Website Design and Hosting for Small Organizations

As part of my duties as IT Manager for NSI Partners TechConnect, I also oversee our Hosting services.

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In today’s marketplace, the Internet, and the Web, are everywhere.  From desktop and laptop computers, to tablets and smart phones, to TVs, other home electronics, and even some cars, the ubiquity of the Web is enormous.

Whether you are a for-profit or not-for-profit organization, a web presence is essential to draw attention, provide services, get new customers, and communicate with constituents.

Many places today offer simple, easy-to-configure, bottom-dollar priced do-it-yourself site design and hosting.  Some of these sites, such as our own NSIHost, offer such services and additional features you can easily add in (e-commerce, SSL certificates, various Social Media plugins, etc.).  This is a great option if you are willing to spend a little time getting comfortable with the interface, tools and walk-thrus available to build your own site.

Another option is to contract with a provider (NSI Partners provides these services as well) to design a site for you, often using images and graphics you provide, with a layout design you have input into, and features / add-ons that make sense for your goals and organization.  This, of course, is more expensive, but gives you the luxury of a no-hassle site designed by experts without having to spend much time fiddling with the site design yourself.

There are other choices to make, such as the registration of domain names (e.g. www.mycoolsite.com), whether or not you want email accounts for your registered domains, and whether you want your website in a shared or dedicated hosting environment.  In addition, Search Engine Optimization is very important if you want to be found.  Many online marketing firms offer services in these areas, including NSI Partners, and money spent on various forms of online marketing usually means more visitors, links from others, and ultimately, customers.

The main point here is that if you are part of a new small business, a non-profit or ministry organization, or represent some other organizational interest, you need a website, and it’s not as complicated or intimidating as one might think.

If you are ready to get started, follow one of the links in this post, or fill out our contact form, and one of our Design and Hosting experts will reach out to you and assist you in the next steps for your agency!

CRM in the Cloud…Salesforce Group Edition

This post is about a year overdue, but as relevant, if not more so, than it would have been in Fall 2009.

Last spring/summer, our company leadership decided that the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software we were using was falling behind the times and not getting prettier.  After months of research and several near-misses, we decided pretty much unanimously that Salesforce offered the best feature set (cloud-based, requiring no real company infrastructure, web 2.0-style easy-to-learn interface, little internal technical support required, integration with Outlook and Office via apps, huge user community, robust 3rd-party plug-in development).  However, the price per user was painful for a smaller business, and so we almost missed the boat.  But at the last minute we were turned onto the Group edition, which we had previously not been aware of.  With a significantly reduced subscription price and some blocked features (no deal-breakers), we excitedly worked with a 3rd-party contractor to migrate 10 years of data from our old CRM (Goldmine) into Salesforce.

And we’ve never looked back!

All those features we felt drawn to have taken some time to get used to, but Salesforce not only has a great feature set and interface, but also provides a guiding light to their “doctrine” around the sales process.  Let’s face it: though it’s great to have a robust set of data that captures phone calls, meetings, projects, and emails with existing clients, the main fruit of a platform like Salesforce is in leveraging it to get new business.  Though we are still working through the details of how to best leverage Salesforce’s feature set, suffice it to say we have been very pleased with all the features actually working for us like we hoped they would.  And we can’t always say this about every product we might turn to in hopes of features delivering on their promises.

For other folks out there in the SMB market wanting to have an affordable, intuitive, cloud-based, ever-improving system of capturing client/partner/vendor data that also excels at helping with managing the lead/opportunity/sales process, I can’t encourage you quickly enough to point your browser to the Salesforce pages and get your own relationship started.  Hopefully you too won’t be looking back as you move forward with this bright system!