The Backstory of Your Crime Site

A few years ago we built a website for a Crime Stoppers program (you know, the program where submit an anonymous tip and get a reward for it if the crook is captured). That site did really well, mostly because of the strength of WordPress. Crime Stoppers programs have an innate need to publish their own content quickly and often, but most aren’t able to do that with their current static websites, if they have a site at all. The only company offering websites specifically for Crime Stoppers? Well let’s just say that their sites are a little pre-1990. Still. But they have HUNDREDS of programs using their sites because they’re the only ones doing it!

Our one Crime Stoppers program here in the middle of Ohio gets more traffic than the national Crime Stoppers website, the INTERNATIONAL Crime Stoppers website, the Crime Stoppers programs of Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and is only a few hundred hits short of eeking out New York. Not bad for the middle of Ohio. Beyond the traffic, they’re able to do things with their site now they just couldn’t do before. They hold online auctions, take online donations, accept event registrations, integrate with social media, and so much more.

All of that is old hat for anyone who has been around internet marketing for more than a few years at this point. BUT for non-profits (I would dare say MOST non-profits) it’s all still very new.

Can We Have One, Too? Yes!

So when other Crime Stoppers program (like Chicago and Baltimore) started calling and saying, “We want a website like that,” we knew we were on to something. Why weren’t WE offering the same type of GREAT websites for the anti-crime community in a turn-key fashion? Packed with all of the great features that are so easy to integrate using WordPress? The same features that many non-profits pay TENS of THOUSANDS for (far too much in my opinion).

Now we are! I have been toiling away on www.YourCrimeSite.com, a membership site offering websites for the anti-crime community- Crime Stoppers, block watches, neighborhood associations, victim memorial groups… The functionality of it is finished, but the marketing isn’t quite yet. Even still, I thought I’d share how I’m building it in case you want to take a stab at something similar.

The Backbone: WordPress MultiSite

If you’re reading MyNameIsAngie, you’re probably familiar with WordPress. You may not be familiar with WordPress Multisite. WordPress Multisite allows you to create a network of websites from one installation of WordPress. It’s more than I can explain in this one post, but you can learn more about it from the best in the WordPress Multisite business, Ron and Andrea Rennick, here or here. You can even download their free ebook on how to enable multisite in your WordPress installation here.  Multisite is not for everyone – enabling it creates some extra security issues, and there are only certain reasons why you’d even NEED to use Multisite in the first place. But for me, it is what I needed.

The Social Network: BuddyPress

Once I had Multisite enabled, I was able to create new websites easily on our network of websites. I also added BuddyPress, which allows us to have our own social network within our network. We want to increase the value of being a member of YourCrimeSite.com beyond just having a website. We want all of our members to be able to talk with one another about what is working for their organizations, and to see what the others are posting on the sites. BuddyPress lets us do that with features like forums, activity streams, private messaging, user profiles, and user groups.

The Themes: Almost Entirely StudioPress

Each of the sites on the network can have its own look and feel. I have chosen to use StudioPress themes for almost all of our themes (with the exception of two so far: Deadline and Magzimus from Themeforest). That’s because with the Genesis Framework from StudioPress, we can so easily expand and update any of the child themes across the network. I also know that their support is CRAZY fantastic, and they’re hip to both Multisite and BuddyPress. In fact, the Multisite geniuses I mentioned above (Ron and Andrea) work with StudioPress now. When I use their StudioPress, I feel like I have this entire TEAM on my side, understanding my project and helping me to make it happen.

