Quaker Magazine Web Design

Client projects and tech blog posts about Quaker Magazine

Quaker Design

Martin Profile Picture 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:


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Categories: quaker | Edit

Organizations

Martin has worked with over two dozen nonprofit organizations, often serving as webmaster and internet evangelist:

A.J. Muste Memorial Institute
American Friends Service Committee
Center on Conscience and War
Cornerstone Fellowship, Galloway NJ
Council of Parishes of Southern New Jersey
Episcopal Peace Fellowship
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Friends Council on Education
Friends General Conference
Friends Institute
Friends Journal
Haverford (PA) Friends Meeting
Haddonfield Foundation
Global Network for Nonviolence
Indymedia.org
International Nanny Association
Jewish Peace Fellowship
Lutheran Peace Fellowship
National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund
Nepal Foundation
New Society Educational Foundation
New Society Publishers
Nonviolence.org
O'Reilly Media
Pax Christi USA
Pendle Hill Conference Center
Pennsylvania Ballet
Philadelphia Nanny Network
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
Raphael Webscapes, LLC
QuakerQuaker.org
Salem County Special Services School District
Skipping Stones Magazine
Slim Goodbody Productions
Steady Footsteps
Syracuse Cultural Workers
Training for Change
United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO
Urban Land Institute / Philadelphia
Veterans for Peace
War Resisters League
William Penn Charter School
World Game Institute
Young Friends North America

Categories: Consulting
Tags: A.J. Muste, Council Of Parishes, Episcopal Peace Fellowship, Fellowship Of Reconciliation, Indymedia, International Nanny Association, Jewish Peace Fellowship, Lutheran Peace Fellowship, New Society Publishers, Non-Profit, O'Reilly Media, Peace Tax Fund, Pendle Hill, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, United Farm Workers, Urban Land Institute, Veterans For Peace, World Game Institute, Young Friends North America | Edit

Blogging for the Long Tail

One of the neatest observations to gain popularity in the last few years is that of The Long Tail, first coined a few years ago by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson (here's the original article). He noticed that the internet had opened up access to niches--that searches and national distribution networks had given new markets to obscure and small-market products. The classic example is Netflix, the direct-mail movie rental service, that has a huge catalog of titles, the great majority of which are so obscure that no local video rental store could afford to carry them. But Netflix actually rents them all and if you add all these low-volume rentals together you'll find the total volume exceeds that season's blockbusters.
I learned just how strong the long tail can be a few years ago when I worked on Quakerfinder.org, a meeting/church look-up service. For the first year, the site got moderate traffic from search engines. Google wasn't able to index the actual church listings because users were required to type towns and postal codes in to get results. The only search engine visitors we got came in on very generic phrases like "find quaker meetings."

Suspecting we were losing a large potential audience, I redesigned the site so Google could index each and every meeting (adding a few tricks so each listing traded links with half-a-dozen other listings). Once the change was in effect (help from our programmer), those old generic search phrases were still the most popular. But now we got small numbers of visits on thousands of terms which we hadn't hit before: "Quakers Poughkeepsie" and "Quaker Churches in San Francisco," etc. This was the long tail in effect. Our visits jumped fourfold within a few months (see chart). The long tail made us much more visible. (More on the Googlization effort in that year's analytic report.)

A great new traffic analysis service is called HitTail. Like many other programs it tells you what search phrases have brought traffic to your site. But what's cool is that it gives suggestions--keywords it thinks will bring even more visitors in. Some of the suggestions are funny. For example, it thinks I should post about "traditional sweat lodge songs," "ticklish armpits" and "how to dress with personality" over on Quaker Ranter. But it also thinks I might consider posting on "small church local outreach ideas," "new online magazines" and "christian quakers."

If all one was worried about was sheer traffic volume, then a post on each keyword might be in order. But this would bring a lot of random traffic and dilute any focus the blog might have (I already get a lot of traffic on a particular non-typical post that I wrote partly as an SEO experiment). My guess is you should go through the HitTail suggestions list to find topics that match your site's focus but do so in language that you might not normally use.

I might try some experimental posts on my personal blog soon. I'll definitely report back about them here on the MartinKelley.com design blog. In the meantime, check out HitTail's blog, which has some good links.
Categories: Beyond SEO
Tags: Direct Mail, Moderate Traffic, Netflix, Niches, Original Article, Rents, Search Engines Google | Edit

Tweaking the blogs for hyperlocal content

Interesting article over the Moveabletype blog. Anil Dash interviews George Johnson Jr of Hyperlocal Media, who's using MT as a content system to build hyperlocal community sites that can compete against local newspapers (see their very-cool looking BuffaloRising site).

Here's some of what Johnson has to say:

Distribution, content creation, and the ability to more easily compete with established local players online... blogging is perfect for that. I mean a blog is chronologically arranged, in columns, divided by categories and changes (in many cases) everyday. That's the broad definition of a newspaper, right? A blog is so much more than that, but the basic structure lends itself very well to developing an online competitor for newspapers.

