Category: Blog

Branding for Nonprofits

Photo via Adobe Stock

Turn Your Cause Into a Brand People Remember

Standing out on social isn’t about volume — it’s about identity. When your nonprofit speaks with the same voice and shows up with the same look across platforms, people start recognizing you before they even read. That’s not branding fluff — that’s trust in motion. A consistent voice and visual style act as shortcuts to credibility, helping your message land faster and more often. If your presence feels scattered, it’s time to build one that sticks.

Understand the Basics: Voice Is Constant, Tone Is Contextual

Too many teams confuse brand “voice” with tone. They’re not interchangeable. Voice is your baseline identity — how your nonprofit sounds, what kind of language it uses, and what emotional frequency it operates on. Tone, however, flexes depending on the situation. The key is to remain consistent in core voice while allowing tone to shift appropriately across messages.

If you’re not sure how to start, begin by distinguishing voice versus variable tones. It’s a strategic decision, not a copywriting flourish. When everyone on your team — from social media manager to executive director — shares the same foundational voice, you stop rewriting everything from scratch and start building recognition with every post.

Brand Recognition Builds Real-World Trust

Supporters don’t just donate to causes — they donate to organizations they believe in. That belief doesn’t form in a vacuum. It’s shaped by what you say, how you say it, and whether that message holds steady across touchpoints. One Instagram post might spark curiosity. A newsletter follow-up could lead to a share. But it’s the repetition of voice and identity that creates the credibility to act.

There’s a direct connection between how identity increases donor confidence and the results you see during fundraising pushes. When people recognize your visuals and tone instantly — when your posts sound like you — they stop needing to ask, “Who is this?” That clarity clears the path for trust.

Internal Consistency Starts with Clear Guidelines

Visual identity isn’t just a logo. It’s colors, fonts, layout preferences, image style, spacing, and even what not to post. When you combine that with clear brand voice guidance, you get the ingredients for true cohesion. But these elements must be documented and accessible — not just something the design team keeps in their head.

Build a living brand system that can guide internal voice and visual standards. Give your interns and volunteers what they need to create content that sounds like you and looks like you — without heavy handholding. It prevents mismatched design. It makes onboarding smoother. And it cuts down on friction between departments.

Social Platforms Don’t Need Uniformity — They Need Alignment

Posting the same thing across platforms may feel efficient, but it often backfires. Each platform carries its own norms and content types. LinkedIn expects context. Instagram expects visual pop. Facebook favors community storytelling. If you treat them all the same, you’re not leveraging their strengths — you’re diluting your presence.

The goal isn’t to clone content, but to adapt it well. Look at examples showing brand applied well across platforms to learn how nonprofits shape content formats without losing identity. Use the same voice, swap the storytelling style. It works. The story flexes, the identity stays firm.

Consistency Moves the Numbers

Branding isn’t abstract. When done right, it shows up in your analytics. Post reach goes up. Engagement rate jumps. Donor return rate increases. A consistent brand doesn’t just look better — it performs better. One case study showed how a nonprofit’s rebrand directly contributed to a social engagement spike, website visit increases, and greater donor reactivation.

That’s not coincidence. It’s proof that branding success leads engagement jump. Cohesive branding means each post carries more than its own weight — it reinforces every post that came before. The effect builds. The metrics follow.

Avoid the Friction: Inconsistency Costs You

The most damaging brand mistake isn’t bad design — it’s scattered identity. A post that sounds like one person, followed by a video that sounds like another, erodes trust. So does a visual style that shifts too frequently. Your audience may not articulate it, but they feel the inconsistency.

You don’t need a design degree to fix this. You need clarity and repetition. Keep your visuals tight and your voice tighter. Pay attention to risks of inconsistent messaging and visuals and treat them like technical debt. Because if you don’t fix the fractures, they multiply — and eventually, they’ll show up as lost donors, not just clunky posts.

Where DIY Meets Identity

If you’re building your brand voice and visuals in-house, Adobe Express offers a nonprofit-friendly way to stay consistent without always outsourcing. It’s not a substitute for pro design — but it complements it beautifully, filling the gaps between big projects or campaign launches. These free and easy-to-use options can give your social channels a unified, polished feel — without becoming a second job.

Every post you publish teaches people what to expect from you. When your voice shifts and your visuals wobble, you lose more than style — you lose recognition. But when everything aligns, your brand becomes unmistakable. That’s when people start remembering, sharing, and backing what you do. Cohesion isn’t just design; it’s momentum.

Heron Design helps small businesses and nonprofits turn their story into a full marketing system — built to match your voice, stretch your budget, and move people to act. This article was written in partnership with Adobe.

How to Fix a Slow Website in 6 Easy Steps

A slow-loading website hurts your business in more ways than you might think. Obviously, it’s annoying to would-be website visitors to have to wait until your page loads (and according to a study commissioned by Google last year, website visitors will wait an average of two SECONDS for your site to load before moving on).

But if your website is slow, would-be prospects might not even get to you in the first place: search engine ranking algorithms, including Google’s, look at how fast your site loads. If your website loads slowly, it will hurt your search engine rank.

Here are the six easy steps for speeding up your website:

Step 1: Optimize your images. This is the #1 mistake rookie web designers and do-it-yourselfers make: using images that are way too big and relying on the website code to serve up the right sized image.

