#but only because Darren was doing h2$

[klinger-io]

Close your office. Now. How to operate your startup under lock-down.

What a week.

The US declared the state of emergency. Many leading startups closed their office. And I expect that all startups in the tech hubs will have their offices closed by the end of next week – if they haven’t already.

You might not live in a hot-zone of COVID-19, and might be unsure if it’s too early for to do so as well. You might be based in a rural America, LATAM, India, Europe – in a region or city where it’s moderately safe right now.

No matter where you are based: I think you should

Close your office. Now.

Think of it as a test-run.

Most likely you don't need to worry about COVID-19 too much. You might not worry that it could get as bad as in Italy, maybe experts overreact or you are just lucky because your city has no cases and team is young and healthy anyway. But you should worry about being not fully operational in a phase that could be critical for your customers. You don't want your most important people laying sick in bed while this happens.

If everything goes well you have a week of experience with a wfh-setup that you can fallback to. If things continue to escalate, you ensure that your team and business stays healthy. And most importantly, you might help slow down the spread of a pandemic.

Close your office. Now.

In this blog post I want to share my minimum recommendations I think you need in order to continue functioning as a startup, and what you need to watch out for over the next several weeks.

I want to keep this document evolving so please send me your feedback and suggestions.

First up: We are the lucky ones

If you are reading this there is a high chance that you are working in a tech startup – maybe you even live in a high density tech hub. The majority of people like us are able to work digitally, safely from home.

It's worth reflecting that we are the lucky ones – this is a pure luxury. Many people worldwide aren’t able to stay at home to work, and will need to risk their health and personal safety moving forward.

While I want your your team to be set up for success during this time, I want you to also consider reaching out to the hourly workers that help you in your office. Your security, cleaning staff, cafeteria personnel, and anyone else who enables your office to sustain an environment and culture that employees want to work in. Continue paying their wages and see if there are other ways you can help them.

Let's get started…

As a team leader you have the following todo list

Right now:

Understand the situation

Own the moment and communication

Working from home - Help your team to optimize their daily routine

Remote work - Set your processes up to function remotely

In the next weeks:

Get ahead of the problems you might face next

Create confidence & focus by going the extra mile

Understand the situation

The current situation we face is not about “remote work”.

Right now, we face forced isolation and forced work-from-home during a global pandemic.

There is no point in sugar-coating this. This is stressful for everyone – including you and your team. Especially now in the first weeks.

Many countries will manage it properly, other might create a complete mess. But in any case this requires you to change how you operate as a company for the next few months.

Remote teams have years to optimize their internal processes, and everyone who joined them did so with a prior understanding about this work setup. Your team doesn't have this luxury right now.

Your goal right now is not to become a fully functional remote team overnight.

Your first goal is to establish an emergency work-from-home setup that sustains your productivity.

Own the moment and communication

Together with your HR and people team, figure out the right process for your startup. You want to tackle this head on and get ahead of the situation. Even if you are “just” a 10 person startup, this is a moment where your team is looking at you for leadership.

My Recommendation:

Read about the internal processes of other startups

Skip all the in-between steps and directly go to the most drastic approach

Close offices, stop traveling and introduce mandatory work-from-home for everyone

Then…

Put your HR/people team in charge and make this a CEO/COO issue

Implement a test week in which everyone works from home

At the end of the week decide if you want to continue like this (you should)

Expect this to last 2-3 months and allow planning accordingly

I hope this document can help with this

Working from home - Help your team to optimize their daily routine.

Day one this will be perhaps the biggest issue that your employees will face.

My Recommendation

People will realize how bad their internet at home is

Tell them to upgrade

Their home setup might not be useful for daily work

Create a stipend they can use to buy proper chairs or desks

Tell them to get equipment from the office (if it’s safe to go there)

Normal apple headphones are fine, fancy headphones are great

External monitors are a game changer

Advise people to have dedicated work and non-work areas at home

If possible with a door in-between

It's worth rearranging furniture to make this work

Recommend morning and evening routines

Eg walk around the block

Encourage them to have regular calls with each other (see below)

Create a slack channel in which your team can share with each other work-from-home-tips

This is not only a good source of information but also gives the people on your team, who have worked remotely before, a moment to shine and become the “go-to person” for private discussions

