Matrix Group International

Category: CMS, E-Commerce, Integration and Mobile Apps

Set 2023 Up for Success: 7 Easy Upgrades to Make
Looking for a few easy upgrades that are light on the budget but will start you off strong in 2023? Matrix Group Creative Director Alex Pineda and Lead Front-End Developer Jaime Quiroz have suggestions for a few simple upgrades and updates you can make that will improve your user experience, give you more accurate data, and help you better serve your members.

1. Pick one template that you use often, and update it.

We live in an era where new and fresh is not just preferred but expected. Keep your brand and assets fresh by auditing and updating one or more of your most-used templates. This could be a template for your: newsletter, PowerPoint presentations, meeting pages, PDFs, press releases, or social media posts. Little tweaks like this can make a big difference, and good designers should be able to do this work fairly quickly.

2. Refresh the most visited page on your website.

Google loves it when you update your pages, and your users do, too! Take a look at your most visited page, and ask yourself:
- What images could we replace to make this page more high-impact?
- What can we reduce to increase clarity on this page?
- Is the page too cluttered; what can we do to make it simpler?
- What is the goal of the page? Is there a clear flow to the call-to-action to meet that goal?
- Why is this page so popular? What other content can we feature that is connected to the popularity of this page?
- Is there any industry jargon on the page that needs to be reworded?
Even updating two or three little things can make a big impact!

Not sure which page is your most-visited page? Take a look at your analytics. If you’re not sure how to do that and need help, maybe now is also a good time to invest in some Analytics training. Speaking of Analytics….

3. Upgrade to Google Analytics 4

If you haven’t upgraded to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you need to upgrade as soon as possible! Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023. Due to the new data model in GA4, you won’t be able to move your data from UA to GA4 and data between UA and GA4 won’t be comparable. You need to start collecting your data in GA4 yesterday to have the comparative reports you’ll need next year. (Psst, if you need help getting GA4 installed on your site or want training on the new interface, we can help!)

If you already have GA4 installed on your site (bravo!) we recommend investing in one Google Data Studio custom report. Google Data Studio lets you create beautiful dashboard reports that aggregate data and reports so you can see and understand your data more clearly.

4. Update link text and button text on your website to improve accessibility and usability.

It’s important to make your link text and button text as descriptive as possible on your website. This is important for usability, but even more important for accessibility. People who use screen readers (e.g., people who are blind or low vision) need descriptive links or button text so that they know how to execute an action. For example, a link that says Click here is not useful to screen readers; “Register now” or “Read our annual report” is more helpful.

The icing on the cake: this practice is also great for search engine optimization. When you link the whole phrase, your sites gives Google and other search engines better clues about what your content, page, and links are about; this can help boost your authority and ranking.

5. Take your most important PDF and turn it into an HTML page.

Why? For so many reasons. Search engines can’t tell from a PDF what your content is really all about because all of the text is treated equally; PDF pages are lacking H tags that provide a hierarchy for what the page is all about. In addition, PDFs are not good for accessibility, they’re not mobile friendly, and they’re not easy to update. Yes, you have more design control with a PDF, but you need to consider all of the other factors at play. Converting your most important PDFs to HTML pages will drastically improve usability, accessibility, and SEO.

If you can’t do away with the PDF completely, a great option is to convert what you can to an HTML page, and still make the PDF version available. A great example of this is ERISA Industry Committee’s Policy Priorities document that they turned into a web page, while still making the PDF available. See ERIC’s Policy Priorities web page here.

6. Increase security by using and requiring 2-factor authentication

If you haven’t already, we beg of you: install 2-factor authentication for EVERYTHING that you can, and update your security policy to require it. Yes, it can create a minor inconvenience – maybe add 15 seconds to a log-in process – but those few seconds might be the very thing that saves your organization from being completely compromised, which would cost you a lot more time.

7. Improve your search by adding 10 more best bets

For your top 10 most searched queries on your site, are your users getting to where they need to go? One way to make sure they get where they want to go, or where you want them to go, is to update your best bets to serve better results. Best bets, or featured results, tell your search engine that for specific keywords or phrases, you want X and Y pages to be at the top. For example, if someone types the word “awards” into your site search, they might get a jillion results, but what they probably want is your awards landing page, so set up a best bet for the awards landing page. Start by looking at your search analytics, determining the top 10-15 searched words or phrases, and adding best bets for those words and phrases. This is a quick and easy thing to do, but has the potential to drastically improve your users’ experience with your site.

