Background

The Membership Interest page allows site visitors to register for club events and information. Each site comes configured with basic features already enabled. These features include Attend a Meeting, Speak at a Meeting, Receive Club Newsletter, and Membership Application. Club webmasters can add additional opt-in items through Site Admin >> Opt-in Features, which is scheduled for its own upgrade in the near future.

Cookies

Cookies are small files that web sites use to track visitors. Cookies reside on your computer and are placed there by a web site that you visit unless your security settings prevent this. We use cookies to facilitate the registration process.

Registration Process

When a visitor or member goes to the Membership Interest page to register and clicks on a checkbox, a dialog box will open. If the visitor has no cookie on his computer, he’ll be asked to specify a status in a dialog box like that shown here. The visitor chooses whether he’s new to the site, has registered before, or is a member.

Logging In

For visitors who select the status of Previously Registered or Member, a login screen will appear in the dialog box. All other visitors will go directly to the signup form.

The login form also includes a Forgot Your Password link in case the visitor doesn’t know his user name and/or password.

Registering

The information collected in the registration form is dependent upon what information you specified and/or required in Site Admin Opt-in Features. At a minimum, the visitor will be required to provide a name and email address.

Quick Search for Members

Another new feature is the ability to let members register other members or previously registered supporters via our Quick Search. The default setting is to allow all members access to this feature. However, should your club wish to only allow administrators to use the Quick Search, this feature can be disabled in Site Admin >> General Information. Even with this setting turned off, members may still register other people. However, those other registrations will be viewed as new supporters, not existing members or supporters.

Upcoming Changes

We’re currently planning on updating Opt-in administration within the next couple of months. Until that time, you can find instructions for adding your own Opt-in items in my Tips and Tricks blog post, Demystifying the Membership Interest Page.

Background

Facebook is a great tool for clubs to use to help improve club communications. Used in conjunction with a web site, a Facebook page can provide a way for members to interact as often as they choose. Finding the club’s Facebook page, however, can be difficult. And, Facebook itself doesn’t make creating a “Facebook badge” like the one shown here that is a link to your Facebook page very easy. That’s where this enhancement comes in.

Creating the Link

We like making things simple, so here’s the process. Start out by going to your Facebook page and copying the URI (web site address) from your browser’s address bar. With the URI copied, do the following:

• Go to Site Admin
• Click “General Information”
• In the Site Configuration Options accordion, click the heading “Make changes to the main menu”
• Click “Change Facebook setting”
• Paste the URI you copied into the “Facebook link” field
• Choose where you want your Facebook badge to appear
• Click the submit button.

That’s it! The result will be a Facebook badge like the one shown above that links to Terry’s Facebook page. To check your work, go to the Home page and click the Facebook badge. If your Facebook page opens, you’re done! If it doesn’t, start at the beginning (with the copying of the link from Facebook) and try again. If you have trouble, please contact us for assistance.

Background

Recent changes to the Message Center opened up other opportunities to streamline the admin interface you use to manage your ContentManager web site. The changes appear to be simple modifications to the administration buttons used to add a news story, upload a document, or upload a newsletter. Behind the scenes, however, much has changed. And while I won’t go into that, I mention it to point out that there was a reason for the change.

Other Administration Options in News & Doc Admin

Previously, you used Upload a Document or Upload a Newsletter buttons in News & Doc Admin for those respective functions. We did, however, have some isolated cases where documents were inadvertently uploaded as a document and then couldn’t be converted to a newsletter. Also, sometimes people missed the Newsletter button, etc. To solve this problem and to make your site more flexible, these buttons have been combined into a single new button, “Upload News Doc.”

Sending Email Notifications

The other feature that needed streamlining was in how notifications were sent to members and supporters who had indicated that they’d like to receive a copy of your newsletter. Now, as soon as you click the submit button, you’ll be presented with a dialog box that gives you the option to send a notification about the new news item. This works for all news items, not just newsletters or uploaded documents.

You can also send a notification directly from the listing of news stories by clicking the “+” sign next to the name of the news item you want to notify others about. In the dialog box that opens up, you’ll see a Send Notification link.

Both of these notification options do exactly the same thing. They open the Message Center with all of your members available in the listing. If the notification is for a newsletter, this listing also includes anyone who has registered on your site to receive a copy of your newsletter. The text editor will include a message that gives a link back to the document or news story and all you need to do is enter a subject, your name and email address (if it isn’t prefilled), and click the “Check All” checkbox above the list of recipients.

