We’ve Arrived!
Your feedback is important to us. We did extensive testing on our upgraded site to ensure our visot experience was a good one. But there is nothing better than 406 real visitors to help uncover some of the unexpected issues that you might uncover.
It should be obvious that we’ve made a major upgrade to our website.
We are now using WordPress for our content management system. Have an interest websites? Please contact us and let us know your skill sets.
WordPress is the CMS du jour for websites, it is open source and supported by a thriving community. It is non-proprietary and is here to stay in the foreseeable future. Yes, the WordPress user-interface is very intuitive and multi-platform friendly… “Easier than Facebook” to post a news story to share with other USNA Outers.
The best feature of this new site are the communications tools available to our all-volunteer leaders. As long as you keep your communications preferences up-to-date, we can keep you updated with news about USNA Out and our members.
What won’t WordPress do for us?…
…not keep your membership data up-to-date. You will still need to log in to update your account so that the information shared on our roster is current.
….write posts! Stories that we share with our members just don’t write themselves, and sharing great information has been our challenge all along to maintain our website fresh and vibrant. In our typical “call for newsletter articles” we typically get zero to two responses.
Absolute best feature: total integration of communications to our members. The site will actually build the newsletters literally in SECONDS, then send out to everyone or targeted (SF Bay Area, for example) lists to which people themselves subscribe.
Why WordPress? This graph says it all:
Note the break… WordPress is now 12x more common CMS than Drupal, 60 times Wix.
What are the Benefits?
#1 Benefit – database management. With over 400 members, maintaining our membership database has been by far the biggest time-suck to keep things current. NO MORE MANUALLY MAINTAINED GOOGLE GROUPS. The WordPress site will allow our members to self-select which communications they wish to receive.
There is still the issue of individual members keeping their contact data up-to-date. In our last blast to members who had not yet RSVP’d to the May Dinner in Annapolis, we got 37 bounce-backs.
#2 Benefit – automated newsletters, targeted newsletters. This is huge. Communications to our membership utilizing the newsletter feature of the site become a breeze.