I highly recommend reading Benedikt Lehnert's omgwfh.com

Remote work - Set your processes up to function remotely

To minimize any initial shock:

Get a zoom and slack team license

Encourage daily calls for smaller teams (standups) in the beginning

If you notice that people don't pay attention switch to daily text updates instead

Consider having a #hibye channel

People check in and out and greet each other

If it doesnt work for your team stop doing it

Encourage video meetings

Have a video-on policy

Experiment with meetings that dont require people to be muted

But make sure to mute people who have loud background or bad mics

If you notice this to be a problem switch to muted by default

On the long run you will try to minimize meetings and synchronized processes but for now this help people to accommodate

Once you feel comfortable:

Set up one central place for all documents

I recommend Notion but you can use whatever you are used before

The goal is to have one place where people expect to find documents

Write every process down that you expect more than one person to follow more than once

Manage slack

Reduce channels so it’s clear where communication happens

People will otherwise feel anxious about missing stuff

Encourage public discussions instead of private chats

Ensure that complex topics/decisions are discussed in collaborative documents, not in slack

Run more efficient meetings

Have a lead for each meeting who prepares beforehand an agenda and documentation

Make sure that you write down decisions and tasks resulting from each meeting so that less people feel like they need to join it

Make sure that each team has at least one meeting per week so that ad-hoc meetings and long slack discussions can be avoided

Measure output (instead of time)

Make sure you communicate clear expectations around goals

Involve and trust your people

Resources

Make sure to read the recommendations from the best remote teams out there:

GitLab's “Remote Work Emergency Plan”. Darren Murph wrote a condensed version of all their learnings over the last years.

Doist’s “So You’ve Been Told to Work From Home. Now What?”

use.fyi’s remote work tips – Marie and Hiten did amazing work here

And there is a lot more. Go read the advice from the experts - everyone is trying to help right now!

Feel free to stop reading here

Focus on the parts above. Once you feel comfortable in your strategy come back here and continue reading. The following paragraphs mainly focus on how to get ahead of the problems you will face next.

Forced self-isolation and the feeling of loneliness

Over the next several weeks’, your employees might be worried about leaving their home and overcompensate by barely leaving at all – or if they do leave , experiencing high levels of stress while doing so.

Buffer and AngelList did the 2020 State of Remote Work survey. One of the biggest drawbacks even to successful remote teams is loneliness.

Given your team is not used to working from home, coupled with the added pressure of unclear semi-broken work-processes, this feeling of loneliness might become more prominent, sooner.

To minimize any initial shock:

Ensure they leave their house from time to time

Educate your employees about hygiene measures that should be taken, as well as how to behave safely when in public spaces

Encourage breakfast, lunch or evening walks outside

Crowdsource ideas from your team

Consider implementing happyhour-/lunch- or even cooking-zoom calls with no agenda

Start casual slack channels (Photo channels work very well)

Organize Online videogame tournaments or "show your pet/hobby/flat" shows

Being worried about family

Team members might have spouses or family members that work in hospitals, or parents or grandparents who aren’t healthy even on good days.

How you can help:

Evolve your 1on1s from pure functional discussions to focus more on the human side of work. Move the functional discussions and project updates to your team calls

Get to know the people reporting to you and what this crisis might mean for them

Allow taking time off now to get their stuff in order

Schools will get closed

Many people on your team might have kids, their schools will get closed or they might be forced to take them out regardless anyway. Help them figure out how to create time to focus while being a full-time parent.

How to help them

Offer to pay for any online courses or entertainment channels that kids can take during this time

If they have an option for private childcare (eg a babysitter) offer to pay for this as well (even if it’s a relative)

If your employees live close together, consider setting up a small-group Microschool so that education can go on and the burden of keeping their kids entertained while working gets shared

Have succession plans

You don't want your company come to a halt because your DevOps person needed to get into a hospital. You don't want your company to run into troubles because you are sick in bed.

Make sure decisions and todos are transparent

Have passwords shared in 1password

Have documents that explain what to do in case of problems

It should be obvious who jumps in for leadership decisions if someone drops out

Thanks to Rolf Veldman and Susanne Knoll for this one

Nice-to-haves

Consider this part as nice-to-have. If you are reading this blogpost for the first time feel free to skip this part.