Newsletter Page

And speaking of newsletters. Another option that we introduced a while back is the conversion of your news page to a newsletters page. If you’re not using your news page to add news stories to your site, check out how you can convert that page to a newsletters page in my Tips and Tricks blog post, News Stories - Three Formats

Message Center Basics:

To access the Message Center in Site Admin, click the Access Message Center link in the tan area on any Site Admin page. The Message Center will load with your name and email address already completed (unlike the image here, which was taken during testing). Sending a message to your members is simple. The following basic steps are always required.

1. Enter a subject for your email.
2. Enter a message in the text editor.
3. Select some recipients from the list of members.
4. Click the Send Message button.

Here is an overview of what is contained in each of the Message Center sections shown at the right of the page. Click on any of the buttons under “Optional Features” to open that section. Click the button again to close the section.

Help

We will soon be adding video tutorials for the new Message Center. Those tutorials will be available under the Help section. Currently, there is a link in that area to this Tips and Tricks post.

Personalize Message:

Each message that is sent from the Message Center is individually addressed to the recipient by default. This behavior can be overridden on a per message basis or by changing the default setting in General Settings (Site Admin >> General Settings (this used to be General Information)). Each message can also have the distribution list shown at the bottom of the message or you can specify to leave this off. The default setting is to not show the distribution list.

Attach File:

Upload files or images to be included as attachments in your email. Any file you wish to upload must be less than a 2mb file size. If you don’t know the size of a file in Windows, find the file on your desktop or in MyDocuments, right click on the file, then click the Properties option in the popup menu.

Send Later:

Choose to send your message at a later date and time. This works well for meeting reminders and other emails that need to be sent just prior to an event. Click on the date to open a date picker, then select your date. Click on the drop down list to select the time of day to send your message. Note that all times listed are Eastern time.

Filter Members:

The member filter is a tool that you can use to select message recipients by their member status. All member statuses used on your site are available as choices. Be aware that we use the most recent status in the database for each member to assign that member a status. If a member is showing with the wrong status, i.e., showing up as Active instead of Resigned (or something similar), check Member Admin to see what the latest status is for that member. In Member Admin, you can assign a new, correct status for the member. That change will be reflected immediately in the Message Center.

You can also use the filter to send emails to groups of Supporters, i.e., those people who are not club members, but who have indicated that they want to receive a copy of your newsletter, attend a meeting, etc.

Public Groups:

Easily select groups of members to receive an email based on their committee participation. The Message Center includes Public Groups for all of your committees, your officers, and your board.

My Groups:

You can create your own groups that are available to only you. Each member can create his/her own groups and those groups will only be usable by the creator of the group. If there is a group that you want to share with all members, it should be set up as a committee so it appears in Public Groups.

To create your own group:

1. Click the “Add new personal group” link under My Groups.
2. Enter a name for the group
3. Click the “Submit” button.

To assign members to your new (or an existing group):

1. Open the group by clicking the “+” sign for the group
2. Check the checkboxes next to the names of members in the main recipient list
3. Click “Set Group Members”

My Messages:

You can view any message that you sent through the Message Center and any message that was sent to you through the Message Center. You can filter these messages by date, i.e., look for a message sent during the previous two weeks, by clicking the Sent BY me or Sent TO me links under Advanced search for messages.

New Features

The Message Center is getting a facelift and some new features. In the new version, you’ll be able to do everything you could do before, but will also be able to:

• Access all optional features the same way via a right-side menu.
• Send the same (or a slightly modified) message sequentially to different members, i.e., create your message, send it, modify it slightly, send it to other members, etc.
• Filter the recipients by member type, i.e., Active, Senior, Honorary, Previous, etc.
• Send a message to the Supporters group (those that have registered on your site to get some sort of info) the same way you send to members.
• Always use the text editor to create messages.
• Search for messages you have sent or that have been sent to you through the message center.

Only One Version

The last time we updated the Message Center, we found ourselves in the unusual predicament of having two versions of the Message Center on the sites. One version was in Site Admin, the other in Members Only. This meant that the features were the same in both versions, but the inner workings were slightly different. When this update is complete, both versions will match, so there will be no differences between the two.

