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Using Wufoo Forms with Salesforce

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You need to get information from your website into Salesforce, especially for Leads for new clients.

If you are on full WordPress you can use Gravity Forms for Salesforce plugin – it is a free plugin to Gravity Forms, and it can be used on all versions of Salesforce – with Web to Lead for the lower end versions of Salesforce, and Web to Anything, via the API with higher end versions of Salesforce.

If you are not using Gravity Forms, you can use the WordPress-to-lead plugin.

You can also use Integration services like Zapier, as detailed in my previous post on Integrations, however Salesforce is a premium pricing level in Zapier.

Wufoo Forms is another app that does Salesforce Integration, but not really very well. About the only time you would use Wufoo integration with Salesforce is if you were a NFP with a WordPress.com site. Wufoo is a great option for nice forms for a WordPress.com site (see my previous post on using Wufoo with WordPress.com), but as there are so many other options for full WordPress, I would not use Wufoo except for on WordPress.com.

Read more using Wufoo Forms with Salesforce

Mailchimp plus Wufoo plus WordPress.com – it’s almost great

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You want a form on your website, right? The form is to enable members of your community group to sign up to become a member or sign up for a newsletter. Most websites will allow you to embed a form into your website, however WordPress.com has some limitations on embedding codes and only allows code from a few sites to be embedded. One of those sites is Wufoo.

Wufoo is the master of online forms – if you want to create fantastic looking forms then go no further than wufoo, and you can create three forms for free. Wufoo handles the collection of data and has a great range of APIs to link to other web apps.

Mailchimp is the master of email marketing, plus they have fantastic tools for profile and list management that makes it the ideal choice for maintaining your members list for your community group. You can create a custom signup form with all the required details and Members can use the mailchimp forms to update their own details. Oh, and they enable you to do great looking emails to your members, and it’s all for free!

So, you can’t embed a Mailchimp form into your WordPress.com website, but you can put a link on your website to go to the Mailchimp form. You can embed a Wufoo form on your WordPress.com website, and set it up so that every time someone fills in the form, the details automatically get passed across to Mailchimp. This way you have a great looking form, embeded on your website, and the data gets stored in Mailchimp where you can use it for communicating with your members. Sounds great, doesn’t it.

Well, there is just one small catch, and unfortunately it’s a big enough issue for me to not recommend using embeded Wufoo forms on your WordPress.com website. Here’s the deal:

Mailchimp forms have this brilliant feature in-built into them. If someone has already registered and fills in their details again, it recognises that you already have that email address recorded and asks the user if they want to update their details instead. When using the Wufoo form on your website, this smart behaviour doesn’t happen. Therefore if I’m a member, have added my name, address and all my membership details into the Wufoo form, then come along and fill in the form again, this time with only my email address, Wufoo just updates mailchimp with the new details, and therefore deletes my address and membership details. (eg, it could do this if someone entered an incorrect email address and it happened to be the same as a subscriber in Mailchimp already, potentially deleting records you have stored in Mailchimp.

I checked with Wufoo support about this and they said there is no way around this, it’s how the Wufoo to Mailchim integration works. Wufoo’s response was:

Unfortunately, the Wufoo integration with Mailchimp only works in an ‘update’ function. This means that it will only update lists with either new addresses, or current addresses with the new information.

I understand this, and it is one of the limitations of working with APIs, but it’s a bit disappointing. Therefore I will recommend, if you want to put a form on your website to manage members details, then just link to the Mailchimp form from your site, and style the Mailchimp form to look nice, like your website does.

The Wufoo form integration works great for simple forms, like a newsletter signup that can be displayed in a widget on the sidebar.

WordPress.com Now Works

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I my series of posts last year on creating a web presence for your community group, I devoted one post to creating a calendar for your community group, where I lamented the fact that WordPress.com did not allow embeds of Google Calendars for some very strange reason. Thankfully this has now been rectified, and you can now embed a Google Calendar in your WordPress.com site. But it’s not only for Google Calendar but Google Docs as well. This is fantastic news, because this now makes WordPress.com the almost one stop shop for your basic website requirements, for a small business, community or sporting group – basically, WordPress.com now works!

