Working Smarter Now from The Nerdery on Vimeo.
You’ll be singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” after watching this short clip from the nonprofits who benefited during the 2008 Challenge. Here they talk about how much their new website has changed the way they work and generally made things a kabillion times better.
Today, our president, Luke Bucklin and User Experience Manager, Mike Johnson along with Molly Kennedy Lageson of Store to Door presented at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits’ New Times – New Tech conference.
The presentation, which you can watch above, is about empowering nonprofits to take control of their website by treating it like an employee. We’ve found that oftentimes organizations treat their website like a copy machine, a piece of technology, but really its your hardest-working underachiever.
During the event our presenters took attendees through the Website Employee Review form (which you can download as a PDF) and talked about how you don’t have to be super tech savvy to get the most from your website.
Finally, here are links to a few of the sites/services mentioned in the presentation:
Facebook
Twitter
Google Analytics
Google Alerts
Crazy Egg
Blogger
WordPress
Typepad
Also, further reading:
Advergirl’s Rethinking Web strategy for nonprofits: The New Best Practices (part 1, part 2, and part 3)
As you might have noticed we’ve been spending a lot of time this week talking about the Overnight Website Challenge. It’s to be expected, the event is a mere 1 week, 2 days, 22 hours, and 26 minutes away.
Today we’re presenting you with a video featuring some of last year’s nonprofit participants. Here they talk about their old websites and some of things they did to prepare for the challenge.
Website Job Description from The Nerdery on Vimeo.
Overnight Website Challenge Meet & Greet 12Feb09 from The Nerdery on Vimeo.
As I mentioned yesterday today we’ve got some a bit of video from our Meet & Greet event last week.
Unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to talk to all the nonprofits (once more people started to arrive it just got too loud). But we did get to talk to five of the groups who will be at the Overnight Website Challenge about how bad their current site is and what some of their web hopes and dreams are.
As you can see we had a pretty good turnout for the Overnight Website Challenge Meet & Greet at New Horizons of Minnesota last week. This was an informal affair that gave the team captains from the web teams a chance to mingle with representatives of the nonprofits. A lot of great questions were asked and some good advice was given, including this list of tips from Susan Inglis who was on last year’s winning Team IB.
Tomorrow we’ve got some video from the event with a few on the nonprofits talking about why their website is so needy
First, the party: 6:30 to 8:30 (that’s tonight folks) at Sevnthsin, 1121 Jackson Street Northeast Suite 144 Minneapolis [More info]
Second, the reason: To celebrate the launch of AIGA Minnesota’s Emerging Designers website. The site, is dedicated to providing Minnesota entry-level designers a place to connect with other designers, learn about the local design community, and access resources for professional development.
The site was designed by Sventhsin and put together by nerds. Specifically, our own Gillian Reynolds knocked this one out of the ballpark with a bit of help from others around The Nerdery.
Gillian said working on the site was a lot of fun even with some of the complex work involved in filtering AIGA’s job listings by locale.
“The site’s design is great,” Gillian said. “It was a lot of work, but Sevnthsin provided everything I needed to do it.” She mentioned that she really liked the way the Events calendar worked.
In a move that’s a little unusual for The Nerdery, Gillian worked on this project solo. “It’s funny,” she said. “When you develop a site alone you sort of take ownership of it, and you want to make sure everything is looking exactly right and is done exactly right.”
Which is why, even though this was a solo project she still turned to her fellow nerds to help her out a few times. “I’m really pleased with how it all turned out,” Gillian said. “It’s going to be a great resource for designers.”
The last time you slid behind the curtain at The Nerdery I was telling you all about The Wonder Twins and how a proposal comes to life. Today I am going to tell you about someone whose job description might make your pulse race and give you goosebumps. That person is Michelle, our production coordinator.
Goosebumps yet? Yeah, I didn’t think so. But get this, when I sat down with Michelle to talk about her role here at The Nerdery she said her job was basically to make sure that the projects we take on stay on budget and on time.
Yes, you read that right. When you boil down all that Michelle does, it comes to making sure that your projects are on budget and on time (it bears repeating, don’t you think?).
But before you get too excited, I have to break the news to you that Michelle doesn’t actually have any interaction with our clients. Nope, that’s the job of our SDMs (software development managers), who you’ll get to learn about later. Basically, Michelle helps the busy SDMs manage each project’s overall health.
Michelle has been instrumental in helping to develop roughly twelve different processes here at The Nerdery to make sure our projects get done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now she gets to help implement these processes which include dealing with scope changes in a project and sending out timely status reports to clients.
“I’m the extra set of eyes to help manage things,” Michelle said. “I help the SDMs not lose site of the big picture. I get an overview of every project that we’re working on and since I don’t have to worry about the little details that go into each project I can monitor how many hours we’re working and help the SDMs get their ducks in a row.”
While this is only a small part of Michelle’s role here at Sierra Bravo, it’s probably the part that’s most important and interesting to you. The most important to us? Michelle gathers the shout outs and procures the beer for our weekly Bottlecap Talks.
