Webinar Recap - How Effective Website AX Can Transform Your Business

Ralph Otto Chief Product Officer

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June 7, 2024

News

Thank you to the attendees of our webinar “Cracking the Code: Does Your CMS Provide a Great AX?” If you didn’t get a chance to join us, the webinar discusses the importance of AX for operational efficiency, improved performance, user satisfaction, security, scalability, and flexibility.

Key Points

1. Introduction:
   • Morgan Witham and Ralph Otto introduce themselves and the focus of the webinar on AX.
2. Importance of AX:
   • AX impacts the efficiency and effectiveness of digital platform operations, enhancing productivity, user experience, security, scalability, and customization.
3. Comparison with User Experience (UX):
   • UX enhances the end-user experience, while AX streamlines backend tasks for administrators. Both are equally important for a well-functioning website.
4. Components of a Great AX:
   • Content Management and Publishing:
     • Easy content addition, editing, and organization without coding.
     • Page layouts, media management, content scheduling, revision history, and bulk editing.
   • Usability and User Interface (UI):
     • Efficient, intuitive, and consistent UI design for administrators.
     • Mobile responsiveness and customization to fit specific needs.
   • Security and Data Protection:
     • Strong security measures including SSO, 2FA, activity monitoring, and backups.
     • Data privacy and legal compliance.
   • Scalability and System Performance:
     • High uptime, automated tasks, multilingual support, and integrated systems.
   • Customization and Flexibility:
     • Customizable page layouts and smart content types.
     • Feature customization to adapt to changing needs.
   • Support Resources and Training Materials:
     • Availability of training resources, community support, and regular software updates.

What’s Next?

We’ll be hosting a series of “snackable,” on-demand how-to webinars focusing on website key features and how teams can leverage them to get results. The intent of these is to demonstrate what’s possible and provide some ideas on ways to implement.

Transcript

Morgan Witham (01:01): Hi there, and thank you for joining us today for the second episode in our cracking the Code series. My name is Morgan Witham and I’m the CEO of Colab. We are a digital agency based in Richmond, Virginia that consults, designs, and develops custom websites that empower you marketers to do your work faster and better. We specialize in websites for credit unions and have a really nuanced understanding of what your members need and what credit union marketers need to do their best work. I am joined today by Ralph Otto, who will be leading us through a discussion about the administrative experience.

Ralph Otto (01:39): Ralph hi, I’m Ralph Otto, co lab’s director of product. I’m a 14 year veteran at Colab where I’ve kind of played every single role on the project team and now I’m responsible for the company’s innovation.

Morgan Witham (01:52): Great, thank you and let’s dive on in and get started.

Ralph Otto (01:57): Okay, so the administrative experience is really a fundamental part of your website because it impacts the efficiency and effectiveness of your digital platform operations. A well designed administrative experience can really enhance productivity and facilitates a better user experience. And when I say that, what I mean is from an operational efficiency standpoint, it’s not just about streamlining your content management and your system administration tasks, is about freeing up your time from those routine tasks that you just have to do and allows you to focus more on the strategic aspects of the work. It also is crucial that performance is optimized for it so that our digital platforms are able to handle increased traffic, increased data loads. We also want to make sure that user satisfaction is high.

Ralph Otto (02:47): By making the backend user friendly, administrators can more readily impact that front end experience for visitors, leading to higher engagement rates. From a security perspective, a well designed administrative experience includes robust security measures to protect that sensitive data and prevent unauthorized access on scalability. Your administrative experience must facilitate your platform’s growth by allowing for adjustments so that you can accommodate expansions without needing to compromise performance. And finally, from a flexibility standpoint, we need to have administrators be able to tailor the system to specific organizational needs so that your overall functionality and user experience can be improved.

Morgan Witham (03:31): Okay, so to summarize, the administrative experience is pretty important and critical because it can streamline tasks, it can enable a more powerful website and a more powerful front end experience and really make sure that your site is running smoothly, securely. How do you compare the importance or the value of the administrative experience with the user experience?