How do you fix this? First, resize your images to just a little bit larger than the size you’ll need for your website. Unless you have a full page background image, you typically won’t need an image that’s 3000 x 3000 pixels. If you don’t have photo editing software, online tools for resizing images include Canva and, my favorite, Sprout Social’s Landscape (https://sproutsocial.com/landscape).

Second, optimize your images. When you optimize your images, you reduce the file size as much as possible without sacrificing quality. Even when I optimize my images using Adobe Photoshop, I take it one step further by using the free online drag-and-drop compression service, TinyPNG (https://tinypng.com).

Step 2: Stop using unnecessary plugins. If you are using a framework such as WordPress, plugins are awesome – they make it easy to add bells & whistles and needed functions to your website, often for free. But they often add extra javascript and css stylesheets to the header of every single page in your site. If it’s needed, it’s worth it. But if it’s not, you’re paying the price in page loading times.

It’s easy to install a plugin and then forget about it. Do a plugin audit regularly to make sure that every plugin that’s active on your website is needed.

Step 3: Don’t use too many fonts. Unless you’ve got a compelling design reason, don’t use more than three different font families on your website. It looks unprofessional and cluttered, to begin with, and loading additional fonts adds time and requires more resources.

Step 4: Minify all your CSS and Javascript files. When you minify files, you remove all comments, extra spaces and hard returns, all of which are ignored by browsers anyway, and drastically cut the size of these files.

Where possible, load your minified script files from the footer of your web pages instead of the header. This doesn’t actually speed up page loading times, but it speeds up the time it seems to take the page to load, which is all your website visitors care about.

Step 5: Enable gZIP compression. When gZIP compression is enabled, your server send web elements – images, style sheets, Javascript, etc. – in a single compressed package from the server to the browser. It’s an easy way to speed up your website performance.

Most web hosts have gZIP compression available, but it often needs to be manually added. To enable gZIP compression, you’ll need to make a simple change to your .htaccess file.

If you have cPanel, here’s how to view your .htaccess file:
(Note: if you do not have cPanel, you can find your .htaccess file by accessing your website through FTP.)
1. Log into your cPanel.
2. Under Files section, select File Manager menu.
3. cPanel will popup a message asking you where you would like land within your website directories. In the same window, you will see the checkbox asking if you would like to show hidden files. Check the checkbox Show Hidden Files and click Go.
4. Under public_html folder of your website, find and edit the file called .htaccess.
5. Paste the following code into .htaccess file at the end of your existing content.

## GZIP Compression ##

# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
# Removing browser bugs for older browsers
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent

## END GZIP Compression ##

Step 6: Cache your files. A website cache is a snapshot of your files stored in temporary memory – if your website can show itself without having to regenerate the pages every time it will load much faster. There are a multitude of plugins and free online services to do this. My go-to is CloudFlare, which not only will give you a free SSL certificate – also a must for higher SEO ranking – it also provides full site caching.

However, when you cache your files, you also need to specify when cached files should expire. To do that, you’ll once again need to edit your .htaccess file, and add the following code to the end, editing the expiration times as needed: 


Header set Cache-Control “max-age=84600, public”

 
## EXPIRES HEADER CACHING ##

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/png “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/svg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType text/css “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/pdf “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/javascript “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access 1 year”
ExpiresDefault “access 2 days”

## EXPIRES HEADER CACHING ##

Before making any of these changes, always back up your website, just in case something goes wrong.

Some causes of slow-loading websites – bulky WordPress themes, for example – don’t have a simple fix, other than a site overhaul. The steps listed above are relatively simple things that you can do to speed up your website.

I’m Leslie Smith, I own Heron Design. I’ve worked in marketing & communications for three decades, and started my company 18 years ago. I love helping clients realize how much power they have in creating their own lifestyles. I believe that the right branding & marketing can open a whole new world for a business owner.

You can learn more about me here. If you’d like to talk about whether I can help you, let’s set up a 20-minute conversation!

My Advice for You – From Decades of Experience

Yes, you can do this.

Starting a business is hard. You’re putting everything on the line – your reputation, your income, your very way of life – and it’s scary, I know. You’re going to have a lot of people tell you what your next step should be. I’m sure you’ve seen, and probably already researched, all the things you need to do to get your business started: business license, check. Business plan, check. Mission statement (not completely necessary, but check). Budget, check. Marketing plan, office space, email, check, check and check.

But there’s one thing that you won’t hear about in school, or from small business startup guides, even though it’s important. In fact, it’s probably the one thing that will have the most impact on your success as a business owner.

It’s your confidence. Your mindset. How you see yourself – and how well you can envision your success and the path that leads there for your company.

Unfortunately for most women, confidence doesn’t come naturally. We’re smart, of course. And ‘accomplished.’ And we damn sure know how to do our jobs. But then there’s that little voice inside, the one that cries out, “You’re in over your head” or “You don’t know what you’re doing” and “You’re crazy to dream so big” or the worst one, “You’ll fail.” If you listen to that voice long enough to fall under her influence, she’ll be right.

Or you can ignore that negative voice. Because right now, this very minute, you have everything you need to succeed.

