The first talk was delivered by Cooper Dukes and concerned the essentials of creating the foundation for an organization’s online presence.

Crafting Your Nonprofit’s Website: Building the Foundation from Strategy For Good on Vimeo.

Marcus Finley delivered a talk focusing on how to use social media to generate social action.

Social Media for Social Action from Strategy For Good on Vimeo.

Julia Rota spoke on the subject of financially empowering non profits through proper grant development practices.

Financial Empowerment Through Grants from Strategy For Good on Vimeo.

Rahul Singh closed the talks with a comprehensive overview of executing internet strategy.

Executing Internet Strategy from Strategy For Good on Vimeo.

The group will be reconvening soon to plan Strategy for Good 2.0 which will be taking place in late October. If you would like to help, participate, or attend, please let us know by sending us a note at strategyforgood@asitchanges.com.  All of the talks are available at our vimeo website.

Define your Niche & Brand

For starters think about what your niche is and define a business plan.  You do not have to be perfect; just get down some ideas on what your vision at least.  You’ll never realize what writing down your thoughts will do to give breath to your ideas.   These recorded ideas will professionalize your venture (because what venture starts without a business plan?) and lead to brand creation.  Your brand should be a small subset slogan of your niche combined with an image. Try to use an image that elevates your brand and is not copyrighted.  The worse thing would be for you to push your brand and then be told to stop using it.

There are a variety of free resources for writing a plan on the internet:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/36341/Business-Plan-Template

http://www.sba.gov/smallbusinessplanner/plan/writeabusinessplan/index.html

http://www.bplans.com/

http://articles.bplans.com/category/writing-a-business-plan

Blog, blog, blog

I would say the best way to start a web site for free would be a blog.  A web site is always defined by its users and a blog is a good way to identify your user.  There are many free blog sites and it is an easy way to connect with the user.  This allows you to at least establish something to build from.   It is always harder to save money when you have no money in the bank.  Creating a starting point will lead to more work which in turn will lead to more content and help shape your vision beyond the blog phase.

As online blogging services go, I personally recommend WordPress for a variety of reasons.  I work as a Microsoft Consultant and have not seen better interfaces than WordPress. When a Microsoft consultant recommends a PHP product, you know it has to pass muster. WordPress has many extensions out of the box (such as twitter integration and other mini application modules) and is ready for Search Engine optimization.  It also offers the ability to link your branding URL easily to your site and gives good stats on your users.  I am truly underestimating the power of WordPress and it deserves the books it has received for its social dominance.  It was just yesterday that I saw they had processed their 200,000,000^th comment.

Content, content, content

The next step would be content generation.  Start with one blog entry on your subject matter a week or a month but stick to your plan.  Plan your blog entries on a calendar including title and small notes of your ideas.  Create a series based on interesting topics from your site’s niche that break up in to three to four parts and explain ideas over time.  Content is the single hardest part of a new site and by far one of the most important.  In the end, what are you creating a site for if not for a user’s integration with your content?

Promotion

Choose 25 of your friends and place their emails on a Newsletter (you can use Google Groups for this).  You can use this newsletter to broadcast about your updated blog posts.  This also allows you to send to one email and not show all your friends emails within your newsletter.  Google Groups records messages as conversations where you can always refer to them ala Gmail.  Tell your friends through the powerful use of word of mouth and don’t be afraid of negative feedback as this will help you refine your vision.

Create your Social Image

After you have generated content with promotion (and I do mean after), you should then create your social image.  Take a look at your stats and make sure you are getting at least 25-50 users every blog post.  You should then create a facebook fan page, a twitter account and be active on your Newsletter with information other than just your blog post updates.  You should also include this social image in all of your distributions (such as your twitter on your email, facebook, etc).

Analyze your results

Once your social image is created the next step would be to analyze the user.  The user, along with content, is the most important to shape your vision not to mention your site as a whole.  You should look at your WordPress stats and also install Google analytics on your site to really get reports of your user. Grow your site by responding to what your users love and avoid what they despise.

