About Drupal 8 Migrate

The migrate module has been moved into the core in Drupal 8, showing the community dedicated to making the process of upgrading between versions or migrating into Drupal easier. The migrate module takes advantage of the Drupal 8 Plugin system, offering developers with several plugin types that they can implement: MigrateProcessPlugin, MigrateSourcePlugin, and MigrateDestinationPlugin.

Quick Recap of our previous blog:

  1. Complete rewrite & moved into Drupal 8 core
  2. Out of the box support for D6 -> D8 and D7 -> D8
    1. Nodes, Users, Comments, Profiles, Taxonomies
    2. Content & Configuration
  3. Support for custom sources and destinations
  4. Processors for working with/manipulating data

Series Mapping:

Part 1: Migration Setup & Mappings

Part 2: Working with Processors

Part 3: Coming soon!

Drupal 8 Migrate Module Overview

The Drupal 8 migrate module that is shipped with core provides a set of API’s for setting up migrations. The module also provides extensible object-oriented base classes and interfaces for migration plugins including:

  1. Source & Destination Plugins
  2. Process Plugins
  3. Config Migration Mappings

While the migrate module has been moved into core, the contributed space still provides significant value and I wouldn’t recommend trying to build a migration without it:

  1. Migrate Plus: The Migrate Plus project provides extensions to core migration framework functionality as well as examples.
  2. Migrate Tools: The Migrate Tools module provides tools for running and managing Drupal 8 migrations.

Creating Migration Mappings

In Drupal 8 all of your migration mappings are done through configuration files. In Drupal 7 these migration mappings would have been done in classes through the $this->addMapping() function.

Configuration files provide the blueprint for the migrations, and there are two main types of configuration files that we will need to define:

  1. migrate_plus.migrate_group.<name>.yml
  2. migrate_plus.migrate.<name>.yml

Migration Group

The migration group is a configuration file and is similar to the idea of hook_migrate_api in Drupal 7. This configuration file defines a group of migration classes and configures global configuration/settings to be shared across the classes.  

  1. id – Unique identifier
  2. shared_configuration – Defines shared configuration between all migration classes that are part of this group. **Example: setting the source database to use
  3. dependencies – Sets the dependencies for this set of migration classes to function

Let’s see an example:

Migration Configuration File

The migration configuration file is similar to a migration class in Drupal 7. At a high level, the migration config file defines the metadata and field mappings for a particular migration in Drupal 8. There are 5 key concepts that you need to be aware of in the migration configuration file:

  1. Definition – The definition of this migration class, its dependencies, and what migration_group it belongs to
  2. Source – What migration source should be used for this migration when it is run (i.e. where am I migrating my content from?)
  3. Destination – The destination for the migration (i.e. where am I migrating my content to?)
  4. Field Mappings – The mappings from Source -> Destination
    1. Processors – The processing of the source data so that it can be consumed by the destination

Let’s see an example:


Stay tuned for our next blog post in our migration series on custom processors. In this post, we will dive into what it takes to create a custom processor for a WordPress to Drupal migration.

Would you like help to create a more detailed plan for migrating your website to Drupal 8?

Contact Us – We would be happy to help!

B2B website design that focuses on the user experience will continue to be a top priority for brands who thought UX was only for consumer and e-commerce sites. In a recent blog post, we offered some of the best practices for developing an effective user experience on a business-oriented website. In this post, we will explore some additional best practices for the B2B website design that puts the user first in its architecture.

Write the way your targets think.  When potential buyers visit your website, they will have a level of knowledge that most often is not as deep as you. Write content for who they think and eliminate jargon or text that won’t keep their attention. Use language, phrases, and concepts that are more likely to be familiar to them.

Make sure the text you include on your site appears in a logical order, but it should be natural as well. Confer with key customers and ask them to describe what your solution, services or products mean to them. What problems do they solve, and what were their pain points before working with you?

Let the buyer maintain control. Eliminate designs that override how a prospect might want to interact with the website. Autoplay videos, which have become ubiquitous across social media platforms and many news websites, can frustrate visitors who view these are a nuisance.

Don’t assume what the visitors want to do; let them play the video only if they want to. It should supplement, not be a substitution for, good content that is in text on the page.

