Non-Profit organizations often feel this more strongly than others that I work with for many reasons, such as volunteers coming and going, limited budgets, and the issue that faces all of us, not enough time in the day.

To that end, I’m releasing a FREE 2 page PDF worksheet that will start to guide non-profit organizations in organizing their thoughts as they sit down to plan a new website or revise an existing one.

This worksheet includes some of the questions I ask my non-profit clients. I don’t ask millions of questions in a long drawn out planning meeting. I find those are rarely useful. We’ll circle back to these questions again.

The first page is for the Big Picture. Why do you want a website? What does your ideal website do? What are a three sites you like?

The second page delves a bit deeper into specifics that are useful to know about early on in the planning process.

If you aren’t a non-profit organization, I think you will find this PDF useful. I will be releasing one tweaked for small crafts businesses in the near future.

Free Non-Profit Website Questionnaire — November 2011 update: Please contact me if you are interested in a copy of this Questionnaire. I’m changing how I manage the delivery of this. Thank you.

WordPress 3.2.1 is out. This is more a cleanup the loose ends release than with one of security fixes. Please stay updated. Related – WordPress Now Powers More Than 50 Million Sites.

Interesting and Potentially Useful Links:

• Lifehacker’s Cheatsheets quick simple guides, the newest one is for Google+.

• Lifehacker’s guide: How to Upload and Share Photos on Flickr, Picasa, or Facebook. Clients keep asking me how to do this. It’s not a complete guide but maybe it’ll help get you going on your own. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

A beautiful photo of Atlantis the night before her final launch.

This is a challenge of today’s new social media and web driven world. Websites can change quickly and I sometimes blink and find something new. This recently happened to me with LinkedIn. Until I sat down to work with my client, I missed that a user’s profile can now show a website’s name, instead of a generic category. It’s more meaningful for everyone and aids in what the branding gurus say is brand recognition. I like it because I feel it helps bring trust to the links.

How do you do it?

In the additional information area of your profile select other for the website type. An extra box will appear and you can type the site title in it. This is how my LinkedIn profile looks when edited:

The finished section looks like this:

If you need further assistance, please do not hesitate to ask.

Learning the new: Google+
I’ve been taking small bits of my day to familiarize myself with Google+, the new social service that’s still in testing.

I haven’t had much time to work with it yet and I sometimes feel overwhelmed when I do stop in. I find myself wondering if I am using it in the intended manner or if I doing things how I intend to do them.

There’s a new lingo to learn and a way to do things that is familiar (for example to facebook or twitter) but slightly different.

Thankfully others have been spending time compiling lists and helpful tips.

Yesterday afternoon I was thankful to find this list of tips by Robert Scoble and an in-progress ebook Google+ A Collaborative Document: (or how 120+ people wrote a book at the same time).

These are both useful now in July 2011. Will they be useful a month or a year from now? Time will tell. I do look forward to what new there is to learn and to teach you.

I do not check email first thing in the morning if I can avoid it, nor do I check email as I am closing up for the night (unless there is a need such as confirming a morning meeting).

I do try to get the most important thing I need to do that day started, if not completed, before I check email. It is very useful way to help me gain momentum on my to-do list.

I do not check email every twenty seconds.

I do have my email programs set to check for new messages every two hours but in reality that means I manually refresh it every 15-30 minutes.

I do not have any notifications on my phone or computer that alert me to new mail.

I do always have new email. That’s a given. Why let announcement of its arrival eat at me and distract from what needs to be done?

I do not let everything go into my inbox.

I do sort and filter aggressively so that much of the routine stuff gets processed together.

Mailing lists, store announcements, the stuff that doesn’t need to be acted on immediately because fifteen years ago it probably would have come as a paper mailing and not be read immediately. This sort of email gets automagically filtered away and pass go (the inbox).

I do not leave everything in the inbox for eternity.

I do try to process through my inbox daily, weekly, and monthly to make sure that closed items are stored properly, emails that can be deleted are, and that I hopefully haven’t missed anything important.

Is it a perfect system? No. When things become too overwhelming from the flood of messages pouring in over my multiple email accounts I either head out for a trail run or pick up my knitting needles for a few short bit. I do not currently work with EMS or doctors or hospitals. Nothing is a super critical life or death situation. It can wait thirty minutes.