I do strongly recommend WordPress.com if you fit into one of the following broad categories:

Individual

Like me, if you just want a place to record a bit about yourself, a landing page for your domain, and a place to rant or share your wisdom with the world, then WordPress.com is for you. See my post on WordPress.com for your domain.

It might be too structured for you if you want a highly visual site or want to quickly post from email and mobile, where Tumblr or Posterous would probably be better. If you want to sell stuff or embed ads or are fanatical about your google ranking, then it’s probably not the platform for you either.

Small Business

As I have mentioned before, if you are a small business, it’s easy to look at MYOB’s Atlas offering as a simple way to get a web presence for your business. Please don’t go down that path. Spend a little bit more time and effort, (and less money) and create a site that is individual to you and your business.

However, before you decide, have a look at the websites of your competitors – if you are in an industry that is highly visual, maybe just having your logo and a few images on your site is not going to be enough, and you will need a custom designed site.

Also, if you are going to sell stuff online, and you want a great looking simple site, then head over to Chieftech’s blog for a review of Goodsie.

Community Group or Sporting Group

WordPress.com is absolutely perfect for a community group or sporting group, which is why I did the whole series of posts on the topic.  I reckon with the combination of WordPress.com, Google Apps for Your Domain, MailChimp, and possibly a few other cool free or low cost tools that I have blogged about previously, you now have a fantastic platform for your Community or Sporting Group.

I would love to hear if you have any other ideas for either extending WordPress.com, or what other alternatives there are for Small Business, Community groups and the like to get a great web presence.

Getting Australia Online? MYOB Atlas is not the answer

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Recently, a new initiative was launched by MYOB and Google called Getting Business Online. It is a very simple website creation tool called Atlas from MYOB… or is it too simple? The websites that are created by Atlas are to be frank, UGLY, and look like they have come right out of 1995. Doesn’t your small business need something better than a website that looks the same as every other one created with this tool? Yes, there is some good about the service – it is backed by MYOB and Google so it is getting reach to exactly the people that need it – small businesses that probably use MYOB to do their books and still think the Yellow Pages is the only way to reach their customers, and it is quite cheap at $60 per year after the free first year of website (plus the cost of the domain name after 2 years).

I fully agree that every business in Australia needs a website, but is having a website that has no ability to extend it to use e-commerce (yet), email marketing, SEO tools, or even just using your business’s font is definitely NOT the way to go, when there are so many other options out there.

Having to learn about Domains, DNS, MX Records, SEO, Email Marketing, CMS, HTML, and any other acronym you can think of, is a bit overwhelming to most small business owners just dealing with trying to pay the rent and staff each week. But is having a website where the only way to buy online is to download a PDF and fax it back more detrimental to your business than not having a website at all? (yes, that is one of the sample sites on the MYOB Atlas site, and another of the 3 sample sites has a spelling mistake on it’s home page).

So what is the answer? I don’t have a simple answer, because unfortunately there is no magic bullet to get you online and get great Google search results and get huge numbers of orders or new clients via the web, without understanding a little about how this all works. If you don’t take control of the process and understand what is required you will end up giving some unscrupulous website or SEO marketer thousands of dollars for a crap looking website and no impact to the bottom line.

Having a discussion on Twitter today about this, with @paulwallbank and @chieftech lead to a few interesting links. Paul has a book coming out soon to help small businesses understand the world of the Web, and runs Workshops to help small businesses get online. James gave us links to http://www.digitalbusiness.gov.au/ and a cool homepage creation site called flavors.me (probably more suited to those who have a solid business look or who are confident with design).

For me, I’m still a huge fan of WordPress.com teamed with Google Apps for Your Domain for a simple web presence and business email solution –  So much so, that it’s what I use. It is quite simple to set up, as it takes the hassle out of the DNS and Email setup for you – and for US$12 per year (+ domain name costs), it is a bargain. It has hundreds of themes to choose from that require no web skills to set up, but for the adventurous, for an extra US$15 per year you can do unlimited customisations. Now there is no e-commerce available in WordPress.com, but if you are serious about doing e-commerce, you need to get serious about creating your whole online presence, and it’s outside the scope of this post (but see my portfolio showing a simple e-commerce website created in WordPress.org).