Automatic carousels, once a common feature on many high-end websites, have also lost their allure, for the simple reason that they don’t work. Besides the fact that motion in carousels is distracting and rarely timed at the right intervals, it doesn’t present key messages to the visitor where they will be certain to see all of them. Layer information for your website in a way that makes it easy for your buyers to discover and explore instead of using an element that is less effective.

See how Bluetext can help your brand deliver an effective user experience.

User experience and personalization was the top trend for website development, and it will continue to be for 2018. Designing and executing the best architecture for a website engagement and conversion, while offering the right content at the right time to improve SEO and move prospects through the sales funnel, needs to be every marketing executive’s top priority. It remains a process of emotional transformation for many organizations, as top executives push still need to be convinced that creative design alone isn’t going to make their website the business tool that it needs to be.

With that in mind, here are our top tips for creating websites with user design as the first and foremost priority:

  1. Personas are evolving. It’s easy to look at personas as a type of user who fits into certain common demographic categories. In the political arena, for example, a typical persona might be the “soccer mom,” shorthand for suburban mothers in the 30-45 age range whose main concerns are focused on their children. That makes sense for political purposes, but it gives little insight into how people actually engage with a website. We are recommending grouping personas into categories according to what they want to do on the site. Is it browsing, comparison shopping, or looking for specific content in order to make a decision. Recognizing these groupings offers more useful insights about what they want from their experience, and how best to deliver that content when they want it.
  2. Less is more. It’s easy to clutter up a website with tons of promo boxes and fly-out menus. But the goal is to make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for and take the actions that we want them to take. Instead, design the home and landing pages to reduce the tasks required of users to the bare minimum. Make it simple, and get rid of all the clutter that doesn’t add value or that serves as a distraction.
  3. Design the user experience. Remember that designers are always working on large monitors with the best resolution. Unfortunately, most users are on laptops, tablets or mobile devices. User design for that reality shouldn’t be an afterthought. Visual hierarchy, spacing, content grouping, positioning, and size should be solved in the wireframe process before a visual designer is passed the assignment.
  4. Take a field trip. There’s an old adage in real estate that says the more houses a homebuyer visits, the more likely they are to know the one they want when they see it. That’s why one of the early steps in our design process is an extensive virtual field trip to explore design elements in scores of websites across multiple industries. The idea is to show the client team the wide range of user designs that are out there on the web and to react to the design elements and functionality in multiple settings. We watch their faces closely during this exercise to see what they respond to, and to give them the confidence of knowing it when they see it.
  5. It’s all about the user. It’s easy to gravitate to what you like for the website based on your own preferences. But it’s not about you, it’s about your customer and the user experience. While tempting to select design elements with your own preferences and tastes in mind, that won’t help engage your target audiences if they have a whole different set of preferences and needs. Always remember that it’s about what users want to do. Our job is to help them to get the content and take the actions they want in the easiest and most intuitive way possible.

See how Bluetext can help design a website with a great user experience. 

Many companies turn to Bluetext for a rebrand to increase visibility and market share, to better compete against other major challengers, and to enter new markets with a compelling message. In the case of some of our clients, the goal is to launch their product or service into the market with a look and feel that will attract attention and result in an acquisition. It’s always gratifying when our work pays off for our clients.

So we like to brag just a little when our rebrand clients succeed in a transaction that takes them to the next level. That’s the case with NetWatcher, a mid-market cyber-security service, that was just acquired by Qualsys, a cloud security provider that has been making a lot of noise in the market.

Our client came to us two years with a service that presented a new approach to the mid-market cyber challenge facing many medium-sized businesses: How to protect against threats such as weak passwords, unsecured assets, unsafe employee behavior, and outdated software that leave their networks vulnerable to attack. Their solution was a network appliance that monitors traffic inside the firewalls for anomalies that could spell trouble.

As the main focus of the rebrand, Bluetext developed a brand look and feel and name – NetWatcher – to reach the large mid-market audience the company was targeting for growth. We designed and built a new website designed to help customers and MSPs – managed service providers who are key channel partners for the business – understand the benefits of the solution to their organizations. And we launched this new brand at the MSP World Conference in Las Vegas. During the awards portion of the conference, NetWatcher was honored with the “Best in Show” award for its innovative and promising solution designed specifically to address the security needs of small and medium-size businesses.

