Flickr Web Design

The Tract Association is venerable Quaker publisher dating back to the early part of the Nineteenth Century. They had a website but wanted a new one built with a content management system that would allow for easier editing. The new site is built in WordPress. Befitting the organization's ethos, the site is relatively plain but there's a lot going on underneath the surface.

Discover Thyself is a "discernment" site for Quaker teens. Sponsored by Earlham College, it features resources, videos and the all-new "Discer-o-Matic Quiz."

The design is all original. We went through six rounds of the concept design mockups made up on Adobe Fireworks. Because the site is built on WordPress used as a CMS, Earlham College staff was able to add and arrange content even before the design coding began. The site uses the excellent Thematic theme, a blank template that allows for quite sophisticated designs using Action Hooks and complete CSS markup.

The most exciting element of the site is the "Discern-o-Matic" quiz, which takes users through a series of questions. At the end the questions are reorganized and presented to the user to help them understand what it is they want to do. The quiz is powered using the open-source LimeSurvey. Results are outputted via a custom PHP script that polls the LimeSurvey database and outputs in a nicely-worded and formatted WordPress results page. The templates for Lime Survey were altered to mimick the look of the rest of the site; the average user won't notice the pass-off from WordPress to Lime Survey and back to WordPress.

In hopes the quiz might go viral, individual results are saved on a unique URL. Users are invited to share their results page via Facebook.

Visit Site: http://www.discoverthyself.org

Catherine Lockwood is a therapist in the Los Angeles area who had built a site in the since-discontinued Google Page Creator service. It had a nice design but she could never get her domain pointing to it and she was frustrated that Google had closed the service. She wrote me saying "I would like to have a website address that WORKS. I have never been able to give anyone my address because apparently the address is not connected to my website. So instead I have to tell people to google me!"

The DiMeo family owns and operates several of the largest blueberry farms in the world, right here in the "blueberry capital of the world": Hammonton, New Jersey. They have an existing website that is hand-edited. We created a second site using WordPress. On launch it has much of the same content as the other site, but arranged into posts and categorized and tagged for search engine visibility. It also highlights the DiMeo Blueberry Farms' Facebook, Twitter and Youtube outlets. I'll be interested to see how it gets picked up by search engines and how visitors start to use it

ReconRabbi is a social network for rabbis associated with the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. It is designed to provide ongoing education and networking for far-flung alumni.

It's a highly customized, member-only site built on the Ning platform. The typical Ning features are here: video, podcasts and member profiles. Expanded areas include extensive training material for members. We recorded and I edited a series of eight screencasts of approximately five minutes each for their Help section using Screenflow for Mac; topics include signing up, adding discussions, using the customized training material.

Member-only Site: http://www.reconrabbi.net/.

In early December 2009, I got a call from a prospective client who wanted me to build a website for her husband's home improvement business. The catch? She wanted it to be a surprise Christmas present! She started collecting pictures from his clients and I went to work with a simple but expandable WordPress site. Reports are that Brad was thrilled!

See it live: http://www.bradleywinkler.com/

Metropolis is a "news, analysis and commentary" site from veteran Philadelphia reporter Tom Ferrick (Wikipedia). An alum of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Tom's spent the last half-dozen years talking to everyone who will listen about the future of print and Philly news. He's done talking and is showing what can be done on a budget budget. From "This is Metropolis," the lead article:

Local newspapers, TV and radio stations are retreating from in-depth coverage of regional news either due to economic or audience considerations.

The retreat has been gradual, but no one expects it to stop. The company that owns the region's largest newspapers - the Inquirer and Daily News - is in bankruptcy. The size of the editorial staffs at the papers continues to shrink. The prognosis for metro dailies here and elsewhere is not good. The journalism practiced by these papers is still robust, but the economic model that has sustained it is eroding. If these traditional sources of news falter or fail what will take their place?

The site was built in Movable Type. The most prominent feature is the slideshow display of featured articles. Tom has seen a similar effect on another journalism site and a search found the "Sliding Horizontal Banner Rotator" at Active Den, a great site to purchase pre-built Flash files. Movable Type entries are outfitted with custom fields to enter images and links. Movable Type then creates a custom XML file for the "Main Stories" feed, which is then picked up and displayed by the Flash banner. In addition, the site uses Google Adsense to provide income.