I have also done a series of posts about creating a web presence for your community group, and the tips in that series could be easily translated into your small business requirements.

So overall, my advice to small business is, take control of the process – spend some time learning some basics about how the web works, and don’t get caught out by apps that make really bad looking websites, or shonky web marketers that will rip you off.

2010 – My Blog in review

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I really like what WordPress.com produced automatically and sent in an email. It included a handy link to quickly make a post, so I did :).

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

 

In 2010, there were 22 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 117 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 64kb.

The busiest day of the year was November 16th with 119 views. The most popular post that day was Samsung Galaxy Tab Review.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, confluence.atlassian.com, google.com, blog.seibert-media.net, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for word vs excel, selenium locator, excel vs word, selenium measure website, and sharepoint vs confluence.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Samsung Galaxy Tab Review November 2010
2 comments

2

Selenium Locator Tips March 2010
5 comments

3

Swtiching to Android – Gmail Contacts January 2010
6 comments

4

Confluence and SharePoint Wikis May 2009
4 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

5

Automated Website Testing with Selenium October 2009
3 comments

Event Management and Emails for your Community Group

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Updated

This is the fifth in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at Event Management for your Community Group.

Community Groups exist for having events – whether they be committee meetings, fund raising or the gatherings that are the reason for the group. Community Groups also have members, and you need to keep in touch with the members, and invite them to the events.

This post will cover how to maintain membership lists, how to email members and people interested in your group, and software to help you run events. This post has been the hardest to do, as there are so many options and it is very hard to pick the best ones to recommend, and that are free, provide the level of features you need, and are not too difficult to use.

Membership Lists

Where is your current membership list? it’s probably in an excel spreadsheet, on someone’s home PC, or worse still, hand written in an exercise book that gets handed to each new incoming secretary (and yes, that is a real scenario from a community group I belonged to).

Why do you need a membership list? It is probably part of the constitution of your group, and that probably says you need to keep the name, address and the date they joined, as minimum information. You probably also want to include Phone and Email details.

You can use a Google Docs spreadsheet via your Google Apps for Your Domain account to maintain a list and share it with other members of you committee, and you can even use a Google Form to collect information from your members.

But for full management of all aspects of your members you may want to go with a full CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. There are a few that have free plans such as BatchBook or Wild Apricot (specifically for membership management), and they could be enough for what you need. Wild Apricot is the only one free online management system I have found that enables members to update their own profiles, but I have not tried it yet to be able to recommend it fully. But see below about MailChimp.

Emails to Members

You need to email members regularly, and unless you have under about 20 members it’s not a good idea to email your members using your email account. Often you can forget to BCC everyone, and you won’t comply with the Spam Act. This is where I recommend using MailChimp. It is a full email management system and it’s FREE for mailing lists of up to 1000 subscribers. You can import your contacts list from anywhere, and it will handle email bounces and unsubscribes for you. You can even put a link from your website to a sign up form to enable people to subscribe to your newsletter automatically.

The great thing about MailChimp is that the sign up form and lists can include most of the information that you need to keep about members, such as Name, Address, Phone Number, Date Joined etc (however, they can not update this information themselves). So the MailChimp list could be your full membership database.  MailChimp also has a powerful groups feature that allows people to sign up to receive information about specific topics.

Update
I really don’t know how I missed this when I first wrote this post – but MailChimp does allow your members to update their own details via the Update Profile link included in each email. This is such a fantastic feature, that I would strongly recommend that you maintain your full membership list inside MailChimp and just let people update it as they wish. At any time you can export your current membership list into Excel or Google Docs to do something like print a list of names onto labels for nametags.

Basically, MailChimp is so good that I would not recommend any other app to do emails to your members or handle your membership lists.