Ralph Otto (03:55): Okay, in terms of importance, weigh them pretty equally in our work at Colab, and that’s because we know from building websites for the last 16 years and building hundreds of them, that you can only get the full benefit from the user experience when that is fueled by a powerful, well designed administrative experience. And so thinking through the ways that these two things are different, the user experience really focuses on enhancing the overall experience for users that are interacting with the website or application on the front end, whereas the administrative experience focuses on streamlining and optimizing the backend management tasks for administrators of that website. We’ve got a few differences listed on this slide, but what it really comes down to is that these are two different audiences.

Ralph Otto (04:47): Users and administrators are both users of the website, but they have really different needs and they have different tasks that they need to accomplish. So our job is to consider both those things when we build a website.

Morgan Witham (05:00): Okay, that’s very helpful to level set as we go in and dig in a little bit more on the administrative experience side. So now that we have level set, what we mean high level, when we refer to the administrative experience in that audience group, along with its value and the importance, can you walk us through the various parts of a good ax?

Ralph Otto (05:21): Yeah. Yeah. So I think one common misconception is that the administrative experience is the same as having a content management system, but that’s not necessarily the case. A really great administrative experience is definitely inclusive of that ability to manage and publish content, but it’s a lot more than that. It includes the overall usability and the user interface security and the data on the backend, scalability, performance, customization, flexibility, and the resources that actually support and are able to help you train on that administrative experience.

Morgan Witham (06:01): Well, yeah, because I suppose a good administrative experience is pretty useless if the team isn’t fully trained on how to leverage it to its fullest or have the support they need when questions come up. Okay, so let’s dive into each of these parts a little more.

Ralph Otto (06:16): Okay. All right. This is the part that everyone kind of knows, right? The ability to add and edit and organize content. That really should be stable. Table stakes for an administrative experience, this is like, you know, there are a few things that you probably need to keep in mind when you’re adding content. You shouldn’t have to know or understand code to update a new page whenever possible. What you’re seeing and editing on the backend should really be close to what you get when you actually publish your page. And then one of the efficiencies that we really like to do in the administrative experience is make sure that we separate out content types so we’re able to apply very specific patterns or templates or layouts or placeholder text just to make it really easy to continue to add content to the site.

Ralph Otto (07:08): All of these things are going to help you maintain an active, engaging online presence.

Morgan Witham (07:13): Great.

Ralph Otto (07:16): Page layouts and the ability to adjust them over time can make creating new content a lot easier. And this is what were just talking about. Oftentimes with a CMs here we’ve got a WordPress CMs. We want to be able to preset patterns and we want to predefined templates for content types. What’s highlighted here are patterns inside of WordPress allows you to quickly add components to your page without much effort in line with adding just typical text content or formatted content. You also want to have solid media management and that’s going to allow you to upload, organize and optimize your images or videos and give you the ability to enhance the visual experience of your site while making that process really fast and easy.

Ralph Otto (08:04): You want to be able to add your images, documents, videos, replace images site wide, update things like your alt text for accessibility, or add captions. You want to be able to search it if there’s a piece of content that you’d like to reuse. One of the other things that’s often missed is you want these assets to automatically size for you. That’s going to help with the performance on the front end of the site. This is also something that most teams don’t need every single day, but you’re going to want to be able to schedule content. And this is so you can plan really well. You can plan your marketing calendars really well, and you can make sure that you don’t have to be in the system every single day.

Ralph Otto (08:48): You can plan ahead, you can make your content in advance and say, like, I want this to publish later. It gives you a lot more flexibility to optimize how that content is delivered to the end user. And then we see this as really critical to content creation too. This is example of revision history and you really want this type of version control of the content. It’s pretty rare that you might need this, but it’s really important when you do need it because you need to recover text or content that you may have accidentally or maybe you did on purpose, but you want to revert to previous content that was maybe performing a little better.

Ralph Otto (09:31): It’s really helpful when you’re looking at your site metrics like analytics or your SEO scores, and you want to figure out what was it that I did that resulted in that particular outcome. It’s also really helpful when you have multiple people working on a site that you can understand who did what and when. Having that content integrity and management efficiency is super important for industries that are heavily regulated like financial services. Lastly, in the content area, bulk editing can save a tremendous amount of time. This is really useful when you’re phasing out pieces of content. Like if you no longer want a type of content on your site.