Do you feel overwhelmed by your email?

Do you have a friend who constantly floods your inbox with those silly forwards that you never read? If you would like guidance on configuring your specific setup to sort through everything, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Do you want help figuring out the best way to sort, categorize, and store your emails for your small or solo business? I can assist you in drafting a plan, implementing it, and if you want scheduling audits to make sure you are doing what you set up. Again, please do not hesitate to contact me.

If you want more ideas on how to deal with this I’ve found that there are many many sites and articles to help.

Lifehacker is probably the most recognized at this point.

Inbox zero is the concept of getting your inbox down to zero items. My record is somewhere in the double-digits …

There are also the gurus such as David Allen’s Getting Things Done (aka GTD)

I recommend searching for life hacks or getting things done. Will the above sites come up? Yes, but so will many others interpretations and implementations and tweaks. Maybe you’ll find an idea that works with you.

Will these work for you? Do you need to subscribe to the completely? No. Find what works best for you and don’t feel that you have to change your way completely overnight. If you want advice or some help getting it started I can help.

Little Acorn Creations is the result of lots of knitting and stitching. It is a solo part-time operation. It’s run out of my home on the most shoe-string of budgets. It exists because I love to create and make things, mostly through knitting but I also embroider and crochet. Sites such as Etsy and ArtFire have made it much easier for someone to have an online business selling handmade items (I never thought of eBay as a good route for this though it was a successful option for many).

It was also the business I had in mind when I completed my Master’s Project a few years ago. My project was a technology guide for the accidental crafts business owner, that is the working outline for many of my current writing series here.

For Little Acorn, I need to figure out my technology needs. How do I plan to track invoices and emails? Do I need a website? How do I integrate it with Etsy? How do I plan to keep it updated? Will I schedule other social media outlets? I need to set up QuickBooks and make sure the proper files are backed up. I need to work on digital files, mostly photos, and make sure I include them in my backup plan. Not to mention making sure I keep sales receipt records for the period required by my state.

There are lots of little technology and data management things I need to spell out to make it so that I don’t have to spend all my allotted Little Acorn time on business stuff.

This series will focus on

• How I choose the tools that work right for this business, and for me
• How I write a data management plan
• How I backup my important files and non-electronic items
• How I plan for the unknown … the future.

Google announced Google+ No, I don’t have an invite yet and can’t speculate at all if this will or won’t be a Facebook killer. I received an invite at 10pm last night. I haven’t done very much with my account yet and do not yet feel comfortable speculating further.

Microsoft Office 365 is out of beta. I didn’t have a chance to work with it much while it was in beta, but it’s definitely something to consider…

Google (again) is refreshing the UI– the design of the site … if you suddenly see a black bar at the top do not be afraid.

Google (again the second) now allows you to “free” some of your data easily and download it via Google TakeOut. The biggest benefit for most of my clients is that it will allow you to download some of your Picasa photos in a somewhat simple step. I expect that this service will evolve as Google+ comes further online.

Amazing trains that were never built (found via boing boing)

Your three year old is showing you how to use the iPad.
You successfully create presentation slides for seminars you give and your tween has a webpage she designed for a class.
Your wife set up and secured your wifi network.. and unplugged the blinking VCR since you now have a NetFlix account as well as a TiVo.

Why do you need to check in on Literacy?

There is a gap in knowledge. My clients very often teach me specific new features of the software they use every day. What they show me often makes my life much easier.

But they still get duped by the phishing email.
They still have the same three passwords they first generated back in 1997.

They wonder what’s the best way to fill in their LinkedIn profile. I’ve seen some list their home phone number just because there is a box for it. What information do they need? What can be left out? What if they’re not comfortable filling it out truthfully?

Why should you care?

Identity Theft. It’s a royal pain in the butt to fix everything and git it all back right. I don’t think you should be paranoid and not use any of these services, because your information is being shared to a degree anyway. That doesn’t mean it’s good to put every last detail online either.

There are tons of resources out there to help you.

The State of Ohio published an extensive list of links listing resources to help you learn about Privacy Basics, Identity Theft, Safe E-mail and Web Browsing Habits.

Wait, how do I know this? Why did I include the two links above?

They are Government websites and I am putting a degree of trust in the Government to provide educational resources that do not mislead its citizens.