Congratulations to the NetWatcher team for building a successful new brand in the crowded cybersecurity space, and for achieving your goal of an acquisition by a major player, taking your solution to an even larger audience. Bluetext is proud to have been a part of your success.

Looking to rebrand so you can rise to the next level? Learn how Bluetext can help.

Are you still on Drupal 6?

Whether you operate a blog, a small business page, or a large corporate website, if you are still operating on Drupal 6 it is past time for you to consider upgrading your operations. Drupal 6 officially reached End-of-Life on February 24th, 2016. Since then, the Drupal community has largely abandoned support for this version of Drupal.

Why does this impact me?

Anyone running their business on a Drupal 6 version should be concerned because the Drupal community has moved on. As an open source platform, the vitality of Drupal depends on contributors adding new components, modules, features and more. When the community moves on to new versions of Drupal, the older versions are no longer receiving the care and attention required to maintain modern content platforms.

By not adopting Drupal 8, you no longer have the community actively working on modules, bugfixes, improvements, and most importantly, security updates and improvements. The Security team is no longer providing Advisory updates for Drupal 6, and the majority of modules are no longer supported by the maintainers. The bottom line? If you are still operating on an old version of Drupal, you are exposing your site to unnecessary security risk.

Uh oh…so how do I make the switch to Drupal 8?

It’s easy! Upgrading your Drupal site using a migration approach. The first step is to decide how you want to handle your upgrade. Use these questions to help you get started:

  1. Am I happy with how my website functions and how it looks?
  2. Does my website/brand need a refresh or update?
  3. Do I want to refresh my content as part of this upgrade?
  4. What are the key functions that my website needs to perform?

Based on your answers to the questions above, you will likely fall into one of two categories: Lift & Shift or Website Rebuild.

Lift & Shift: As is migrations

Drupal 8 has made significant strides to make the upgrade process from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 as smooth as possible. Mike Ryan and others have made a huge impact in this space, rewriting the migrate module from the ground up and including it in the Drupal 8 core. The fact that this was added as a Drupal core initiative speaks volumes of the importance that has been placed on this by the community.

If your site is mainly brochureware, the upgrade process from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 should be quick and relatively painless. The new migrate module not only migrates content, but it will also migrate data structures through a configuration migration tool. Wait, what? I can migrate my content types and taxonomy terms so that I don’t need to rebuild them!? The answer is YES! (…with some caveats of course).

For more information about the Drupal 8 migrate initiatives and upgrade documentation, check out the “Upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8” section on Drupal.org.

Website Refresh: Rebuild Content, UI and UX

So, I don’t have a basic brochureware site but I really need to refresh my brand. Can I still use these tools to take some of the load off of my shoulders? The answer is yes, but in a more limited fashion.

Depending on the size of your website, utilizing the D6 to D8 migration tools may still save you time and money. This will ultimately depend on how significant the changes to your information architecture and content will be.

If you have a large number of pages (let’s say >1000) and some percentage of these pages will remain relatively in-tact from an information architecture perspective (Blogs, Resources, Press), then you will likely still benefit from investing time in migration scripts.

If you are planning to refresh/rewrite all of your content AND provide a new UI/UX on your website, the effort to create a migration script may be higher than handling the process manually.

So, how do I get started?

If you are planning to move forward with an upgrade, it will be useful to check out the following links before you start:

While the idea of being able to be generic enough to meet a wide variety of peoples needs, it is unlikely that your migration to Drupal 8 will be handled out-of-the-box. In the likely case that you will need to customize, here are some more useful links:

Would you like help creating a more detailed plan for migrating your website to Drupal 8? Contact Us – We would be happy to help!

The year was 2014. The new Apple Watch was all the rage; selfies weren’t annoying the bloody hell out of everyone yet; and The Ice Bucket Challenge had everyone soaking themselves for a good cause. It was also the year I examined some of the most innovative B2G marketing and PR strategies that were helping government contractors and IT providers stand out from the crowd and grow their public sector revenues.

This past February, I put together a brief update on B2G digital marketing ideas for 2017, looking at the emergence of B2G virtual reality initiatives, innovative go-to-market campaigns, as well as 3-D interactive experiences for lead generation. But as we approach 2018, the time is right for anyone selling technology products and services to the government to think about what will move the needle in sales, branding and market leadership next year. Yes, white papers, webinars, as well as traditional public relations and advertising all play a valuable role if executed properly, but it requires more to become top-of-mind with government decision makers – and to stay there.