Styling Smoother

Okay, this is just an appearance thing, but the new Message Center looks better. In Safari and Firefox, most of the elements have nice smooth corners. Internet Explorer 8, because it doesn’t implement the stylesheet feature that enables rounded corners, is stuck with square corners. the good news is that it sounds like IE9 will implement this stylesheet feature (the way everyone else has already done).

Sneak Peek and Schedule

Here’s a sneak peek of the new version. The new version will be implemented in Site Admin later today (unless something really bad happens between now and “later.” We’ll leave the Site Admin version active for a few days to a week, then implement the Members Only version.

Using the Message Center

You access the Message Center as you always have, by clicking on the Access Message Center link. This will display the Message Center. When you click in the Subject field, the text editor will begin to load. Type your subject, enter the message in the text editor, select the recipients, and click the Send Message button.

Member Filter

In Site Admin, you can use the Filter Members button to display the different group options for filtering members. If there are no members in a particular group, a message will display at the top of the list indicating that there are no members in that group.

The only difference between the two versions will be that in Members Only, the member filter will be turned off by default. You may activate this feature by going to Site Admin >> General Information >> Site Configuration Options >> Message Center Options and changing the setting for the member filter.

Message Sending

The actual sending of all messages will now be handled by the our delayed sending routine. All messages will be put into a queue and sent at the next available interval. Typically, this means that the message will go within one minute. On days when there is a lot of traffic, this might take a few minutes.

About two weeks ago, in preparation for this change, we implemented a new mail sending program for all messages marked for delayed sending. This new program is far more efficient and reliable than the older program. By putting all messages into a mail queue, we will now be able to better balance the load on the server, which means less opportunity for it to bog down when two or more messages are sent simultaneously.

Help

You’ll note that all of the help options have been consolidated into a single Help button. For now, the content in that area will link to this post. However, before we release this to all members, we will be producing additional help materials and video tutorials to guide members through the Message Center.

Step 1 - The Kiwanis Club Locator

The first step to making sure your site is found by prospective members is to be listed in the Kiwanis club locator. The club locator service will ensure that anyone looking for your club on the Kiwanis site will be able to find your web site.  Do this by having your club secretary change your Web address on the KiwanisOne secretary dashboard (via login at www.KiwanisOne.org/login) for addition to the Find A Club locator on the public site. Edits are reflected in real time for the website address and club meeting date, place, time.

Step 2 - Register Your Domain with Google

Google controls a majority of the search engine market. If your site has been around for more than a month, it’s probably already been crawled and listed by Google. Getting good placement from Google or other search engines isn’t difficult, nor is it serendipitous.

1. Go to the Google Add URL page
2. Enter your complete web site address including the http:// protocol at the beginning. The best way is to just copy it from your browser’s address bar.
3. Follow the instructions on the Add URL page to finish your submission.
4. Check to see if your site has been indexed in about a week or so by going to www.google.com and searching for just the site name, i.e. “satoriwebdesign.com” not www.satoriwebdesign.com.

Registration Does Not Guarantee Placement

Placement on search engines is determined by a combination of factors that include page content, keywords, and description tags. All of these elements are evaluated by the search engine each time it visits your page to determine if your site should move up or down in the rankings. If you want to improve your Home page placement, do the following:

1. Make your Home page text between 100-250 words
2. Mention the name of your club at least twice
3. Mention Kiwanis at least twice (this should be handled in #2!)
4. Mention things like community service, children and your city or community name
5. Mention a major service project or fund raiser.

Warning: If you have no content on a page, your ranking will suffer! Therefore, you should always have content on your web page. A page without information on it is wasted and can result in your page dropping in the rankings.

The Importance of Links

The other step that will help improve your site’s position in search engines is if there are links to your site from other sites. The easiest way to accomplish this is to exchange links with other clubs. This simple exchange of links on the Links page under Other Kiwanis Links can incrementally help both clubs with their search engine rankings. To add a link to the Other Kiwanis Links area:

1. Go to Site Admin
2. Click on Link Administration
3. Click on Add a New Link
4. Type the name of the club in the Link Name field
5. Set the Link Type to Other Kiwanis Links (unless you’ve changed this heading)
6. Copy and paste the link URL into the Link URL field. (Use copy and paste to ensure you don’t have a typo in the address!)
7. Submit the entry.
8. Check your work on the Links page to be sure the link works!