Event Management

When you run events, you may have large events that the general public can get or buy tickets to. There is a great range of web based apps for running and ticketing of events now. The original (and probably best) app is Eventbrite. The number of features of Eventbrite is quite amazing, including an iPhone app to check people in at the event. Eventbrite is free for free events, and it is simply the best way to organise, promote and manage free events. Unfortunately, for paid events it gets quite expensive. A cheaper option (that I have not tried) is TicketBud. They have a flat fee of US$19.99 to manage a paid event.

Of course, after your successful event, import the list of people who attended the event into your MailChimp subscribers list for emails of future events to those people (assuming you have told people that that’s what you will be doing with their email address when they give it to you).

A Calendar for your Community Group

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UPDATE: WordPress.com now supports Google Calendar Embeds! See my post and the announcement from WordPress.com

This is the fourth post in a series of posts about creating A Web Presence for your Community Group. By now you have a Domain, your website up and running with WordPress.com and have set up Google Apps for Your Domain and now have email for all your core team members.

The next thing most community groups need is a Calendar of Events. Most community groups exist because they have events run for the members or the general public, and you need to be able to promote your events via your website. Your Google Calendar is perfect for this. You can even create as many different Calendars as you want to your Google Calendar, for different parts of your Organisation (eg Committee, Meetings, Events, or a calendar for each different sub group of your organisation.

I have put off writing this post for so long because I was really hoping that WordPress.com would come to the party and allow embedding of Google Calendars. Unfortunately they have not. Here is a WordPress.org (hosted wordpress) site showing an embedded Google Calendar (created by my friend @adb). This is what you can NOT do on a free WordPress.com site. Unfortunately it is still the best way to show your Calendar of Events, and it is such a shame that WordPress.com will not allow this.

However, here are a few other options to overcome this limitation:

  • Create an Event’s Page on your website and manually enter details about the events. This is not the best idea as you have to continually update it and there is nothing worse than looking at someone’s website with outdated information on it.
  • Add a Link to your Calendar of Events from your WordPress.com website’s Sidebar or Menu. See the Instructions from Google on how to make your calendar public, then use the HTML link from your Calendar Settings to create a link to the calendar. The Calendar will look like this one (created for a Community Sporting Group who’s website I look after). This option is the easiest, but the calendar page is separate from your website, and not branded with the look and feel of your website.
  • There is a trick you can use to create an RSS Feed of your events and display them in the sidebar of your website. This is quite complex and involves relying on another service. I would only recommend it for the technically adept. (I have not tried it yet).
  • I do hate to say this but maybe create your site in Posterous (pronounced post-er-us) rather than WordPress.com. Posterous is a new-ish Microblogging platform but it now has almost as many features as WordPress.com (and a great new feature of group sites). I found this Posterous site that looks great and has an embedded Google Calendar.

For right now, I would create a link to the Calendar, and wait a bit longer and hope that WordPress.com comes to their senses and allows Google Calendar embeds in future. UPDATE: Which thankfully they have now done.

When you do start to use Calendar Embeds, Google has a great new feature that helps you create the code to embed multiple calendars.

Email for Community Groups

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This is the third in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at Email for your Community Group. This is a bit of a long post and has a lot of technical details and involved steps, but the good news is that you only ever need to do it once!

Most community groups have a President, a Treasurer and various other committee positions. The main feature of community groups is that the people in these roles change regularly – at least once per year. If you are dealing with suppliers or members of the public, the email communications may get lost when things transfer from the outgoing President to the incoming President. You usually remember to transfer hard copy files, and even maybe soft copy documents, but what about the email history of the group, that is harder.

This is where I will suggest one option only – Google Apps for Your Domain – because it is great, it’s FREE and it works so well for community groups and small businesses (See my previous post on Google Aps for Your Domain for small business).