The Advertising Network: OIO Publisher

We are offering free websites as part of the network. Not every organization can afford a custom site and we get that.  Those sites will be ad-supported to help offset the cost. We can run a series of ads across the entire network of websites using OIO Publisher. OIO is a WordPress plugin that allows you to manage your own ads (of various sizes and types: banners, texts, adsense, etc…) but also to sell ad spots directly from your site. You might visit the site and see a 300×250 banner that says Advertise Here, click on it and then right there, purchase your ad for one month, upload your advertisement and pay for it. Of course, the ad has to be approved first… but once it’s approved, it will enter the rotation of ads for the spot (unless that spot is exclusive, of course). There are widgets for displaying ads on individual sites, or, I can hard code an advertising zone (zone = collection of ads) into a theme with just a simple line of PHP provided  by OIO for each zone. It also provides reporting for the ads. Last note about OIO which is true of most plugins when using them for Multisite – I can allow each individual site to have their OWN instance of OIO Publisher – effectively giving each organization their own advertising network (read: opportunity to easily raise money by offering advertising on their site).

The Automated Membership: S2 Member

Now we could just add a PayPal button for each level of membership and manually add a site for each member who confirms payment. But we are dreaming big and assuming that we’re going to have hundreds… no thousands… no MILLIONS of customers and that we couldn’t possibly manage that process manually. So we’ve chosen to use a plugin called s2Member to help automate the membership process. It can be used for any membership site, including those which will offer blogs as part of their membership, and those which use BuddyPress. s2Member integrates with a variety of payment gateways – we’re using PayPal. It will keep track of when a person joins and, when their year membership is up, if they haven’t renewed, demote their membership to a free membership. (That works for us because we don’t WANT organizations to just up and lose their sites altogether). You can set the membership levels and costs at so many variables – much too much to cover here! Take a look – this is a SERIOUSLY powerful plugin.

This plugin can also protect content based on the various membership levels, which is an important part of what we’re planning. Most non-profits today need help understanding the internet marketing landscape. We’re going to offer content on YourCrimeSite.com specifically for our members, and we’ll be able to protect that content from the general public by just choosing a drop in the post editor that marks the content for a particular membership level. We can even tease content (show just a few sentences) and then require registration to view the rest.

Like I said, CRAZY cool.

E-Mythin It: WP-Multisite Replicator

We’re using a plugin called WP-Replicator to quickly replicate our demo sites on the network for our new members. WP-Replicator allows you to create a demo site, complete with content, pages, posts, photos, plugins – the whole shebang… and then replicate that entire site with just a few clicks. When a new member registers, we can create their new site in less than a minute using this plugin. Something we think is great about this is that we can pre-seed content on the free sites – articles about neighborhood safety and crime tips.

Professional Domain Mapping

The last bit I’ll cover in this post is domain mapping. Each of our members gets a subdomain for their site. Something like www.ourblockwatch.yourcrimesite.com. But, if they have their own domain www.ourblockwatch.com they can use that instead! And, setting that up takes about five minutes using the Professional Domain Mapping plugin.

Summary

A few other tips – we had initially planned on aggregating the most recent content published on all of the members’ sites into one area on our YourCrimeSite.com for viewers to browse, using the Sitewide Tags plugin, but I’m not sure we’re going to do that just yet. We had that set up for awhile and let me just say, it is a POWERFUL way to gather content. My challenge is finding the best way to display all of that information so that it’s most truly engaging to the reader. Otherwise, it could turn into a big pile of craziness.

We will also work on pushing content into the free members’ site using another plugin, but I can’t remember the name of it and I’m out of time for this post!

I hope that you’ve found this post interesting and somehow helpful. This project is really exciting for me because I know that it offers such a great value to the organizations and non-profits who will utilize it. If you have any questions about how we’re building it, please don’t hesitate to ask!

PS. Big HUGE thanks to @andrea_r and @wpmuguru for all of their help over the past two years helping me to understand Multisite enough to be able to do this! I couldn’t have done it without them!