Expansion

Finally, you should grow your site and expand when your traffic demands it.  I would say having 1,000 users a month in a year from launch would be a modest target for expansion.  Ask your friends or use your social network to find other writers to add more content.  Form partnerships without other sites (twitter) that fit or expand your niche and allow them to link into your domain.  Respond to comments on all your distributions ( blog, email,twitter) and build your creditability.  You should think about applications on your site that build from your niche.  You don’t have to be a software developer to come up with ideas and your niche is most likely an application within itself.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have recommended this to many of my friends and they have had fun success with it.  Some of my friends have reached the 1,000 unique visitors a month and are on their way to expansion.  A friend and I are also starting a site called AsItChanges.com to promote the creation of  micro-enterprises.  We are using all the ideas within this blog entry as the standard for our business sites and recommendations.

The Website is the Tip of the Icerberg

Open Source
This means that you can hire outside developers to develop extensions as you need them. If you click on the diagram to the right, you’ll see how other pieces of software available on the Internet can help you run your business in addition to Rainbow. We’re developing modules that work with third party software as a service vendors so that all your business operations show up on one Intranet. (Like Us)

Great Template Engine
They have one of the better template systems currently in use. This lets your web designer use his current skill set of HTML and CSS to build a look and feel for your site that can be applied to all your pages.

Extensability
Rainbow modules can be created by anyone who knows SQL Server and ASP.NET. Sometimes you may need to have specialized content structures and this extensability lets you do that easily.

Security
If you want to have a section of your site that is just for certain people, such as Clients or Employees, that can be taken care of using the built in security and permissions system.

A standard installation of Rainbow starts out with one Page and an Administration section. The setup is currently a little complicated, but its nothing that an experienced system administrator can’t figure out. Actually its’ not that hard, you just have to do the right things in order to get it up and running. I would suggest getting someone to help you do this if you are just a business person or an individual.

Pages
Rainbow Sites are made up of Pages which can have SubPages. Pages are like containers. They keep all your content in one of three panes. Although all pages share the default template, you can specify a different template for a special page.

Panes ( Left , Center, Right )
You have three panes where you can put just about anything. I think they are working on more, but not many sites need more panes than that. I know, I’ve built quite a lot of them. The panes don’t have to be positioned left to right and can be placed anywhere in any shape using CSS.

Modules
Each Page can have many modules in one of the aforementioned panes. There are many different modules that come packaged with Rainbow. We’ve made one called the Amazon Books Control. We’ll release a new version once we get our pending work done.

Once you’ve logged in, you can go to the Page Manager under Administration and start Adding pages. Once you’ve added a page, you can click “Edit This Page” and add modules of your choice on the pane of your choice.
There aren’t too many things you need to learn as an End User that manages content. Here are a few actions.

• Add A Page
• Move a Page
• Protect a Page
• Add Modules to a Page
• Move Modules on a page.
• Move Modules from Page to Page.
• Delete Modules
• Recover Deleted Modules
• Add Content to a Module
• Move Content from Module to Module.

Some Useful Modules The most useful module for a content site made in Rainbow would have to be the “HTML Document” module. After placing this module on your site, you can insert any HTML content that you would normally put on your site using outdated tools like DreamWeaver or FrontPage. I would say you should still use tools like that to do your layout, but for content edits, its just way too much overhead and inefficient.
Another very useful module is the Enhanced HTML Module. This module lets you publish multipage HTML documents in multiple languages. This is great if you are writing a multipage article that needs to be split into sections.
Some other modules that you can find on the system are Articles, Announcements, FAQs, and Events to name a few. Once you’ve been introduced to Rainbow it’s hard not to use it for your content needs. More to come on using on using Rainbow for Content Management.

When I worked for BTG (now Titan) in high school, Dr. Temple told me to read the SEI-CMM to get an understanding of all their “official” software development methodology. Until then I had coded for my business using PHP, Bash, Perl without any requirements documents and just worried about getting the job done. The job definately opened up my eyes as to what could be done with a planned action of software development.