You’re not in over your head. And you can win at this. You were made for success. And here’s how you’re going to do it.

(1) Believe in yourself. You know that dream you have, the one of accomplishing BIG things? Not everybody has that. (I know, it surprised the hell out of me, too, when I first discovered that.) If you’ve got a big dream, God put it there for a reason. And then he gave you the means to reach it. Anything you can envision, you can achieve. All you have to do is give your mind a reasonable path to get there, because once you believe there’s a way, you can do it.

(2) Do something every day, or at least every week, that scares you. Don’t be complacent. Challenge yourself. Push your boundaries. Grow. This is how your confidence grows. And confidence has a beautiful way of growing into all the other parts of your business and life. Confidence is the #1 secret weapon of successful female entrepreneurs.

(3) Know that you’re not going to get where you’re going overnight. And once you get there, there’ll be another ‘there.’ So enjoy the journey – every single step of it. You chose this life, in part, to give yourself freedom. Enjoy that freedom. Take time every day to do something fun. Otherwise, what’s the point?

(4) Take care of yourself. As the business owner, you are your most important asset. That means you have to drink enough water, every day. Eat your veggies. Enjoy wine, but not too much, and try to do so with friends at least once a week. Plan to exercise every day, because there’ll be days when you have to skip, and if you shoot for every day you’ll get it in at least four times a week.

(5) Sleep. Time spent in bed is never a waste, and you’ll always be more productive after a good night’s sleep. There will, most likely, be times when you have to work late into the night or even sunrise to meet a project deadline, but make these rare, your choice, and worth it. Don’t do it for less than your time is worth, and reward yourself afterward.

In short, treat yourself like you would one of your own children. Because they’re watching you – and learning how they should act when they start businesses of their own.

(6) Find a fight song and start a playlist that inspires you. There’ll be times, usually once a day, when you’ll need it.

(7) Every single morning, spend at least 10 minutes visualizing the life you want to live. Don’t allow any interruptions from outside, or negativity from within. Then spend another 10 minutes in stillness. This is where inspiration is born.

(8) Don’t work in your pajamas, unless it’s 5 am. When it’s time to be at your desk, be dressed, with makeup and hair done, if that’s your style. Even if you don’t have a mirror in front of you, you’ll know. How you look affects how you act, so dress like the woman you want to be.

(9) If someone believes you can reach your dream, talk to them as much as they’ll allow. If someone isn’t sure you can do it, or worse, thinks you’re wasting your time, avoid them at all costs. And if you can’t avoid them, for heaven’s sake don’t talk to them about your work. Naysayers can drag you off your path and send you into a downward spiral without ever realizing it – especially the ones who are just trying to be helpful. You’re not avoiding them forever; once you’ve gotten a couple of major wins, you won’t be as vulnerable. You’ll know when it’s safe to be around them again. (Unless you discover that negative people are best avoided permanently because they suck the joy out of your life.)

(10) Don’t look back, because that’s not where you want to go. When you make a mistake, don’t dwell on it. If someone makes you mad, let it go. Save all your mental energy for the present and your future.

You’ve got this. There are many, many women who’ve gone down this path before you, and we get to enjoy the freedom that you can only get from being your own boss. It’s hard, at times, but it’s also the best way to live your life.

Embrace it, and enjoy every minute.

Welcome to the club.

I’m Leslie Smith, I own Heron Design. I’ve worked in marketing & communications for three decades, and started my company 18 years ago. I love what I do for a living, and I love helping clients realize how much power they have in creating their own lifestyles. I believe that the right branding & marketing can open a whole new world for a business owner.

You can learn more about me here. If you’d like to talk about whether I can help you, let’s set up a 20-minute conversation!

Digital Marketing

Avoid This #1 Mistake in Building Your Website

What’s the number one thing business owners do wrong when it comes to building their websites?

Starting without a plan. Not having a clear marketing strategy overall for their business, and what role, exactly, their website needs to play.

But it’s easy to do. Even though I know better, late on a Friday afternoon last October I decided that my own website looked embarrassingly out of date. With no major plans (i.e. high school/middle school sporting events) for the weekend and cold rain in the forecast, I dove in to give the site a makeover. After an entire weekend spent coding out a new site, I stepped back to admire my work.

And realized that I had totally bombed. I had a pretty picture, but no call to action. I had revamped my online portfolio, but left no clear path leading site visitors to it, or letting them know the logical next step. While the look of the site and my portfolio pages were usable, I had to start over on the structure and outline for the rest of the site. Wasted effort, when I could’ve been curled up by the fire reading a book. (If you’re a business owner, you know how rare those days are!)

Building a website without a plan is like walking into a builder’s office and telling the owner, “Here’s some money; build me a structure.”

You could end up with four bedrooms, three baths, and a two-car garage … or an office building … or the most expensive treehouse in your town. If you don’t know what you want when you begin, there’s no telling what you’ll have in the end.

A website works like any other project: begin with the end in mind.

Your website has the ability and power to be your marketing superstar.

What role does your website play in your marketing strategy?

