Matrix Group International

Month: August 2017

  • Our Favorite Video Editing Tools: Final Cut Pro & iMovie

    It’s no secret that video is one of the hottest marketing trends and tools right now. If you haven’t taken the leap into video creation for your organization, now is certainly the time!

    Video creation can seem like an overwhelming task at first thought, but good news! If you have a smartphone (who doesn’t these days?) and the right video editing software, you can create pretty great video content. Sure, your videos may not be super bowl ad worthy, but you’ll be surprised at the quality of content you can produce with the right tools.

    Two of our favorite editing tools are iMovie and Final Cut Pro, which are both Apple products. While they are a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison – one is a more basic, budget friendly option and the other is more full-featured and an investment – they are both great tools to get the job done, depending on your needs.

    Here’s a little background on each editor, and the advantages of each:

    iMovie

    This is a great program for beginner video editors to use to learn the ropes. We love it for it’s ease of use and basic editing features – it has enough tools to get the job done, but none of the more complex editing options that often intimidate beginners. Since it’s an Apple product, you can seamlessly bring in different Apple programs to the application such as iTunes, Garageband, Photos, etc.

    We also love that it:

    • Makes it easy to jump back and forth between scenes
    • Is very simple to change the audio over a video clip
    • Gives you the ability to fix shaky/unsteady video
    • Is available on all Apple devices, so you can make edits on your video from anywhere

    The biggest advantage of iMovie is that it’s free! A great way to get some exposure to video editing, without an initial investment.

    Final Cut Pro

    This is a signature video editing software, and includes more advanced features and capabilities. With a modern and sleek design, Final Cut also makes the experience for the editor more exciting while remaining pretty easy to use.

    Some of our favorite features include:

    • The magnetic timeline, which makes it easier to produce your project. It automatically snaps multiple clips into place and gives you the ability to move the clips around the timeline quickly and easily.
    • Multi-Channel Audio that allows use different audio channels to make the sound of the video high-quality.
    • Compound clips option, that keeps you from worrying about gaps when you add videos together, and it transitions the video smoothly.

    There is a cost associated with Final Cut Pro – right now it’s priced at $299 – but we believe it’s one of the best video editors on the market and worth every penny.

    For most of our video editing needs here at Matrix Group, such as the Matrix Minute video series, we use Final Cut Pro. But we also love using iMovie to quickly edit and post videos to social media that are more timely.

    There are many other video editing programs out there, but these are by far our favorites. And remember, if you ever need any video help, we’re here for you!

    Have to dabbled in video editing? What’s your platform of choice?

  • How to Have a Really Great Search on Your Website

    How to Have a Really Great Search on Your Website

    We hear this a lot from people who manage websites and navigate websites, “the site search sucks!” So what can you do to make search not suck on your site?

    Here at Matrix Group, we believe a good site search is the result of many things:

    • Good search technology. There are many products on the market, from the free Google custom search, to the very pricey Google Search Appliance, to commercial products like SearchBlox and open source products like Solr and Lucene. Your vendor can help you navigate the products and find one that is right for you. We like SearchBlox and here’s my Director of Software Engineering on the many reasons why we prefer to implement SearchBlox these days.
    • Effective site search setup. I’m working with a client on a search project and here are just some of her organization’s requirements: she needs her search to index multiple websites, allow filtering of the results by category and source website, index members-only content, support featured results, and allow some content collections to be prioritized over others. A good search solution supports all of these requirements and more. A good search partner helps you develop effective requirements and can implement the solution properly.
    • Good, deep content. Our association and nonprofit clients rarely lack good content, but it is important to take stock of your content, archive what’s outdated or redundant, and keep only the best online. I ask clients to meet as an organization and come up with the topics that they want to be known for on the web, and then audit their content to see if they have ample content on that topic. For example, if I ran Worldchefs and I wanted my site to be known on the web as the place to go if you want to be a culinary chef, I would make sure we have the following types of content:
      • How to be a chef
      • The training you need to become a chef
      • How it takes to become a chef
      • Training for chefs
      • The qualities of a great chef
      • Are great chefs born or made?
      • Etc.
    • Good content preparation. It’s not enough to have good content. Your content has to be optimized for search. Here are some example of best practices: descriptive and unique title tags and H1 headlines on all pages, properties populated in PDF documents, all content available to be crawled, and categories populated and displayed on the page and in metadata.
    • A good understanding of what good search results look like. Sometimes, clients tell me their search sucks. So I ask them to give me examples of 20 searches that people conduct on their site and what great search results look like. If they can’t tell me, we work together to define it. Only then can we refine the search technology, weight the content, and customize the results for the best results.
    • Search analytics. How will you know that your site search is working (or not working?) if you don’t have good analytics? Did you even know that you can have search analytics? Here are some examples: you can track the volume of searches, the search terms being entered, the number of results, and so much more. If you have analytics, be sure to look regularly at what people are searching for and then conduct those searches yourself. Are the results what you expect and want visitors to see?