BONUS: Update your 404 page

Your 404 page is a great place to have a little fun on your website, and provides a low-stakes opportunity to show a little personality and reinforce your branding in a new and different way. For example, FMI – The Food Industry Association’s 404 page says “Clean up on Aisle 4!” something often said in their grocery store members’ day-to-day. At Matrix Group we’re big Star Wars fans, so check this out: https://matrixgroup-wp-new.matrixdev.net/whoops

If you have some extra budget left to spend in 2022 or are looking for quick wins for the start of 2023, we hope these suggestions help! If you want to dive deeper into any of these ideas, you can watch the recording of the webinar we held last week on this topic or reach out to our team, who would be happy to continue the conversation.

Remember, little things add up and can make a big impact!

What projects are you planning to tackle in 2023, big or small?
December 15, 2022
Should Virtual Conference Sessions Be Live or Pre-Recorded?
I’m attending a lot of conferences these days. I’m also helping clients plan and execute a lot of conferences. All of them online, of course.

One of the biggest questions being asked by meeting planners is: Should my educational sessions be live or pre-recorded? Live streamed at a certain time or available on demand?

Pre-recorded has some obvious benefits:
- Your speakers won’t have technology issues
- You can control the start and end times
- You can up the production value of your sessions with extra editing, graphics, transitions, etc.
I recently had the pleasure of working with Teri Carden on Non Dues-a-Palooza, a conference dedicated to helping associations increase their non dues revenue through partnerships and great ideas. Teri had 10 case studies, and 6 pitches by sponsor companies. The case studies were going to be pre-recorded so Teri wondered how she could add a live element to the conference so that the case studies didn’t feel like just another set of zoom webinars. Should the 2-minute pitches by demo companies be live or pre-recorded? Should her welcome be pre-recorded?

After much discussion, Teri decided on a mixed format: she would be live but the case studies and 2-minute demo pitches would be pre-recorded. In addition, the demos would be live as well.

Live can be nerve-wracking. You never know what can happen: someone’s Internet drops, the speaker mutes herself accidentally, your schedule falls apart because someone ran long. BUT, live has benefits as well:
- Your presenters can answer questions in real-time
- Your presenters can lengthen or shorten remarks as needed
- Perhaps most importantly, your attendees feel like they are experiencing something happening real-time, that they need to be online at a specific time and place in order to be part of something.
I’m speaking at the ASAE Annual Conference this week. Speaking is perhaps a weird verb because my session was pre-recorded. Instead, I will be available via chat to respond to attendee comments. There’s a part of me that wants people to listen to my session, not just try to keep up with the stream of comments. If I had my druthers, I would have pre-recorded my session but been live, on video, for the Q&A. But yes, that’s different, more complicated technology to make that happen. So I will be presenting on Wednesday AND responding to questions and comments.

Personally, if a conference is made up entirely of pre-recorded videos, I think some attendees will lose interest. The motivation to participate NOW will dissipate because sessions are pre-recorded and will inevitably be available on demand, in which case it doesn’t really matter when you watch the videos.

How about you? How is your organization navigation live vs. pre-recorded? What has worked? What have you learned?
August 10, 2020
What is Tech Debt and What Should You Do About It?
A couple of weeks ago, I did a webinar on Tech Debt with my CTO, Maki Kato, and MatrixMaxx AMS Product Manager, Tanya Kennedy-Luminati, and was also recently featured in an AssociationsNow article on the topic. What exactly is tech debt?

Wikipedia says Tech Debt “reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.”

I say tech debt happens when:
- You rush a solution
- You don’t understand what you’re really trying to accomplish
- You allow your tech to get too old
- Your tech no longer meets the requirements of your organization today
Examples of tech debt include:
- The membership database that never really met the needs of your meetings department, even at launch
- The really old version of WordPress that’s hanging out somewhere, just waiting to be hacked
- The software that you stopped paying support for, and now it’s four versions behind, and it will cost a fortune to upgrade and you may have to start fresh
- The custom application that is running on an old version of Windows and SQL Server. The app still works but it’s now on an unsupported version of Windows.
Does this sound like your organization? If so, you might have tech debt!