  • It could be the place where your products live online (i.e. – your online store). Customers come in, decide what they want, pay for it and products are shipped to them.
  • Or maybe it’s where you bring in prospects, use it as a ‘get to know you’ place and gather their emails and other contact information, like a virtual business card exchange.
  • Or where new clients or patients fill out online forms that are imported straight into your office computer, saving you hours each week of data input.
  • Or, it can be a resource library for your existing clients, with how-to guides, material safety data sheets, and product information.

Your website can be all of these things. Or none of them. Maybe you need something entirely different.

The point is, a website – your website – has the ability and power to be your marketing superstar. It can boost your sales, improve your image, and save you hours of administrative time. If, and only if, you build it to do those things.

Or you can start without a plan, simply going for a cool look, and discover half-way through that you’ve got nothing usable. Best-case scenario, you’ll waste a weekend.

So what’s the first thing you need to do when building your website? Plan where it fits into your marketing strategy, and what you want it to do.

There are plenty of other mistakes I’ve seen over the years. These round out my top ten:

2. Not defining – and knowing – your target audience. Who’s your ideal customer, and what’s the best way to attract them? What do they want from your website?

3. Using the wrong messaging. What are your products or services? What problem does your product or service solve? Address the key reason someone is visiting your website first. Otherwise, you may lose them before you get the chance to explain anything else.

4. Not matching your company’s branding. Your website colors, the fonts you use, even the style of your graphics and images … these are part of your brand. If your customers, clients, and prospects don’t recognize you when they open your website, you’ve done it wrong. And you’ll either lose them or waste valuable time recommunicating who you are.

5. Using bad images. Images that are poor quality or too small scream cheap. Images that are irrelevant or don’t match the rest of your website are confusing. Both make you look unprofessional. On the other hand, few people take the time to select high-quality images that match their brand’s color tone and style – doing this one thing can really help you stand out.

6. Not having a clear call-to-action. This goes back to your marketing plan, and your website’s role within it: what do you want your website visitors to do after they land on your site? Don’t leave it up to chance; lead them where you want them to go.

7. Not providing enough information. Online space is cheap. If someone visits your website in search of information, make sure it’s there – and easy to find.

8. Providing too much information all at once. It’s easy to overload your visitors with information. Don’t cut back on what’s there, just put it into bite-sized chunks that are easy to follow and search through.

9. Designing your website for a desktop. In the U.S. last year (2018), 58% of internet traffic came from mobile devices. So not only should your site look good on your phone, it should load fast and have mobile-friendly navigation, buttons, and links. Otherwise, you’re potentially turning away over 40% of your traffic.

10. Wasting time. Pages that load slow waste your website visitors’ time. Plus, they’re annoying. And they really hurt your search engine optimization (SEO). So make sure your images are optimized, you get rid of unnecessary scripts, fonts, and features, and keep your pages to a manageable size by breaking them into smaller pages when necessary.

If you’re getting ready to build a new website for your company or practice, I hope this information helps. If you need help putting together a plan for your website, let’s talk. For almost 30 years I’ve developed marketing strategies and plans for businesses and organizations, and in the last decade, I’ve personally built over 100 websites.

If you’d like to learn more about how I can help you, call my office at (423) 402-0422 or email me at [email protected].

What if you decided when it was time to leave work today?

If you’re a professional, you know what you need to get done at work. If you’re a professional who’s also a mom, you know when you really need to make time for your family, and when choosing work is the better option.

You are the one – sometimes the only one – who understands all the moving pieces that go into that decision.

But if you work for a large firm, you don’t always get to decide where you’ll be based on what’s best for everyone involved. The decisions get made for you.

So what if you could decide what was best for your family, and it was up to you to balance that out with what your clients, your company, and you, need?

What if you decided when it was time to leave work today?

Almost 18 years ago, I decided to find out, after my boss told me to find a daycare that stayed open later.

I had left work the night before and flown across town to get to our daycare before they closed. Being the last one picked up always terrified my oldest, who was three at the time. And so the pickup rush was a daily source of anxiety for me.

It had been three weeks since my husband had graduated from college and accepted a job out of town, coming home on the weekends. Before graduation, he picked our son up right after nap time each day, which allowed me to work as late as I needed. I was usually the last person out of the building. (Although very nice on the inside, my office was on ‘that’ side of town. The cleaning guy used to sit in my office and wait after he finished – I usually bought him a Coke – because he was uncomfortable with me closing up and walking to my car alone.)

With my husband gone during the week, I could no longer stay at the office after we closed. I had never missed a deadline at work, and that dedication continued; I still put in the time, just not there. I took work home and worked in the early mornings.

I found that I could get as much done between 4 and 6am as I could in four hours in the office, and I was proud of my productivity. But the top management in my organization was looking at more than productivity. They wanted face time – their version of dedication.

I had long dreamed of starting my own company. Months before, I had even put together a business plan. But I was absolutely terrified of going out on my own; I was still the main breadwinner in our family and didn’t want to risk our security.

That Tuesday, my boss’s ultimatum changed that.

Even though we had an awesome daycare, I already didn’t like how long my son’s day was, and I wasn’t about to make it longer. My boss’s ultimatum was the push I needed. I borrowed money for startup expenses and to cover our bills for three months. That Friday I turned in my two weeks’ notice and told everyone I knew that I was starting my own company.