It was three years ago that I followed Brad Choate's instructions for using Moveable Type as a whole-site content management system. What started as an experiment became a way of life for me. The MT interface lends itself so well to content management that I'm now using it for my non-techie clients: Quakersong.org and Quakeryouth.org are both put together by MT and I've been surprised that there's been almost no learning curve for the client's adoption of this software.

Given this, it seems odd that the kids at Moveable Type haven't taken MT in this direction (even more surprising since they hired Brad himself a few years ago!). I see a big market in my niche sites for this sort of functionality and three years later I'm still having to tweak templates to get this to work. Anil, what's up? If Drupal had better documentation and smoother installation it would have been the brawn behind MartinKelley.com.

It would be fun to follow Until Monday's example and create a hyperlocal site (hint hint to VW if she's reading this). Of course, locality is not just geographically-based anymore. Quakerquaker.org is a local portal of a different kind. I'm a big believer that the hyperlocality of niche and geographic sites are the cutting edge in the next-wave of the social web.

There's a lot of pioneering to be done in this regards. The net has a lot of power to take down culture monopolies by confronting old boy networks and business-as-usual thinking with innovative social networks that harness the talents of the outsiders. The smart newspapers, magazines, churches and cultural organizations will come on board and leap-frog themselves to twenty-first century relevance. Too many of the Philadelphia (and/or) Quaker institutions I know respond to change by shuffling job titles and putting blinders up against recognizing the ever-narrower demographic they serve.

Categories: Drupal , Practical 2.0
Tags: Blog, Blogging, Content, Content Management System, Local Newspapers, Local Players, Movable, Moveable Type | Edit

The Early Blogging Days


When Nonviolence.org morphed into a blog
An early edition of "Nonviolence Web Upfront," which debuted December 29, 1997.
I started Nonviolence.org in late 1995 as a place to publicize the work of the US peace movement which was not getting out to a wide (or a young) audience. I built and maintained the websites of a few dozen hosted groups (including the War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi USA) but I quickly realized that the Nonviolence.org homepage itself could be used for more than just as a place to put links to member groups. I realized I could highlight the articles I thought should get more publicity, whether on or off the Nonviolence.org domain. The homepage adapted into what is now a recognizable blog format on November 13, 1997 when I re-named the homepage "Nonviolence Web Upfront" and started posting links to interesting articles from Nonviolence.org member groups. In response to a comment the other day I wondered how that fit in with the evolution of blogging. I was shocked to learn from Wikipedia's that the term "weblog" wasn't coined until December of that year. I think is less a coincidence than a confirmation that many of us were trying to figure out a format for sharing the web with others. Below is an excerpt from the email announcement for "Nonviolence Web Upfront." The reliable Archive.org has index of Upfront's second week, whose feature was a guest piece by John Steitz, Is the Nonviolence Web a Movement Half-Way House that sounds eerily similar to recent discussions on Quaker Ranter.

Here's the email announcement that coincided with Upfront's debut:

NONVIOLENCE WEB NEWS, by Martin Kelley Week of December 29, 1997

CONTENTS
Introducing "Nonviolence Web Upfront"
New Procedures
New Website #1: SERPAJ
New Website #2: Stop the Cassini Flyby
Two Awards
Numbers Available Upon Request
Weekly Visitor Counts

With my travelling and holiday schedule, it's been hard to keep regular NVWeb News updates coming along, but it's been a great month and there's a lot. I'm especially proud of the continuing evolution of what I'm now calling "Nonviolence Web Upfront," seen by 1800-2200 people a month!

----------
INTRODUCING "NONVIOLENCE WEB UPFRONT"
The new magazine format of the NVWeb's homepage has been needing a name. It needed to mentioned the "Nonviolence Web" and I wanted it to imply that it was the site's homepage (sometimes referred to as a "frontpage") and that it contained material taken from the sites of the NVWeb.

So the name is "Nonviolence Web Upfront" and a trip to http://www.nonviolence.org will see that spelled out big on top of the weekly-updated articles.

There's also an archive of the weekly installments found at the bottom of NVWeb Upfront. It's quite a good collection already!

Now that this is moving forward, I encourage everyone to think about how they might contribute articles. If you write an interesting opinion piece, essay, or story that you think would fit, send it along to me. For example, "War Toys: Re-Action-ist Figures" FOR's Vincent Romano's piece from the Nov. 27 edition, was an essay he had already written and made a good complimentary piece for the YouthPeace Week special. But don't worry about themes: NVWeb Upfront is meant not only to be timely but to show the breadth of the nonviolence movement, so send your pieces along!

Categories: MartinKelley.com
Tags: Cassini, Interesting Articles, Martin Kelley, Member Groups, Nonviolence Web, Org Web, Pax Christi Usa, Peace Movement, Quaker, Web, Wikipedia | Edit

Hire Martin! I build sites and online promotion campaigns to your specs and budgets and can be your guide to social media marketing.

Also available: my resume, a brief biography, organizations I've worked with, speaking and workshop engagements, client recommendations and a portfolio of recent work:

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