During the webinar, Maki, Tanya and I talked about how the first step to addressing your tech debt is identifying and fully describing it. So before your next budget cycle:
- Inventory your software and systems.
- Describe them.
- Find out the versions.
- Are they working?
- Do they meet your needs?
Even if you are not in a position to do something about the tech debt immediately, you will know what’s out there and you can start prioritizing the list and budgeting for solutions.

In future blog posts, we’ll talk about ways to remediate and avoid tech debt. Stay tuned!
January 30, 2020
Does Your Website Need Web Push Notifications?
Let’s face it. As marketers, we’re always wondering how to reach more people, get more opens and clicks, drive traffic, and get more conversions.

Mobile apps have been terrific at generating visits and conversions because of their ability to send push notifications to users. We’ve all gotten used to the notifications on our phone, as well as the numbers next to apps that tell us we’ve got announcements to read.

What if you don’t have a mobile app? You can now use web push notifications to send reminders and announcements! How does it work?
- Websites that have web push notifications ask you for permission to send you notifications when you visit the site. You can either accept or block notifications.
- If you accept notifications, you’ll get little messages that pop-up in your browser when a new article, video or product has been posted AND notification has been enabled for that update.
- You’ll get the notifications no matter what website you’re currently visiting at the time the notification goes out.
To see web push notifications in action, visit www.fmi.org or my blog at TheMatrixFiles.net. If this is the first time you’ve visited the site, you’ll see a red bell icon in the bottom right corner. If you click it, you’ll be given the option to subscribe to browser notifications. It’s that easy!

If you subscribe to notifications on my blog, you’ll get a reminder whenever we publish a new post, regardless of what site you’re surfing at the time. It’s remarkably effective and yet surprisingly not annoying. If you use Google Calendar, you can enable notifications via your browser so that Google can send you reminders about upcoming meetings.

I see more websites employing web push notifications for these reasons:
- They represent another way to get people to convert and give you permission to send them updates.
- Web push notifications are easy to opt in to because they don’t require an email or contact information, just a click.
- Subscribing and unsubscribing is very easy.
- The notifications services can give you good analytics about number of subscribers, delivery and clicks.
Here’s the bad news about web push notifications: they are not currently supported in IE or iOS. They are supported in Chrome, Safari and Firefox, so a good percentage of the web is covered. Apple has announced the web push notification support is in development and the same thing is likely happening at Microsoft with IE and Edge.

Adding web push notifications to your site is inexpensive and easy to do. Contact my team if you want more info. I hope you’ll consider this valuable tool for reaching your target audiences.
June 5, 2018
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Your Website: Part I
Last year, my husband and I read Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.“ To say this book was life changing isn’t an exaggeration. Besieged by clutter, we went about decluttering our books, clothes, papers, kitchen accessories, and on and on. We gave away over 1,000 books, I donated 60% of my closet, we shredded mounds of paper, and we can finally see the floor in our garage. Are we done? Absolutely not! But I’m not overwhelmed by the clutter, the master bedroom is a sea of calm, and I love everything in my closet.

Like closets and homes, websites need regular tidying as well. If you hear this from your members, “I can’t find anything on your website” or “I can’t find what I”m looking for because I get too many search results,” it’s time to tidy.

Why The Clutter?

First, let’s examine why our websites have become the equivalent of cluttered homes and self-storage units. This is what I hear from my clients:
- We need a place to store our archives
- Someday we might need that study from 25 years ago
- We don’t know what’s valuable to our members or the public
What Members Really Want

And yet, in interview after interview with members, this is what we hear:
- Just give me the best stuff when I do a search
- I need my association to curate all the information on “x” topic
- Tell me what I need to pay attention to
- The navigation is overwhelming with too many choices
- I just don’t know where to start looking
Take the First Step Toward Tidying: What Are People Trying to Do On Your Website?

