Wordpress for Conservation & Land Trusts

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS Leveraging the leading CMS for your Trust’s website

September 2, 2015

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

About the Author ...... 5

Preface ...... 5

Introduction ...... 6 Why Wordpress? ...... 6 Stop editing HTML, Start focusing on your content ...... 7 Enable more contributors, retain control ...... 7 Respond to each visitor’s screen size and device capabilities ...... 8 Getting started ...... 9 It’s about the audience ...... 9 Marketing and Search Engine Optimization ...... 10 Take Inventory ...... 10 Plan, Do, Check, Act ...... 10 Now Comes Technology ...... 11 Part One: Wordpress Basics ...... 13 No, really, what is Wordpress? ...... 13 Hosting choices ...... 13 Your own domain ...... 13 Managed Wordpress ...... 14 Good, better or best? ...... 14 Installing Wordpress ...... 15 Hosting service installers ...... 15 From Wordpress.org ...... 15 Staging and Production Servers ...... 16 What are AMPPS and MAMP? ...... 16 Tips for moving from staging to production ...... 16 Permalinks ...... 17 Site Title and Tagline ...... 18 Choosing a theme ...... 18 Free themes ...... 18 Paid themes ...... 18 Key theme features ...... 19 Child Theme ...... 20 Make it your own ...... 22 Wordpress Pages ...... 22 Page templates ...... 23 The Visual Editor ...... 23 The Text Editor ...... 24 2 © Trail Websites / Lewis Studios, All Rights Reserved.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Media in Wordpress ...... 25 Wordpress Posts ...... 27 Categories ...... 28 Plugins ...... 30 Useful plugins ...... 30 Shortcodes ...... 31 Sidebars and Widgets ...... 32 Part Two: Conservation & Land Trust Website Tips & Tricks ...... 34 Multiple, Simultaneous Conversations ...... 34 Owned v. earned media ...... 35 Feeds on your website? ...... 35 Calendar Options ...... 36 Categories ...... 36 Google Calendar ...... 36 Event Manager Plug-in ...... 37 Donor pages ...... 38 Online Soliciting Regulations ...... 38 Privacy ...... 38 Paypal, Network for Good and other payment processors ...... 38 Donation page design ...... 39 Attracting donors ...... 41 Volunteer pages ...... 42 Volunteer roles ...... 42 Private content ...... 42 Volunteer registration ...... 43 Forms ...... 44 Contact form ...... 44 Email subscription forms ...... 45 Search ...... 46 Newsletters ...... 47 Using categories for newsletter pages ...... 47 Formatting posts and linking PDFs ...... 47 Weather Gadget ...... 48 Locator maps ...... 49 Google MyMaps ...... 49 Google Maps API ...... 49 Open Street Map ...... 50 Image Maps ...... 50

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Topographic Maps ...... 51 Social Media: Sharing and Follow Us ...... 51 Part Three: Operational Considerations ...... 53 Backup ...... 53 Backing up the site’s files ...... 53 Backing up the database ...... 55 Testing your backup ...... 56 Updates and upgrades ...... 57 Wordpress updates ...... 58 Theme updates ...... 58 Plugin updates ...... 58 Wordpress upgrades ...... 59 Testing updates and upgrades ...... 59 Conclusion ...... 60

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott Lewis is the founder of Trail Websites (http://trailwebsites.com), a total services provider of website services to conservation trusts, land trusts, conservation commissions and others needing websites that feature lands and trails. Scott is also a trustee of Littleton Conservation Trust in Littleton, Massachusetts. He has combined passion and knowledge of web design and development with passion and knowledge for the outdoors and preserving open space to create a business focused on the specific needs of land managing organizations.

PREFACE

This eBook is intended to provide ideas, concepts and how-to information to help conservation and land trusts use Wordpress to build their websites. Much of the information translates easily to other web content management systems though specific examples in this eBook are from Wordpress. This eBook does not presume that the reader is using any services from Trail Websites. Where mention of Trail Websites is made, it is either incidental for the purpose of explaining our thinking from our experience, or complementary and meant to show how you can do what a solution like our Trail Data Manager™ does, without such a solution, albeit with more manual work.

Even if your trust is planning to pay for web design and development, this guide will help you understand the process, make good content decisions and negotiate a fair and successful project.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

INTRODUCTION

With easy content management, flexible configuration and modern capabilities like mobile responsiveness, Wordpress is a great tool for your trust’s website.

Trail Websites has helped multiple Conservation Trust’s update or build their websites. Our clients range from all-volunteer to larger organizations with paid staff. Very few have large IT or marketing budgets and most don’t have web developers on staff. Most do have donors, volunteers and public visitors that enjoy the land and want to keep these constituencies informed and engaged.

We use Wordpress, a Content Management System (CMS) to build most of these sites. Why Wordpress? Wordpress is a flexible Content Management System (CMS) and allows us to rapidly build sites and easily adjust branding elements to make each site fit each organization. Much of the functionality needed by our clients is common to all: a calendar or event management system, a blog to share news and articles of interest, pages about their mission, trustees and history, a donation page, volunteer information, information about properties and trails along with some maps. By using Wordpress and re-using our approach to this common functionality, we save a lot of time for ourselves and time and money for our clients.

Once a site is built, it will succeed or fail based on content. Much like a newsletter, a website is nothing without a stream of fresh content. Although we can supply some common content to our clients and have future plans for additional content syndication services, the main source of content is the client organization and its community. The other reason we use Wordpress is that Wordpress, as a CMS, allows the author to create content in an easy, word processor-like editing environment with no need for a web developer skilled in things like HTML and CSS. Wordpress also offers media management so that photos, graphics and PDF documents can be stored and easily inserted into blog posts or pages.

What Wordpress doesn’t do out-of-the-box is often provided by someone else in the form of a plug-in or theme. Themes package up layouts, colors, administrative tools and other functions into an installable “look and feel” for your site. Plugins add rich

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS functionality in a particular category such as security or event management and are usually compatible with multiple themes (but not necessarily all). We rely on several plugins to secure and enhance our clients’ sites and will mention some throughout this document.

We’ve had good success with the Wordpress included “Twenty Fourteen” theme for Trust websites but it isn’t the only one we’ve used. An important consideration in theme selection is how well the theme responds to visitor devices with varying screen sizes and capabilities. We choose themes that display your content well on devices from smartphones to desktop PCs with large screens.

With so much to offer, Wordpress probably sounds pretty appealing to use for your website. If it does, this document is for you. Here are some more details on why we recommend a Content Management System, like Wordpress, for your website:

Stop editing HTML, Start focusing on your content

Most conservation and land trusts have websites. Some are more up to date than others. Many are not yet mobile friendly. And many require someone with knowledge of HTML to make changes. As a result, they don’t get updated often, if at all. In this eBook, we’ll outline how to use Wordpress, the most popular Web Content Management System, to more easily manage your website.

Enable more contributors, retain control

One reason to use a Content Management System is for the editing workflow. Wordpress user roles allow you to do things like have a wider group of people authoring content but a smaller set of editors who review and publish the content.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Respond to each visitor’s screen size and device capabilities

A website that adapts to the user’s device is “mobile responsive” or just “responsive”. Common responses include moving sidebars to the bottom of the page, collapsing the navigation menu into an icon and reflowing text to avoid the need to scroll horizontally. Many Wordpress “themes” are mobile responsive and ready to present your content in its best light regardless of the device the user is using.

Figure 1 - Menu collapsed (left) and expanded (right) on smartphone screen.