Ralph Otto (10:13): One example that we often see is when you have blog posts that are in a particular category and maybe you’re adjusting what vertical you’re going after, you might select all of those and want to draft them all at once.

Morgan Witham (10:26): Great. So that was content management and publishing. Now we’re going to dive into usability and the user interface design. Is it fair to say, Ralph, that the user interface is typically only thought of as the end user of the front end of the site versus the administrative user?

Ralph Otto (10:43): Usually, yes. Whenever we talk about usability and user interface design, this would typically map to a visitor that’s on the front end of the site versus on the back end. But you can think about it the same way because administrators, they need an easy experience in their job too. Not just they need to be able to easily navigate, rapidly achieve their administrative tasks, and have a good experience too. If those administrators we mentioned this before, if they’re well enabled on the backend, then they’re usually able to create a better front end experience too. An easy to navigate and usable interface is so important to be able to efficiently manage your content, your users, your system settings, your day to day work is faster and new employees can get up to speed more quickly.

Ralph Otto (11:34): And generally speaking, you can do more, do it faster and do it better when you have a really good interface. This is one of the measurements from design heuristics, which is making sure that we’re minimizing those errors. Preventing mistakes by providing these forgiving UI controls is really helpful to avoid errors that could otherwise go undetected. Before you publish something that is going to be incorrect or incomplete, we want the interface to actually highlight, like here, where we haven’t filled out a field correctly, and we want to make sure that our administrators are flagged before they put something on the front end that’s that maybe isn’t appropriate on the backend. It’s more common for this error messaging to be neglected, but that can lead to errors in the future that you may not, may have to discover yourself.

Ralph Otto (12:25): And then something that is really helpful when you’re working inside of your administrative experience is consistency. Consistency to the interfaces, and this is the same rule as on the front end, is a consistent UI across all parts of your website, reduces the learning curve and it helps administrators develop a little bit of an intuition on how different actions are performed within the software. Whether you’re editing a page or an article or a case study, it all uses a very familiar interface and you’re always seeing the same kind of patterns. Like you always have a list view, you always have a detail page that you can edit, you always have categories, and while there might be different columns for different content types, it all follows a similar pattern. That’s very understandable.

Ralph Otto (13:15): On the responsive side, this is something that most folks don’t think about, but we always want to make sure that responsiveness is there on the front end and that in today’s mobile first world that you’re able to access a front end website. But administrators can also need to edit on the go and this is not ideal and is not that common. But I have definitely helped solve many issues by hopping on my phone to make an edit when I wasn’t near a computer. Doesn’t really interrupt me in what I’m doing. And it’s super handy if you want to do if you’ve ever been on call for something on the website.

Morgan Witham (13:59): So if you have to respond to an issue, for example, well, none of us are perfect, that is for sure. And even with really tight controls around quality assurance like we have on our own site, errors certainly happen. So I think you’re right that making quick changes from your phone, at least for us, has come in handy in a pinch.

Ralph Otto (14:14): Okay, so if one really important thing as well is not all tools are created equal, you may need to customize your UI to how your team works and your specific needs, so you can definitely enhance how your overall administrative experience works. And this might include adjustable settings for displaying information. Maybe you would use different themes for ease of viewing or workflows that match the user’s preferred way of working. If you’re working in your cmS, you’ll find things that you want to tweak that are really specific to your work style. Here we’ve got a couple examples. We’ve got one on the left side is in WordPress. These are more standard controls that allow you to show and hide particular UI elements on your screen. Drupal is a little different. You have a lot of control around how that back end interface looks.

Ralph Otto (15:07): And in this case we’re using a back end theme designed for the front end on the backend. So when folks log in, they have a completely different administrative experience. It’s all within brand. This is really good if you’re building a portal or something that a lot of people are going to have to log into and you really want to change how that experience plays out.

Morgan Witham (15:29): One thing that often clues us into opportunities for further customization, at least for our clients, is when we’re working with them and we hear the word workaround. And more often than not, we’ve realized that marketing teams have had to come up with workarounds in their cms or their administrative experience to accomplish something that they want to do on their website. But it’s not straightforward or linear or clear. So typically when we hear that word, and I encourage the marketers here with us today to think about things that they have created as their own workarounds, because almost always that is indicative of an opportunity to streamline, create a custom workflow, or display information differently. Something that can help eliminate those workarounds and speed up that work, make it a little more efficient.