“Inmates” is one of those books that causes a paradigm shift in one’s mind of how to do things. For me the book changed the way I perceived business and technology because it doesn’t necessarily contradict traditional methods to design and develop software, but it forces one to go through a strong interface design phase before delving into construction. Why would you build a house without knowing who is going to live there and what they need?

Inmates has a simple philosophy to Interface Design. Define the Personas. Define their Goals. Work to meet their goals. I have always been a goal and objective oriented person and after reading this book, I have looked at the world of software and especially interfaces from a completely different vista.

Since Inmates are Running the Asylum, Cooper Design released two other books. About Face 1.0, and About Face 2.0. Both are very technical in their content. Inmates itself is a light read and as said by Alan himself “its a book for technology minded business people and business minded technologists”.

I’ve only focused on a few parts that Charles and I thought were important to getting the point across. (BTW, The Real Executive Summaries ( summary.com ) has awesome books in this format )

Part 4: Interaction Design is Good Business
The current design methods used in technology just don’t work. They yield products that dehumanize people. The “Goal-Directed Method” is a set of guiding rules and tools that solve problems they way they should be.

Designing For Pleasure: Personas
Personas are the hypothetical people for which the application or product is being designed for. They represent the actual users. Design of software should be geared towards one persona, not many. Products designed for one Persona are better because every extra feature added to accommodate another user will hamper the first’s ability to get their work done.

Persona definitions are very important. Too often we try to stretch and adapt define users Elastic Users as their target audience. Doing this causes the software to made for too many people, and it fails to do it’s job properly.

Personas must be specifically designed with great detail.  A persona with a name, age, background, and possibly skill set provides a great reference point for all those involved.  Personas must be hypothetical. They cannot be too representative of a real person. A real person’s needs aren’t always what others might want. Personas must be designed with precision, not accuracy. “It is more important to define the persona in great and specific detail than to have it be the precisely correct one.” Personas can’t have edge cases, and must be designed as an average person, precisely.
e.g. Average people don’t have 2.5 children, but rather 2 OR 3.

User skills must be realistically assessed. Most users don’t fit the profile of a “Power User”, “Computer Literate”, or “Newbie.”

Personas are an extremely valuable communications tool; they can help quell any arguments over features. All design decisions must be what the persona needs, or it can be thrown out. All features must pass the test of a persona’s goals. “Does Persona Johnny have to export to PDF?” If Johnny doesn’t that means adding PDF export is unnecessary. Personas are important for both Designers and Programmers. Both must understand the goals and needs of the specific personas by taking on the personality of one. Then only can they both see what is needed in a product and what’s not. Products must be designed for the User, not the buyer. The person buying the product may not necessarily be the person using it. IT managers buy for end-users in a corporation. If the software is designed for the end-users, the manager and the end-user can both be satisfied. Good software designed for the end-user means less help-desk calls for the manager.

It is helpful to create multiple Personas for a product. The product isn’t going to be designed for all of them. “Some are defined to make it clear that we are not designing for them.” The definition of the Primary persona is important. The product must be designed for this persona. If two primary personas will be using the product, then the interface should satisfy both their needs. Too many primaries might mean that the problem hasn’t been narrowed down enough. The best thing to do is to create different Interfaces for different Personas.
Defining precise personas helps make software that gives people pleasure. Defining their goals helps make the software better by making it powerful.

Designing for Power: Goals

Personas and goals are inseparable. They are like yin and yang. “A persona exists to achieve its goals, while the goals exist to give meaning to the persona.” Goals are why people carry out tasks. Products must have a purpose. People use products for some purpose. “You cannot have purposes without people.” They are both important. That’s why the two key elements of the design process are goals and personas; purpose and people.

“The essence of good interaction design is devising interactions that let users achieve their practical goals without violating their personal goals”

Important Personal Goal: NOT FEEL STUPID

Goals are not tasks, and tasks are not goals. A goal is what a person wants as the end result. Tasks are the steps that help them achieve that goal. Tasks can change as technology changes as the goal may remain the same. A person wanting to eat a well-done steak in the 1800s might have to kill a buffalo, skin it, cut it, trim it, star a fire, and cook it. Now a person can drive to Giant, pick up a pack of meat, pay for it, come back home, put it on the stove, and cook it.