This blog post is NOT about the art and science of information architecture. I can go on for day about that. This blog post IS about decluttering. If you want your website to be high performing, ask yourself questions like these:
- What are people trying to do on my site? If your audience includes researchers who need the historical data, then please include a comprehensive library AND create an effective search. If you want to make the case for membership, chances are you need to do that in six pages or less.
- Why do we have archives of the conference pages from the last 15 years? If people need the handouts, perhaps you’re better off creating a database of the presentations and creating a great search. If it’s just the staff that find the archive useful, take it offline and make it easily accessible on your local network.
- Why do we have news and newsletters from the last 25 years? If people need the archives for research purposes, great. If legislative updates from even last year are irrelevant because Congress has a new set of priorities each year, ditch the detailed updated but do keep a list of your legislative priorities and what you’ve done over time.
Over the past year, Matrix Group has completed about a dozen website redesigns. In almost all cases, the client, after reviewing the content inventory, looking at the analytics and discussing content strategy, ditched more than half of their old content. Tidying made content migration easier and less expensive, the information architecture is more streamlined, and site search is more effective.

In the next blog post, I’ll talk about love. What’s love got to with your website and clutter? Stay tuned.
March 15, 2018
A Good Site Search Requires an Investment of Time and Money
I hear this a lot from prospects: Our website search sucks! It seems many organizations are in pain with search. Here’s the thing: a good site search requires an investment of time and money. This investment can be substantial and I think it’s worth it.

In many ways, Google has spoiled us. Google is a free, powerful, really amazing, awesome, spot on search. “Why can’t I have a search like Google?,” ask many of my clients. Google used to license its search technology, but no more. So what’s an organization to do?

There are many search options: free, open source, commercial, at all price points. Here at Matrix Group, we have developed expertise at implementing SearchBlox, Solr, Algolia, Zoom, WordPress and Sitefinity.

In our experience, a great site search involves:
- Great technology
- A good understanding of the desired search experience
- Great data hygiene where pages have unique title tags, all content can be crawled, meta data is populated, etc.
- Search analytics
- Ongoing tweaks
No search technology is fabulous out of the box, unless you were willing to pay $200K+ for Google, and even that’s no longer available, which is why you’ve got to invest in the steps listed above to have a great search. And yet I hear this time and time again:

“Our site search sucks. We want and need a good search. An effective search is critical to my site’s success. But I’m not willing to invest staff on data hygiene, and money on good technology and services from a great vendor.”

Yikes. What’s a vendor like us to do?

Instead of thinking about how Google is free, think about how search is just as important to wayfinding as good navigation and user flows. And if that’s the case, shouldn’t you be spending at least as much on search as you do on information architecture, e.g., navigation review, wireframes and user testing?

The next time you’re considering a website redesign, or remarking on how bad your site search is, think about the steps needed to have a great search and budget accordingly. If it’s a small site in WordPress, you won’t need to spend a lot of money to have a great search. But if you’re looking for a search that will index multiple sites, weight content according to your rules, display a members-only icon, support an advanced search and filtering of results, etc., etc., please, please budget accordingly.
February 2, 2018
A New CMS Won’t Fix Your Broken Web Strategy

I read a lot of RFPs (Requests For Proposals) for website redesigns, and I sit through a lot of demos and presentations. What strikes me is the number of projects where the focus is on the content management system, and not the goals and strategy of the project.

Why do we have such an obsession with changing platforms and technology when a “website isn’t working?”

I believe this is because we think the problem all along has been the platform. And I believe that in most cases, this approach is wrong.

As a technology vendor and implementer of technologies and platforms, this thinking might seem counter-intuitive. But the truth is this: web content management systems have come a looooong way and most systems do more than any organization can ever hope to use. Yep, there are differences between WordPress, Sitefinity, Drupal, Sitecore and Ektron for sure, but today, I think these differences are at the margins.

Ultimately, the things that really matter are the strategy behind the website redesign, the ability of an organization to rally behind the strategy, a solid implementation that includes lots of training, and the quality of the technology vendor.

If your website isn’t working for your organization, investing in a new CMS with a fancy WYSIWYG editor, drag and drop interface and complicated workflow won’t’ solve your problems. They will help, for sure, but if your content strategy isn’t in place, if you don’t make a commitment to fabulous images, you don’t have a plan for marketing your site, you don’t measure results, and you don’t have the right team in place, you’ll be replacing that CMS in a few short years.

BTW, don’t confuse my being CMS-agnostic with the idea that once you invest in a CMS, you can let it sit as is — forever. Content management systems must be upgraded on a regular basis so you have benefit of the latest security patches, new functionality, and vendor support. I tell clients to use the upgrade process as an opportunity to reevaluate their businesses processes, get staff trained and retrained, and make optimization tweaks to the website.