Your goal: Create confidence and focus by going the extra mile

My Recommendation:

Organization

Set up documents that outline and explain all information they might need over the next several weeks regarding their health benefits and plan

Link to every provider you use and outline what to do in which situations

Make it clear who they can reach out to if they have questions

Spend extra time staying up to date with everyone’s productivity and mental health

Set up a temporary emergency budget to cover budgets we mentioned above

Add online mental health counseling and online sport classes to your benefits if you haven’t already

Match donations to COVID-19 related foundations, or your local food bank or to the WHO

Send care packages consisting of the most basic and typical needs of your team

This could be hand sanitizer or simply someone’s favorite drink from the office in bulk

Management:

Sign up for Running Remote's Remote AID a free conference on all topics remote work

Optimize your engineering team for “single player mode” as i describe here

Ok, we are done… What next?

Once you have the short term under control focus on the long-term.

People will get worried about the economy and their jobs. Change the discussion from short-term crisis management to long-term strategy.

An extreme way to see this: Companies that try to keep the status-quo alive while the market goes down will go down with it.

Show that your company is here to stay

Don’t delay quarterly planning or ambitious projects

Create the vision that shows the WHY of your company

Your customers might need you right now

Your company might build the tools people rely on to continue their business.

Your services might help customers ease the burden of a potential upcoming recession

Or you might create the apps for a much needed distraction right now

Whatever your company's vision is. Make sure to continue thinking long-term

Thanks for reading

This document sounds a bit dramatic. I know.

I hope 90% of what i recommend won't be needed and this will all blow over without much fuzz.

Note that most of the suggestions in this blogpost are temporary and fairly cheap in comparison to your payroll but will leave a lasting impression. If your team's budget is more limited consider what you can do without breaking the bank. Not every good idea has to cost money.

COVID-19 will be over in a few weeks or months. But your team will always remember how you prioritized their safety and put in the extra effort to facilitate a healthy, comfortable, and productive environment for each and every one of them.

This is your moment to step up as a leader.

You got this.

PS: Please send me your improvement suggestions for this article

Thanks for reading Andreas ✌️

[muhamedshafaan]

Changes in SEO after Maycore update

   Changes in SEO after Maycore update

The new core algorithm update was announced on the official Google SearchLiaison Twitter account on May 4, 2020.Over a period of two weeks, they introduced the changes in a number of smaller updates to the algorithm.

Search engine ranking algorithms are a unique technology that is protected as an expensive commercial product. Google does not disclose the details of the algorithms operation and describes them with a single phrase: “Make content for people—get profit.” Unlike other updates, Google announces the Core Update on Twitter when the deployment is complete.

What has changed

E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness). It’s a key factor for YMYL sites. Those who neglected these factors rolled back farthest.

Mobile version site. It includes the adaptation of the mobile version to the users’ needs and its full support at the desktop level (development, new products implementation, A/B testing).

High-quality content. Even small sites with good content have improved their positions.

Link profile. There should be no spam by anchors or links of unknown origin.

The above is for the logical and expected improvements. However, there have been changes that surprised webmasters. Google experts have already commented on a number of them. After starting the updates, Google engineers collect feedback from webmasters and see what is broken. As a result, they have to smooth out the negative effects (false positives) because of which the owners of the “good” sites suffered. Many posts on social networks mention local search changes. Local SEO Specialist Darren Shaw notes that the niche has been storming since the end of April. Google experts have already confirmed that it had been a bug.

In addition, it is worth noting the following Google May 2020 Core algorithm updates:

Partner sites and aggregator sites improved their performance.

Projects with a strong brand image received a significant boost from Google, while “less branded” ones went down.

Some projects with a weak link profile also came forward.

Winners and losers of the Google algorithm update

Many at the World Forum of Webmasters have already been outraged by such changes. In their opinion, in less than a week, updates have led to a global decrease in traffic and online sales for many fields: healthcare, technology, finance, and dating.

After the first wave, SEMrush compared the average value of volatility seven days before and two days after the announcement of the update. The most affected categories at that time were: Travel, Real Estate, Health, Pets & Animals, and People & Society. This applies to search both on a computer and on mobile devices.