This eBook is meant to provide a foundation for do-it-yourselfers that want to build their trust website on Wordpress. If you’d rather learn about our services to build, and even operate, your site, or our Trail Data Manager™ toolkit, please visit us at http://trailwebsites.com

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

GETTING STARTED

Building or updating a website doesn’t start with technology. As helpful as a tool like Wordpress can be, it is a tool, or a means, not an end. Start with objectives and hire the right tools to do the job or you risk ending up with a mixed bag of tools that don’t accomplish anything in particular. It’s about the audience The first step to an effective website is to know why it exists and what it is trying to accomplish and there’s no better place to start than with who it serves. We recommend establishing personas for your different types of visitors but even the simple step of writing down the categories will help you think about design and content more effectively. It is common with trusts and other non-profits to think about these constituents:

• Clients: the people that benefit from what you do such as the public who enjoys the outdoors on trails on conservation lands or future generations who benefit from your stewardship and advocacy for open space and a better environment. • Donors: the people who provide the funding and other non-human resources needed to fulfill your mission. You do have a mission or purpose, right? That’s also useful content and guidance for design. • Volunteers: the people who help you do what you do. Land stewards, fundraising committee, event organizers, policy advocates and on-demand volunteers like trail crews are all examples.

For each category (or sub-category in some cases) of visitor, what does the website need to accomplish and what content and experience will generate the best outcomes at each stage of the journey? When a new donor arrives, you probably don’t want to just drop them on a donation form and hope for the best. It might be helpful to orient them to your purpose and scope then offer evidence that you use donations effectively first. Many donors are also clients. Perhaps it is better to help them discover and enjoy the land and trails before focusing on showing need and requesting funding.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

With the audience in mind you can also think about how they will consume your content. How important are laptops, tablets and cellphones? Will they need to access some of your content offline such as a downloaded PDF trail guide they can use while hiking even if there is no cellphone service? Should you design for mobile-first or a rich full screen experience that gracefully degrades to a good phone sized experience? Marketing and Search Engine Optimization It’s never too soon to think about how your audience will find you. Presumably you will do some local promotion, seek publicity in the local papers, print your website URL prominently on posters, postcards, newsletters, etc. Will search also be an important tool? The answer is yes as many people now simply type words into search bars rather than bothering to type full URLs into destination bars. This means your content will need to use keywords that are apt to fit audience searches and that means you need to start thinking about, asking about and keeping track of how visitors search for you and for what you offer. Take Inventory You have content assets already. Past newsletter content, existing website content, photos from events and projects, your mission statement, policies and more are all content you can use on your updated site. How you organize and present the information depends on your audience analysis and how much of what kinds of content you have to work with. Take inventory. Make a simple spreadsheet of the assets and note the type, format (text, PDF, jpeg file, link, etc.) and audience category relevance. If you have a detailed description, photo, trail map and brief history of each property, you have the beginnings of an online trail guide. You can organize this into pages and menus in Wordpress or use a tool like Trail Data Manager™ to automate the presentation of this data in several useful formats. Plan, Do, Check, Act When you know your objectives and audience, your current assets, what your audience likes and dislikes about your current website (their view is far more important than yours), you can begin to design and develop your new website.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Measurement is a critical element of a good website as it feeds the process of continuously optimizing your layout, navigation, content and design. The process is on-going and is a use of the Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle.

Here’s an illustration of how we approach the process with our clients:

Experiments such as A/B testing help us learn what works best so we can circle as far back in the process as necessary to optimize design, functionality, layout, the color of a call-to-action button or anything else that improves the results the website helps create. Now Comes Technology With a better understanding of who we’re serving, the content and experience that we’ll start with and our needs for promotion, measurement and on-going content, we can now consider technology. This guide is all about Wordpress so let’s jump in.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

WORDPRESS BASICS

(If you’re already very familiar with Wordpress, skip to Part Two: Conservation & Land Trust Website Tips & Tricks for ideas on using Wordpress specifically for Conservation & Land Trust websites)

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

PART ONE: WORDPRESS BASICS

No, really, what is Wordpress? We’ve established that Wordpress is a Content Management System that makes it easy to author and organize content and presents that content as a website but what is it, really?

Wordpress is made of programming scripts written in a language called PHP. Wordpress stores its data in a database, most often MySQL, a popular open source database. And, Wordpress runs on a web server, most often Apache, a very popular open source web server. In turn, the web server, database and PHP processor run on an operating system, most often the open source Linux operating system.

Together, the platform for a Wordpress site is known as LAMP: Linux, Apahe, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python. To use Wordpress, you need your own server or a hosting provider’s server that supports LAMP and, ideally, offers a one-click install of Wordpress.

Hosting choices One of your first decisions is where to host Wordpress. In most cases, installing Wordpress on a shared or virtual private server at a well-known hosting provider makes the most sense. Most major providers include Wordpress as an option in their software installation tools.

There are other choices such as Wordpress.com and other Wordpress specialty sites. These can be useful if you don’t want to have to know much about Wordpress but beware that they sometimes come with limits on everything from your domain name to which themes and plugins are allowed. Wordpress.com requires yourname.wordpress.com in their free hosting, for example, though you can use your own domain if you upgrade to a paid plan.

Your own domain

To use your own domain (littletonconservationtrust.org, for example), you need to register your domain name and set the name servers for your domain to those of your hosting provider. It is usually best to acquire your domain from the same 13 © Trail Websites / Lewis Studios, All Rights Reserved.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS company as your hosting to simplify this configuration. Most non-profit organizations use domains that end in .org to signify they are organizations, not companies (.com).

Managed Wordpress

Managed Wordpress plans cost more than basic hosting. The hosting provider usually provides extra service and support compared to a basic plan. For example, several managed Wordpress plans include pre-configured security, content distribution networks (CDN), caching, custom control panels, automated backup of the site’s files and the Wordpress database, multi-site administrative tools and a selection of tested and supported themes and plugins along with tech support. You get to focus mostly on your content while they keep the Wordpress engine safe, backed up and up-to-date. Trail Websites is a Managed Wordpress provider with a focus on organizations like conservation and land trusts. We offer services similar to most Managed Wordpress providers then add extra value for these specific clients through subject matter expertise and our Trail Data Manager™ toolkit.

Good, better or best?

Web hosting plans are often offered in “good, better and best” variations. These are typically labeled as starter, business and enterprise or similar categories with increasing capacity, performance and support. Which is right for your organization? Most smaller trusts are well served by the most basic plan. We often recommend the “better” or middle plan only if it offers something of specific value such as a content distribution network.

One difference between tiers is usually the number of email accounts included. We recommend most 501c3 non-profits consider Google Apps for non-profits for their email, calendaring, online forms / surveys and shared document needs so the number of email accounts from the hosting provider isn’t relevant.

We’ll explain how to setup your own Wordpress instance in the next section. For now, know that running Wordpress on your laptop or desktop computer is a viable way to do design and development. We do not recommend hosting your public website on your personal computer but why pay for a hosting plan while you’re designing, developing and populating your prototyped site with content?

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Installing Wordpress You’ve chosen a hosting solution or decided to run Wordpress on your computer to get started. Where do you get Wordpress and how do you set it up?

Hosting service installers

Hosting providers often include a tool like “Installatron” or “Softaculous” in their control panels. These tools are sort of like App stores. You can browse web applications in several categories and install them with a click and the answers to a few simple questions.

To get started with Wordpress on a hosting account, use one of these tools and answer the questions through the guided installation process. You’ll find Wordpress in the Content Management or Blogs section.

From Wordpress.org

If you’re installing Wordpress manually, go to http://wordpress.org to download the most recent version. Bear in mind that there are several pre-requisites. Wordpress runs on what is commonly referred to as LAMP or Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. In reality, Wordpress mainly depends on MySQL and PHP but for most beginners, this nuance isn’t important.

You’ll need to make sure the server or local computer where you will run Wordpress has the Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language engine installed and configured.

A quick word on operating systems

Wordpress is easier to maintain on Linux, Unix or *nix-like environments such as Mac OS X. You can run Wordpress on Windows locally for design and development but we highly recommend a Linux hosting account or Linux server when you’re ready to put it into production. We’ve found that many plug-in and theme update processes depend on *nix scripting abilities.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Staging and Production Servers

It is a good idea to plan to run two copies of your website: one for the public to access and one for you to use for development and for testing updates and upgrades before applying them to the production server. These can be two virtual server instances on the same actual server. You might event want three servers, one for production, one for staging changes before deployment to the production instance and one for development. This allows you more freedom to experiment on the development server without needing to replicate the production environment to support staging and testing. Only the production server should have things like SEO plugins enabled. Development and test servers should normally use a .robots.txt file to discourage site crawling by search engines so your production site gets all the limelight in search results.

