Whitepapers

When to Make the Move to Drupal 7

The decision to upgrade to a new major version of Drupal usually requires a significant investment of time and work because of the significant changes with new versions. But there are payoffs: New functionalities and continual updates are readily available and often more powerful than those in previous versions. This white paper walks through the steps of deciding whether to move to Drupal 7.

Knowledge is Power: Know Your Website's ROI

Companies understand when its time for a website redesign. But how much should it spend, or should it be said, invest? What impact will this investment make on achieving its business objectives today and into the future? The answers to these questions and others are found by conducting an ROI analysis on the website redesign. This whitepaper presents a how-to guide for developing a website redesign and covers the what, why, when, and how to conduct an ROI analysis.

Measuring Social Media

With the insights from this whitepaper, a little time and Google Analytics, anyone can learn to:

  • Measure the impacts of social media efforts in a quantifiable way
  • Identify which social media sources are having the greatest and least impact on a website’s goals
  • Identify which types of visitors are most likely to engage with you in social media sphere

Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization for Websites

Search engine optimization (SEO) has changed dramatically since its inception and continues to be a dynamic science. Before the advent of Google, any business owner with a website could “stuff” a few keywords into the meta keyword tag field and rise to the top of the search engine page rankings (SERPs). No more.

This whitepaper highlights current ways to get good visibility in major search engines that you can do for yourself.

All in One Place: Integrating Drupal Across Your Enterprise

Website visitors come to engage. When customers, prospective customers, members, the media and other critical audiences arrive at your website, they expect to be able to access a variety of resources in one seamless and easy-to-use interface. Web visitors don’t want to go one place for their member information, another to register for events, and another to engage in conversation.

They want it all, and they want it in one place. This is no small challenge for organizations because one product or solution rarely is robust enough to serve all needs.

Several techniques are outlined here for integrating disparate systems with your website to create one seamless online user experience. All of these options can be employed at websites that use the Drupal content management system, and many can be used with other content management systems as well.

Social Media Primer for Associations and Non-profits

The fact that your target audience is getting information from social media is reason enough to want to get involved in that space. But knowing that your audience is gathering at certain websites or communicating with a certain online tool is not enough. Social media is a place for interaction and engagement.

For associations and non-profits, social media means that opinions (good or bad) travel much further than they ever did before. The good news is that associations and non-profits can both listen to and take part in the conversations that are occurring online - something that is more challenging than when the chatter is taking place in someone’s backyard or around the office water cooler.

By engaging in relationships with others online, associations and non-profits have the potential to influence others and to reap rewards that you certainly would not have realized if you were not part of the relationship. The reality is that as the general public clamors more for transparency. Social media allows associations and non-profits to deliver that transparency.

Web Server Hosting: Internal or External

Every organization that has a web site should carefully consider the decision of whether to host its own web server(s) (internal hosting) or to contract with a web host service (external hosting). This white paper is designed to help you evaluate that decision for your organization.

Because of the unique demands and needs of web servers, in the majority of cases websites should be externally hosted. This puts the organization in the best position to have robust, reliable, secure and supported web services that do not require internal expertise or place undo burden on internal IT resources.

Seek a reputable firm that does hosting as its core business and has easy-to-access technical support. A full service web development company, like Balance Interactive, should be able to make specific recommendations based on your web server needs and web technologies that are used.

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