interaction with menus and links. If the site is busy downloading a file before it begins to paint the picture of the final website, then that produces a poor user experience. Our attention span has become so short that even a load time of a few seconds can feel like an eternity.

Imagine you are preparing to bake a pie using a recipe. If the first step of that recipe says, “Refer to Chapter 2 for a basic pie crust,” then you must leave the recipe to go read the reference. While you are doing that, the recipe will not progress. But it may be a critical step to the finished product. If you skip the step you’ll have a pie tin full of filling. If you wait until the end of the recipe, you’ll have the crust sitting on top of the filling. So it’s not always guaranteed that render-blocking resources are unnecessary.

What can you do to mitigate the impact?

Evaluate each file that is being loaded. In many cases, the render-blocking files are not even used by the finished page. In this case, it’s an obvious benefit to remove the files. If you’re using WordPress, a lot of plugins will come with their own CSS style sheets or JavaScript files. Even if you deactivate a plugin, it may not remove all of the files from the page load. Determine which plugins can be removed, and deactivate and delete them.

In some cases, render-blocking content is absolutely necessary. In that case, all you can do is try to keep the number o files to a minimum. You can also “minimize” the files, which removes all white space, comments, and makes certain functions and loops use fewer characters. Reducing the kB size of the file will make it download faster.

You can also keep the files just as they are, but load them last. Moving certain file references from the header to the footer means the whole page will load first, and only after it is almost entirely finished will it load the footer. Depending on the file, this may be perfectly acceptable. Your page could take 20 seconds to fully load, but if all of the visual and interactive elements are available after 1 second, then your load speeds are good.

Check out the blog on Measuring load speeds with Google PageSpeed Insights to see if render-blocking resources are a problem for your site. Faster load speeds can not only delight your users, but can have indirect benefits like better SEO ranking.

Measure load speeds with Google PageSpeed Insights

April 4, 2021

Load speeds for your website are an important metric to be aware of. The most obvious impact of a slow site is frustrated users – especially on mobile devices. However, it can also create a technical debt that can be difficult to overcome. Search engine crawlers aren’t going to wait around for your site to load so they can crawl and index it. That will indirectly impact your SEO ranking and could lead to less organic traffic over time.

Be aware of site load speeds

There are two free tools from Google that can tell you about your site’s load speeds: Google Analytics and Google PageSpeed Insights. I like to start in Google Analytics, because you can see aggregate data over time for each and every page of your site. It might be that you have a fast home page, but a very slow blog archive. Google Analytics will also link directly to PageSpeed Insights suggestions.

Navigate using the left-hand main menu to Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings. Here you can look for any problem child in your entire site and start your focus there. First, the average load time for all pages is show at the top of the chart. Then each page is assigned a bar chart for its deviation from the average. The red bars show the slower page and what percentage above average they took to load. This is accumulated for all users over a period of time, so may not perfectly represent a single load experience you may have had.

Average Page Load Time compared to site average

Get more detailed data on load speeds

The menu item just after “Page Timings” is “Speed Suggestions.” If you’ve determined that you have a page with a load speed problem, this is the next place to go to view suggestions. The link for suggestions will actually take you to a new window loaded with PageSpeed Insights. So you could skip right to there from the beginning if you already know you have some slow pages. Here you will see more detailed information about some timing measurements.

First Contentful Paint (FCP) – how long it takes your site to go from a blank screen to the user seeing something
First Input Delay (FID) – any delay between a user interacting with an element, say clicking a button, and the page being ready to respond
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – basically how long it takes your site to look good and as if its finished loading (even if maybe it’s still doing some work in the background)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – how much do items move around on the page as they are being loaded

There may be no problems with the perception of your load speed, and often times, perception is reality. Take a look at these advanced measurements and look forward to another blog describing some common problems and things you can do to speed things up!

5 Mobile Apps to help monitor your digital marketing

February 27, 2021

Gone are the days of being chained to your desk in order to run effective social media and digital marketing campaigns. Almost everything can be done from your phone on the go! Below are five mobile apps that will assist you in staying up to date on your success.