Another practical goal for people is to go from D.C. to N.Y.C. Two hundred years ago, people would have had to either go by horse, carriage or ship. Today, the same goal can be accomplished by car, train, or plane. Maybe in the future, we maybe able to teleport. (NASA, When are you getting this released?)

Programmers design software to fulfill tasks, not goals. Since programs are made up of step-by-step procedures, it’s easier for programmers to design features that meet specific task requirements.  “Interaction designers analyze goals to solve problems.” Analyzing the goals helps find better solutions, because that’s what needs to be done: to satisfy the goals.

Principle of Commensurate Effort: The user is willing to invest extra effort because they know they will get extra rewards for it.

As well as practical and personal goals, there are corporate and false goals.

Personal goals are simple, universal, and personal. Corporate goals are important since the every individual’s personal goals affects the corporate goals, which are pretty important. Practical goals bridge the gap between objectives of the company and the objectives of the individual. False goals are set usually to ease software creation, fulfill task and feature needs.

Personal Goals

1. Not Feel Stupid
2. Not Make Mistakes
3. Get an Adequate amount of work done.
4. Have Fun (not get too bored)

Corporate Goals

1. Increase profits
2. Increase market share
3. Beat Competition
4. Hire More People
5. Offer More Products and Services
6. Go Public

Practical Goals

1. Avoid Meetings
2. Handle the client’s demands
3. Record the client’s order
4. Create a numerical model of the business.

False Goals

1. Save Memory
2. Save Keystrokes
3. Run in a browser
4. Be easy to learn
5. Safeguard data integrity
6. Use cool technology
7. Make it look pretty

Designing for Politeness

In order for people to like software, it must be polite.

Polite software:

1. is interested in­ me
2. is deferential to me
3. is forthcoming
4. has common sense
5. anticipates my needs
6. is responsive
7. is taciturn about its personal problems
8. is well informed
9. is perspective
10. is self-confident
11. stays focused
12. is fudgable
13. gives instant gratification
14. is trustworthy

Designing for People: Scenarios

Once user personas and their goals have been defined carefully, then only can the tasks be put in place. Tasks can be incorporated as scenarios. A scenario is a concise description of a persona using a software-based product to achieve a goal. Creating scenarios is similar to acting. An actor assumes the role of a character and then tries to become him/her in every respect as they act in a certain scene. To create scenarios of a persona, the designer must think like the Persona and try to see how they would meet their goals. Two types of scenarios must be created for a user and their goals, the third can be ignored.

Daily Use Scenarios are the most useful and important. These are the primary actions that the user will perform, and probably most frequently. Most users only have one or two daily use scenarios. Daily use interaction must be robust and assisted by on screen help. Additionally, these actions should be customizable, and be able to be accessed by shortcuts. Necessary Use Scenarios include actions that must be performed, but are not performed frequently. Actions like truncating tables and purging databases are examples of necessary use that don’t need the kind of customization that a daily use interaction might. Edge Case Scenarios can be ignored during product design. While the code may succeed or fail on its ability to handle edge cases, the product will succeed or fail on its ability to handle daily use and necessary cases. The ability of a product to meet the Daily and Necessary use interactions are what will determine its success.

Personas, Goals, and Scenarios are the most important concepts in product design. Others include inflecting the interface, perpetual intermediates, vocabulary brainstorming, and lateral thinking.

Products that are powerful might end up with complicated interfaces. To keep the balance of power and simple interfaces, the “inflecting the interface” technique is used. An interface can be simplified by placing the controls and data needed for the daily use scenarios in the main interface, while pushing others to another secondary interface (e.g. an advanced menu).

Perpetual intermediates are the type of people that are neither beginner nor experts. The experience of people using interactive systems tends to follow the bell curve of statistical distribution. There are very few beginners, and experts, however the majority of people are intermediates. Beginners usually don’t stay beginners, because they don’t want to feel incompetent. People usually start off as beginners of a certain skill, learn what they need and become intermediates. One they are comfortable with their level of knowledge, they stay where they are. If they can’t learn the skill, they just drop off.