Here are 5 innovative B2G marketing strategies to consider for 2018:

Geo-Fencing

Geo-fencing is location-based digital technology that allows you to select a geographic point using latitude and longitude and then to create a virtual “fence” around that point of a given radius in which your ads can be served up.

For contractors and Federal IT providers, there are multiple ways that geo-fencing can be utilized to reach government decision makers. If you are seeking to do business with a specific agency, you could pinpoint a single DC Metro station in proximity to the agency office, then  deliver a targeted ad to anyone who comes within a 1-block radius of that location. Ads delivered through geo-fencing typically yield higher conversions and better ROI for marketers since they’re highly contextual.

Geo-fencing can also make an impact reaching prospective buyers at key industry and government conferences. Geo-fencing at conferences:

  • Uses GPS or Wi-Fi information
  • Create a barrier around a location and target everyone within that location
  • Usually a tight radius (around an event or storefront)
  • Deliver display, audio, video ads or mobile app notifications

Bluetext recently completed a project for client ARQ at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference. The police body cam and digital evidence market is crowded with products that frustrate their users. So when a new player with a better, complete approach wanted to enter the market with a solution far ahead of the competition, it turned to Bluetext for a name, brand, corporate identity and website that would get attention and convey its value to law enforcement agencies. For the official launch, Bluetext executed a sophisticated outreach campaign including mobile geo-fencing to drive attendance to ARQ’s booth at IACP that included interactive product demo’s, and a comprehensive retargeting campaign pre and post show.

Mobile Retargeting

The government decision makers you need to reach – as well as government workforces if you are employing bottom-up marketing initiatives – are on mobile devices…a lot. Frost & Sullivan found that almost three-fourths of government organizations issue smartphones to at least some employees and more than half deploy tablets. Consumers overall spend 5 hours per day on mobile devices, so the bottom line is that if you want to reach government decision makers, mobile has to be a big part of the equation.

Mobile retargeting is now a key element in most any successful government-focused campaign seeking to increase reach and engagement far beyond other channels. There are six key strategies to get started with mobile retargeting:

  1. Unsure on how to reach target audiences on their mobile devices? Think social media platforms. Today’s target audiences are more likely to browse their social media apps on their mobile than search websites. Take advantage of the tools that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer for their ad campaigns.
  2. Want to increase mobile traffic to your site? Optimize your website for mobile to fully take advantage of this platform. That means a design that is responsive for all devices, and features simple and concise headlines, titles and other text. More importantly, make sure that images are sufficiently compressed, reduce the number of redirects (nobody wants to wait for a new screen to load), and minimize code to maintain a high-performing experience.
  3. Not sure how to design for mobile? Think like a government decision maker visiting your website via a mobile device. That means simplified designs and copy, but also calls-to-action that are clear about where the visitor will land if they click on that button. Viewers don’t want to leave the screen they are on unless they know there they are going.
  4. Need to improve your reach on mobile? Safari is the leading browser for mobile devices, but leveraging Apple’s tool is not so easy. One simple trick: Make sure you are enabling Safari, which typically blocks third-party cookies in its default setting. Find a provider that is skilled at accessing Safari’s massive number of users.
  5. Still not seeing the conversions you expect? It could be your landing page. Try to simplify the actions on the landing page to make sure there is no confusion or abandonment from that conversion point.
  6. Want to get hyper-specific with your targeting? Try geo-fencing for conferences, events, shows and other gatherings of target audiences. Sophisticated new geo-locating tools allow geo-fencing to specific blocks around convention centers, hotels and other venues. Serving ads at the right time and place can pay big rewards.

Bluetext does mobile retargeting for many of its engagements, including:

  • For a leading satellite networking services provider, Bluetext surrounded the perimeter of a major trade show to drive traffic to its booth
  • For a leading cybersecurity company, Bluetext surrounded the perimeter of the RSA conference to drive traffic traffic to their booth featuring a cool virtual reality experience
  • For a leading healthcare company, Bluetext coordinated with their sales team and surrounded medical centers where their prospects work to drive brand visibility when they walked into work everyday on their personal cell phones.