How do I know these are from the government? Below is what my Google search results screen looked like.

What do you see?

1. The first line is the title of the page. This might have a meaningful name, or it might not. This is generated from the code* of the page. The two icons are specific to google and we can ignore them for now.
2. The next line is part of the content, the meat, of the web page. Think of it as a sort of preview. Is it useful? Sometimes. This is where all that talk on SEO optimization comes in.
3. The last line is what I want you to focus on. This is the URL of the page. Will it always lead you to the most trustworthy site? No, but understanding some basics of this will help you begin to make some decisions.

Did I loose you on that Wikipedia page? I thought so.

Here’s what to keep in mind, then I’m going to throw you a hard curveball**:

Your mailing address is similar to a hostname. For example, let’s pretend my business address is 123 Main Street. That’s not easy to remember, so I tell you that PennyWise Consulting LLC is at 123 Main Street.

I’m a business so I have a .com.

URLs for my business start with http://www.pennywiseconsulting.com

If I was a government agency I’d probably be a .gov

Schools can have .edu

However, beyond schools and the government, there really isn’t anyone checking if a .org is really a non-profit or a .com is a real business. If you pay the fees to buy this easier to remember name, it’s yours. (note: this is highly highly simplified)

However, the second, (here’s your curve ball) the Agency that decides what the last bit of the hostname, the dot com, dot org, etc are has declared that there will be more options and that almost anything goes.

What does that mean to you as a user of various websites? How will you protect yourself form phishing? I’m not sure I have the answers.

* it’s not technically code, it’s scripting. I will explain the difference in the future if there is enough interest.

** I run. I cannot throw balls nor hit them with any degree of skill or accuracy.

This is true for small businesses as well.

It is difficult to say no to potential work.

I hope I give my clients the high level of quality and focus that they deserve by being selective of the projects I take on.

There are many things I can do, oftenwith ease. However it isn’t good to offer carte blanche services. It is difficult to say no, mostly because in the past I couldn’t easily say, “I don’t do this, but let me connect you with another who does.”

I’m not looking to recreate services that exist already, such as LinkedIn, but I plan to compile a list of people, websites, and businesses that I feel confident recommending. When it is completed, this list will be found under the Resources tab at the top.

I look forward to working with you.

The first organization in the spotlight is a nonprofit organization. I enjoy working with nonprofits as I find their resource constraints (of people and budget) to be a challenge that aids me in thinking of the most effective solution for all of my clients, regardless of their available budget.

Five years ago I created their first website and didn’t work with them to create a longterm plan.

Why? I welcomed the work but didn’t quite know how to bridge that gap between the quick thing I was doing for them and the services I really wanted to offer.

Yes, I could have easily updated their site three years ago as I figured out my business. However as is often the case, status quo won. The site works and is easy for me to maintain even though it looks dated.

Launching this spotlight series has nudged me to finally update their site and to provide assistance on how to incorporate various technologies into their organization.

Every few weeks I will update the status of this project and will include guidance worksheets for various phases. These will be free and also available through the resources tab in the navigation above.

Organization – Hungarian Studies Association
Website – www.hungarianstudies.info
Project Goal – update website to look modern, provide simple interface to make updates, and potentially incorporate social media to provide more benefits to the membership.

Seth Goldin’s email checklist — it’s a list of good things to keep in mind before you hit send.

Appointment Slots in Google as soon as I get a chance to work with this new feature, I hope to turn it on for clients. I’m not yet sure how I’ll use it, but we’ll see.

Fake anti-virus scams are still happening. If you aren’t sure if a site/link should be trusted, feel free to contact me and send me the link. My tutorials in the Info and Tech Literacy series will show ways to work through an unknown site.

Hacking Epidemic: No Joke, Lock Down Your Gmail Now
A friend had her Yahoo account compromised on Monday. Her elderly Aunt wired money before she could contact her and let her know it wasn’t true. I had a flurried email exchange with my mother so that she wouldn’t also try to send money to help out. I assured her that said friend was definitely okay and that emailing her to see if everything was all right wouldn’t really help much. I’m working with my friend to help repair the damage and prevent future occurrences. I hope to get this literacy series together soon!

To end with something completely different and hopefully upbeat: as I work on my garden, I have found this new site plant lust to provide a super simple way to find information about plants.