What are AMPPS and MAMP?

AMPPS (http://ampps.com) is a Apache, MySQL, Python and PHP stack that is meant to be cross-platform so you can install these tools on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux and then run software, like Wordpress, on this “stack” of supporting software. AMPPS is free though you may find value in subscribing to the Softaculous desktop installer to help keep AMPPS up-to-date.

MAMP (https://www.mamp.info/en/) is a similar “stack” but for Mac OS X specifically. We use MAMP for much of our development here at Trail Websites. MAMP comes in free and Pro versions where the Pro version adds additional tools for database management, virtual servers, one-click install of many tools like Wordpress, a mail server, dynamic DNS and more.

Tips for moving from staging to production

A little bad news. Wordpress stores internal links to posts, pages, images and more as fully qualified URLs. If your staging server is something like http://yourname.org/staging and your production site is http://yourname.org, your site won’t work if you copy the database and files from staging to production as-is.

There are several ways to resolve this issue. If your development and staging environments are on a local network you can give them the same URL and manually configure your hosts file to let you access the correct version. This is risky as it is easy to forget which site you are working on but it does make the process easier.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Another approach is to use a plug-in (we like Velvet Blues Update URLs (https://wordpress.org/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/ ) to search and replace URLs after you copy the database to the production server. You may or may not have other issues to resolve depending on what customizations you’ve done but this saves most of the time needed to sync up the sites.

At the time of writing, Velvet Blues Update URLs does not update links inside “widgets” so you’ll have to find those and fix them yourself. However, links usually get into widgets when you type them there. Use relative, not absolute paths in your widgets. If your staging server is yourname.org/staging/ and your production server is yourname.org/, you will have to fix up URLs in widgets that contain http://yourname.org/ or that start with “/” but you will not need to fix up links that start with a file or folder name.

Sub-domains such as staging.yourname.org are a useful way to avoid the root path issue. If your staging server is staging.yourname.org/ and your production server is yourname.org/, paths in widgets that start with “/” will work without modification when moved to production. Paths that start with http://staging.yourname.org/ will still need cleaning up. Sub-domains involve configuring Apache virtual servers.

Virtual servers are beyond the scope of this eBook. Virtual servers can be setup on Apache web servers and have the advantage of serving files for a given virtual server from its top level folder as if it was the root folder.

Your hosting account may automate the creation of virtual servers for you if it allows you to install Wordpress in a sub-domain (ie. staging.yourname.org).

Permalinks

Permalinks are the URLs that refer to pages, posts, events and other URL addressable content in Wordpress. Even though most of these aren’t actual files in the file system, Wordpress assigns them permalinks that get redirected to the dynamically presented pages generated from the Wordpress database.

In the Wordpress admin menu you can set permalinks up several ways. Normally the best choice is “Post name” as named URLs are more search engine friendly than numbered URLs. They also make more sense to the human eye.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Site Title and Tagline When installing Wordpress, you will likely be asked for a site title and tagline. These, optionally, display on the site in some themes. They are also used as meta data for the HTML title of your site which labels browser tabs and has an effect on search optimization. If your title is yourname and your tagline is Preserving open space for future generations., your site title in a browser tab will show as yourname | Preserving open space for future generations. Be thoughtful about what will best help you get found in searches. You can always turn off the title and tagline display or just disable the tagline display on the site and use a text widget to display an alternate tagline on the page. Choosing a theme Wordpress installed and working? Check! Now it is time to choose a theme. Themes often come in starter and paid / pro versions and offer various conveniences such as page templates, widgets and configuration options for colors, fonts, layout, search engine optimization (SEO) and more.

This eBook doesn’t cover the wide range of themes and choices of places to get themes but we will talk briefly about free and paid themes and some key things to look for in a theme.

Free themes

Free themes sound like a great deal. In fact, the themes that come with Wordpress work well and it is tempting to just use those. We use them on many client sites. These are the themes called “Twenty Fourteen”, “Twenty Thirteen”, “Twenty Fifteen”, etc. The names refer to different designs, and should not be construed to imply that older year themes are obsolete when new themes come out. Twenty Fourteen, for example, is a magazine layout theme while Twenty Fifteen is a barer theme intended specifically for blogs and single topic sites. There are many 3rd party free themes as well, some are starter versions of paid themes and some are just free.

Paid themes

Paid themes usually incorporate something of value not directly derived from Wordpress. In fact, they have to do so in order to be sold due to Wordpress’ use and interpretation of the GPLv2 open source software license. Common value-adds are 18 © Trail Websites / Lewis Studios, All Rights Reserved.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS integrations with advertising networks, payment processors or on-going packaged updates and support which means you pay for associated services, not really the theme itself. Some paid themes are well-worth the cost as they make integration of Google Analytics and Search Engine Optimization easier than doing it manually.

Key theme features

When selecting a theme, keep in mind the requirements that came from your objectives and audience analysis. Typical requirements include:

• Responsive: the site “responds” to the screen size and device capabilities of the visitor by re-flowing text (instead of making the user have to scroll left and right or squint at really small type), moving sidebars to the bottom of the page and collapsing the menu into a “hamburger” menu (three bars vertically stacked, the most common icon for getting to the menu on a mobile friendly site). • Search Engine Optimization: the theme injects analytics code into each page served and gathers and shows statistics to help you understand and optimize your traffic. SEO can be added in manually or with plugins even if the theme doesn’t support it but it is nice to have it “already in there” if you’re a beginner. • Widgets and Layouts: Themes offer different layout options particularly when it comes to things like sidebars and columns. Multi-column sites are losing popularity since they don’t work as well for mobile devices but sidebars are still common as they can be pushed down the page on smaller screens. Widgets are components you can drop into sidebars (and sometimes other elements like pages, depending on the theme) to add pre- determined or custom content. • Branding Elements: Some themes give you very little ability to customize colors, fonts and logos. These are to be avoided. You want a theme to give you easy access to functionality and layouts that are good for many sites, not force you to branding that has nothing to do with who you are as an organization. If a theme is otherwise compelling, there are ways around these constraints. For example, we use a plug-in called Fourteen Colors to make it easier to style the colors of the Twenty Fourteen theme.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Themes can be installed through the Wordpress admin panel or by uploading the .zip file of the theme to your site and activating it from the admin appearance | themes panel.

Child Theme If you plan to do any customization of your theme other than with plugins, it is important to create a child theme. A child theme is a new theme that inherits mostly from an existing theme. By placing all customization in the child theme’s folders, you protect your changes from being overwritten when the original theme gets updated.

Create a child theme early on as your child theme won’t necessarily inherit settings you make in the admin interface to the parent theme.

To create a child theme, use a file manager or ftp to:

Go to the /wp-content/themes folder for your site

Create a new folder for your child theme named parent-child such as “twentyfourteen-child” (alternatively, name it your own name)

Create a new file called “style.css” in your new folder

Add the following to the style.css file, being careful to change it to match your specifics:

/* Theme Name: Twentyfourteen Child Theme Description: Twentyfourteen Child Theme Author: Scott Lewis Author URI: http://trailwebsites.com Template: twentyfourteen Version: 1.0.1 */

@import url("../twentyfourteen/style.css");

/* =Theme customization starts here ------*/

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

In particular, note that the theme name is what will be displayed in the theme chooser in Wordpress and the @import url statement is how you inherit the styling of the parent theme. Any CSS you override to style the site differently should come after the comment at the bottom of the example.

Next create a file called functions.php in the child theme folder and add the following to it to make sure Wordpress loads your styling:

You can add additional Wordpress programming to this file to override or enhance functions in Wordpress. For example, if you will have visitors logging in to your site you may prefer that they be directed to the front page instead of the login page when they logout. Add this to functions.php before the closing “?>”:

add_action('wp_logout','go_home'); function go_home(){ wp_redirect( home_url() ); exit(); }

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Make it your own

Now that you’ve selected and installed a theme it is time to make it your own. By putting your background, colors, font, logo and header images into the theme, you’ll quickly find out if you’ve chosen wisely and, hopefully, succeed at making the site a part of your brand! The following images are of two sites built on the same theme but styled to each organization’s brand:

Wordpress Pages Ready to create some content? The two places where the most content lives on Wordpress sites are pages and posts. As the name implies, pages are separate web pages that are typically navigated via the menu. Posts are blog posts, articles or short updates that flow newest to oldest on a blog page and, optionally, on other pages by category. Let’s cover pages first.