The five winners included such categories as News, Business & Industrial, Online Communities, Arts & Entertainment, and Health. The injured were Arts & Entertainment, Online Communities, Business & Industrial, Games, and News. The situation is ambiguous because several categories fell into both lists, which means that the matter is not only in the subject of the site itself but also in other factors that influenced the ranking.

Today, when the Google core update may 2020 impact calmed down a bit, the distribution of winners and losers has slightly changed. The News is still confidently holding the first place but sports and auto-related appeared among the main losers.

It’s important to understand that major core updates to the Google algorithm are usually not industry-specific. A change can have a strong impact on the niche, but this does not mean that it was the goal of the update. Traffic drawdown after algorithm changing may have nothing to do with the site itself, but is associated with a reassessment of ranking factors.

How to adapt to the changes

Changes have already occurred, so now webmasters can only observe, analyze and adapt to the latest Google algorithm update. Here are some points to pay attention to:

User signals matter

Google reports that it focuses on traffic signals determining in which cases the site is important and useful, and how much it meets the user’s expectations. Although it is too early to draw far-reaching conclusions, you can take a closer look at the sites that clearly benefit from Google changes May 2020.

The head of SEO at content marketing agency Suxeedo Niels Dahnke is sure that good user signals (high CTR, low bounce rate, and good dwell-time) have a positive effect on Google’s ranking stability.

Update your content

Constant posting and content updating is an important step in improving your position in SERP. It is not enough just to pull out old texts and add a couple of sentences to update them. You should make efforts to keep up with the Google algo update: check relevance, get rid of outdated information, add a few paragraphs, and, if necessary, even rewrite the entire article.

The famous marketer Neil Patel conducted a study based on 641 sites that regularly update their content. Thus, only about 6% of these sites have reduced search traffic by more than 10% since the update. SERP improved by 10% for more than 187 websites.

Make the content rich

Another important task for webmasters in the terms of the new update is to review the quantitative part of their content. Sites with thin content, i.e. where at least one page contains texts with a small number of words, went down. Of the 400 resources that Neil Patel tested, 31% were adversely affected: their search results fell by more than 10%.

Checking the site for the thin content is a must-do thing on the SEO checklist 2020, and not only as part of updates from Google, but also for regular work on the site quality. However, do not forget about common sense. See if it is really necessary to increase the number of words and whether you really need this page.

Improve SEO

Errors in the SEO, mainly duplicate headings and meta descriptions, can seriously influence the drop in search results. More than 20% of repetitions can critically affect performance. However, the pursuit of the perfect result is not always the right option. Using the same tags may be justified, for category pages with pagination for example. In other cases, you should fix the errors to match the Google SEO update.

Add expertise

After the May update, extra points in the search results went to the sites with first-hand expert opinion. The author of the texts should have good knowledge of the field they write about and, if possible, consult with relevant experts. Checklist for expert content:

It reveals the narrow aspects of the topic.

Heading H1 and subheadings H2-H6 correspond to the topic.

There are no spammed and uninformative texts.

There is a clear structure of articles including bulleted lists, graphics, tables, diagrams, videos, headings, and subheadings.

There are feedback forms and all the necessary information is visible.

Check with Google guidelines

Google emphasizes that a drop in SERP does not mean that the site is bad, just someone else has more relevant and high-quality content on the same topic, and that’s why users prefer the competitor’s site. Pay attention to Google’s recommendations for webmasters, especially after core updates. By responding to the changes in time, you will most likely be able to avoid traffic loss. It’s worth starting with two main points:

Check Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines for each item that may be applicable to your site as signs of high or low quality.

Refer to the official Google blog. An excellent checklist is presented there to verify that your content meets quality requirements.

How to keep up with Google’s changing algorithms

Google search algorithm updates are geared to improve the overall search quality. The sites that were previously ranked lower may rank unexpectedly higher, and vice versa. The webmaster’s task is to monitor all changes and improve the content, making it expert, relevant, and interesting. Then, whatever changes are brought about, you will still rank high on Google.

https://transorze.com/

[ranwing]

Trolls should stop trying to fake-equivalency Chris and Darren. Chris literally made his career himself. He got hired on Glee with no role, got his movie made, writing career sustained by himself, new projects entirely on his own, Noel offer directly to him. Darren by his own admission was unsuccessful at an audition for a previous BW musical before Glee and the same producers hired him for H2$ only because of the fame. His TV career is tied to Fox and Murphy. The rest is all gay benefactors.