Google Analytics

If your tracking parameters are all set up properly, then monitoring multiple campaign sources can be done from a single analytics platform. Google Analytics is free and the most common. The app has all of the data easily accessible in a mobile format as well as fantastic features like plain English querying of data.

Google My Business

Easily update your operating hours or any other information on the fly. Get notified in real time whenever someone leaves a review of your business. You should respond to every review, but especially negative reviews. Enable messenger and respond with anyone who might be trying to locate or contact you directly from Google search results.

Google Ads

All of your Google Ads campaigns are easily accessible from this mobile app. Switch between campaigns, Ad Groups, and individual ads to see their performance over time Add new keyword ideas or edit headlines and descriptions.

HootSuite

In Benefits of a Social Media Management Tool, I talked about HootSuite being a good aggregator for social media management. Their mobile app can be used in conjunction with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter so you can make edits to your scheduled posts and see what campaigns are active without having to open multiple apps. You can easily create new posts too if inspiration hits you while on the go.

Facebook Business Suite

If you are running social media advertising campaigns across Facebook and Instagram (or just looking to boost a few posts) then Facebook Business Suite will give you access to all of your campaign data. You can create new campaigns and track information like impressions and clicks from your mobile device. You can also enable or disable certain campaigns if you need to make a quick change due to overspending or other urgent reason.

Anchor Text: Good, Better, and Best Examples

February 9, 2021

Anchor text is an important and often overlooked aspect of SEO onsite optimization. Understanding the role it plays in crawling evaluations can help you eke out incrementally better performance.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text refers to the words you click on when clicking a hyperlink on a website. Traditionally they are blue and underlined. While it may seem like a technical necessity, there is an art and a strategy to selecting text. The more you can tell your visitor about where they will go when they click the link, the better. Think about anchor text as a keyword, and a link as a vote in favor of the destination URL to rank for that keyword.

Examples of good, better, and best

For our good example, we’ll make a link that is merely functional. It takes you from the page you are currently on to where you want to go.

To learn more about Lorem Ipsum, click here: https://www.dijonmarketing.com/blog/what-is-lorem-ipsum/

In the above example, the raw URL is not terrible since the URL has been well optimized for SEO and easily tells you the content of the link.
Still, it would be better to define some anchor text and hide the big, long URL. It can help with formatting as well not trying to cram that big long string onto a single line.

To learn more about Lorem Ipsum, click here.

That is much more compact and visually appealing. However, it is a little bit old school. When the internet was brand new and navigation wasn’t intuitive, it gave the user a directive of what to do. But it tells them nothing about what they will find.
The best anchor text in this scenario would tell the user what they will discover, as well as give directives to crawlers about the most valuable content available for a set of keywords.

Continue reading to learn more about Lorem Ipsum.

In today’s web, users can be trusted to know what a hyperlink looks like and to be able to decipher clickable text, so the words “click here” don’t need to appear.

You can see the evolution from good to better to best. If you discipline yourself to stop and think before every link is added to your website, you will see a benefit in your SEO performance. It’s a lot easier to do it right the first time than to go back and correct everything. Next time you see a good or better example, you’ll know how to make it best!

Google for Nonprofits 2020 year end message

December 17, 2020

It is a great privilege to be able to assist multiple nonprofits in how to navigate Google for Nonprofits. I help with everything from how to judge eligibility, enrollment, enabling products, and staying compliant with the many rules and regulations required once approved. It can be daunting for the uninitiated, but with a little help, the rewards are great.

Did you know that Google for Nonprofits is a full grant program that spans many of Google’s Business solutions? The entire GSuite line of products, which includes Gmail, Calendars, User admin, Google Meet, and more is a great way to establish a cloud-based email system. Google Ads also let you advertise for free on Google search results pages for certain key terms. There are also programs for YouTube and Google Maps.

These tools help nonprofits be more efficient and effective at solving problems at the local community level. I will add my gratitude to the video below from Google. Dijon Marketing connects good people to people doing good. But I couldn’t do that nearly as effectively without the generous tools provided by Google.