Your static content about history, mission, long-running projects, properties, trails, volunteer opportunities, how to donate, membership and links to other resources are good candidates for pages. Think about (and then measure, experiment and optimize!) how to arrange your menus to best serve your visitors. Because there is a lot of valuable content across these pages, they also play an important role in getting your website found through search engines like Google and Bing.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Page templates

Themes often come with multiple page templates. These could include a standard page and a “full-width” page, for example, that eliminates one sidebar to give you more room for wider content.

You can also create custom page templates. This is a bit advanced for this eBook but know that it is possible to create templates that show more complex pages or pull data from non-standard sources. You can do a lot with the visual editor and even more with the text editor and a little HTML knowledge. Sometimes you need a page to work just so and a custom template can be a good solution. For example, we use custom templates for “Trail Issue Report” contact pages where the form lets the user choose from a drop-down list of trails from Trail Data Manager™ and gives the option to get GPS coordinates from a smartphone to let us know where a trail issue needs attention.

The Visual Editor

Most of your content can be created in Wordpress’ Visual Editor. This is much like using a basic word processor and lets you style sections of text as various levels of headings, paragraphs, bold, italic and underline. It is easy to insert media or create bulleted or numbered lists. You can align text left, center, right or justified. You can insert horizontal rules, block quotes and special characters. There are also toolbar buttons to make it easy to insert links and a “Read More” tag that cuts off the text and prompts the user to click “continue reading” to see the rest (used primarily in posts, not pages).

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

The Text Editor

The other view of the editor is the text editing view. Here you can see, and modify, the underlying HMTL markup that is used to create the desired look on the page. If you’re having a really hard time lining up tabular data in the visual editor, you might use the text editor to create an HTML table. Be careful though, tables can be less useful on small screens like smartphones as they cause the user to need to scroll left and right as well as up and down. You can even override or add CSS styling to modify appearance using the text editor.

Use visual content

Your written content is really important. It is what gets you found by search engines. As much as a picture painting a thousand words sounds good, the text often conveys the real content on a page. Visual content, on the other hand, is what pulls the eye to the page and can be what keeps the visitor there long enough to read and appreciate all that great text. Sprinkle photos and graphics into the text to keep it interesting! Consider using video to tell your story too. More on video later.

Wordpress makes adding media easy. Using the visual editor, click the Add Media button and either upload a new file or choose existing media from the library. Set it to display at an appropriate size and align either in-place or to the left or right with text flowing around it. Add a caption in the media form and Wordpress will style it nicely below the image.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Media in Wordpress

You can view media as a grid of thumbnail images or a list of titles in the Media Library. The bar at the top of the page filters by media type (images, audio, video), whether media is currently attached to any pages or posts or by date. You can also bulk select images to delete unneeded media quickly. You can also search for media. If you click on a single media item (without bulk selection turned on), that item opens in a panel where you can edit its title, caption, alt text and description. Each is important.

Title is important when you’re browsing through media and trying to find a particular file. Change meaningless photo names like “IMG_0001.jpg” to something more meaningful like “Trailhead Sign at Smith Land.jpg” when you import the file and life will be easier later on. Title also appears to the site visitor when they hover the mouse over the image so friendlier text is valuable here. Sometimes using the search feature or browsing in the list view makes it easier to quickly find an image when you know something about its title.

Caption is the text Wordpress shows under the image in italics. Changing the caption affects future uses of the image but does not go back and alter the captions in past uses of the image in existing pages and posts.

Alt Text is useful for visitors who cannot or who choose not to display images in their web browser and for visually impaired visitors that might be using special software that “reads” your page to them.

Description is useful for you when searching for files and is an opportunity to add a more detailed description that might help you come up with caption variations in the future.

Photos and images

Wordpress lets you insert photos and images into your posts and pages and see how it will appear in the Visual Editor. At insertion time or later, by clicking on the image in the editor and then clicking the pencil icon, you can align the image to the left or right of text or let it stand on its own between paragraphs, change the size of the image, edit the caption and alt text, and you can assign a link to the image so that a larger version opens when clicks, nothing happens or the user is taken to a URL on or off your site.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Image sizing

Wordpress creates multiple size variations of images uploaded to the media library (exact number of variations and sizes depend on theme). You want images to load quickly AND look great. Before uploading an image, resize it and set its resolution to a reasonable maximum file size and quality needed for website use. Some themes require very specific sizes for optimal header images or featured item images so check the documentation for these settings. For all other images, our general advice is to use jpeg format for photos, png format for everything else, maximum of 1024 pixels on the long edge and 96 ppi resolution.

PDF Documents

Though it is best to display most of your content as web pages and blog posts for maximum SEO value and best cross-device display, there are times when posting a PDF document makes more sense. You might create an archive of all of your past annual reports or newsletters as PDFs, for example.

Create a post with a short table of contents for documents like these then insert the media as a thumbnail linked to the PDF file. More on this later when we talk about newsletters.

Audio and video files

Wordpress has the ability to manage and present audio and video files as media in the library. We do not recommend this approach. Visitors expect high performance video and audio streaming and your Wordpress server is not likely to have the performance or add-on software to deliver. Instead we suggest using a 3rd party streaming media service such as Vimeo, Google’s YouTube, Wistia, SoundCloud and similar services embedded into your pages, posts and widgets as needed. Here’s how we embed a YouTube video into one of our Trail Websites’ pages:

YouTube generates this embed code for you when you select your video, click on Share and select the Embed tab. We’ve added one parameter manually because YouTube doesn’t let you configure it. That is the “rel=0” parameter which tells YouTube not to show related videos when the video ends.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Wordpress Posts Posts are created just like pages. By default, they all appear on one page which is called the blog. The default location of the blog is the front page of your website but you can re-assign the blog to another page such as http://yourname.org/blog if you want to feature a static page as your front page.

Use the Visual or Text Editor to create a post. If you want to display short posts on the blog page in order to fit more headlines there, you have multiple choices:

• Write concisely! It takes more work to write shorter posts but it is worth it as readers have short attention spans. • Insert the “more” tag from the toolbar or manually to break the article and show a “continue reading” or custom prompt. • Use a theme, or customize your theme, to show only excerpts on “list” pages like the blog and category pages o You can let Wordpress automatically decide where to continue the article or o You can add an excerpt for the post on the editing page so Wordpress shows exactly what you want.

Post Formats

Wordpress offers several types of post formats that display slightly differently (exact choices depend on theme). You can put any content in any format. Here is a partial list of post types from the Twenty Fifteen theme:

• Standard: a normal post that displays as a regular blog entry • Aside: a very concise entry that just offers a tidbit of information • Image: a post that is primarily an image • Video: a post for embedding video • Quote: a post for inserting a blocked quote into your blog stream • Gallery: a post for showing an image gallery (more on galleries and slideshows later)

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Categories Posts can be categorized and tagged. Categories allow you to arrange posts into one or more levels of taxonomy to make it easy to display related information. You can create a virtual page of all the posts from one category by creating a “category” entry in the menu, for example.

Categories work best with a little planning and foresight. What kinds of category pages might be handy? If you don’t use an embedded calendar or event management plug-in, perhaps an Events category will make it easy to serve a page of events to your visitors. Similarly, if you use a News category, you can show a News page with almost no extra work. Want to show a page of all your trails? Consider creating trails as posts, not pages, putting them in a Trails category and setting up a virtual Trails page. There are better ways to handle trails, including our Trail Data Manager™, but this can be a great solution for a simple trust website.