Fortunately, in those two weeks I booked enough business to hit the ground running, and I’ve never looked back. Since 2001 I’ve helped countless business owners create ad campaigns, marketing strategies, logos, and websites, and I still love what I do. My oldest is now away at college, but I still arrange my schedule in the afternoons to be there for his teenage brothers.

Owning your own business is hard work, and there are days when I put in long hours, but those hours are on my terms. And every day I’m grateful for my freedom to choose what’s most important for my schedule.

I am convinced that professional women, moms especially, can figure out how to do everything we need to get done, but only if we’re allowed the freedom to choose our schedules.

For some, that may mean starting work at 4am; for others, 10pm to midnight is more productive.

Taking time off during the ‘work day’ for things that really matter allows us to be there, fully, wherever we are – whether it’s at work or with our families. And being there fully makes us more productive.

If you’re struggling with the balance between corporate life and taking care of your family, there’s a better way: Become an entrepreneur.

You can create a ‘job’ that you love, that works for your family, with the freedom you need for the best life possible.

–Leslie Smith
Owner, Heron Design

Want inspiration for starting your own business? Subscribe to our newsletter!

Top photo by Igor Starkov from Pexels

Website Hosting Basics

Setting up a website isn’t rocket science. Get past the jargon, and it’s actually quite easy to understand.

You have a business, you need a website. That’s a given. For a little while, a brand new business can get by with just a Facebook page, but sooner or later you’ll want to own your internet presence.

So, you find a registrar, choose a domain name, find a web host, set up hosting, add WordPress, build out your site, point your DNS to your web host, and voila! You have a website.

Yeah … huh?

Actually, yeah. That’s exactly how you do it. It sounds complicated because of the web developer jargon, but it’s not. Here’s the process, same as the above, in regular English:

  • Select the company to buy your domain name from (this is your domain name registrar).
    Typically, registrars charge a yearly fee to reserve a domain name and give the owner the right to use it. In addition to registering domain names, the registrar records where on the internet your website files are stored and directs your website traffic to that location.
  • Choose your domain name.
    When you purchase your domain name, unless you already have website hosting set up, select the option to park it. This means you own the domain name, but it isn’t pointing website traffic anywhere, yet.
  • Select a different company to store the files for your website on a computer that is always accessible to the internet (this is your web host).
    Your web host will store your website files on a computer called a domain nameserver.

>> At this point, you MAY want to consider hiring a developer, because they can do the next few steps seamlessly, where it may take you a bit of time to sort through. Either way, you SHOULD learn the basics of what’s involved. This is your business, after all.

Recommended Platform: WordPress

There are a lot of options when it comes to the framework for your website. I highly recommend WordPress because it is versatile, secure and search-engine friendly. The downside of WordPress is its learning curve, but I’ve found the most difficult part is setting up your site. Once that’s done, learning how to add pages and make changes is not hard to learn.

  • Have your web host create a WordPress installation for your website – this is often a ‘one-click’ installation. If that’s not an option, follow the installation instructions on WordPress.org.
  • Choose a WordPress theme for your site, or start with the TwentyNineteen theme that comes with WordPress.
  • Add pages and content to your site. (If you can use Microsoft Word, you can add a page to a WordPress website.)
  • When you’re happy with the way your website looks, it’s time to make it ‘public.’ Until your domain name is pointed to your web hosts’ nameserver, no one can view your website.
  • To point your domain name to your web host’s server, edit the DNS settings at your registrar. At your website host, look up your website’s nameservers; this will typically be something like ns1.supercp.com, ns2.supercp.com, etc. Log into your registrar, find the place to edit your DNS (domain nameserver) settings, and change the settings to your website’s nameservers.
  • Within 15 minutes to 24 hours (yes, it’s a big window, web developers share your frustration), your domain name will point to your web host, and your website will be live.

My domain name is heronco.com. My domain name registrar is DirectNIC, and my website files are hosted at A2Hosting.

Keep ‘Em Separated

Many web hosting companies, such as GoDaddy and A2, offer to serve as both registrar and website host. On the front end, this is simpler and sometimes less expensive. But simpler and cheaper don’t equal better, especially when your complete online presence is at stake.

Why? If your hosting company controls your domain name, your hosting and your email, you’ve got all your eggs in one basket. If something happens to the company, your online presence is kaput. (Think it couldn’t happen to a major hosting company? Keep reading.)

With everything separate, if you ever decide to change your web hosting company, all you have to do is log into your registrar and edit your DNS (domain nameserver) record to point it to a different web host. If your current host controls your domain name, things become exponentially more difficult – in extreme cases, they can lock your domain for up to 60 days. Having complete control over your own domain name is a much better situation to be in.

Ask Me How I Know

It’s a lesson I learned the hard way.

In August 2005, I gave birth to my youngest – a beautiful, perfectly healthy baby boy. Nine days later, I noticed during a middle-of-the-night feeding that he had a slight temperature, and mentioned it to my husband. Crazy thing: right after he was born, our pediatrician was in our hospital room and I sneezed. Our doctor nonchalantly turned to my husband and said, “By the way, healthy babies don’t get temperatures.”

Remembering that conversation, my husband insisted that we call the doctor’s office, even though it was 2 a.m. Less than four hours later, the emergency room physician gently told us that our son had meningitis and that there was a good chance he would not survive the next 24 hours.

