One of the behaviors I have noticed over and over again is the confusion created for some people when a link opens up a new window. While the purpose of the new window is typically to make sure the site visitor can easily return to the site, for less savvy web users it does the complete opposite. Suddenly, the back button doesn’t work. They don’t know why. They have a really hard time finding the site again.

Bad! Bad! Bad!

Paraphrasing Steve Krug, don’t make them think.

If you want people to stay on your site, give them something to stick around for. Don’t open up new windows. Tech newbies will be confused by it and tech superstars will scoff at your attempt to keep their attention.

What do you think? Are you passionate about spawning new windows or eradicating them from the face of the earth?

The funny thing is, talking about all of our specialties eventually brought us around to a fundamental truth about the online world: As fancy as organizations are now getting, and as many bells and whistles as they are adding to their repetoir, great content is and always will be the core of a great web presence.

Take a website like World Wildlife Foundation (not an Amplify client – I just like their site!). During a time when there are so many issues at play in environmetal news, they manage to promote all of their work and still produce important and well-written content about the Gulf oil spill. Their readers get immediate access to:

• up-to-date news about the oil spill
• information about how they can help WWF take action
• first-hand accounts from organization representatives reporting from the front lines

The updates are timely, and the first person narratives capture the situation in a way that is different from other sources. You can also get great – and somewhat different, for a different audience – information from their Facebook page.

So besides having an attractive site that allows people to find all the things they’re looking for, it’s really their well-written, thoughtfully considered content that sets them apart. In the advocacy world, this is the most basic, crucial thing for you to get right. And all the other stuff – from search engine optimization to Twitter feeds and everything in between – need to be an extension of your great content in order to be truly meaningful.

When I say that content is basic, however, I don’t at all mean that it’s easy. Understanding your audience and finding your voice can be the most difficult things in the world to do, and shouldn’t be taken lightly. That’s why when Amplify’s clients come to us for special projects – ad campaigns, advocacy microsites, social media, videos, etc. – we very often ask them to take a step back with us and first consider what’s already on their site.

By the way, hooray for meetups like the Web Content Mavens for keeping the important stuff in the spotlight.

Sure, one of the biggest reasons the Drupal CMS is popular among smaller organizations is the very attractive ($0.00) price tag.   But a less obvious strength of this platform is also one that makes it an even more cost-effective choice: A well-built Drupal website can be superior in both functionality and usability for day-to-day content managers.

That’s right, organizations can have powerful, feature-rich websites, without needing advanced webmasters on staff for everyday site updates.

The key is Drupal’s almost limitless flexibility.  The users and developers in the Drupal community have built an extensive collection of contributed (non-core) modules, all of which were created to meet needs, solve problems — even address pet peeves.

Website builders can achieve back-end user-friendliness, without sacrificing functionality, by taking advantage of a number of contributed modules that facilitate customization of workflows and interfaces.  Here are some of my favorites:

• Create an additional or alternate content administration page with Views Bulk Operations, an extension to the all-powerful Views module. With VBO, you can provide a simpler, more functional interface for managing the site’s content.
• With Node Convert, content admins can convert nodes to and from any content type. The process can be even smoother if you set up Node Convert Templates — which also help ensure the safe transfer of any custom content (CCK) fields.
• Make content entry a little less tedious — and a little more standardized, in some cases — with Node Clone (works just like it sounds: create a new node by copying an existing one).
• Improve the node adding/editing interface with any of the following modules:
  • Save and Edit: Adds a “Save and Edit” button to node forms (to apply and save changes without leaving the node-edit form), along with an option to have nodes not be published when “Save and Edit” is used (in which case a “Publish” or “Save and Publish” button can be added)
  • Node and Comments Form Settings: Options for hiding and configuring various elements of node and comment forms (i.e. hiding the Input Format and “Split summary at cursor” fields), plus the added feature of a “Cancel” button for node forms.
  • Workflow: Allows for setting up multiple, custom workflows for node types — for example, a workflow could move users through the Draft, Reviewed, and Published “workflow states” for a Press Release node type. Additionally, each stage of a workflow can trigger specific actions, like an email being sent to a content administrator or a message being displayed to the current user.

If you build or manage a Drupal website, what other features should be on this list?

Whichever platform you use, think about your website’s back-end usability — what do you really like about your CMS, and what makes you want to throw your computer out the window?

About two weeks ago, I took a screen-capture of the front page of Crist’s campaign site shortly before he announced his party switch. One element of the site that caught my eye was an image linking to an issues page, which said: “*Consistent Leadership* The Charlie Crist Conservative Record.” This had been a part of his site for some months, in an effort to defend credentials on the right when he was running in the Republican primary against Marco Rubio.

Now the “consistent leadership” remains, but in a slightly different form: “*Consistent Leadership* The Charlie Crist Record.” The word “conservative” has been deleted.

Here is the before picture:

And here is the after picture:

For his run to fill a U.S. Senate seat held by U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy for decades, in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1, Brown invested early in an online campaign that drew supporters, turned them into active volunteers, contributors and advocates, and laid the foundation to exploit a tidal wave of excitement and enthusiasm that rose unexpectedly in the last weeks of the campaign. The image of Brown taking time to shake hands with every single supporter who showed up at his victory celebration the night of the election is an image of how he sees the online campaign: as a way of meeting and connecting with people who want to be involved.

For the story from Prosper Group, online consultants to the campaign, read What Brown did right online, Behind the scenes of the Brown moneybomb, and The other Scott Brown campaign “bomb” from their blog.