The Set Up

Here are the steps to getting up and running with GAFYD Email for your community group:

  1. Sign up for Google Apps by choosing the Standard Edition of Google Apps for Your Domain – this is the FREE version.
  2. Enter your domain name and follow the prompts through the setup process. It is quite straightforward. There is a great step by step guide for the whole process.
  3. Now you need to verify that you own the domain you said you did.  For this you go back to your WordPress.com site you previously set up (if you chose not to set up a WordPress.com site see the instructions here).
  4. You will be given a verification code from Google Apps – it starts with google and has a long string of numbers and letters after it.
  5. In WordPress go to Settings, then Domains then click on Edit DNS. Halfway down the page enter your verification code, click on Generate DNS which enters the correct DNS records into the box at the top. Now click the Save DNS Records button.
  6. Now go back into your Google Apps account and click the Verify button to finish the process in the Google Apps control panel. You’ll know when verification is complete by checking the status of your services. Next to Calendar, for example, it will say Active instead of Updating.

Note that it could take up to 48 hours for the verification to apply because it can take that long for the DNS servers to update.

You should now be able to send and receive email from your Google Apps account, with the initial account you set up.

Create the Users

The next step is then to create an email address for each member of your community group. Create generic email addresses such as president@yourdomain.com.au, treasurer@yourdomain.com.au and info@yourdomain.com.au. There is a step by step guide on how to create users in Google Apps. Assign each user a generic, easy to remember password for now.

It will be annoying for your users to keep checking their email from your community group domain, so now you want to forward your email to the individual’s own existing email address. They can do this themselves, or you can do it for them before you let them know about the account you have just created for them. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Log out of the admin of the domain and in to the newly created president@yourdomain.com.au email account. Use the URL of http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com.au to get to the email.
  2. Follow these steps to set up the forwarding.
  3. Log out of that user, and into the account of the other users and do the same thing.

You may also want to set up a group email called committee@yourdomain.com.au. That way, to email the whole committee, people just need to use the one email address. Follow these steps for setting up groups in your domain.

Sub Domains

The URL of http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com.au is a pretty long URL to remember and may not be so easy for your committee members. So in this step you will set up some sub domains for each of the Google Apps, apps (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Docs etc). We have not delved into the other apps other than Mail – that will be covered in one of the next posts in the series.

The subdomain for mail will be http://mail.yourdomain.com.au

This is the steps to set up the sub domains.

  1. Log back into WordPress.com and go to Settings then Domains and click on Edit DNS.
  2. In the DNS box enter the following CNAME entries.
    3. CNAME mail ghs.google.com.
CNAME docs ghs.google.com.
CNAME sites ghs.google.com.
CNAME calendar ghs.google.com.
CNAME contacts ghs.google.com.
  3. Click on the Save DNS Records button.
  4. Now come back into your Google Apps admin, go to Service Settings, and follow these steps to set up the mappings for the sub domains for each app. However, when you are in the page to change the url for Mail, there is a link to “Change URLs for all domain services”. If you click on that link you can do all the sub domain URL’s in one hit.
  5. Now log out of the Admin and test your new subdomain by going to http://mail.yourdomain.com.au (as with other DNS changes it may take up to 48 hours for it to work).

Spread the Word

Now email your committee members and let them know the following:

  • The new email address for their committee position
  • The fact that the emails sent to that address will be coming directly to their own inbox.
  • The general committee email address for sending emails to the whole committee.
  • The URL http://mail.yourdomain.com.au to log into the email
  • The password that you created originally (tell them to change it right away by following these steps).

I would suggest the following rules for using the president, treasurer etc emails. If they are replying to an email sent to president@yourdomaincom.au it is fine to come from their own email address (if you are particular about keeping a full audit trail of communications both ways, then ask them to cc or bcc the president email address in all replies). If they are sending an “official” email on behalf of the group then they should log into the mail account to send the email from there (eg an email out to all members).

Or, if they already use Gmail for their own personal mail, they can use this trick to send your group’s email right from within their own Gmail account and have it come from their yourdomain.com.au email address.

In the next post I will talk about options for managing your members, and communicating with your members.

Websites for Community Groups

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This is the second in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at the Web Site itself.