We lived in Chattanooga, TN. A few hours later, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, where I’m from.

In shock, I spent the next four days with my son in quarantined NICU, numbly staring at the television and the devastation Katrina unleashed. During that time, it never occurred to me that I had 24 websites hosted on servers in downtown New Orleans. Had I thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have worried, because I would have remembered that the company I used for web hosting – one of the top rated companies in the country at the time – had a mirrored backup server in San Francisco.

Except the unthinkable, the impossible, happened. Two days after the floods knocked out the company’s computers in New Orleans, their building in San Francisco caught fire. Temporarily at least, our website hosting was gone, and I was in no position to deal with it.

When the Easy Route Isn’t

Fortunately, my staff was on top of it. We had backups to every website. For 19 of them, they copied the sites to a new web host and changed the DNS settings at the registrar, pointing the domain names to the new host.

But for five of the sites, I had taken the easy route: in a hurry during setup, I bought the domain names through our hosting company and left them as our registrar. (Did I mention they had the highest customer service ratings in the country at the time? I thought we were safe.) No one could have foreseen a natural disaster on one coast and a fire on another temporarily knocking out the company, leaving us no way to edit the domain name settings for five stranded websites.

In the end – after several days – the websites were back up. And my son? He’s now a beautiful, perfectly healthy 13-year-old who’s a proud half-inch taller than his 15-year-old brother. No lasting damage from either crisis, but a lot of temporary heartaches.

Three takeaways: (1) Websites aren’t rocket science. Whether you handle it yourself or hire a developer, if you’re a business owner you can – and should – understand the basics of how they work. (2) Keep your domain name registrar and your website hosting separate. You never know what could happen. (3) Healthy babies don’t get temperatures.

‘Getting More Clients’ Should Not Be Your Marketing Goal

If you’re a small business owner and provide a professional service, “getting more clients” is probably a running mantra in the back of your mind. It could even be your top goal of the year.

More clients = more sales = more money = success, right?

Sure. If you’re happy working 80+ hours a week. If you don’t mind spending a huge chunk of your budget on marketing. If you want to stay stuck on the pendulum of either enough time, or enough money, but never both at the same time. If you want your business to run your life.

Or, you could change up that goal with one simple word. This one word can simplify your marketing. It can help you transform your branding into something that gives you confidence and clarity throughout every business deal. It can change your business into something that brings you joy. And it can make you more money.

Ideal. Five letters that will transform your business.

Change Your Goal

Change your goal from “Getting more clients” to “Getting more ideal clients.”

It’s that simple. But it requires a lot from you.

Adding the word “ideal” means you have to define it. You have to choose who your ideal client is. You have to choose what service you want to provide that ideal client. You have to choose how you really want to spend your work days.

It takes courage, but isn’t that why you went into business for yourself, to be able to have a choice on how you spend your life?

You can choose to do anything and everything for anyone who will pay you. Or you can choose the work that you are most passionate about – or most interested in – and the people that you’d most like to work with. You can choose to work with the clients who will bring you joy.

The point is not just to make you happier (although that’s a side effect with benefits beyond measure): when you are doing work that brings you joy, it’s easier to focus. You bring more energy. You do a better job. As a result, you make more money.

Your Marketing Gets Simpler

And your marketing becomes much simpler. When you’re no longer trying to be everything to anybody and instead focus on your ideal person, it’s much easier to get that person’s attention.

And that ideal client who you enjoy working with? They’re most likely going to like you back. As a service provider, your branding – done the right way – represents you, and your personality shines through. Plug that into your marketing, and you become a powerhouse. That ideal client, the one most likely to like you, connects with your marketing. Your message resonates. Suddenly things are getting easier.

You get to show up as you. Authentic. Real. You can kiss imposter syndrome goodbye.

When you walk into a presentation – whether it’s in a real room, an online meeting or just a phone call – if your marketing and branding have led the way, the person on the other side of the table is expecting, and just as importantly, wanting, you. All you have to do is be yourself.

In an age where 80% of business owners have admitted they lack confidence at least part of the time, walking into a meeting where all you have to do is be yourself, and having the confidence that goes with it, can be the difference between making a sale and leaving empty-handed. Salespeople with confidence are more likable. Service providers who are confident are more trusted. And business owners who are confident make more money.

It’s a whole lot easier than trying to be everything to everybody and spending your energy shifting back and forth, every meeting, every project, every day.

In fact, it’s ideal.

Nonprofit Website Tips

Add a Google Calendar to Your WordPress Site

Since writing this post, we’ve written a custom Calendar Plugin that offers our clients much more flexibility in displaying events. See it in action here. For more information on how we can create a similar plugin for your organization, reach out!

Need to add a calendar to your website? One of our clients, the Center for Mindful Living, had a Google calendar. It was easy for volunteers and staff to maintain, but the Google calendar was ugly – and didn’t match the peaceful modern feel of their website. They wanted a way to use their Google calendar, but make it blend in with their website. As usual, there’s a plugin for that. In this case, we found the plugin Simple Calendar.