Here at MyNameIsAngie.com, I’ve ALWAYS offered a free video course teaching the basics of WordPress. The opt-in for it has ALWAYS been in the upper right sidebar and has always included basically what it does now. And, I’ve always had very minimal success with gaining subscribers. Go figure. I mean, who needs a free 8-video course to learn how to do what some pay a designer hundreds or even thousands to do for them? Anyway…

You should also know that I don’t get thousands of visitors a month. Mostly because I don’t usually DO the things for myself that I teach OTHER people to do which would drive traffic here! Not enough time in the day to teach, design, mother and wife (read: poor time management)! So when you see the opt-in numbers below, they might not look impressive to you. Look beyond the actual numbers, and simply compare the before and after opt-ins.

I installed PopUp Domination on May 19. In the 53 days PRIOR to installing it, I had 2 subscribers. In the 53 days since installing PopUp Domination, I’ve had 37 optins for my free video course. That’s an increase of 1,750%.

I don’t know what else to say. I changed the design of the site a few times, but the new design has actually worked against the other stats of the site (retention, pageviews, bounce, etc…). There is no other explanation except for the in-your-face popup opt-in! I have about a 5.67% opt-in rate right now, with very little effort to either drive traffic to my site or to get what traffic does come to opt-in. I can’t imagine how this little plugin would help turn my visitors into subscribers if I was actually TRYING. What would YOU do with a 1750% increase in subscribers this month?

Click here to purchase your copy of PopUp Domination.

And here is a quick video showing exactly how to use the Editorial Calendar directly from the EC plugin authors.

The WordPress Editorial Calendar Screen Cast from Zack Grossbart on Vimeo.

Screenshot of widget output on "Open Source" page under top level page "My Portfolio", running Twenty-Ten theme

The title of the widget is the top level page within the current section (but you can change that in the widget’s settings) . It will show all page siblings (except on the top level page), all parents and grandparents (and higher), the siblings of all parents and grandparents (up to top level page), and any immediate children of the current page. If you’re a programmer, you can also use it inside template files using a function.

If you’re just using WordPress for simple blogging, then you might not need this plugin. But, if you develop sites for clients who sometimes have complicated page structures or hundreds of pages with groups of pages, then this is definitely something you can use.

(click to enlarge)

Last year, I designed a site for a tutoring franchise in Canada. They wanted each of their franchises to have several pages dedicated to their location and for one of those pages to be that location’s blog…but to only display those three pages in the sidebar navigation when a visitor was look at that location. Makes sense. Someone looking at Location A doesn’t need to be distracted by all of the pages for Location B, right? So here’s how using the Simple Section Navigation looks on that site:

To install Simple Section Navigation on your site, navigate to the Plugins tab on your dashboard, click Add New, and search for “Simple Section Navigation.” Install it, then remember to activate it, too. Once you’ve done that, go to Appearance>Widgets, and you’ll see a new widget called “Simple Section Navigation.” Drag it over to the sidebar where you’d like it to display.

(click to enlarge)

There are a few settings you can play with once the widget is in place. For example, you can change the title of the widget. If you don’t, it will simple display the top level page’s name (for the Scholars example above, that would have “Our Centres.” You can choose how to sort the pages, to exclude particular pages from that section, whether to show the widget on the home page, whether to make the title of the widget a link to the top level page (in our example above, “Our Centres” could either be a link to the “Our Centres” page, or just be the text “Our Centres,” to show all the pages in a section, to show the widget even if there are no pages in that section to show, and to not show the navigation on pages that are excluded.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site. (sitemaps.org)

How to use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin:

• Once you have logged in to your WordPress website, scroll to the PLUGINS tab in your dashboard’s sidebar. Expand it and click ADD NEW.
• Search for “Google XML Sitemaps.” At the time I’m writing this post, it is the second plugin returned in that search. Click INSTALL NOW, and confirm YES, you do really want to install this plugin.
• After the installation process is complete, remember to click ACTIVATE, or your plugin will not be available for you to use…it will merely be installed on your site.
• Once you do that, scroll to the SETTINGS tab in your dashboard’s sidebar and expand it. You should see a new link for XML-SITEMAPS. Click it.
• You will see a notice at the very top of this settings page that tells you to build your sitemap for the first time. Click that link… and the magic will begin!