Web Content

This is a tough decision. Depending on your organisations needs you can do it all for free or you can spend thousands of dollars. I’m only talking about the free and cheap options because as a community group, unless you have some very specific requirements, then you don’t need to spend a heap of money.
The first decision is what do you need on your site? For a community group you will probably need at least the following information on your website:
  • About the group
  • History of the group
  • The Committee
  • Rules of the group
  • Any legal obligations (eg if you are an incorporated association)
  • Minutes
  • News
  • Contact details
  • Locations of events, clubs or meetings
  • Photos and details of past events

This content can be broken up into Static and Temporal content. The static content is the information about the club itself, the committee and location and contact details. This information doesn’t change that often and is updated only when it needs to be. The temporal content is the information that is applicable to a particular point in time only. This is news, details of events, minutes etc. If people want to look back at old content that is fine, but only the most recent and relevant content should be the most visible on the site. I will put Upcoming Events into another category because that is going to be a separate post.

One thing to be aware of is the privacy of the individuals in your group. Have a discussion in your group about what your web privacy policy will be and make it known to the group (via the minutes or some formal communication). Allow people to opt out if they don’t want their names, photos and details online. See the post on Email for some more ideas about how to preserve people’s privacy.

WordPress

This is where I’m going to delve right in and say use WordPress for your site – yes that WordPress – the one that does “blogs”. WordPress is NOT just for blogs, it can be used for almost any kind of web site – including a shopping site.  Wordpress is a Web Content Management System – that just means that it is an easy to use web based system that allows for the content to be separated from the design. So when you need to write a news article, you just write the article, you don’t have to worry about how it looks on the page, because that is already handled for you. Other Web CMS’s are Joomla, Drupal and Squarespace (to name just a few of the thousands there are out there).

WordPress comes in two flavours – self hosted (WordPress.org) and hosted (WordPress.com). This post will mainly focus on WordPress.com as it is free, simple to us and suits 99% of the website needs for a community group.  If you want to host your own WordPress install you will need a web hosting provider. There are thousands and thousands of them out there, but for a simple WordPress hosting service you should not have to pay more than about $150 per year. Self Hosted WordPress has many features that WordPress.com does not have, including the ability to extend your site by using PlugIns, control the look of the site exactly using themes and CSS and even use custom code to make it do almost anything you could imagine. I like this article that explains self hosted WordPress in a bit more detail. If you start with WorPress.com and want to move everything to a self hosted WordPress at a later date, then it is a simple process. So there is nothing stopping you from starting now with a WordPress.com site.

Setting up WordPress

WordPress.com is simple to set up – it takes just a few minutes and you have your basic site set up – for FREE. From there you need to choose a theme. WordPress.com at the time of writing has close to 100 themes to choose from, so you should be able to find one that suits your community group. (If you want more control over the look and feel then you can pay US$15 per year to be able to apply custom CSS to your site). My advice is to stick with a simple theme with a custom header (where you can put your logo), and maybe custom colours. (This is why I love the Vigilance theme that this site is based on). See more information about Themes from the WordPress.com support site, including the great video. You may need to play around with a few themes until you find the one that is right for your group. It may not be 100% perfect, but this is where you trade off perfection for cost – remember so far this site has cost you nothing but a few hours of your time.

The next thing you want to do is create some content. Your static content such as committee, about the group etc will be created with Pages. Your temporal content such as news, events and minutes will be created as Posts. Each Post will be given a Category (eg News), which will help you navigate to only the posts about news or events. As WordPress is orignally designed for blogs, by default he Posts page will be the first page that you see when you come to the site. You need to change this to be one of your static pages. You set the home page in the Reading Options settings.

The next thing you need to set up is the Widgets that display in the sidebars. (Sidebars can be on the left, right or bottom of the page, depending on the theme you have chosen).  In the sidebar, I would suggest at least some navigation to the latest news stories, some information on how to contact your group a search box, and a links to any other web sites that your group has (eg you may have images on flickr or a twitter account or facebook page). In the Events post I will talk about how to put an events widget on your sidebar.

Map your Domain to your Site

Once you are happy with the overall site, it is time to link the site to the Domain and then publicise the fact that you have a web site now. To link the Domain to the web site follow the steps to Map an Existing Domain on the WordPress.com site. This costs US$10 per year.  There are three steps to this process.