Ralph Otto (16:16): Absolutely. All right. This might not be as exciting of a topic for everyone, but without having strong security in place, you pretty much lose the integrity and reliability of the other features of the administrative experience. So when we’re thinking about the ax from a security standpoint, we’re looking to ensure that data is secure, login information is protected, and cyber threats are kept out. Compromised security really risks the foundation of trust that you’ve built by your organization. To make sure that everyone is protected, we put in a number of control measures, or we recommend putting in a number of control measures, such as single sign on, which is something that you could do if you have Microsoft 365 or Okta, some service that you use to log into other services within your organization, you can put that in place for the website.

Ralph Otto (17:09): You could use two factor authentication or multifactor authentication, so that you’ve got a separately stored passkey, maybe via mobile app or via text message on the back end. We would have activity monitoring to make sure that you can see which users are doing what really helpful for auditing purposes, especially if something goes wrong and you don’t want to repeat that or you want to alter a process. You can look in there, you might have software security that you apply. So maybe patches or maybe core updates for your CMS. You can also add a software level firewall, which just allows you to block malicious traffic and very specific threats. And you could also have a piece of software that has a threat database. So if there are known threats or that database can actually counteract those known threats without having you to take any action.

Ralph Otto (18:05): On the login side, what we see often is that there are a lot of malicious users trying to log into pretty much every website all the time. And through rate limiting or user lockouts, we’re able to prevent that abuse and brute force attempts at logging in, really limiting how many times somebody can log in and making sure that you can stop those repeated attacks. And then on the privacy side, this is becoming a larger and larger topic. Protecting personal information and making sure that those individuals data is safeguarded, that’s pretty critical. And this is a huge topic on the web right now. Not only with a security issue and customer data, but also a legal issue in many states that have increased requirements around what data is being collected.

Ralph Otto (18:55): You know, who’s it, who is it being shared with and how will it be used. We usually lean on third party services like Iubenda or Humanity Co. Which runs cookie compliance to make sure that we have really good coverage, since this is increasingly a legal requirement and in many of the states that our clients operate inside of. On the backup side, we’ve already talked a little bit about content version history. We do want to make sure that every administrative experience has built in content management, backups, recovery solutions, safeguard against data loss, and make sure that you have continuity and reliability in your experience. This is something that you should probably tackle at the infrastructure level.

Ralph Otto (19:41): And what we’re talking about here is not so much the words and images that display in your site, but more the database and the file system, those things getting backed up. There are a lot of different services that you can use for your website. A couple ones that are platform specific. Like specific to WordPress is VaultPress, who I actually met a member of their team at a Wordcamp. If you’re inside of that WordPress ecosystem, this is a pretty nice integration. It does a lot to protect your data, your files, especially if you’re running something like woocommerce, they have special considerations for that. There are also freely available ones like UpdraftPlus, which allows you to back up to one of many services like S three, or rackspace, or Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, all those things.

Ralph Otto (20:35): Drupal has a similar setup where they rely on a module called backup and migrate as a base module, and then you additional modules onto that. Depending on where you want to backup offsite on a Dropbox or s three or azure, you can do that. Again, this is best done on an infrastructure level, but if you want to just have a software solution. These are some options that you can use and then on the user role side and at least the management of user roles, a robust system for customizing roles and permissions is really essential to have efficient administration of your website and security. User role management usually has two parts. They have roles like administrator or contributor, and they have permissions, and that’s what can each role do.

Ralph Otto (21:23): So an administrator can access all the features on a site without restriction, while an editor can publish and manage posts, including posts of other users. And maybe somebody who has an author role can only publish posts for themselves and manage their own posts. So you can control how these work to make sure that if you’ve got a variety of different folks in your website that they only have enough access for what is needed. And then on the workflow side of things with user roles, we can build much more efficient workflows for content review and approval. And this can help with collaboration between your content creators and your editors. The little flow on the top of draft, edit and publish is a pretty standard editorial workflow. That’s generally what tools like WordPress use.