A: Install the Simple Calendar plugin

From your WordPress Dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New. In the Keyword search box at the top of the page, type in Simple Calendar. WordPress will show several similarly-titled plugins, select the one by Simple Calendar. (Note: ALWAYS check the author when installing a new plugin to make sure it matches the one you’re looking for.) Click on the Install Now button in the plugin box, and then click Activate.

The free version of Simple Calendar allows you to display public Google Calendars. To make your Google Calendar public:

  • From Google Calendars, click on the dropdown icon next to the calendar you want to share.
  • Select Share this Calendar. This will take you to Google’s calendar sharing settings.
  • Check the box next to Make this calendar public
  • Click the Save button

Next, you’ll need the ID for the calendar you want to share:

  • In the Calendar Details tab, scroll down to the Calendar Address section.
  • Copy the Calendar ID (including the string @group.calendar.google.com) and paste it into a text file. You’ll need that in a few minutes.

B: Create a Google API

To allow website developers – that’s you – to integrate data from Google into other applications, Google created a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to transfer information back and forth. You’ll need to create a Google API key to allow your website to pull information from your Google Calendar. It sounds complicated, but it actually takes less than two minutes.

  1. Go to the Google Developers Console. If you don’t have a Google account – or you want an account that is separate from your personal Gmail account – create a new one.
  2. From the top Project menu select Create project.
  3. Give your project a name, agree to the terms, and click Create.
  4. From the Google Developers Console Dashboard, select Enable API. (If you don’t see this, click on the top left menu icon and select API Manager.)
  5. Under Google Apps APIs, select Calendar API. Then click Enable.
  6. Select Credentials under API Manager in the left menu, click Create credentials, then select API key.
  7. On the API key created popup screen, select and copy your newly created API key
  8. Navigate back to your WordPress dashboard.
  9. Go to Calendars > Settings. Paste your Google API Key here
  10. Click on Save Changes

C Add Your Calendar

To add your Google Calendar to your website, from your WordPress Dashboard, go to Calendars > Add New. Add a title for your Calendar (just like any other post).
  • Scroll to the Calendar Settings panel at the bottom part of the Edit Screen.
  • In the Event Source dropdown, select Google Calendar
  • Click on Google Calendar to open the Google Calendar Settings panel. This is where you tell Simple Calendar which Google Calendar to pull events from. Copy your Calendar ID that you saved in step A, and paste it into the Calendar ID input area.
  • Click the blue Publish button in the top right column to save your Calendar page.

You can choose to display your calendar as a monthly grid or a list, and both are customizable. The overall look can be set to Light or Dark, depending on your WordPress theme, and you can edit the colors for the calendar. More information on these settings can be found on the Simple Calendar website.

8 Simple Ways to Take Your Website from “OK” to “Awesome”

Thinking about a website overhaul? Here are eight ideas to incorporate:

  1. Pantone color swatchesYour color selection process should start with your logo, then take into account your existing marketing pieces. We suggest 3-5 colors as your base palette, then choose a contrasting color – think opposites on the color wheel – for your ‘call to action’ buttons.
  2. Free Google fonts are one of the best ways to incorporate your look into your website, as long as you limit it to 2-3 fonts that match your brand. Using 5 or 10 fonts just because they are available is a rookie mistake; it makes you look unprofessional and slows down your website.
  3. Your contact information and links to your social media pages should appear on every page of your website. We like to include them in the footer, but you can place them in the header, in a sidebar or floating on the edge of your site – just make sure they’re easy to find.
  4. Studies have shown that websites with the logo or name in the top left corner have better name recollection, and visitors find it easier to navigate through the site.
  5. Well over 50% of people surf the web using their smartphones, yet many websites display incorrectly on some mobile devices. (Test. Test. Test. And then, test again.) Is your site mobile-friendly? You can check here:
  6. The default WordPress setting for permalinks – the URL to each page – will kill your SEO. Take a look at these two permalinks:
  7. WordPress default: https://heronco.com/?post=661
  8. Permalink set to Post Name: https://heronco.com/8-simple-ways-to-take-your-website-from-ok-to-awesome/
  9. Which one do you think is more descriptive? Here’s a hint: search engines look at the URL for clues to page content, which makes the first one useless for your SEO. A much better practice is to enable ‘pretty permalinks,’ using the name of your Post or Page in the Permalink. A simple adjustment to your settings creates the perfect roadmap for Google: from your WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings > Permalinks. From here, click on Post Name and then Save Changes.
  10. If you aren’t using your domain name in your emails, your audience will question your professionalism. If you are a nonprofit, Google’s G-Suite for Nonprofits offers FREE email. Or, if you choose us to host your website, use the 30 @yourdomain emails included with our hosting package. We’ve got a step-by-step guide and free technical assistance to help you set things up.
  11. Make sure you have a clear map for the path you want your visitors to take through your website, and that the “next step” is easy for them to find. Do you want them to Buy Now🛍️, Donate Today💰, Sign Up📧, or just learn more about you? Make sure their next step is obvious.
    12. Speaking of the next step: how’s your website? If it needs help, give me 45 minutes, no strings attached, and I’ll save you hours of time. We’ll talk about what you need for your site, and I’ll help you put together a plan, even if you don’t sign up for our design services. Email me to set up a call. -Leslie Smith, owner

Brand New to WordPress? Here are some terms you should get to know.