    My biggest concern with site search is that people complain a lot about it but organizations are rarely willing to invest the time and money to have a really great search. Search is undervalued in that way. I hope that with this post, more organizations understand what goes into having a really great search.

     

  • What is a Canonical URL and Why Should I Care?

    A canonical URL or “canonical link” is an HTML element that helps search engines avoid the appearance of duplicate content. It does this by identifying a preferred version of a web page. Using canonical URLs improves your site’s SEO and makes searching the site easier for your visitors. The canonical link appears in the head section of a web page and looks like this:

    <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page-path/page-title/” />

    How it works

    Imagine you’re throwing a party at your home and you provide directions to your guests. (I recognize that nowadays people will just plug your address into their navigator, but my father refuses to use such technology and still prefers written directions and paper maps.) Knowing that your guests will be coming from different starting points, you provide a different set of directions whether they are coming from the north, east, south, or west. Each set of directions presents a differt route, but each ends up at your house.

    Now consider that you publish a news story to your website, and your website allows your visitors different paths to get to news stories. One path may be to navigate to a menu choice “News” and click the link to your story. Another might be to click a link from a section titled “Latest News” on your home page. A third might be that your visitor navigated to some other page and saw the link to your news story in a side bar of related content. This could result in three different URLs:

    No matter how visitors navigate to your news story, they will end up reading the same content, even if the URL and the appearance of the web page around the storyare different based on how they got there. Likewise, the different directions you offer your party guests will result in them all arriving at your home regardless of which route they took. The directions you provided your guests are like your web pages and your home address is like the canonical URL! There are different ways to get there, but only one home. Following through with the news story example, each of the pages above should have the same canonical URL. It might look like this:

    <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/news/archives/story-title/” />

    Search engines crawl through links on your site just like humans only [very much] faster. That means that Google will find all three paths to your news story just as visitors will. Should it show all three results? No, instead when it sees the canonical URL – common to all three pages – Google presents that one. In doing so, Google avoids the appearance of duplicate content and your website visitors are not confused by multiple links to the same story. That’s why canonical URLs are important.

    Historical footnote

    The canonical link element was introduced in 2009 by consensus among the major search engines Google, Yahoo! and Bing. It was formally added as an HTML standard in 2012 and is now an expected feature of all modern content management systems.

  • An Executive Director’s Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Next Conference

    I recently had coffee with Carol Singer Neuvelt, Executive Director of NAEM. NAEM is a professional association that empowers corporate leaders to advance environmental stewardship, create safe and healthy workplaces, and promote global sustainability.

    Carol says that one of NAEM’s biggest member benefits is its peer-led educational program, during which members share what they’ve done at their companies.

    “How do you make sure members get the most out of these conferences?” I asked Carol.

    Turns out Carol has three rules for getting the most out of a conference and she doesn’t hesitate to remind her members of these three rules at every turn.

    1. Learn something. This sounds so obvious, but how many of us decide to learn something? Carol says that if we go into each session with an open mind and a keen intention to learn at least one thing, the conference will be a success.
    2. Participate in the conversation. Carol says passively attending a conference is not enough. We should ask questions during sessions, interact with the speakers and attendees during the breaks, post comments on social media, and otherwise make our voices heard.
    3. Make a friend. This is my favorite pro tip from Carol. She’s basically telling us to get off our phones and make a new friend. At lunch, during dinner, at breakfast, during a reception. Introduce yourself, explain what you do and why you’re at the conference, and look for ways to connect with others.

    I loved these tips so much, I had to share. They’re so obvious and yet so wise and so needed. I hope you’ll think about these tips as you head out to your next conference and encourage your staff and co-workers to do the same.