Documentation for CrowdVine
By terrie | No Comments
We’ve been collecting answers to questions, how-to advice and tips for making the most of CrowdVine….and, behold: documentation that reveals the inner awesomeness of CrowdVine, the secret sauce of community management, the cookbook to solve all of your problems! (Well, most of them….)
The first is our CrowdVine User Manual. This is for members of CrowdVine networks, and offers a more in-depth discussion of profiles, connecting with other members, and creating and using personal conference schedules.
The second is our CrowdVine Admin Manual. This document goes in-depth with features for network administrators like:
- Creating a custom home page for your network
- Uploading sessions to your conference calendar using spreadsheet data
- Tips for better profile questions
- Basic and advanced tips for inviting people into the network
We’d love to hear feedback on these documents, especially if there are ways we can improve them to make them more useful.
Conference Design Customization Checklist
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Many self-service conferences are doing design customizations that are amazingly beautiful and thorough. We love that!
Design customizations are one of the main services we provide in our support packages, but the tools we use are the exact same tools you get from our self-service packages. So doing a design customizations is just a matter of skill and experience.
On the skill side, we usually say you should have basic web development experience, know CSS, and have access to a tool like Firebug. If you are that person, or have that person on staff, you can make CrowdVine look like any of the networks from our Favorite Designs post.
Below are tips for the major decisions you need to make before you get started and the checklist we use internally to make sure we didn’t make any mistakes.
Getting Started
You’ll find your design customization options on the Admin panel in the “Content and Design” section.
“Design” gives you access to basic features like changing colors or adding a logo. “Customize our default templates” is where you’ll find the goodies for advanced users with knowledge of HTML and CSS.
Many of the templates that are used to display a network are completely customizable by you. The two most common templates to override are layouts/top_header, which allows customize your own navigation banner, and sites/css, which allows you to add your own custom CSS.
You will probably want access to images for your design. You can upload those through the Admin Manage Uploads page.
Decision Time
Check for compatibility between your existing design and CrowdVine. Most customizations are based on an existing design from the main conference website. For the most part, CrowdVine is extremely flexible. But there are two gotchas. CrowdVine likes to use the entire content area and so we have a strong preference for avoiding vertical navigation (i.e. navigation that appears in a sidebar). CrowdVine also uses the prototype javascript library. This often conflicts if you’re using jquery in your design. If either of these are the case, most conferences choose to create a simplified variation of the design for CrowdVine.
Most CrowdVine customizations are based on an existing conference website. You need to decide whether to add the CrowdVine navigation as additional navigation or as replacement of existing design’s navigation. – in most cases, you can keep your site’s navigation and let CrowdVine add its own navigation below. Here are two examples of how that design decision works out:
CrowdVine navigation only
Conference navigation + CrowdVine navigation
Our default CrowdVine networks have an overall width of 940px, with the left column (#left_side) being 620px and the right column (#right_side) being 280px. Please keep in mind as you adjust the design of your network that decreasing the overall width could cause problems on certain pages. If you do plan on reducing the size of your network, we suggest changing the width of the left side before the right side. Many items on the post-customization checklist are there because of potential issues you may run into with width changes.
Many conferences want to add a sidebar for sponsors. This is possible, although it’s basically the most complicated design customization because it often requires changing the width of the CrowdVine content, which creates cascading effects. A less invasive way to add a sponsor column is to just add the column to content pages by customizing the pages/show template. If you do want an extra sidebar on all pages, you can add content to sites/optional_third_column and CSS to sites/css along the lines of:
#third-col{float:right;width:180px;}
#outer_content{width:940px;margin:0 auto;}
#content{width:730px;float:left;}
#left_side{width:440px;}
body#sites.show #left_side .summary, #left_side .summary{width:420px;}
#right_side{margin-left:0;}
OK, on to the checklist!
- Check that #flash and .prompt are pleasantly styled. These often get missed if you’re doing heavy customizing of colors in the content area.
- Make sure text areas aren’t cut of on private messaging, discussion posts, comments, and profile comments.
- Check the login page for pleasant styling (http://yournetwork.crowdvne.com/account/login)
- Check the photo page for pleasant styling (http://yournetwork.crowdvne.com/posts/photos)
- Check the map page for potential overlap issues (http://yournetwork.crowdvne.com/maps/show)
- Check the twitter page for correct styling, esp. borders/margin/padding (http://yournetwork.crowdvne.com/posts/twitter)
- Make sure the right side is actually on the right side on /posts instead of below the content
- For sites with a smaller #left_side, add this for IE7 and IE6: body#profiles.show #left_side #bio_section .infobox{width:__px;}
Happy customizing!
Customized Mobile Conference Websites
By terrie | No Comments
CrowdVine’s mobile version is now customizable via the “Customize our default templates” link in the Admin panel of your network. This gives you the ability to brand the mobile version with your own design touches. Compare UX Week‘s customized version this year with the generic version from their previous conference:
If network members are logged in on their mobile device, they’ll see their personal schedule, with an option to toggle over to the full schedule. If members are not logged in, they’ll see the full remaining schedule for the day.
We’ve added quick links for your “Want to Meet” list, and “Chatter”. Chatter is a combined view of tweets and discussion posts from members of the network.
The goal of the mobile site is the same: get you quick access to information you need on-site at the event: the people you’re trying to meet and the next session to go to.
(HUGE, special thanks to Ljuba Miljkovic at Adaptive Path for pushing the envelope and helping us work through these changes.)
The Support Behind Support
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I hear a lot of good things about CrowdVine customer support, and because I’m the forward-facing side of that, I get lots of nice kudos about it. But the truth is, there’s a lot more to support than the person the customer talks to. I started out in tech support for WordStar in 1989, and I’ve been in support roles for a handful of companies in the past twenty-plus years. Our customers have said that working with CrowdVine is different because of the support, and I can tell you that working for CrowdVine is also different.