Lately, we’ve been receiving an average of one to two help requests a week regarding pages that have “stopped working.” The main symptoms are that an error message appears when the submit button is clicked or page content doesn’t change after you’ve added new content. In almost all of these cases, the problem occurred because we’d made a change to the processing and the webmaster’s browser was still trying to use an old version of the page.

What is a Cached Page?

In order to speed up page delivery, browsers put web pages that you visit into memory, which is also called a cache. This cache allows the browser to deliver a copy of a web page more quickly than if the browser had to actually go to a current version of the page over the Internet, retrieve an updated version of the page, and display it. Different browsers have different ways of handling this issue, but the bottom line is that if you’ve made a change to your site content and it’s not appearing, or if you’re receiving an error message in Site Admin, the problem could be your browser.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer has a fairly straightforward way of handling cached pages. The IE method lets you choose how often it will search for new content on web pages that you visit. To solve the cached page problem, tell your browser to update the page every time you visit the page.

1. In Internet Explorer’s toolbar, click Tools
2. Click Internet Options
3. Click the General tab
4. Click the Settings button in Browsing History
5. Click the radio button for Every time I visit the web page
6. Click OK, then click OK or Apply

Firefox

Firefox lets you choose how much memory is used to store web pages in its cache. From a memory-management standpoint, this is really a good solution. From a user-friendliness standpoint, not so much.

1. In Firefox’s toolbar, click Tools
2. Click Options
3. Click Advanced
4. Click the Network tab
5. Set the Offline Storage number to 0 (zero).
6. Click OK

In Firefox, we’re forcing the browser to never store a page and to always check for a new version of the page every time you visit the page by limiting the memory available to zero.

Conclusion

Often, you don’t even realize that your browser is displaying an old version of a web page. Forcing your browser to always search for new versions of web pages will affect every web site that you visit. It will slow your browser slightly, but, in exchange, you’ll see fewer error messages and the most current content.

Lately, we’ve been receiving an average of one to two help requests a week regarding pages that have “stopped working.” The main symptoms are that an error message appears when the submit button is clicked or page content doesn’t change after you’ve added new content. In almost all of these cases, the problem occurred because we’d made a change to the processing and the webmaster’s browser was still trying to use an old version of the page.

What is a Cached Page?

In order to speed up page delivery, browsers put web pages that you visit into memory, which is also called a cache. This cache allows the browser to deliver a copy of a web page more quickly than if the browser had to actually go to a current version of the page over the Internet, retrieve an updated version of the page, and display it. Different browsers have different ways of handling this issue, but the bottom line is that if you’ve made a change to your site content and it’s not appearing, or if you’re receiving an error message in Site Admin, the problem could be your browser.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer has a fairly straightforward way of handling cached pages. The IE method lets you choose how often it will search for new content on web pages that you visit. To solve the cached page problem, tell your browser to update the page every time you visit the page.

1. In Internet Explorer’s toolbar, click Tools
2. Click Internet Options
3. Click the General tab
4. Click the Settings button in Browsing History
5. Click the radio button for Every time I visit the web page
6. Click OK, then click OK or Apply

Firefox

Firefox lets you choose how much memory is used to store web pages in its cache. From a memory-management standpoint, this is really a good solution. From a user-friendliness standpoint, not so much.

1. In Firefox’s toolbar, click Tools
2. Click Options
3. Click Advanced
4. Click the Network tab
5. Set the Offline Storage number to 0 (zero).
6. Click OK

In Firefox, we’re forcing the browser to never store a page and to always check for a new version of the page every time you visit the page by limiting the memory available to zero.

Conclusion

Often, you don’t even realize that your browser is displaying an old version of a web page. Forcing your browser to always search for new versions of web pages will affect every web site that you visit. It will slow your browser slightly, but, in exchange, you’ll see fewer error messages and the most current content.

If your club uses our Standard package, you can include information about who will be attending from your club on your News page. If you have a Small Club package or just want the story to have more prominence, add this information to the Home page.

No matter where you add this story, it should include the standard details: who, what, where, when and why. If you have our Standard package, you can use the ContentBuilder tool (go to Site Admin >> News & Doc Admin >> Add New ContentBuilder story) to use a template as the starting point for your news story. Or, just use the following example as a place to begin.