Account Based Marketing (ABM)

If you are an old-timer like myself who still buys clothes at actual physical stores, you know that the sales racks are filled right now with unsold summer inventory, probably the same summer clothes you paid double for just a few months ago. But no matter how enticing the sale, we often bypass the out-of-season sale items in favor of what we will wear in the here and now.

This comes to mind as I started thinking about how businesses market their products and services to the public sector. You not only have to hit prospective new customers you want to convert and existing customers you want to upsell with the right message, but it has to be the right message at the right time. The right time, as is the case with summer clothes on sale as the weather turns colder, often comes down to when prospects and customers are in the frame of mind to be thinking about your product or service. Catch them too early and they will get distracted and move on; catch them too late and, well, that’s self-explanatory I suppose.

This challenge becomes more difficult for marketers trying to blanket a large number of customers and prospects. The ability to personalize the message and the timing is why more marketers are increasingly intrigued by Account-based marketing (ABM). With ABM you concentrate efforts on a very defined set of target accounts – a single Agency or even units within an Agency – and then utilize campaigns personalized down to the single account level.

Marketing automation leaders are also looking at ABM to round out their services portfolio. Recently inbound marketing and sales leader HubSpot invested in ABM startup Terminus as part of a $10.3 million Series B round. In its blog explaining motivation for the investment, HubSpot talks about the fact that while inbound marketing is valuable for targeting an individual throughout the purchase process and beyond, ABM is useful when there is a need to build a relationship with multiple stakeholders at once. When done right HubSpot notes, ABM is about “precision and personalization not brute force.”

Embrace the Inhumanity of Content Marketing

For government marketers, it can be incredibly frustrating to create a compelling white paper or develop a webinar you know will be of value to agencies, but see that content sit untapped or underappreciated. The fact is that prospective customers may want your white paper or webinar but…they may not know they want it. You might have to sweeten the pot.

Cards against humanity, the self-described, “party game for horrible people,” has gone from kickstarter campaign to global phenomenon. It is also an example of how you can utilize the concept of game cards to incentivize key prospects to download and access marketing content – ideally using a more sanitized version of the game.

Think about your buyer persona. What is their typical age range, gender, title, geographic location, etc.? This can inform a creative content marketing campaign in terms of theme (Game of Thrones, professional sports trading card sets, or a variation of Cards Against Humanity like ‘Cards Against IT Complexity’ that could feature various challenges that Agencies face with their IT systems and available only to prospects who download an ebook or whitepaper, or participate in a webinar.

Virtual Reality and 3-D Interactive Design

Virtual reality can lead to real government contracts. For all of the noise surrounding virtual reality in the consumer market, it has emerged as an effective platform for storytelling with technology companies targeting decision makers in the government and enterprise markets. For a Bluetext virtual reality project with client Varonis, we enabled their marketing team to navigate a complex customer landscape and to share the Varonis story and product to a wider audience using innovative technology. The Varonis Digital Briefing Center launched at a major conference that many of their existing and prospective customers attended, and enabled Varonis to scale their demos concurrently by 6x, differentiate in a global trade show, and drive traffic to their booth.

To drive user engagement and leads, forward-thinking B2G companies are looking beyond white papers and webinars and towards immersive user experiences. Bluetext client NJVC was looking for a powerful new message as well as an immersive experience to engage and inform its global audience. Bluetext delivered a cutting-edge user experience that merged 3-D interactive design with thought leadership content marketing.

With 1,300 IT professionals deployed globally supporting 200+ sites on six continents, NJVC is the partner of choice for federal agencies, commercial clients and large and small businesses. The NJVC experience is integrated into a responsive Mission CrITical campaign microsite designed to enable users to easily access the content that best aligns with their needs. Bluetext also recently collaborated with XO Communications to develop a 3D “Etherverse” experience placed prominently in the site to drive user engagement and leads.

Are you interested in taking your marketing strategy to the next level. Contact us

 

What is Render Caching?
Have you ever found yourself asking the question “Why are my changes to my twig template not showing up?” or “Why do I have to clear my cache every time I make a change to a preprocess function?”. The answer is: Render Caching. Render caching is the process of storing post-rendered data so that Drupal does not needlessly rebuild and re-render arrays.

Why Render Cache?
The process of loading, rebuilding and re-rendering entities in Drupal is a very expensive task and much of the time, is unnecessary. Render caching allows us to bypass much of the unnecessary processing and dramatically improve the site performance.

