We at Unleashed Technologies are thrilled at the announcement that three of our sites have been voted the winners of the Blue Drop Awards, including Website of the Year. Thousands of sites leverage Drupal worldwide and many quality sites were nominated to win in these awards.

Here at Unleashed Technologies, we are proud to announce that three of our clients have sites nominated in the Blue Drop Awards. Those sites are: Eyemaginations.com, Forging.org, and Shunra.com. Have you voted for your favorite sites yet? If not, here are three easy steps to  vote in the Blue Drop Awards:

Many Non-Profits have a hard time establishing a consistently visited web presence. There are many attributes that contribute to this but perhaps the most important is the relation of different content types (i.e. - Video, Blog Posts, Articles, Research, etc).

Most people when visiting a website whether direct or through search already know what they are looking for. In that process they want as much content pertaining to their inquiry and your ability to deliver will decide how often they return to your website. This is particularly true when your non-profit is focused in a much defined mission such as breast cancer, military topics, or the construction industry as a few examples.

Reading magazine articles on the web is different than delivering content in a print format. By addressing this simple fact upfront, magazines have an opportunity to still provide a unique experience on the web and other digital delivery platforms.

The very restricitions of a magazine are what make it possible to uniquely tailor each article. From the page count, to the maximum amount of artices allowed and the pliability of a static delivery mechanism magazines truly provide a unique experiece to every article in the magazine. But what happens when publishers lose control in the ways people read their content? When restrictions leveraged as advantage are removed?

The answer usually starts with a substantial amount if internal arguements from editors. Very poor delivery of your content online will degrade the value of it and not keep the attention of your audience. As a key challenge many magazine publishers also struggle with an effective way of getting their content online without consuming many many hours and assigning staff directly to the process.

With today’s blog counts, there are several million active blogs offering a great variety of topics and content. The best aspect of a blog is that anyone can easily promote their organization, hobbies or passion on any topic.

I find it odd that in this day in age the public facing web presence of any organization whether it be non-profit or commercial is still perceived as a one time investment. Like all companies in the small to mid-sized business range the reality of budget is something everyone must work within.

Drupal 7 is here and it's never been more exciting to be one of the front runners in open source content management.

For Part 3 of this series we will be getting into what tools and modules can be used to create an intranet of committees using Drupal and civiCRM

For this we will be going over how Drupal can be used to create an intranet with access to membership directories and provide individual group pages for each committee within your organization, with the ability to subscribe to messages organize events and share documents.

It just keeps getting tougher for non-profits as the expectations for resource availability becomes higher and higher.