Join in the spirit of GivingTuesday 2020

November 28, 2020

This Tuesday, December 1, 2020 is GivingTuesday. Started in 2012, GivingTuesday has grown to become a global day encouraging generosity. That can include anything from going out of your way say hi to a neighbor to making financial contributions to nonprofit organizations helping out in your community.

It is especially poignant this year when so many are in need due to the coronavirus pandemic. If you are looking for individuals or organizations in your community that could use either volunteer or monetary donations, a good place to start is by searching for #GivingTuesday. Most will have some social media posts in the next few days asking for your help.

Ways to participate in GivingTuesday

Volunteer your time to assist a local organization either on site or remotely. It’s likely you have a skill set that could be useful, even if it’s not directly on the front lines.
Amplify the message of a nonprofit whose values you share. Add a link to their homepage, retweet their latest post, or shout them out in an Instagram story.
Donate needed items. That could be canned goods for a food drive, knitting scarves for a clothing drive, or fulfilling an Amazon wish list.
Make a monetary donation. Just about every nonprofit is hurting this year from a lack of fundraising events and opportunities. Making a one-time or recurring donation can help them keep their mission alive.
Spread kindness. Perform random acts of kindness for friends, family, or complete strangers. You never know how your simple act could transform the day for the recipient.

To learn more about this global day of selflessness or to find a local or issue-based participant, visit the official Giving Tuesday website.

How to maintain a blog long term

October 6, 2020

Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. Many well intended authors set up a blog, feverishly post to it for a few weeks or months, and then abandon it altogether. The main purpose of a blog (like on this website) is to keep fresh content and ideas, and to expand the footprint of an otherwise small website. Additional thought leadership pieces can introduce new keywords and bring new audiences to your page. Finding a stagnant blog that has gone 2 years without a new post, however, can do just as much harm as a maintained blog can do good.

The important thing is to post regularly. But “regularly” just means … regularly. Not often. Not daily. I post on this blog every 18 days, give or take. That gives me time to think of new topics. It gives me a little break between blogs. And it is not too taxing. The reason I chose this topic for today is that it is now the 3 year anniversary of posting every 18 days. Obviously, it has been quite sustainable.

Tips for keeping a blog going

Set a cadence you can easily maintain. Even if you have a ton of ideas right now, there will come a day that the well runs dry. You want to give yourself ample time to discover new topics.
Don’t post every idea all at once. If you have 50 great ideas for blogs, congrats! That means you have 50 or 100 weeks of content queued up. Having a backlog of great topics you can’t wait to write about is a good thing. Don’t squander it too quickly.
Maintain an editorial calendar. Posting regularly doesn’t have to be quite as strict as my every-18-day rule. But it should be spaced somewhat evenly. Don’t do 3 blogs today and then none for 5 months.
Keep a backlog of topics. When you think of the next great topic, add it to the list. Then when it’s time to write your next blog, you can review that list and pick your favorite or most timely.
Write. Don’t wait for inspiration. Don’t hope you feel like it tomorrow. Be disciplined. The hardest part to writing is getting start. So sit down, and write.
Don’t obsess. This is blog content. Get your idea across. Inspire some thoughts, then move on to the next. It doesn’t have to be perfect and you can always edit it later if you need to.

I’ve seen far too many blogs putter out and die after far too short of a time. Following these few helpful hints should help you extend your influence out over several years, increasing your footprint, benefiting SEO, and representing your brand!

North Texas Giving Day 2020

September 17, 2020

Today is North Texas Giving Day – an 18-hour long fundraising push for nonprofits in the North Texas area. Over 3300 different nonprofits have registered with the organization to receive donations through this event and their website. You can search by county, city, cause area, demographics served, organization size, and more.

Visit NorthTexasGivingDay.org to search and pledge donations directly to the causes that resonate the most with you. Especially during the pandemic, a lot of nonprofits have seen an increased need. Unfortunately, that has coincided with a decrease in their typical revenue streams. This virtual event is a great way to revitalize organizations. Your dollars go directly to those doing the most impactful work on the ground in your community.