WordPress is one of the most popular website frameworks in the world. Over 60 million people, according to WordPress, use it – that’s 31% of websites worldwide. But at first glance, it can seem a bit overwhelming. So, here’s a primer on the basics.

First, there are two ‘official’ WordPress websites: wordpress.com and wordpress.org. WordPress.org is the place where you can download WordPress software, for free, along with themes to control the look of your site, plugins to add additional features, user guides and support forums. With wordpress.org, you download the software and install it on your own website. And while the software itself is free, you will need to buy your domain name and web hosting from a third party, and be responsible for your own backups, updates and security.

WordPress.com, on the other hand, is its own web host, of sorts: it provides free WordPress websites. While very limited in scope – you won’t have your own domain name, for example – it works for beginner bloggers and others on a very limited budget. However, with wordpress.com, you can’t upload custom themes or plugins, modify the underlying code or control the ads that appear on the site. For companies and nonprofits alike, the first step in designing your website should be matching it to your brand. Customizing the look of a wordpress.com website is pretty tough, so we don’t recommend it for established organizations.

The look and feel of every WordPress website is controlled by its theme. A theme is a collection of templates and stylesheets that define the layout and front-end styling for your pages, and also colors, fonts and graphics, although some themes allow you to customize these, as well. Your WordPress theme works with and on top of the WordPress code; it usually doesn’t – and by usually, I mean shouldn’t – change the core functions of WordPress. In a well-designed theme, the theme files are separate from your content: all the text and images you add to WordPress are stored in your WordPress database. Changing your theme changes the way your information looks, but your information itself doesn’t change.

Out of the box, WordPress provides a pretty robust website. But most organizations will find that they need something a little more – whether it’s a contact form, a calendar, search engine optimization, or something as simple as duplicating content. These “something more’s” can be added with plugins. A plugin is code that adds a feature or function to your website, and, in my opinion, what makes WordPress such an incredible framework: hundreds of thousands of developers are constantly finding new features that they or their clients need, and writing plugins to do it. A saying we use almost daily in response to client requests is “there’s probably a plugin for that.” (And if there’s not, we’ll write one.) The cool thing about plugins is that when they add a feature to your website, if you change your theme, the plugin is still there – so you keep the plugin’s function even if you change the look of your website.

Many, if not most, themes include special areas called Widgets. Widget areas are often included in sidebar, header and footer areas of your website, and they allow you to add text, links and information to these specific areas.

Most of the content in a WordPress site is held in either Pages, Posts or Media. A Page – the WordPress term for Page – is probably what you’re most familiar with in regular websites: it’s a static website page. Typically, pages are more-or-less permanent parts of your website, and typically the content included in your navigation menu: about us, contact, mission, services, get involved, donate, etc. Pages can have “parent pages” for logical grouping. For example, if you have an “About Us” page, you can nest other pages that have information about your organization, such as “Our Staff,” “Our Mission,” and “Our Board”; with “About Us” as the parent page, the link to Our Board, for example, would be https://www.yourdomain.org/about-us/board-of-directors. Descriptive URLs such as this are great for your SEO.

Posts, on the other hand, are the type of dynamic information that would appear in a feed: news articles, events, announcements, press releases, etc., and what most people associate with blogs. Posts can be organized by date, category, tag, and author; the default WordPress setting is to display them by date, newest first. They can include an excerpt, which is a shortened version that can be shown in a feed. Both Pages and Posts have the option to choose the author, publish date, and whether to allow comments, but typically these are only shown on Posts.

Both Pages and Posts include all standard WordPress editing tools (similar to Microsoft Word), and you can add images and videos to both. These images and videos, along with PDFs, are stored in your Media Library. You can add files from the Media Library or any Page or Post.

Some websites, including many of our larger custom-designed sites, also have additional categories of custom content called Custom Post Types – these are for storing information that have pretty consistently defined fields, and that you’ll need to display in a feed-like group. For example, in recent websites we’ve developed, we’ve created custom post types for coaches (of a swim team) and doctors (of a practice) so that we could display basic information for all on one master page, with links to each individual’s bio. Custom post types are generally added to a site by using a plugin.

Creating a Page or a Post is simple: add a title, add some content, add an image if you like. The WordPress editing screen is a lot like Microsoft Word, with buttons for bold, italic, bullets, etc. When you are finished adding content, hit the blue Publish button. In WordPress, Publish is the key to making your content public for the world to see. You can, of course, save your page or post as a draft and return later to finish it, if you prefer. But if you leave a Page or Post without hitting Publish or Save Draft, you’ll lose your work.

WordPress isn’t rocket science. Once you understand the basic terminology, get your site set up and start using in it, the sky really is the limit. My best advice for learning it? Get into a WordPress site and play with it. So, we’ve got an exclusive offer for Volare readers: if you would like a free WordPress test site, we’ll set one up for you. It’ll have the latest WordPress theme and our recommended plugins. You can’t use it for public information – your traffic will be limited – but you can play to your hearts content. It’s like flying … with a safety net.

To get your free test site, email us at [email protected], with “Free Test Site” in the subject line. Give us your name, a username to log in to your site, and a password. Within 24 hours, we’ll set up your site and send you the link.