Exactly. Look, I'm no fan of Darren and he's a best a subpar actor, but I fully expected him to be able to get work just because he's an easily marketable talent. I don't see him ever winning major acting awards (if he does, I'll be monumentally surprised), but he will get parts. He's got a team that is working very hard on his behalf and given that he never lost Ryan Murphy's favor, I'm not surprised that he eventually found his way into one of Murphy's projects. But I also can't ignore the quality of his acting that I've seen (am not impressed) and none of the jobs that he's gotten have managed to launch his post-Glee career in any meaningful way. He still very much needs Ryan Murphy to give him the kind of high profile job that he needs to push his career forward.

Chris has had his setbacks (with the Noel Coward biopic derailed because of financial issues that have nothing to do with him), but he's also had his successes. His writing career took off in a way that no one expected and has expanded far beyond his Glee fandom. Having the opportunity to not just star in a potential new series, but to be offered the opportunity to create the series, write the pilot and direct. That is a tremendous show of support from the production company, that they're willing to put  resources behind Chris and market him and his series. Chris took a well needed break after Glee, focused on his writing for a bit, gave the Noel biopic as much of a chance as he was able to, and dealt with a major family tragedy. Now he's moving forward with a new phase in his career and is charting his own path. He's already expressed his unwillingness to work with Ryan Murphy again (even if offered a role) and he'll carve his own path in the business. His past and future successes will be based entirely on his own remarkable talents and not because he depends on someone else to give him those opportunities to showcase himself in.

[ministrywebsitedesign-blog]

CHURCH OF THE CITY

Hi everybody, Tyler Rominger here from Ministry Designs. I’m here to do another church website review. Today we're going to be talking about Church of the City. Church of the City is a church in Nashville. It's a relatively new church. They're doing some phenomenal things down there. Darren Whitehead was a pastor on staff at Willow Creek Church in Chicagoland area and a couple of years ago he went down and planted in Nashville and they've seen some explosive growth over the course of the last couple of years. And so, because of the things that they're doing, I wanted to take a look at their website and see how they are communicating that. So we'll go ahead and jump right in. You can see on their home page, it's actually pretty simple. This is literally the only thing that their homepage consists of. I like the background image, but there's not a lot of information there. So from a personal standpoint, because the majority of people are looking at websites on their mobile device now, I like to see a little bit more information on the homepage. That doesn't mean that this is bad or wrong it's just a personal preference. The data would suggest that when you have less information on your homepage, obviously you're forcing people to click more, which means people are less likely to stay on your website. And so if you have more information on your homepage it gives them that ability to scroll that we've all become so accustomed to.