So… What does the Render Cache look like?
The first step in your journey is to understand what makes up the Render Cache property:

  • Cache Keys – a representation of a set of code that you want to make cacheable, and is typically something that is too expensive to render on every page load.
  • Cache Contexts – variations of what I am rendering. Does my display change based on user role, language, time of day, location, etc?
  • Cache Tags – custom identifiers that this render array depends on to render properly, such as Referenced Entity ID’s
  • Cache max-age – determines how long the item I am rendering can be cached for.  This should always be set.

The render cache is a “#cache” property that is defined on your render arrays. You are able to add and/or customize this for any render element.

Plan for caching
Working with render caching is something that you should be thinking about from the beginning of your project.

Some questions that may help you in the early stages of your project would be:

  • How often are pages on my site updated?
  • Are there any highly dynamic sections of the website? (ie. Stock Ticker, Countdown Timer, etc…)
  • Is there any content that is context specific? (ie. Location based, user role based, etc…)
  • Is the website complex enough to require custom render processing?

The importance of cache tags
Cache tags are where the magic happens! Cache tags allow the system to identify dependencies to a render object and invalidate pages when there are changes made to the dependent page.

As mentioned above, cache tags are custom identifiers that this render array depends on to render properly, such as Referenced Entity ID’s.

Real World Scenario:
Lets walk through an example: We have a website that has a blog post node/123: “My Drupal 8 Render Test” which is referenced in the recent content section on the home page, featured on a few of our product landing pages and in the related content of other blog pages.

In the example above, assuming that we have followed best practices and rendered our cache property arrays, the cache tag of “node:123” should have been added to the render tags array of the homepage, product landing pages and relevant blog posts that reference this item.

Now, we want to change the title of that page to be “Drupal 8 Render Caching”. When I save my node to make this update, it will trigger a cache invalidation of all nodes that have “node:123” in their cache tag list, thus ensuring that my new title shows up on pages where it is referenced.

For more advanced cache purging (memcache, varnish, CDNs), you will need to utilize the purge module. Acquia has recently launched their Public Beta for Acquia Purge as well, so if you are hosting on Acquia, it simplifies the process significantly.

There are more useful tidbits in the presentation that John Doyle, our CTO, gave at the DC Meetup in October.

 

Some additional community information around render caching:

 

When redesigning your website, an important decision is choosing between WordPress or Drupal platforms to host your new site.  Both platforms are open source software with a variety of plugins and modules available to increase functionality, but each platform has its own strengths better suited for different needs.  Here are five questions to ask when considering the right platform:

What are my website functionality needs?  Drupal hosts more advanced and in-depth features, such as user permissions, taxonomies, categories, blocks, views, etc.  These features are powerful and comprehensive if you know how to use them but useless and a hindrance if you aren’t familiar with the system.  The backend of Drupal is more complex whereas WordPress is more user-friendly and straight forward.  The platform best suited for your website depends on the required functionality and the user’s comfort level with the CMS.

How much content will my website have?  WordPress was originally built as a blogging platform and is not as suited to handle large volumes of content.  On the other hand, Drupal can handle thousands of content pages as well as thousands of users.  Drupal’s caching feature also increases the load speed of web pages.  For large complex websites, Drupal is the better platform by far.

What level of security will my website need?  Besides functionality and content volume, security is one of the largest differentiators between Drupal and WordPress.  Drupal provides enterprise level of security as well as in-depth security reports for its users.  The platform is secure enough that many government websites use the Drupal platform.  WordPress is prone to hackers, and it has been speculated the platform’s plugins open the system to possible security issues.

How technical is my team?  Many prefer WordPress with access to a variety of free themes and pre-built plugins that are easy to manage and available for use.  Drupal is more suited for custom development and the installation of its modules, the platform’s version of plugins, often require a developer to install and update.  WordPress features are more set and function out-of-the-box whereas Drupal allows for modules to be customized to your needs and requires more technical experience.

What are your cost constraints?  Drupal is a powerful, customizable, and secure platform but will require a Drupal developer to manage.  Premium themes and modules are more expensive on the Drupal platform while there are many free options on WordPress.  Due to content constraints on WordPress, as a company grows and expands its server costs to support the site on WordPress will increase significantly.

Drupal and WordPress are both powerful and useful platforms.  The decision of which to use rests largely on one’s needs, the functionality required, and how the website will develop and grow down the road.