You may decide you don’t want some categories to show in your blog at all. You’ll either need a plug-in that enables you to filter categories on the blog page or some custom programming to filter the content shown on the blog. The custom code is actually rather simple. If you don’t already have a child theme, see the earlier theme section. If your child theme doesn’t have a functions.php, create one in the top level folder for your child theme. Then lookup the categories you want to exclude by going in the admin dashboard then choosing “Categories” under “Posts”. Click a category to exclude and look for the tag_ID parameter in the address bar of the browser. Make note of the number of the tag_ID. Repeat for other categories you want to exclude.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

In functions.php, add this code and change the -6, -23, -24 to the category numbers you noted:

// hide some post categories from the blog page function exclude_categories() { global $wp_query; if( is_home() ) { $wp_query->query_vars['cat'] = '-6, -23, -24'; } } add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'exclude_categories' );

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Plugins Plugins use Wordpress’ programming interfaces and database structure to add functionality and control. There are thousands of plugins but don’t get carried away … plugins can hurt more than help if overused.

Search rankings, in part, depend on how fast your pages load. More plugins mean more processing on the server and more styling and other markup to send to the browser. All these things contribute to slower page loads. Choose plugins (and themes) carefully and be selective. We like to use as few as possible but not less J

Useful plugins

There are many good plugins (and plenty of bad ones) out there. Before we list some of those we find most useful we should clarify that we haven’t tested every alternative and don’t specifically endorse these. They just happen to be what works for our clients’ needs.

• Security: We have had good results from both Wordfence and Sucuri Security • Slideshows: we like to enhance image galleries with a nice lightbox-style slideshow capability and are using Lightbox Plus Colorbox and Gallery Slideshow on various sites • Social Media: some themes we use include social media menu options. In other cases we use Social Media Feather as its light-as-a-feather weight has so little impact on page load times • Event Management: sometimes we embed Google Calendar, sometimes we just use posts categorized as events and sometimes we use Events Manager • Enhanced Search: Wordpress’ built-in search has some limitations. We often use Relevanssi to enhance search to rank results by relevance • Glossary Tooltips: On some sites we’ve implemented a glossary / tooltip feature where keywords show with a dotted underline and hovering the mouse over them shows a definition. We use CM Tooltip Glossary for this feature.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Paid v. free

As with themes, there are free and paid versions of most plugins and the difference is often in associated services. Wordfence, for example, operates a service that aggregates attack data and catalogs common IP addresses used for attacks. Rather than add blacklisted addresses manually, you can use the paid version and block entire countries as well as more targeted lists of known bad hosts. From experience, we believe these types of features are often worth the annual subscription cost but your needs may differ.

Shortcodes

Plugins and other custom programming for Wordpress sometimes offer content through shortcodes. Shortcodes are text embedded in square brackets that tell Wordpress to fetch content from one of these sources and include it on the page or in the widget. We use shortcodes to place navigation menus of trails from Trail Data Manager™ in sidebars as an example.

We also wrote custom code for a client to manage content visibility based on whether a user was logged in or not. In this case, if content is surrounded by [visitor] and [/visitor], it only shows to people who are not logged in. If content is surrounded by [member] and [/member], it only shows to people who are logged in. Content not surrounded by either set of shortcodes shows to everyone.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Sidebars and Widgets Sidebars appear on the left or right of a page on a larger screen like a laptop or desktop computer. On smaller screens on responsive themes, they generally push to the bottom of the page as mobile users expect one, long, scrolling page instead of things on the sides of the page.

Sidebars are usually populated with widgets. Widgets are pre-configured components that display custom menus, an RSS feed, recent posts, archives or other content. The text widget is more versatile in that you can place simple text or fairly complex HTML in it to display anything from a tagline to an embedded video in a sidebar. Some themes also support widgets in pages.

Wordpress includes quite a few widgets as standard. Themes and plugins may include widgets of their own to create more options for including content in sidebars. Other plugins may not include widgets but may include shortcodes that can be used in the text widget to place their content in a sidebar or page.

Standard Wordpress widgets:

• Archives: display an archive of posts by month/year • Calendar: display a calendar of your site’s posts • Categories: display a list of categories that act as a menu to category pages • Custom Menu: display a custom menu created in the menu editor • Links: display a set of links • Meta: Login, RSS feed and link to Wordpress.org • Pages: display a list of your site’s pages • Recent Comments: if comments are allowed on your site, displays recently posted comments • Recent posts: headlines of recent posts • RSS: entries from any RSS or ATOM feed • Search: a form for searching the site (especially useful if the theme doesn’t offer a search icon or field in the header) • Tag Cloud: displays a “cloud” of tags with words in varying font sizes based on frequency of use (if you tag your posts) • Text: any text or HTML

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

TRUST WEBSITE TIPS & TRICKS

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

PART TWO: CONSERVATION & LAND TRUST WEBSITE TIPS & TRICKS

Multiple, Simultaneous Conversations A challenge for non-profits in general and conservation & land trusts in particular is the need for one website to effectively communicate with multiple audiences. Visitors sometimes occupy more than one role. Most trusts need easy navigation and valuable content for land users, donors and volunteers at a minimum.

There are several ways to approach navigation and content organization:

• By role: the primary menu might appeal to trail users, donors and volunteers with labels like “Visit Us”, “Donate” and “Volunteer” • By action: the primary menu might be labeled “Learn”, “Attend an Event”, “Get Involved”, etc. • By topic: the primary menu might be labeled “Trail Guide”, “Get Involved”, “News and Events”, etc.

The topical approach seems most popular with our clients and on sites we’ve surveyed. As long as the words allow the key personas that are looking for you to find themselves in your content, you’re off to a good start. Measurement and optimization will help you improve further.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Owned v. earned media Your website is yours. You own it, you control all the content on it and it tells the story you’ve asked it to tell. It is probably locally relevant and it definitely doesn’t include a bunch of unrelated social noise and shouldn’t contain unrelated ads. This is called owned media.

Social media is owned by the companies that operate the leading networks and the millions of people that use them. You control neither conversation nor distractions. You also know less about those who visit you on social media as the networks view that sort of data as money and use it for ad and sponsored content targeting. To the extent that you have followers viewing your content on social networks, you’ve earned them.

Ideally, you lead your earned media followers back to your owned media where you can tell them the rest of the story, entice them to sign up for your newsletter or email updates and measure their activity. In our opinion, it is far better to manage your events calendar, post your newsletters and share other meaningful content in full on your website, NOT on social media. Like leading news organizations, use social media to drive traffic back to your owned media by publishing headlines with links back to your site. You need to get good at writing headlines to fully leverage social media.

Feeds on your website?

Unless you have an active conversation with the community, there isn’t much value in using up space on your website to show your social media feed. If all the content in the feed is headlines pulling people to your site, the people visiting your site don’t need to see them. If you do have an active community conversation and want to share that user generated content on your site, by all means consider a plug-in or widget code for showing social media feeds.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Calendar Options In the plugins section of Wordpress Basics, we mentioned briefly several ways we’ve handled calendars on clients’ sites. Here we describe these further.

Most trusts have annual meetings, offer public events like guided walks and fundraisers and promote events of interest to their members or community. Depending on your needs, there are several ways to offer a calendar of events on your website.

Categories

A basic option is to categorize posts meant to be events as events and setup an Event category page in your menu. Post listing pages like these display from newest to oldest so, depending on your information and workflow, you may need to sometimes adjust the publishing date of items to control the order they appear in the list.

Google Calendar

Another option is to create a publicly viewable calendar in Google Calendar and embed that in a page on your site. Assign someone to manage the calendar through Google’s interface and it will always be up- to-date on your site. It will also be easy for visitors to subscribe to the calendar in their own calendars. The downside? Limited style and color options from Google and embedded iFrames like this don’t always show well on small screen devices.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Event Manager Plug-in

The third option is to use a plug-in event management system like the previously mentioned Event Manager. Event Manager offers multiple list and calendar views, shortcodes, recurring events, automatic Google Maps for event locations, ticketing (free or paid with the Pro version and a payment processing account such as PayPal) and more. Our clients with more complex calendaring and ticketing needs use this approach.