The next time you find yourself saying, “our website sucks, we need a new CMS,” ask yourself this: Is it really the CMS or does your strategy, process and/or training need the reboot?

January 16, 2018
Getting Started with eLearning and How Mobile is Transforming Professional Development
At the ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) Tech Conference last week, I attended a terrific session called “Anytime, Anywhere eLearning: How Mobile Transforms Education.” Wendy Rath and Mary Rehm of PRMIA (Professional Risk Managers’ International Association), as well as Ken Parker from NextThought, did a terrific job of articulating PRMIA’s eLearning journey.

Background on PRMIA and its Professional Development Program:

PRMIA is a professional society that creates an open forum for the development and promotion of the risk profession. A big part of how PRMIA accomplishes its mission is professional development and education. But recently, PRMIA education appeared to be in trouble. Registrations were way down and the association had to cancel a number of meetings.

What did PRMIA decide to do? Instead of just blasting out more emails, PRMIA decided to go deep and learn more about what’s really happening with their members and their educational needs and objectives.
PRMIA conducted a member survey and learned:
- Members want more learning opportunities, not less.
- Members are constrained in terms of time and money.
- Members want online learning.
The eLearning Solution

Knowing what they learned about members’ education need and desires, PRMIA got to work.
- They took a long, hard look at their technology and realized that much of it was already conducive to eLearning. Much of it supported a mobile experience. The rub was that PRMIA was not taking advantage of these features.
- PRMIA invested in a new learning mangement platform; they selected Articulate Storyline.
- They started re-developing their in person courses to be offered online.
- They offered courses online, in real time, but also recorded courses for on demand viewing later.
Lessons Learned

After about a year of effort and redevelopment, here’s what PRMIA learned:
- When re-developing courses, their winning formula was to split up a course into 10 nano lessons, each about 5-10 minutes long.
- The sessions work best when they are standalone, i.e., members can pick and choose the sessions that interest them, and don’t need to have taken any prerequisites in order to take a specific sesson.
- When offering online courses, you need a really dynamic speaker AND really great slides. Otherwise, it’s hard to keep the attention of the students.
- eLearning must be mobile-friendly. Test out your online courses yourself on a phone and tablet and make sure you can navigate the environment easily.
- Solicit feedback from registrants and have a plan to respond to comments.
Is your organization ready for an eLearning strategy?
December 19, 2017
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.
August 25, 2017
The Life Changing Benefits of Google’s Primary Inbox

I blogged recently that Matrix Group switched over to Google Apps. I have had a personal Gmail account for many years now and my family can’t function without our shared family Google calendar.

So now I have Gmail at work and I’m loving it. I especially love Gmail’s inbox configurations. Here’s how it works.

You can have one inbox and all of your email will flow into it. Minus the spam, of course, which Gmail does a great job of filtering. So far, no false positives.

Or, you can configure your email to have multiple inboxes. The default setting divides your email into Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates. Gmail will automatically put email notifications from sites likes Twitter and Facebook into the Social inbox. Ecommerce promotional emails from sites like Nordstrom and Snapfish go into Promotions. Email newsletters and bulk emails usually go into Updates. Spam goes into a spam folder and you get a summary each day. Everything else goes into Primary.

This auto sorting by Gmail has been life changing. I actually feel like I can focus on the emails that need my attention most. Like the email from a client wanting an update. The inquiry from a prospect. The request from a staff member for clarification on a set of project specs. My inbox has gone from hundreds of emails a day to fewer than a hundred.

The best part? I can train Gmail to do a better job of sorting my emails.

The emails to the DC Web Women list were going into Primary. I moved a message to Updates and Gmail asked if future messages should be sorted that way. Yes, please!

Email newsletters from my sons’ school were going into Updates so I moved one into a Primary and now those messages go into Primary. Phew! Now maybe I won’t miss the next opportunity to come into the classroom and read with my son.

It’s still a battle to manage all of my emails. I still have to go into each inbox and review the emails and take action, tag for later, unsubscribe or delete.

But when I’m busy, I know that Gmail will do the first line of sorting so I can focus on the most important emails of the day. Yes, I still get behind, BUT I don’t feel as buried at the end of each day. This is a victory.

November 28, 2016