Online Volunteering Technology, Tools, and Tips by Randy Tyler

Should a Non-Profit Embrace WordPress as a Content Management System? Five Considerations

• Content Management System (CMS): Templates can be customized (a task for an appropriately screened virtual volunteer) to modify the look and feel of WordPress. For example, WordPress can designed to have the look and feel of a traditional Web site, magazine or news site.
• Extensible: As a free, open source application, WordPress is widely-used, actively developed and extensible with a huge number of powerful plug-ins (for example, with the PowerPress plug-in, WordPress can be a powerful podcasting tool, with ready-made RSS feeds and media player.
• Security Concerns: Due to being widely adopted, WordPress is attacked, which means any non-profit must be committed to security (such as regularly backing up and updating for known WordPress vulnerabilities, including plug-ins). Updating WordPress may break modifications made (such as to CSS files). To address this issue, some developers have moved to adding child themes.
• Hosting: WordPress at minimum requires PHP and a MySQL database. If your site is critical to your operations, a host must be chosen with a demonstrated (WordPress) hosting track record, including remarkable uptimes. Thus, considering your current and future needs, research and ask colleagues/associates for recommended hosts (host review sites must be approached with caution). If a WordPress site has heavy traffic, CPU and memory usage will have to be considered and shared hosting (in essence, one computer serving many Web sites) may not be workable.
• Easy Install: For additional adjustments, I suggest downloading WordPress from wordpress.org and manually installing via FTP (or shell access) instead of a host's one-click install.

Monitor Your Web Site Visitors in Real-Time as They Click Through Your Site, for Free

Who is Visiting Your Web Site Right Now? Non-Profits, You Can Quickly and Easily Know

Billed as providing what Google Analytics does not, Footprint allows you to view your visitors as they click through your Web site in real-time. Any visitor's click path history through your site can also be viewed along with referrer, search engine terms used to arrive at your site and visitor profile (including city, country, company, IP address and first and last visit).

 How to Track Your Site Visitors Using Footprint

After you provide a working e-mail address, account password, the domain you want to track and preferred timezone, you will receive an e-mail message containing the JavaScript-based tracking code. The tracking code must be placed just before the closing body tag on each static html page that you want to monitor (if your site has dynamically generated pages, paste the JavaScript in your dynamically generated footer for quick site-wide placement). Footprint can also be used with any content management system (CMS) such as Wordpress, Joomla, Blogger or Drupal as well as secure (https) pages. After you have added the tracking code, log-in to your Footprint account to review extensive information about your site visitors, including any live traffic on your site.

Visit the following URL to create your free (currently) Footprint tracking account:
http://www.footprintlive.com/live/sign-up--one-step-signup.html

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.