Let me just dive into the site a little bit. Again, the overall design is clean, it's brief; the navigation is pretty short up here. But they do have a footer navigation which again, limits the ability for people to find what they're looking for. The reason that is, is because we're creatures of habit. We know to look in the header for what it is that we're looking for in a website. That doesn't again mean that that's a bad thing, it just means that it's unusual to see that. So we'll go ahead—and they obviously want us to “Learn More” or to take a look at the “Messages”. So I have had the privilege of meeting Darren a few years back. I was a youth pastor prior to starting Ministry Designs and Darren was a part of our youth camp that I was facilitating. And so I got the chance to meet him a little bit. He gave a message at that camp and it was phenomenal so I have no doubt that the sermons are wonderful, so we're going to go ahead and skip that. We want to “Learn More” about the church because that's really why we're here. Looks like they've got a Vision Sunday coming up. They educate you on how to park; they give you directions. They're doing some hurricane relief response. This is a great feature here, “Frequently Asked Questions”. So a lot of times you don't see “Frequently Asked Questions” on a church website but I love that they've put that here. So again, if I wanted to click through the individual campuses—we'll go to the Franklin campus because I think that's their primary campus—it gives you some more information: what's happening, some updated events and those kind of things. Let's check out the KidCity here. Lot of white space … (I’m New—let’s see if it takes me back—oh it takes me back to a different page) … so I'm clicking through this website in real time with you, and just my initial knee-jerk response to this, is honestly it's a little bit confusing to navigate as I'm clicking through the website and kind of analyzing it for the first time. If I'm a parent with children, or if I'm maybe a first-time visitor to the church, I'm not going to know exactly what to look for, or where to look for it, and so I may abandon this website, just because of the difficulty to navigate. I love that they have the Vision Sunday video right here—that's also helpful. They tell us what to expect in the “I'm New” section … “Who We Are”.  We've got some good information here—the “Vision and Values”—people actually do look at that information, so it's good to have. With that said, I want to go ahead and jump over into some of the technical aspects. So if we look at the site speed from Google—the mobile site speed—it looks like it needs a little bit of work. 72 is by far not the worst I've seen; it's also not the best that I've seen. Their desktop however, it's pretty good. And I think that that's because of the limited amount of content on the home page so there's not really a lot to optimize there. So this is a tool that was produced by HubSpot, and basically what it is, is it's an overall website grader. And it kind of audits things like performance, mobile responsiveness, the SEO of the site, like the on-page optimization of the site, and the website security. So it says “This site is ok”, which I can understand why, and we'll jump into a little bit more of that when we get down to the SEO section. The performance is pretty good, like we already saw thanks to Google. A couple of things that they could increase there. Notice that the page speed is really good. We don't ever want to see that load speed higher than about four seconds. If they can get that down between two and three seconds they'd be in a better spot. Mobile-friendly: they get a 30 out of 30 so that's phenomenal. So their SEO grade is a little bit lacking. I've actually noticed that with a lot of churches that I review their website on, that I think there's just a general lack of search engine optimization, and people don't necessarily understand the value of having your website rank higher in the search engines. So a real simple thing that they could do is just add a sitemap. You know, there are free sitemap generators that they can generate the sitemap and then submit that to their google webmaster tools. And what it does, is it gives Google a more clear picture of the layout of their website and helps Google then index the pages more effectively, therefore then ranking the site a little bit higher. They have no headers on their website so they need H1 tags/H2 tags. An H1 tag would be the primary goal of the site. You could have a couple of H2 tags which would maybe … So an example of an H1 tag would be: “City Church—Nashville” and then an H2 tag could be some subcategories inside of that website. They have no header tags in that home page so it's hurting their SEO grade. The security is a big thing, again, there's no SSL certificate on this site, just like Scottsdale Bible. They for some reason have not added an SSL certificate, but this will also help their overall SEO grade. Because Google has now publicly come out and said that if a site has an SSL certificate it's going to be viewed more securely in the search engines, therefore ranking higher. Because Google wants to produce the most quality and secure results possible. So if I had to make a recommendation I would say, “Add some header tags and add an SSL certificate.” So to that point, there are some things that they could do again a little bit better in their SEO. You can tell that they've probably recently given it some attention because their site traffic has just jumped astronomically in the last year. But there are some things that they're missing, right? So if I did a search for churches in Nashville and I view the results on that, they're not even on the first page. So I'm all the way down here to result number 14, which would be the fourth result on the second page. And this has a pretty high search volume. So it looks like the search volume for this particular term is 720 organic searches a month in Google. And so, I think that if they added an SSL certificate and they put some header tags, were strategic about their page linking, created some Nashville-specific content and added it to their website, their SEO ranking would increase pretty dramatically, which would then ultimately help them leverage the search volume that's happening in their specific city on any given month. So just a quick recap: we'll go back to the home page of Church of the City. I love the initial presentation—it's clean, it's concise, it's modern��but once I dive into the navigation, I struggle a little bit to follow the path of the site. It's not very logically organized. I know that churches—larger churches—struggle with this but there are more effective ways to lay out your site. So if I could make a recommendation it would be to add the SSL and maybe clarify some of the navigation. I hope this review was beneficial to you. Again, my name is Tyler Rominger. I'm from Ministry Designs. We'd love the opportunity to take a look at your church website and do a review. Thank you, I hope you’re having a great day, and we'll look forward to seeing you at the next video. Make sure that you subscribe in the link below. Links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1OwBHEXa0I Ministry Designs Website: https://ministrywebsitedesigns.com/church-of-the-city