Event Manager inherits much of its styling from your theme. Event Manager also supports visitors subscribing to calendars and, through the use of custom styling, offers creative options like coloring different event categories and showing event category icons next to events. A land trust with trails of varying difficulty might use colors or icons to indicate which guided walk events are appropriate for what skill levels or a trust that has walks where dogs are not welcome can show dog friendly and please leave your dog home events with different icons.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Donor pages Donor pages are an important part of most non-profit websites. Whether you solicit donations, memberships or some combination, you need your website to make it easy for donors to give.

Online Soliciting Regulations

In most states, soliciting donations is regulated and soliciting donations online is further regulated. In many cases, a certificate is needed from the state before you legally collect donations online. This eBook is not an authoritative source for information on complying with such regulations. We advise you to check with your legal counsel or accountant and to review your state’s regulations.

Privacy

Collecting donations online inevitably means that you, or a 3rd party on your behalf, will be collecting some level of personal identity information from website visitors. It is always a good idea to have a stated privacy policy on your website, usually accessed from a link in the footer of each page. When collecting personal information, it is essential to have and make available such a policy and to take steps to safeguard the data you collect as you are liable for lost customer data. Again, regulations vary by state in some cases and you should review with legal counsel rather than rely on this eBook for compliance guidance.

Trail Websites strongly recommends leaving the payment processing and handling of sensitive data like credit card numbers to 3rd parties. For a small transaction fee cost, they take on the liability and compliance responsibility. For small trusts, these are valuable services that avoid your having to have the expertise and legal diligence to do it in-house. That said, just because you use someone else to process donation transactions doesn’t mean you must or should have an ineffective donation page with a bunch of PayPal buttons on it.

Paypal, Network for Good and other payment processors

PayPal is a popular service for accepting payments by major credit cards or from the donor’s PayPal account funds. Donors do not need PayPal accounts to pay by credit card but this isn’t very clear in the default experience. We recommend

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS managing expectations clearly on your donation page before sending the visitor to PayPal to process the payment. PayPal offers lower fees to valid 501c3 organizations and is fairly easy to integrate into a donation page at a basic level of Donate buttons. They even provide a Donate button generator to help you embed the correct HTML. You can, and should, style the resultant buttons to be more effective and better fit your theme and brand.

Network for Good and similar services offer enhanced donation page design and hosting services to move even more of the donation process to their service from your website. If you don’t have access to the skills to design effective donation pages, consider these services. They typically charge a monthly fee in addition to transaction fees.

Donation page design

Donor pages have effective, easy-to-spot actions such as large, colorful buttons along with compelling call-to-action oriented content to show:

• Need: why should I give? • Impact: what impact can you and I make together if I give? • Efficiency: do you spend my money on the cause or on overhead? • Credibility: are you legitimate?

Put on your best marketing hat and get to work on a concise mix of graphics and text that address these topics.

• Will a BBB seal or link to your Guidestar profile help? • Can you use past projects to show future potential?

Non-profits are increasingly being considered based on impact, not just efficiency but there are frequent setbacks and efficiency still matters.

• Can you simply state that all or substantially all of donated funds go to the mission? What facts can you offer to back this up? o Is your staff 100% volunteer with no salaries? o Does a corporate sponsor or grant fund your overhead so that all private donations go to your mission?

Think through these and other ideas to craft effective content for the page.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

What works varies by community, organization and cause. A clean design with easy to find buttons for common donation (or membership level) amounts can be effective. If you know what your typical donor gives, you can highlight that amount as “Popular” on the page to try to upsell donors considering lower amounts.

It is also useful to provide options for non-annual gifts such as gifts to an endowment and to offer the option to make donations in memory of.

Some trusts prefer to avoid transaction fees on large donations. In this case you can place a message on the donation page that states your preference for donations over a set amount to be made by check and provide your mailing address. You may also wish to provide a link to a printable PDF form they can print and include to direct their gift when they mail it.

Whether you develop your design yourself, outsource or use a plug-in such as Give to create it, make your donation page attractive and effective. Follow these tips for more donations:

• Replace PayPal’s default buttons with larger buttons that use site theme- compatible contrasting colors and better call-to-action words. • Be concise. Get to the point and use a clean page with plenty of white space. White space around buttons makes them stand out. • Use photos to show need by conveying emotional appeal. • Reduce options to make the action clear – even to the point of hiding most menus and sidebars. • Only collect the information you need. • Write about what’s in it for them and for the cause, not yourself – use second person voice such as “you can help conserve and protect open space in OurTown USA”. • Offer a single call-to-action in most cases and repeat it 2 – 3 times in your text – you only need one button but it is more likely to be pressed if you call them to it more than once with your words. “You can protect our open space”, “keep our open space open” and “make an impact on open space now” are three variations on the same call-to-action, as an example. • If the page is longer than one screen (and it probably shouldn’t be!), repeat the button on each screen’s worth of text so it is always visible.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Receipts

Another value of using a 3rd party payment processor is that they provide receipts to your donors. There is marketing value in thanking your donors directly; don’t rely on the 3rd party to do it all. Still, it is nice having them take care of providing the transaction receipt for the donor’s tax and accounting needs.

What about Land Gifts?

Conservation and Land Trusts are somewhat unique among non-profits in that land is a form of donation. Handle land gifts on their own page(s) where you can explain the options, provide links to information on topics like Conservation Restrictions and help educate the potential donor. Success stories of prior land donations are very effective for connecting with potential new donors.

Attracting donors

A donation page with no visits results in no funding. Once you have a donation page it is important to bring people to it. Offer online donations as an option in your normal marketing such as annual appeal letters, newsletters or handouts at events. Remind visitors of the need and provide a link to the donation page in your blog content and social media updates periodically. Make it easy to find the donation page when on the website by featuring it in the menu and other places like a sidebar button.

Consider asking your donors to share when they donate. It is best to let them do this without showing the amount of their donation. When they donate, they should land on a thank you page and receive an email. For larger donors you may also send a thank you letter in the mail. In the email and on the landing page, provide call-to- action buttons that make it easy for them to share “I just donated to ______in order to ______. Please join me in supporting this cause.”

You might also consider advertising either through Public Service Announcements or paid ads. Be sure to craft landing pages on your site that are highly relevant to the ad content and that follow the rules for effective calls-to-action.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Volunteer pages Volunteers are donors too in that they are donating their time in service to your organization and cause. To best utilize this valuable resource, tell them the why, where, when, what and how of your needs for their service. Lead them by the hand to making effective contributions. If you don’t, they’ll wander off to another interest or cause. It is simply astounding how many volunteer-dependent organizations seemingly assume volunteers will figure out how to contribute on their own after the initial interaction.

Volunteer roles

If your trust has volunteer roles with specific responsibilities such as land stewards who check their assigned properties periodically, clear trail obstructions, maintain signs, etc., consider detailed pages for these “job descriptions” that are indexed on a volunteer roles page.

Private content

Do you have information to present to volunteers that isn’t for the public at large? Perhaps you have online forms for land stewards to use when making their periodic property reviews or checklists for trail crew leaders to use for work parties. It isn’t that these are highly confidential, but you don’t need spammers and malicious attackers sending you useless or harmful content.

You can set some content to be viewable only by logged in users in Wordpress. We prefer to hide this content completely (in menus, for example) so we usually build parallel menus for logged-in and not-logged-in users and adjust accordingly. There are plugins that let you control which menus a visitor sees. We include a function with Trail Data Manager™ for basic control of a public and a logged-in menu.

Sometimes it is useful to vary the content on a page or in a widget based on whether the user is logged in. In those cases we use our [visitor] and [member] shortcodes we mentioned earlier to vary the content. For example, in an event list in a sidebar, we might show the public a list of events they can attend while showing logged in users an equivalent list of events with registration enabled so they can register to volunteer at the event.

Using our [visitor] and [member] shortcodes together with our public and logged-in menu controller is a quick way to create a more private section of a website. 42 © Trail Websites / Lewis Studios, All Rights Reserved.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Volunteer registration

A volunteer sign-up form is a good way to assess skills, interests and availability while building an email or call list of on-demand volunteers.