Ralph Otto (22:20): If you are a more content heavy organization or you need a little bit more complex functionality, Drupal really shines at implementing custom workflows. One credit union client we had needed a compliance approval step, which is we actually built right into their editorial process. So instead of that simple process of draft, edit and publish, we added a couple of steps. So when something is moved into compliance review, the compliance officer was notified via email and they were able to jump right into that post and either approve or send the copy back for editing. And this made it really easy to see where each piece of content was in the workflow and if there were any bottlenecks that needed to be addressed. It’s super helpful in streamlining how content goes in line.

Ralph Otto (23:09): Despite having that content or that compliance step in place, we’re able to skirt around that by making that a really effective workflow.

Morgan Witham (23:17): Yeah, it really helped automate something that was a little more tedious and manual before.

Ralph Otto (23:23): Yeah, I mean, this is a pretty obvious one around scalability and system performance. Uptime is. It is worth mentioning though, because you can’t manage your website, much less the content that goes on the public side of the website if your admin is down. So that’s why we really recommend that when you’re finding infrastructure, you’re finding a place to put your website and your administrative experience. That high uptime is a critical factor in that selection process, and you want to make sure that you’ve got a couple key pieces in place to make sure that happens. The first one is definitely infrastructure. So we mentioned this being a solution for security and backups as well. But quality infrastructure stays online and they’ve typically got systems in place to provide a little bit of redundancy. So we typically shoot for a minimum of 99.9% uptime.

Ralph Otto (24:23): And usually there’s an SLA service level agreement that aligns with that. And so what that means is that would be about one and a half minutes daily, eleven minutes weekly, 45 minutes monthly or 9 hours yearly. That’s the sort of tolerance we’re talking about. And so if there is an SLA in place, what that means is that your hosting company owes you money back if they don’t hit that 99.9%, and they’re very motivated to never hit that. So that means that your website stays up. The second thing that you can do is have some more caching, and caching can be built into your infrastructure, or it can be within your software or your application. And what this will do is it’ll make sure that your administrative experience isn’t bogged down by front end requests.

Ralph Otto (25:10): So if you have a high volume of users on your front end, you’re still able to use your back end without interruption. And so if you have core or you don’t have caching, that can mean that you’re unable to access your site during a traffic spike. Like if you had an ad campaign or a major pr event or viral content, you may not be able to access your admin and you want to make sure that you always can in case there’s an error in that or you need to change some of that content really quickly. On the automation side, you should be able to automate manual tasks whenever you can. If you want content on your site should be automatically updated when you add like a blog post, for example. So everywhere you’ve got a list of blog articles that should be updated automatically.

Ralph Otto (26:05): You don’t want to have to manually add that to a page, or add that everywhere that appears. You want to be able to upload an image and have it be optimized so that it performs well on the front end, providing ways that require almost no effort, like generating images to the correct size or converting them to the right format and optimizing them on the fly. That stuff can save a lot of time. Similarly for SEO, you want tools like automatically generating sitemap XML in place, or you want your pages to automatically fill in the meta description. So if you forget to do that you’re not dealing with a blank description and this is really often overlooked when you’re thinking about scalability.

Ralph Otto (26:57): But there are 68 million people in the US that speak a language that’s not English and at home and this is according to census data, right? This is about 20% of the population and it represents a major opportunity that is largely untapped by organizations. Multilingual really expands your reach and allows you to cater to users in their preferred language, which enhances accessibility of your products and services. A large part of this audience regularly engages with ethnic media, which highlights the need for tailored content and communication strategies. We’ve got a couple examples here that Google Translate is probably the most well known that can translate your website on the Fly Deep L is an AI tool that allows you that does really effective translations when you need them. Obviously you need to check this with a native speaker, but it’s really helpful.

Ralph Otto (27:55): Then WPML is a plugin for WordPress that helps with this and Drupal actually has built in translation management, which is pretty handy. You also want your administrative experience to be flexible. You should be able to customize your page layouts without needing to code. This is important for tailoring the user experience and running marketing experiments in all of our sites these days, regardless of what platform, we have a few areas of site that are maybe hard coded and not editable, but for the most part, you should be able to modify almost all of your marketing content between the header and footer pieces of your site. We use tools like WordPress patterns to allow for preconfigured sets of components, so it’s easy to add commonly used parts of pages to different pages.