Once your sitemap is built, you will not need to make any other changes to the settings on this page. This plugin is fantastically configured straight out of the box! I know – it almost sounds too easy… but it’s true. So take four minutes and go install this plugin on your site right now.Then, if you have any questions, feel free to pop over to the forum and ask!

First, let’s install and activate the plugin. Then we will look at the basic instructions you’ll use to tell your widgets when to display.

Now, let’s learn how to create some snippets of code that will tell your newly installed Widget Logic what to do with your widgets.

is_home()

just the main blog page

!is_page(‘about’)

everywhere EXCEPT this specific WP ‘page’

is_category(array(5,9,10,11))

category page of one of the given category IDs

(hint – installing the plugin WP Show ID will be helpful for finding the category ID’s for this one)

is_single() && in_category(‘baked-goods’)

single post that’s in the category with this slug

current_user_can(‘level_10′)

displays widget only for administrators

strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], “google.com”)!=false

widget to show when clicked through from a google search

is_category() && in_array($cat, get_term_children( 5, ‘category’))

category page that’s a descendent of category 5

global $post; return (in_array(77,get_post_ancestors($post)));

WP page that is a child of page 77

global $post; return (is_page(‘home’) || ($post->post_parent==”13″));

home page OR the page that’s a child of page 13

Have questions?

Join our forum and ask away!

Here’s a quick video showing how to use the All In One SEO Pack.

PS. If you haven’t yet signed up to receive my latest tips delivered to your inbox, you can do that here. I’ll even send you a free video course on how to build your website from scratch using WordPress!

Google Analytics lets you track all the things you’re curious to know about your site but didn’t even know you wanted to know! Are visitors to your site returning or new? How long do they stay? What page did they leave from? What city are they from? What did they click on once they were there? All that and SO much more.ff

I’m going to walk you through the three easy steps to creating a Google Analytics account and associating that account with your WordPress website.

1. Visit http://www.google.com/analytics/and register for an account. Follow the prompts after you’ve entered your email and password.

2. Install and activate the Google Analyticor plugin.

3. Navigate to Settings>Google Analytics, and authenticate your account (leave all settings just as they are with the obvious exception of “enabling” the plugin.

Pretty simple. If you’ve followed these simple steps, you should start seeing the statistics for your website in your Google Analytics account, and also on the dashboard of your website.

If you’re using WordPress (please, tell me you’re using WordPress already), the videos below will show you how to find, install and use a plugin called Organize Series. Keep your hard earned series from being relegated to page 28 of your site.

And yes, I know I could have made a series of these four videos…

INTRO TO ORGANIZING SERIES ON WORDPRESS

HOW TO ADD A SERIES

A POST IN A SERIES USING THE DEFAULT SETTINGS

HOW TO ADD A POST TO A SERIES

Undoubtedly, this video has been shared on Facebook and Twitter the same number of times. I’m not even an OSU fan, and when President Gordon Gee comes across with Brutus Buckeye, I almost shed a little tear.

So this post you’re reading right now…it could be about anything, right? It just happens to be about OSU because that’s what was hot in my neck of the woods this week. Whatever you write about, you obviously want your readers to share with other people, whether those people are at your site or not. Now visitors can simply click a Facebook LIKE button on your site and just as they LIKE a link or video on Facebook, they can LIKE your article. Once they LIKE it, a short line will appear on their Facebook wall that says, “Angie Meeker likes Adding a Facebook Like Button To Your WordPress Website,” except that it will have their name, and their article, obviously. Let’s get people showing their friends on Facebook how much their like your website.

Here’s how to install the NEW Facebook LIKE button on your WordPress site.

BTW – It didn’t show up in my feed because when I tested it earlier, and it DID show up, I hid it…so that it wouldn’t be there when I went to show you it magically appear for this video. Try it yourself and see it work!