Respond to sign-ups with manual or automated messages that acknowledge registration, thank them for their offered time and explain what happens next. Invite them to watch a video or attend a live event for some basic orientation so they stay engaged and then follow-up by assigning them to a volunteer opportunity soon enough to keep their interest.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Forms There are many free and paid options for forms in Wordpress. You can create a form in a page with HTML but if you need server-side processing when the form is submitted you’ll want to consider other options. Gravity Forms is a popular plug-in that adds more powerful forms capabilities to Wordpress. We usually create forms with custom page templates (so we can process the submission with PHP scripts on the server) or by embedding an external form like Google Forms (so we can collect the submitted data in a Google Sheet). Google Forms is especially handy for simple data collection such as surveys and volunteer forms.

Contact form

Contact forms that generate email require extra precautions to reduce spam. We use a simple math question and a hidden field, that people don’t fill out but robots do, as ways to screen out the bad from the good. Other’s use Captcha or ReCaptcha. Captcha’s can be hard for visitors to read but Google has recently offered an improved solution that simply requires the visitor to check a box stating they are not a robot in most cases. When they appear more suspicious, they solve a simple puzzle that is easier than the hard-to-read Captchas of the past.

Trail issue report form

This is a variation of a contact form for reporting issues on trails like down trees, broken glass, invasive species taking over, etc. For these forms we add a drop-down list so the visitor can select the property which, in turn, allows us to notify the associated land stewards and trail crew supervisor. We automate this with the data from Trail Data Manager™ so any changes to properties and stewards are always reflected in the form and notification flow. Small trusts with only a few properties could do this by manually updating the forms when changes occur and having someone receive all the messages then distribute them either with email rules (by searching for the property name in the subject line) or manually.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Email subscription forms

One of the best ways to promote your properties, trails and events as well as recruit volunteers and donors is to send them communications periodically so you can let them know what is going on and tell them about current needs. One of the most important things you can do on your website, therefore, is collect the email addresses of your visitors. Depending on your size and complexity, you might maintain one list for everything or you might ask them to state their interests and manage multiple lists accordingly.

It is usually best to use a 3rd party email service provider to make it easy to send email that is formatted in a nice HTML template, that adapts to varying screen sizes and device types and that is less likely to get stuck in a spam filter. Companies like MailChimp, AWeber and Constant Contact offer free or discounted services to non- profits and handle double opt-in and opt-out procedures for compliance with regulations like CAN-SPAM. They also include measurement tools so you can see how many people are receiving and opening your messages and whether they are clicking on call-to-actions in the message.

Integrating email service provider forms

Email services providers offer email sign-up form builders that you can use to build simple to complex forms to embed on your website so visitors can subscribe to your list(s). Integration is usually as simple as building the form then inserting the HTML into either the text widget or the text editor view of a page. It is often worth some extra time to look at how these forms are styled and add some CSS to make it look more like part of your website. The subscribe widget pictured here was generated with Constant Contact’s subscribe form generator and inserted into a text widget by pasting in the generated code and adjusting the styling to match the client’s site:

Subscribe to Our Mailing List

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

The generator requires that you are logged in with an active Constant Contact account and will insert the correct llr and m values for you. You can experiment with styling by editing the inline CSS for width, font and colors.

Search Your site should be easily searchable. Most Wordpress themes include a search widget that will show a search box in a sidebar. We prefer themes that place a search icon (magnifying glass) in the primary navigation menu where it is easy to find and touch on a small screen device.

If you have a lot of content, consider enhancing search with a plug-in like Relevanssi that ranks results by relevance. Wordpress’ own search presents search results by date. Relevanssi’s search results display is also better looking overall. Unless you’re running Wordpress Multisite, the free version of Relevanssi should fit your needs. If you’re working with a developer, they may already have a developer license to Relevanssi Premium which allows them to use it on your site as well.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Newsletters Many trusts publish newsletters in print, electronically or both. The content in your newsletters is excellent, high quality content that is relevant to your audience and can help your search results. It should exist in machine readable form on your website. Wordpress pages and PDFs work, scanned images of the pages do not work and neither do links into your email service provider’s archives as those help their search rankings, not yours.

Using categories for newsletter pages

As mentioned under categories in Wordpress Basics, one way to manage newsletter archives on your site is to post them in blog posts around the same time you mail or email them. Create a post category called “newsletters” and you’ll be able to use a virtual category page in your menu to offer an archive of newsletters on your site.

Formatting posts and linking PDFs

Re-creating your newsletter in a post is a lot of work for little incremental value if you already have the newsletter in a PDF that treats text like text (searchable). You can upload the PDFs to the Media Library and insert them into posts. Create a short table of contents (pay attention to using strong keywords!) in the post body and then insert a link to the PDF with a label that matches the post title such as “2015 Spring Newsletter”. For extra style credit, style the link as a button to make it more obvious.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Weather Gadget An easy way to add timely, helpful content to your site is to include the weather for your area. In Wordpress, you can easily put a weather widget or “Sticker” from Weather Underground in a sidebar by adding HTML similar to this to a text widget:

The easiest way to do this is to use the Weather Sticker generator to create the HTML then copy and paste it into the text widget. You can experiment with changing styling such as width and font by editing the generated code.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Locator maps Locator maps help people find your properties and can go much further, showing trailheads, trails, specific features and more. There are many ways to provide locator maps to your visitors. The key to most mapping options is data. If you have latitude and longitude coordinates for the things you want to show on the map, you’re most of the way there! With GPSes now in most smartphones, it has never been easier to gather coordinates.

Google MyMaps

Google’s MyMaps is used to create publicly viewable maps with your own layers of markers added on top. You can embed these maps on your site. You can edit an information window that opens when the marker is clicked to put in a name, description and link to a page on your site.

Google Maps API

Google Maps offers a javascript Application Programming Interface (API) that provides more capability than MyMaps. Create markers, lines and shapes and add layers that visitors can turn on and off. Use shapes to show properties that aren’t in Google’s base map on your map. Create markers with different icons for properties, parking areas and trailheads. Polylines can be used to show trail segments.

Trail Data Manager™ offers layered maps where the high level view shows properties and parking areas. Clicking a marker opens a detailed map of trailheads and trails. Info windows for parking areas include a link to a navigation view in Google Maps with a pre-filled destination so the visitor can put in their location and get driving directions. Trailheads work the same way but default to walking, not driving directions. Everything is created dynamically from data in the database so there’s only one place to make changes when a property is added, an additional trail’s coordinates are captured or something needs to change.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Open Street Map

An alternative to Google Maps is Open Street Map, created by people like you and us and, offered as open source data. Google Maps, by comparison is only free for lower volume uses. Open Street Map offers similar capabilities for custom maps but really differentiates itself from Google Maps in that you can edit the base maps to correct issues with shapes or trail lines for your properties.

Image Maps

Many sites have HTML image maps overlaying shapes on static images like a scanned town map. Image maps assign URL links to described shapes and can be used to create navigational links on top of any kind of image, not just maps. Because image maps aren’t based on GPS coordinates and don’t extend to driving and walking directions from services like Google Maps as easily, they are fading in popularity. They are also a little harder to get right on smartphone sized screens. They can still be a good choice for some sites and have the advantage of not making your site dependent on 3rd party services. If Google Maps is having a slow day, so is your locator map when you build it on their service. With an image map, your performance depends only on your own site’s ability to serve a single image file and some HTML. The biggest disadvantage of image map’s is that you have to edit the graphic image of the map to change labels for the clickable areas or implement very complex CSS and javascript to overlay reliably positioned labels.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Topographic Maps

Locator maps offer tremendous value to visitors. Once at your property, a topographic map is still the best map for a hiker that wants to understand the contours of the land and navigate by compass.

Include links to image files or PDF documents for topo maps on the pages on your site for each property. Trail Data Manager™ displays a medium sized topo map on detailed trail pages. When a visitor clicks the image, they get the full size version. The map image is also embedded in the downloadable and printable PDF Trail Guide. You can create the same experience by offering a downloadable guide on your site and by inserting the topo map image into its associated trail page.