Looking for best in class digital marketing?  Contact us.

Rebranding is not to be taken lightly. It demands a commitment of time, energy and resources to be successful. There are many things a company should consider and analyze before the decision to rebrand is made.  As the world grows increasingly digital, more and more aspects of people’s lives are affected by the instantaneous nature of information. This needs to factor in to the direction the brand needs to take. The accessibility of information at people’s finger tips has changed the mindset of consumers, posing significant challenges:

Where are your consumers?  It is difficult nowadays to find someone who does not own a smartphone with the ability to access the internet anytime and anywhere.  As consumers spend more time on smaller screens, companies must optimize all aspects of their websites and platforms to perform on these devices— or risk hurting their brand with hard-to-read and poorly-rendered webpages.  Companies either need to rebrand and keep up with the times or risk becoming obsolete.

Are you targeting effectively?  With the rise of the digital age is the emergence of social media platforms and numerous new ways for a company to reach the people they would like to target.  Each new medium requires a different strategy to navigate and not all companies are equipped to immediately do so.  A company’s current messaging and image may not have the ability to capture the attention of its target audience.  These obstacles are a clear sign that a company needs to revamp its brand to maintain a strong market presence.

How flexible is your current brand?  A company’s graphics and visuals must be scalable and adapt to different mediums.  Brand assets in the modern era are used for web, mobile, print assets, social media, icons, and the list goes on.  All these elements must be taken into consideration starting at the core of a brand’s design for the company to grow along with its consumer base.  When a company is unable to effectively utilize its brand in new mediums, a brand redesign is needed before the company falls too far behind.

As the digital age brings new challenges, it also brings new opportunities.  An increasingly responsive world may cause initial difficultly for a company adjusting to adapt, but by rebranding doors are opened for the new brand to reach its target audience like never before.

Looking for agency help?  Contact us

Today, a website is the front door to your association, and every effort must be made to deliver a powerful user experience for current and prospective members. Your digital platform must be modern and intuitive. Beyond a great design, it is important to make sure your website is addressing all of your association key performance indicators around member services, member retention, communications, activism, and engagement.

To this end, when thinking about your association’s website, a great design is not necessarily where you should begin. The first question you should ask yourself is, “Is our website working as hard for our association as it can to help us achieve our association goals in the most efficient manner.” Understanding where your members are coming from, how are they accessing the site, and what tools they need to be successful all must be asked up front through a discovery process in order to maximize the impact of a new website.

With that thought process in mind, here are some recommendations to consider when undertaking a new website design for your association:

  • Provide the tools and resources to help your members do their jobs more effectively. They are paying you to be their advocates, and they need your help in taking action, remaining relevant, and proving the impact and rationale for their membership. For one membership organization, we built a tool that enabled human resources professionals to directly send a presentation to their bosses to show the value and impact of their membership in that organization. It was a very effective tool for ensuring membership dues.
  • Clearly communicate the value and impact you provide. Make sure your messaging and value is clear right up front. We have worked with many associations who are going through an identity crisis and don’t understand why membership may be down or why they are less relevant than in the past. It may be time to audit your messaging and positioning, both internally and externally, to ensure it is relevant to your members and the communities you serve.
  • Don’t be afraid to brand with impact. Changing colors or changing logos can go a long way toward sending a powerful signal to your constituencies. And make sure that the design direction you take aligns with that of the industry you serve. If you that’s the tech community, make sure your brand feels techy. If you serve the healthcare community, make sure your brand aligns. You get the picture. Modern, fresh and engaging can really make an impact in the perception of your association as you go to market with a new website.
  • Content. Content. Content. Being a thought leader and delivering authoritative content is critical for success. Keep your content fresh and engaging, update it regularly, and address the current and emerging topics that are of importance to you members. Association content marketing is becoming a must for the most advanced associations.
  • Make sure your content is Search Engine Optimized and your architecture is designed for SEO best practices. There is so much talk about SEO that people get confused. But that should not be the case. Go analyze what people are searching for and align your content around that. Ranking high with Google and Bing can be very effective.
  • Go mobile. Look at your stats. People are accessing the web from mobile devices more than ever and the stats continue to rise. A responsive site is a must in today’s digital environment. If a user does not have a great experience with your association on a mobile device it can impact your value immensely.