Ralph Otto (28:51): An example of that might be a call to action with a colored background, a heading, descriptive text and standout button. You’ll be able to use a pattern to drop that into any page that you’re working on. You also, we mentioned we touched on this a little bit earlier, but you shouldn’t have to think too hard about managing the content on your site. It’s not always critical to set things up like this to begin with. It takes a little bit longer, but we try to eliminate redundant work wherever we can. This is a block on our site and we’ve got a team component that’s set up as a content type and as a custom block. When you add a team member, you only need to worry about entering their name, their title and their photo.

Ralph Otto (29:35): And once you’ve published that piece of content, this component, this block updates wherever it’s being used on the website, and that means you don’t have to update the content, same content on multiple pages of the website. You can also manage the order without having to rework the layout on the page, which can just be time consuming to do. It’s pretty handy and it can save you the hassle of hunting down content that’s actually out of sync. And this is a very broad slide, but every client is a little bit different here. The administrative experience should definitely change and expand as your needs change. This really varies between clients, but it should flex with you.

Ralph Otto (30:16): This particular client, or this example that I have here, is a client that had a lot of search terms in their analytics and they didn’t really understand in real time how they could adjust their content strategy to help solve users problems here. And so what they’re able to see with this feature that we added on is search analytics right within their dashboard, they were able to see what are the most popular searches and that helped inform their content creation and their content strategy. It can also identify where the business may be able to better serve customers. So in this case, we can see that there is an opportunity to partner or provide financial advisors to members. And that’s something that we wouldn’t have known if this feature wasn’t activated.

Ralph Otto (31:04): Here’s another quick example, just because these are always so different, but this client, they had a global rates management feature where they’re able to adjust rates across the site, but they didn’t want to manually enter those. This was one of those things where this feels redundant. There’s another team that’s working on this, they’re passing it over to us. What they did was they worked with it and the mortgage team to come up with a way that their mortgage team could expose home mortgage rates in a public file. And this is just like a CSV, like an Excel file. And what we do is we read this file and update the rates in the site automatically.

Ralph Otto (31:43): And so every so often what we do is we pull all those rates out of this document, we drop them into the site, and this ensures that prospects and members alike are always seeing the most current rates. And then somewhat related to that, an administrative experience is integrated. And what I mean by that is the tools that your business uses to do business are connected to your website. And the reason you want to do this is you want to take work off of your team and avoid manual labor. That could definitely be automated. Besides that, integrations promote cleaner data, since the data is housed in one location rather than multiple locations. So my workday data is stored in workday. I don’t have to copy and paste that onto the site. It’s automatically happening.

Ralph Otto (32:37): As an example, that workday is HRIs system, and so what we’ve done with that previously is we’ve automatically populated job content onto a site. This may not seem necessary, but when we’ve worked with companies that are going through a major growth spurt and they’re posting tons of job openings or expanding to multiple locations across different states, it saves a lot of time. Posting those job openings, editing job postings, taking them down when a full time job is gone. You could put an embedded list of jobs on your site, but you wouldn’t get SEO credit for that content. You can imagine that same kind of case for each tool or service in your business platform.

Morgan Witham (33:19): And Ralph, I think one area where we find a lot of opportunities for integration are when we are talking to our clients, who are typically the marketing team or the CMO is leading a lot of these discussions, but we’re asking questions to try and figure out what other areas of the business have pretty frequent asks of the marketing team to implement or do differently or add to the website. And those are often opportunities where we can find how do we connect, certainly the systems for the marketing team, but how do we integrate systems across the organization or across the credit union more broadly?

Ralph Otto (33:52): Yeah, yeah. A pretty underrepresented part of the administrative experience is training. And if you’ve ever had like unusual or like a more obscure CMS, you know that, you know, scarce training resources or guides can really hold you back. If you really know your CMS, though, you can often do way more than you originally thought you could. And what we look for to ensure a positive experience are platforms that have really great documentation and training resources. And more often than not, these are freely available on either the platform website or on YouTube. Or they’re housed within a paid training platform like Pluralsight or coursera or udemy LinkedIn learning. For really popular cmss like WordPress and Drupal, there are tons and tons of options available, which is really great.