Visit: Philadelphia Metropolis

Michael Oliveras is a long-time union carpenter making the entrepreneurial jump and starting his own business: Mike's Precision Carpentry, serving the New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware from his shop in Hammonton, NJ. He came to me looking for a webpage to advertise his new enterprise.

It's a simple design, a typical small-business site of half-a-dozen pages. The color scheme matches his business cards for a bit of branding. Oliveras faced a problem typical for new businesses: a lack of good photos. The work he's done for many years is not technically his own (per the employment contracts) so for now the pictures are a mix of the few jobs he has done on his own and a few stock images. I'm sure he'll have a well-rounded portfolio before long and we'll be able to fill out the site with his own work. In the meantimes, he added a couple of great pictures of him and his family on the "About Us" page to give it that personal touch.

See it live: www.mikesprecisioncarpentry.com

Popular children's entertainer/educator Slim Goodbody is one busy guy: most weekdays of the school year find him spreading the message of good health in his trademark body suit ("When a Body needs somebody there's nobody like Goodbody!").

He's been doing this work for decades now and has a vast storehouse of videos, products and fans. Slim came to me to build a branded Facebook presence.

A typical workload for a Facebook branding project is:

• Set up the Page;
• Coordinate with the client for a good profile graphic;
• Adding a number of photos and videos;
• Help set up a posting strategy;
• Provide phone support to answer questions on best practices;
• Give feedback on campaign (like Facebook's "Insights" stats)

For Slim, we decided to rely on Facebook's native apps as much as possible. This became especially important when Facebook shifted it's feed layout (yet again) to focus less on user streams and more on an algorithmically-determined best posts. The more integrated your site is with Facebook, the better chance your pieces will have of showing up on Fan's user streams.

We used Facebook Markup Language (FBML) to create custom Page tabs for integration with his existing online store and listing of tour dates. We would have liked to use FB's Events application but it doesn't allow for the volume of tour dates necessary to cover a busy entertainer like Slim Goodbody!

See it live: www.facebook.com/slimgoodbody

The Friends World Committee for Consultation unites Quakers of all stripes together in joint projects and dialog. It's Americas office has the most complete listing of U.S. and Canadian Friends Meetings and Churches and now has a map to prove it! This is a mash-up of the FWCC database with Google Maps.

Because of limitations of how many data points Google can show the countries have been divided into regions. The main access page is a screen shot of a Google Map with a old fashioned imagemap overlay that allows you to select the region you want to look at. Javascript goodness shadows the currently selected region.

See it live: www.fwccamericas.org/friends

Elisabeth is a painter and artist who specializes in original acrylic paintings and giclee prints of nature and South Jersey beach scenes. Her existing site was attractive, but it didn't have online ordering and she wasn't able to update it herself.

We put together a features list and then went through a round of concept screenshots which I built in Adobe Fireworks and Photoshop (you can see our work here!). Design in hand, I built a customized Movable Type site. A specialized template allows her to enter information about the each piece: medium, theme, price and the URL to it's image (most of which are hosted on Flickr). Movable Type pulls these together into various category and individual art pages, with automatically-generated Paypal "Buy" buttons for available pieces. We stressed search-engine visibility so there are many categories and they all cross-link with each painting.

Visit: Elisabeth Olver

Many Friends will know me from my active involvement in the Quaker world. I've been dubbed the "Quaker Blogfather" for my Quaker Ranter (site) blog and my work in pulling together QuakerQuaker (site), an online magazine and blogging community with over five hundred members and 10,000 visitors a month. I am also a frequent Quaker workshop leader and published writer.

I started building websites in 1995 with an award-winning Nonviolence.org hub site and was a social media pioneer when I redesigned its homepage to a blog format three years later. Before going independent as MartinKelley.com in 2006, I served on the staff of Friends General Conference (site) for eight years, where I worked in the FGC Quaker bookstore and built the Quakerfinder, FGC Gathering and youth ministry sites. I also worked for Friends Journal (site) for two years, putting select articles from their Quaker magazine online every month. Since then I've been privileged to work with Quaker organizations such as Friends World Committee for Consultation (site), Friends Council on Education (site) and Haverford Friends Meeting (site). I've done some exciting media work with the Philadelphia Penn Charter School (site) and built personal sites for well known Friends. I bring our testimony of integrity to every business transaction and when I address topics such as search engine optimization or pricing philosophy, I try to do so from a Friends perspective.