Tony, Jay, Michelle and I work together each day, logged into Campfire while we work. Countless times throughout the day, I ask questions or make requests there that are related to supporting our customers. And I depend on Michelle, Jay, and Tony to help me. They’re the real support-behind-support. And I’m grateful to all three of them for their timely (and friendly!) responses and unfailing support of the work that I do.
We have an interesting perspective on this at CrowdVine because Tony, Jay and I all worked together for a larger company in the past. Our roles were similar in many ways, but there were a couple layers of management and multiple departments involved. That was a fine company, but the three of us did not feel like we were giving great support to our internal customers. My coworkers are the same, but the experience is very different. It raises the question: what changed?
The difference is the culture and mindset of our very small company. Because we’re a small group, it’s possible for each of us to contribute our ideas and our opinions. We have lively discussions and often disagree with each other. Everyone appreciates different points of view and I love that I can state mine and feel no qualms about changing my mind after hearing someone else’s take on a situation. A surprising result of this: the more disagreements we have and resolve, the more I feel inclined to seek others’ advice. I don’t feel like I have to have all the answers, and the solutions that we provide customers are that much better for it.
This kind of culture promotes a greater engagement with our work. It allows our work to be part of our self-expression; it’s part of who we are. When you’re part of a large group, it’s harder to feel that way about your work. There just isn’t the time or bandwidth for everyone to be heard, and eventually it just feels like someone else’s work you’re doing in exchange for a paycheck; it makes it harder to provide support with soul.
We enjoy providing great support and we enjoy a company culture that supports it. That’s good for our customers, and it’s good for us as employees, too.
Posting to Twitter and a Facebook Page in One Step
By terrie | No Comments
There are many ways to manage and integrate your organization’s Twitter account and Facebook page. I’ve tried a lot tactics in my work with CrowdVine and for the Ecology of Leadership program. Here’s what really works.
First off, you want to post to Twitter and have those posts copied to Facebook (Twitter-to-Facebook, not Facebook-to-Twitter), for these three reasons:
- If you go the other direction and use the automatic Facebook-to-Twitter service, Facebook will append its own URL to every post it makes to your Twitter account. This means extra clicking—an annoyance for your followers. On the other hand, tweets with links work great when automatically re-posted to Facebook.
- When you go from Twitter to Facebook, your staff can post and not lose their own identity on your Facebook Page. If you add them as administrators of your page, everything they post comes thru as a generic post by your organization. This is a little quirk about Facebook Pages. For example: assume you’re ABC Nonprofit and that Jane and Frank are two of your volunteer Facebook people. Frank posts photos to the ABC Nonprofit page. Jane tries to comment on a photo, but her comment appears to come from “ABC Nonprofit” and not from “Jane”. Your Facebook Page admins lose their own identity on your Facebook page. That’s social media that’s not very social!
- By posting from Twitter to Facebook, you can get all of the benefits of using CoTweet. CoTweet is a powerful application for giving teams of people the ability to post to one Twitter account. You can schedule posts for the future, manage multiple Twitter accounts from your own personal CoTweet account, and track responses from followers. CoTweet is easy to set up: create an account, and then add one or more Twitter accounts to it. For each Twitter account you set up, you can invite others in to post via CoTweet, using their own CoTweet accounts…so you never need to share your organization’s Twitter password with the members of your team. If someone leaves the team, you simply revoke their permissions through CoTweet. Here’s a screen shot of CoTweet that gives you an idea of its power:
Those are the reasons for a system that copies from Twitter to Facebook; now you need to make that synchronization happen.
There’s an easy solution for this: use the Facebook Application Selective Tweets. Selective Tweets will post your Twitter status updates to Facebook if they have the hashtag #fb at the end of the tweet. (If you’re using CoTweet, use their “CoTag” feature to auto-append the hashtag for you.)
Selective Tweets lets you configure specific Twitter accounts to specific Facebook Pages; you can use it for your personal Twitter account to post to your Facebook Profile AND use it for your organization’s Twitter account to post to your Facebook Page. Other Facebook Apps I’ve seen don’t have the awareness that different Twitter accounts might correspond to Facebook Pages rather than personal profiles.
Just add Selective Tweets to youyr Facebook profile grant it access to your Twitter account(s). Then use the “Your Fan Pages” tab to set up which Twitter accounts should sync to which Facebook Pages:
When using Selective Tweet, Twitter posts might take some time to repost over to your Facebook page…that seems to be normal, so give it some time for your first test.
The combination of Selective Tweets and CoTweet is the best solution we’ve found for teams to post to Facebook and Twitter in one step.
New Themes and Design Tools
By terrie | No Comments
We recently released a new set of themes and design options for CrowdVine. In keeping with our “function first” aesthetic, we wanted a simple interface that that allowed site administrators without HTML knowledge to create a site they liked. We also wanted to offer a new set of color themes. You’ll find them on your network under Admin → Design.
My new favorite is “Jell-O Serenade”:
But most themes are more subtle. I also like “Slate Green”:
With CrowdVine, you can start from one of these built-in themes, or use our new color picker to completely customize colors:
It can be a challenge to pick colors that work well together. We enjoyed browsing the ColourLovers “Color + Design Community for Creative Inspiration” section to help us out with that. On ColourLovers, you can browse colors, palettes, and patterns that are submitted by members of the site, or create your own. And you’ll find some of our inspiration for themes like Jell-O Serenade here.
Enjoy the new design options while buildling your social network on CrowdVine, and enjoy the network of designers on ColourLovers, too!