Morgan Witham (34:45): And to take it a step further, for any of you that are working with an agency, I recommend that you always ask about their approach to training and documentation, because these publicly available sources are super critical for informing and educating and continuing to learn. Because with technology it’s constantly changing. But if you’re building a custom website, in addition to those freely available materials, specific training and documentation for your website is critically important. So it really helps get the most out of your site out of the gate when you’re launching a redesign or a rebuild, making sure that the entire team of administrators is trained on how to use it. And it also really serves as a way to quickly onboard new team members.

Morgan Witham (35:30): You know, one of the things that we find is that having one person or even a couple of people that hold that information kind of in their head is a pretty big business risk if they were to leave or if something were to happen. And so having the document, having that information be documented and usable, specific to your customized website is really important and really valuable for your team and organization.

Ralph Otto (35:54): That is a pretty wonderful segue to ensure that you have a really, a lot of support for your administrative experience. It’s really helpful to have a large community surrounding you. This is quite important so that you can lean on the community for questions or concerns around that ax. Even if you have documentation and materials on your website, having external community can really add value to your knowledge and capabilities over time. That large community really ensures that you’re never unsupported. And it’s a little bit of an unfair comparison. WordPress owns 63% of the market share for content management systems and Drupal has about 180,000 community members. And so these are the types of stats you’re looking for where it’s not a group of hundreds or even low thousands, it’s got to be around the size so that you have options if you need them.

Ralph Otto (36:55): And then finally, the last thing I’ll mention on the administrative experience is that your experience should regularly change and improve. It’s got to keep pace with the standards that modern platforms dictate. Regular updates to those administrative experiences ensure that you’re staying current with the latest standards and security practices. And really your day to day has minimal interruptions.

Morgan Witham (37:18): And I would say even updating to the ways that teams are working, which is constantly changing as marketers are iterating, are testing different channels or different campaigns and tactics. So making sure that your administrative experience is keeping up with that is pretty critical. Okay, so that was a lot of really great information. A quick recap of what the administrative experience includes. So when we talk about the administrative experience, we are talking about content management and publishing, overall usability and user interface, security and data protection, scalability and performance, customization and flexibility. Really critical part of continuing to grow and scale and change, and then support resources and training materials to make sure you know how to use the platform, that your team is well educated and has support.

Ralph Otto (38:12): And we’ve got some resources linked for you. We’ve got a link to our administrative experience assessment that you can use to get an idea of where the opportunities in your existing administrative experience are. What this looks like is it’s a series of questions that really hit on each of the aspects of the administrative experience that we cover. It was a lot. So we’ll pose these questions one by one and you can get a sense of where you might be able to better streamline your work. I’ve got a little plug on here for our insights page where we have quite a few credit union articles and resources available. I try to educate and inform as much as I can, so sign up for our newsletter if you want some tips sent right to your inbox.

Ralph Otto (38:50): And then we’ve got some articles that explore a couple platforms that we love, WordPress and Drupal. These open source platforms we think, offer the best ability to customize and elevate your website’s administrative experience.

Morgan Witham (39:04): Great. Well, thank you Ralph. We’ll be sending a copy of this presentation over to you later today. Feel free to hang on to this and use it as a resource the next time you’re considering or thinking about improving the administrative experience of your website. And you’ll also be able to click through these additional resources, which we hope you find helpful. So that is it for today. If you have any questions for us, shoot us a note or a question in the chat below, or shoot us an email. You’ll see this on this the bottom left of your screen.

Morgan Witham (39:34): And next up in our cracking the Code webinar series, we’ll be sharing a bit of a mini series of on demand how to webinars, where we’re going to take just very snackable 15 to 20 minutes each to dive into a very specific how to for various features and capabilities for credit union websites specifically. A lot of this is coming from questions we’ve gotten so far, so keep an eye out for information coming in the coming weeks about how you can access these on demand videos, and also, if there are any specific how tos that you are interested in us covering or diving into, please do drop it in the chat below or send us an email and we will add it to the list. So thank you very much for your time today.

Morgan Witham (40:19): We hope you leave this webinar today with a little more information than you had coming into it, and we’ll see you next time.