Example Story

The Kiwanis Club of My Town will be sending two delegates this year to the Kiwanis International Convention in Las Vegas, June 23-27. The delegates will represent the club in the House of Delegates, where voting will take place on new International Officers and other Kiwanis International business. Delegates this year are Jack and Jill. If you are interested in attending the convention, you should see Club Secretary Sam for information about how to register.

Adding the News Story

All new news stories are added in the same way.

1. Go to Site Admin
2. Go to News & Doc Admin
3. Click on Create a New News Story
4. Enter a Headline for the news story (this will help you find the story later if you need to make changes or want to reuse it).
5. Choose the page on which the story will appear. If you want this on the Home page, choose Home. Otherwise, choose your news page if you have a Standard package).
6. Choose an ending date of June 27 so the story drops from view on June 28.
7. Enter your text in the Wysiwyg text editor.
8. Submit your work.

If you’re adding this story to your Home page, there are a few more steps to take to have this story appear as an announcement on your Home page. (Announcements are news stories that appear in addition to your regular Home page text.) If you are adding this to your News page, you’re done. If you’re adding this to your Home page, do the following:

1. Return to the top of the form. Just below the News Topic field, you’ll find a link that says, “Set multiple Home Page News Story Configuration.” Below that will be the number of stories currently allowed to be shown on your Home page. Click the set configuration link.
2. A dialog box will open that allows you to set the number of stories to be shown on your Home page. At the bottom of the dialog box is a listing of the currently displayed news stories.
3. Enter the number of stories that you want displayed and click the Set Number of News Stories button.

Convention Logo

Need a convention logo to include in your news story? You’ll find a variety of downloadable images here.

Uploaded Document

You could also add your convention news story by creating a document that discusses the convention on your computer and uploading that document to the website. Use the steps in my post on Creating a News Story with a Link to a Flyer to embed a link to the document. You could even use the above logo as an image to link to the document. In my post Linking a News Story to a Photo Group I cover how to create this type of photo link.

Why a limit?

If you’re not a web designer, you probably don’t think about optimizing images and other files for the web. After all, in this day of high-speed internet connections, is this still an issue? In an article on .eduGuru, Kyle James provided four reasons to optimize photo files:

“Optimized web graphics provides multiple benefits including:

1. Less storage space on the server
2. Less bandwidth is needed to process the file
3. Less storage and bandwidth needs mean that hosting cost are decreased
4. Faster file and page loads correlate to a positive visitor experience which can lead to more visits.”

These reasons are applicable not only to photos, but to all files uploaded to a web site. This includes PDFs that are used for newsletters, agendas, flyers, etc.

How to optimize a photo

If optimizing photos is a good thing, then what’s the best way to do it? In Kyle’s article, he covers how to optimize an image in Photoshop. But what about those who don’t have Photoshop? We continue to recommend Visualizer Photo Resize 5.0, which is available here. However, there are many other free image optimization programs. Just search the web for “free photo optimization program” or other similar phrases. If you’re on a Mac and know of a program that works well, please let me know about it. I’d be happy to pass along the information to others.

Optimizing a PDF

Unlike an image, a PDF doesn’t need to be run through a separate program to optimize the file. Simply change your print settings to reduce the document file size while maintaining screen quality. However, there is a catch. If you have photos in your PDF, you may need to optimize those before sending the document to a PDF writer. So, in order to get the smallest file size and have the best quality, you should optimize your images first, then add them to your document and create the PDF.

Here’s how you change your PDF writer settings to produce a smaller sized PDF. The following instructions assume that you’re using a Windows Vista machine and CutePDF Writer.

1. Click on the File menu
2. Click Print
3. Select your PDF writer, then click Properties
4. Click the Paper/Quality tab
5. Click the Advanced button
6. Change the print quality setting to 72 dpi (or 96, if you have that option)
7. Click OK
8. Click OK again
9. Print your document to a PDF, just like you normally would

Why should I spend the time?

If you’re producing a PDF, try to get your document to be no more than 100kb for each page. Images that you upload to the web site (and that don’t get put into a document) will be optimized for you, but if you optimize your images on your desktop, they’ll be less than a tenth of the size of the original.

So, the reason to spend the time is exactly that: time. Time spent optimizing images or documents on your desktop will be greatly repaid in reduced upload times. You’ll also be making sure that your site visitors don’t get tired of waiting for a huge document to download because properly optimized documents or images will upload and download very quickly. And for that, your site visitors will be very grateful.