Social Media: Sharing and Follow Us Building an audience is hard work. To paraphrase an old ad, you can make it easier by asking your friends to tell their friends and so on, and so on…

We mentioned Social Media Feather in the plugins section of Wordpress Basics. Whether you use this plug-in, another plug- in or a social media feature in your theme, it is useful to promote following and sharing. Ask people to follow or like you on pages and in sidebars and ask them to share in posts and possibly also on pages.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

OPERATIONAL CONSIDERATIONS

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

PART THREE: OPERATIONAL CONSIDERATIONS

Backup Backup is, of course, very important. Technical failures, malicious attacks and human error will cause something to go wrong on your website sooner or later and having a backup that you know is valid will save you time, money and much of the embarrassment that having to rebuild from memory, notes and scratch require.

It is not enough to have a backup. Backups must be periodically restored to a test instance of your site to make sure they can be used to restore the site to service smoothly and quickly. You can do the test restore on a local instance such as one of the ways we described setting up a development server earlier in this eBook.

Wordpress websites are a combination of files and one or more databases. Add-on technology may use the Wordpress database or may require additional databases.

Backing up the site’s files

Some web hosting services include automatic backup services that periodically combine the files from the site into one compressed file that you can download. If using one of these options, be sure to download the file when it is ready and test to make sure you can un-compress and un-archive the contents.

If you will backup manually, our recommendation is to use a quality FTP client that supports FTP over an encrypted connection. We use Transmit from Panic Software on Mac OS X. There are numerous other products that will also work.

The simplest process is to point your FTP client at the root of the Wordpress instance (often the root of your “www” or “public_html” folder) for the remote host and point it at the root of an empty folder for a test Wordpress instance on your local machine then copy the remote files to the local folder.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Copying the files, one at a time, by FTP is easy but not the most efficient way to move all those files. It also needlessly moves files that haven’t changed since your last backup. For these reasons you might consider a few alternatives:

• Use the hosting service’s backup tools or file manager to create a compressed archive or zip file then transfer just this file to the local machine (Transmit can create a zip file on an SFTP server before copying by sending SSH commands to the server – SSH is beyond the scope of this eBook). • Use more advanced features of the FTP client to copy only files that have changed or been created since the last copy. Hint: in Transmit’s preferences you can configure it to preserve file modification dates AND you can set Transmit Rules to copy only files changed after a specific date or a general rule like Date Modified within the last 10 days. • If you’re running Wordpress locally and on your hosting account already, and keep both updated through their respective Admin dashboards, you may not need to copy all the Wordpress files: setup your copy to get /wp- content/uploads (images and other media files), any special folders you may have added (we sometimes use a /images folder for special images like favicons, logos, header images, etc.), your child theme’s folder if you have customized any files there, and your /wp-config.php (which is needed for backup but may not be correct for your local instance – store accordingly) file. This avoids a lot of file transfers but remember that the largest number and size of files are probably your images so the uploads folder is still a good candidate for one of the above techniques. • Consider one of the plugins that are available that automate backups for you. Some of these even sync the backup to a remote file share and sync account such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Most of these will also backup the database. If you need to backup the database another way, keep reading.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Backing up the database

Most of the content in Wordpress that changes over time is in the database. This is where the content for pages, posts, comments, etc. lives.

Most hosting providers offer a way to get an export of your database through PHPMyAdmin or another tool. Whenever you backup your site’s files, you should also export a copy of the database to a .sql file. The default quick export option is usually best as it includes all tables.

PHPMyAdmin Quick Export Screen

Alternatives include automated backup tools your hosting provider may offer, Wordpress plugins and 3rd party database management tools.

You might wonder whether Wordpress’ built-in Export function is a good tool for doing backups. We do not recommend this tool for backups mostly because it only exports your content (pages and posts as well as some custom post types from plugins), not your entire site configuration. This means more work at restore time and we usually have little time to spare when restoring a website that isn’t working.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Testing your backup

Whether you need to restore for real or you are testing to ensure a valid backup, the process is similar:

• If possible, use the same folder structure, site name and domain name when you restore as your site was previously using to minimize adjustments that are needed to make the site work properly • Copy the files from the backup to the server, de-compressing and de- archiving as needed • Empty or Create the database • Use PHPMyAdmin or another tool to import the tables from the .sql file into the database • Make any needed adjustments (see next section) then test thoroughly

Importing a .sql file in PHPMyAdmin

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Update your staging server from your backup

If you are restoring to a development or staging server that uses a different hostname and or folder structure compared to your production server, there are several things you will need to adjust before you can test your restored site:

• In wp-config.php you may need to change one or all of the database name, database username and database user password • Using PHPMyAdmin or another database administration tool, go into the database, choose the wp_options table and change siteurl and home row’s option values to the correct url • Using a plug-in like Velvet Blues’ Update URLs change all references of the production URL to your staging or development URL • Fix any other URLs (such as in widgets) that may need adjusting • Test the staging server’s instance of your site

You might want to periodically use this process just to make sure the staging server’s content is close to the production server’s content to make development and testing more realistic. Updates and upgrades Wordpress as well as the various plugins you might use for your website will sometimes publish updates meant to address security issues, fix bugs, add new capabilities or, in the case of plugins, bring the plug-in up-to-date with recent Wordpress updates or upgrades.

The first rule of applying updates and upgrades is to always have a good, tested backup. Wordpress is fairly mature now and updates rarely go wrong but the risk is real and you don’t want to be caught with a bad or out-of-date backup if an update crashes and leaves your site in an unknown, non-functional state.

If updates are pending, you’ll see a number in a red circle next to “Updates”, Plugins”, “Themes”, etc. in the Wordpress Admin Dashboard.

Some hosting providers and plugin makers offer automated updates. In general, our advice is to ask for automated notifications when updates are available but to apply them manually, after you’re sure you have a tested backup and after you can test for compatibility with the rest of your site.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Wordpress updates

Ideally you will test Wordpress updates for compatibility with your plugins and customizations by applying them to your staging server first. When you know they aren’t likely to break anything and that you have an up-to-date and tested backup available, apply them to the production server.

Theme updates

Ideally you will test theme updates for compatibility with your plugins and customizations by applying them to your staging server first. When you know they aren’t likely to break anything and that you have an up-to-date and tested backup available, apply them to the production server.

With theme updates, you can consider a slightly riskier but more expedient update process by just making sure you have a backup of the themes folder and sub- folders.

Plugin updates

Ideally you will test plugin updates for compatibility with your theme, other plugins and customizations by applying them to your staging server first. When you know they aren’t likely to break anything and that you have an up-to-date and tested backup available, apply them to the production server.

With plugin updates, you can consider a slightly riskier but more expedient update process by just making sure you have a backup of the plugins folder and sub-folders AND the database.

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

Wordpress upgrades

Wordpress upgrades are major version releases such as going from Wordpress 3 to Wordpress 4. The precautions and process are similar to those for Wordpress updates but it is that much more important to have a tested backup and pre-test the upgrade with your theme, plugins and customizations on your staging server before applying the upgrade to your production server.

Testing updates and upgrades

Testing should be performed on your staging server first then repeated on the production server after it is updated.

Testing should exercise:

• administrative and user views • uses of representative pages using each page template that is in use • all active plugins, widgets and short codes • logged in and non-logged in states • laptop or desktop PC, tablet and smartphone devices and screen sizes o iOS and Android devices • each media type (video, audio, PDFs, images, etc.) in use • Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers should be tested on the appropriate mix of Windows and OS X versions

WORDPRESS FOR CONSERVATION & LAND TRUSTS

CONCLUSION

We hope this eBook has been helpful to you as you use or consider Wordpress or a similar content management system for your website.

By thinking about how property and trail content can be categorized and navigated, you can leverage the ease of content management these web content management systems provide to make maintaining your site easier. You also gain mobile friendliness (with the right theme), access to endless plugins for value-adding functionality and many books, eBooks and websites full of useful advice for getting the most out of this flexible, powerful tool.

If you have a lot of properties and trails and want to apply a content management- like approach to managing the data about each in a database and presenting that information in tables, pages, a PDF guide and on Google Maps, we hope you’ll visit us at Trail Websites to learn more about our services and our Trail Data Manager™.

If you have feedback, tips, questions or found an error in this eBook, please let us know through our website’s contact form at http://trailwebsites.com/contact-us/.