Web Design Specialties:

A local client from Tabernacle in Burlington County came to me with an interesting project. He's owned a commercial cleaning company for a number of years and has heard his share of horror stories about the cleaning services clients hired before finding him! This experience led him to write a PDF e-book about how to hire the right cleaning service. What a great idea and a what a useful book this is for small business owners.

The site's on a bit of a budget so it's a simple design, with colors and general look-and-feel borrowed from a site the client likes. Simple editing comes via CushyCMS. When customers click to buy, they are sent to Paypal for the actual transaction and then forwarded to E-Junkie, which provides the automated and integrated PDF download.

Visit the site: Office Manager's Guide to Hiring the Best Cleaning Service

Cornerstone is a relatively new church plant in Smithville, Atlantic County, New Jersey. They're site is a simple design built in Movable Type using off-the-shelf templates to keep the budget down. The most exciting part of the site is the podcast sermons and the ability to ask Bible questions and make prayer requests from the homepage. I'm most happy to see the church using the site and updating it regularly!

Pastor Fred Schwenger also has a new local connection: he and a partner have just opened Superior Automotive here in Hammonton at 880 S White Horse Pike! 

Visit: CornerstoneFellowshipOnline.com

I was hired to redesign the website of a cemetery that represents a fascinating slice of South Jersey history. In the 1880s, a group of Jews escaped Russian pogroms, came to America and started a "return to the soil" movement that led to the establishment of an agricultural colony in the small Salem County crossroads of Norma, New Jersey. Before long they established Alliance Cemetery.

The new Alliance website highlights the entrance gate. The cemetery has hired a surveying company to do a detailed map of the plots and we hope to add this in with a Google Maps mash-up when the data becomes available. A detailed history and photos are also in the works.

The design is hand-coded from scratch and is probably the most tasteful design of my portfolio. The pages themselves are editable by the client using CushyCMS and the Directions page has an integrated Google Map.

Visit: AllianceCemetery.com

Ginny Christensen is the force behind Strategy for Growth, LLC, a Wyncote, PA consulting firm that provides strategic planning, board development, executive coaching, and leadership team development for independent schools and nonprofits. The site is fairly simple. It's built in WordPress and has rudimentary e-commerce with a Paypal option for purchasing books.

Visit: StrategyForGrowth.com

I usually describe myself as a "Web Developer," but often the technical aspects of my job are the least valuable service I provide. Above it I would rank what you might call my experience as a web citizen and online publicist. I put my first website together years before upstart sites like "Google" and "Myspace" came along and I published what I later realized was a "blog" the same month the word "weblog" was coined. I help clients connect with their audiences with a mix of print content, podcasts, pictures and videos, whether delivered through the open web or specialized services like Twitter or Facebook. A better job description might be Technology Lifestyle Guru.

So it was neat to be quoted last week in ReadWriteWeb, a top-twenty blog with hundreds of thousands of readers and a syndication deal with the New York Times Technology section. The article was "Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live?" by Sarah Perez. In a section called "When Should You Disconnect?" she wrote:

The fine line between what's worth documenting and what's not is a hard one to define. We immediately assume that the most important, the biggest, the most incredible moments are those that should be recorded. But it's these very moments that are best to experience live, with our full focus. As religious-focused blogger Martin Kelley notes, "there are times where our presence is much more important than any documentation." (He had just surprised himself by reviewing the grainy, blurry photos he felt it necessary to take while watching a bride walk down the aisle. In retrospect, this was exactly the kind of moment that could have gone unrecorded.)

It's a bit ironic that for all of the tech writing I do I was cited for my personal blog, but this blurring of the line between identities is becoming more common with the web. Thanks to Sarah and ReadWriteWeb for the mention!

This is a Ning-based social network for Friends Council on Education, a Quaker organization dedicated to supporting Friends Schools across a very wide geographic area. I set the site up and did initial training. The members-only site now boasts over 700 members and dozens of member-uploaded videos and photos.

The mission of the Salem County Special Services School District, a regional educational service agency, is to provide high quality, cost-effective programs and services to the schools and districts of Salem County and Cumberland County, New Jersey. This site built with what are for me fairly generic tools: Movable Type as CMS, with Flickr intergration. The design style sheet was built from scratch using CSS.

Visit: Scsssd.org

New York City Journalist Susan DeMark looks for the stories behind the architecture, buildings, history, and nature of NYC and beyond. She and a graphic designer put together the look of the site and I performed the CSS magic to translate their vision into a WordPress blog.

Visit: Mindful Walker