Programmers Design for Experts. Marketers Design for Beginners.
The end result is software that is hard to use, but with wizards for beginners. The intermediates just have to use whatever works, but never really be able to do their jobs the way they should.

Pretending its magic is a good way to focus on the goals rather than the tasks. Tasks will change as technology changes, but goals remain constant. If we think that the goals can be achieved magically with a magical computer, it will spawn better ideas of reaching those goals. (Horse  … Car .. Plane .. TelePortation)

A set of detailed and precise vocabulary can be very helpful in the design process. Parts of the project, UI controls, etc. can be confused between different members of the team or between departments. A good common vocabulary alleviates communication problems.

A way to make great products is to use lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is a process in which reality bats last. Engineers make new products by doings things that are practical, possible, and doable. However, to get to great solutions, one must think of the impossible. Following a path in which no apparent solution comes through will either lead to new and amazing ways to do things, or the solution itself. If it’s truly impossible, then that’s reality. “Reality never needs an advocate, because it can never be denied. It is always true that reality bats last.”

Hardware and Software has been bundled in the past without being given much thought to its interactions together with the user. Users can get frustrated if the two don’t work together. In most hybrid scenarios, hardware designers are in the majority and don’t interact much with the software designers. The goal-directed design process can be used to solve these problems.

In design, less is more. Less interface, less fluff, less everything lets the user do his daily business and achieve his goals without thinking twice about doing it. As programmers throw code away from their programs when they find new algorithms, they make their program better and more efficient. Similarly, when designers decrease the number of clicks, buttons, and icons that a user needs to worry about, they make the product more efficient for them. Doing more with less is always better.

Part 5: Getting Back Into the Drivers Seat

Desperately Seeking Usability

The development process can be improved to allow products to come out which are usable. Before programmers would program, test for bugs, and then tweak. This doesn’t work, because the user doesn’t see the product until it’s done. In some places users are brought to test the program while bug testing is going on. This still doesn’t work. Writing code is to interaction design as pouring concrete is to architecture. Proper design must be in the process before any programming begins.

Usability methodologies hands the control to the programmers. Once they have done the application, then the users can test the program. User testing and usability methods can only smoothen the usability of an application that was designed for a particular user persona. It won’t do much for applications that weren’t designed before they were built. User testing before programming can be done in research settings to find out certain insights that wouldn’t be apparent otherwise. Usability testing should be integrated into the design process and can produce better products. “To paraphrase the toothpaste people, user testing has been shown to be an effective, decay preventative technique when used in a conscientiously applied program of Goal-Directed design and regular professional care.” Multidisciplinary teams with users, programmers, managers, marketers, and usability professionals usually don’t work. This “seat-at-the-table” solution fails to put design in front of programming. Programmers have been given the ability to design the applications they code. Since their designs aren’t challenged, they keep programming the applications as they wish. Once they have done this, they don’t want to let others design. Most programmers are good designers, but they just focus their design efforts to meet the goals of other programmers.

Usability professions believe you can’t know if an interaction is good unless it’s tested. Interaction designers rely on their experience, training, and judgment to make an accurate evaluation. Style guides are collections of examples and use suggestions for visual or non-textual cues that may be helpful in areas where users might get confused. A certain color button may be used to group buttons that do related tasks, or a gray outline might signify advanced features. These don’t help by themselves and must be used in a case-by-case basis in the goal-directed method. Visual design must be used to compliment the interaction and functionality of a product or application.  Cool new technology won’t always help interaction and can make it possible to frustrate users with faster and more powerful systems. Technology requires design to be the complete solution for real users, regardless of what combination of technologies we use.

It is a commonly accepted truth about software development that the way to get good interaction is to iterate. Iteration is a good element in good design: keep working on it until its right. Many developers however think this means to push out versions of the software in the dark. This process is too expensive and only companies with strong brands, piles of money, and lots of time can do this. (e.g Microsoft, Oracle, Google yadi yada)