  1. Nameservers: You will need to go back to the domain hosting provider and log into your domain management to update the Nameservers. This is where it pays to have a good hosting provider as they will have some online help on how to do that, or they will be able to help you set it up.
  2. Payment: You will need a Paypal account to do this (but you probably want a paypal account anyway). Go to Settings > Domains in your site to do this.
  3. Mapping: Once the Nameservers are set and you have paid for it you can then set the mapping up. Go to Settings > Domains in your site to do this.

This process can be a bit fiddly and don’t expect it to take a few minutes. But once it is done, it never needs to be done again (except paying for it each year).

That’s it! A simple web presence online, with your domain name for a total cost so far of under $100 for the domain and the domain mapping.

See the next posts in the series for more things to do with your website such as events and applications and ongoing management of your site.

Domains for Community Groups

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This is the first in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at Domains.

Your Domain is the web address for your group eg www.yourclub.com.au or www.yourclub.asn.au. (actually the domain is the bit without the www, but that is getting a bit technical).

(I’m going to focus on .com.au domains – .org.au or .asn.au are similar also. There are more and cheaper options for hosting a .com or .org domain but there is also lots of info out there about them – just go to somewhere like www.godaddy.com)

First Step – do you have a Domain? If not – get one! It is very important to have a web presence for your group that represents the name of your group. There are 30 accredited resellers in Australia that can sell .au domains. The site WhatsInAName.com.au lists all the providers by price. (The list of domain providers in Australia can be found here). However, price is not the only factor in choosing a domain provider.

Some technical details: Your choice of web hosting platform will also play a part in deciding which domain reseller to go with. If you require web hosting (see the next article on Web Sites for more info on that), it’s best to stick with the same company for domain hosting as it is easier for administration. If you don’t require web hosting, you may still need DNS hosting. The cheaper domain providers charge extra for DNS hosting or don’t include it at all, and it’s not really that obvious from looking at their websites. (There are free DNS providers such as OpenDNS or ZoneEdit).

This is where I would recommend not skimping and going for the cheapest option. You really want a Domain provider that is reliable, has great service and includes DNS Hosting.  (For the record, I use TPP Internet, they are not the cheapest, but they do include DNS hosting. I have found their service to be excellent – they even phoned me to make sure I had paid for my domain name when it was due a few weeks ago).

Remember that registering a .au domain has rules associated with it – basically the domain name has to have something to do with the organisation you are registering. Eg you can’t registered MyClub.asn.au for a club called something entirely different. See the full rules here or there are more basic copies of the rules on the websites of all the domain providers. The site MyWebName.com.au also has some great resources and information.

You also need to decide how many domains to register. Do you want the .com and the .com.au? It’s completely up to you and would mainly be a problem if there were other names similar that might get confusing. To keep it simple, try to keep to one domain name.

If you already have a Domain then who owns it? When is it due to be registered? Do a Whois lookup on the domain.  Go to MyWebName.com.au to do a Whois search on the domain. The Whois search will tell you the name and email address of the registered person. If that person has left your organisation you can at least try to email them to get the login details of your domain.

It also tells you who the domain registrar is and where the Nameservers point to –  we will delve into Nameservers a bit later. If all else fails and you can’t contact the person who has registered the domain, then you can contact the domain registrar and ask them how you can take back control of the domain. (They may require a letter in writing on a letterhead from your organisation). But as the domain has been registered some time in the last two years, hopefully you will be able to get in touch with the person who did it.

Now you need to decide to keep the domain hosting with that company or transfer it to another company. Most domain companies will allow you to transfer your domains to them for free (as they want your ongoing business). If you have a few different domains it’s a good idea to transfer them all to the one company, and you can even have them synced so that they all expire on the same day.

All in all, the domain should not cost more than $140 for 2 years, and you can get it for a lot cheaper than that.

Keep a record of everything you have just found out – it will come in handy for later.

Update October 2011

Modified some broken links.

Note: $140 for 2 years is now ridiculously expensive for .com.au domains. One of the most expensive now is $99 for two years. Remember, the price stated on the website may not include DNS Hosting.