Web 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.

One of the big bits of tech news yesterday was a leaked slide showing that Yahoo was closing down Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking system that helped define. Yahoo must not do Twitter because it took them till today to finally respond. They now say that Del.icio.us doesn't fit their strategy and that they will be selling it.

Do we care? Should we care? When it started in 2003, Del.icio.us was something innovative and quirky. It helped teach us that our online behavior didn't need to be secret and locked away on our hard drives but could be shared. Indicating that you thought a website was worthy of a bookmark could be a recommendation to friends. Even people bookmarking a site was an indication of it's real world value. For us techies, Del.icio.us opened our eyes up to a world where everything could be an RSS feed and in 2006 I jiggered the social aspects to create a human-powered editorial aggregator QuakerQuaker.org.

When Yahoo bought it we were all a bit nervous but it seemed like a good move. Yahoo could bring server resources and a userbase and take Del.icio.us to the next level. When corporate decided to rename it Delicious.com, it stripped the quirkiness but perhaps signaled a willingness to take this more into the masses.

Alas, it didn't turn out that way. Delicious settled in and stopped innovating. Eventually the founder left Yahoo. Things got so bad that it seemed exciting when it essentially got a design make-over a few years ago. Competing services sprang up but none were different enough to make many of change our habits.

So yesterday's news is perhaps a good thing. I've been looking at those other services. Diigo.com looks really fabulous. I tried it when it launched in 2006 but wrote it off at the time as a Delicious clone with high ambitions. But they've been working hard. They're onto version five now and they've been adding the kind of cool features that an independent Delicious might have pursued.

For example, you can add a note to a webpage that you're bookmarking and then send a special URL with the site and note. They make it really easy to Twitter this. Last night I bookmarked and tweeted about an online radio service I've been using:

Listening to a lot of Radio Paradise lately. Good background work music, interesting selections: diigo.com/0e8gw

That Diigo link will take you to Radio Paradise's homepage with the note I added. That's really useful.

Diigo just a few moments ago put out a Transition to Diigo FAQ. Exporting from Delicious is really easy and importing it to Diigo is easy too--though not instant, it was about twelve hours. I'm confident enough about Diigo that I've upgraded to the $40/year Premium account--partly chipping in since I imagine they're being hit with lots of new accounts today.

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

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

One of the great things about Web 2.0 is the empowerment of average users. With Twitter and Facebook pages, individuals can now respond back to companies and organizations with a few strokes of the keyboard. Google's recently entered the fray with an intriguing project called Sidewiki. Once again, companies and nonprofits interested in managing their online brands need to be aware of the new medium and how to track it.

What is Sidewiki?
Google started its sidewiki project in September 2009. It's a sidebar that can attach to any page on the internet via the Google Toolbar. Users gain the ability to comment on any page on the internet. Google uses a ranking system based on votes and various algorithms to determine the order of the comments.

When a user of the Google Toolbar visits a page with Sidewiki notes they see a small blue button of the left side of the page with two white chevrons (see screenshot on the right). Clicking on this opens the Sidewiki sidebar. Here they will see comments left by previous visitors. They are be able to add their own comments.

Visionaries have long dreamed of a web with this kind of two-way communication but similar sidebar commenting systems have failed to gain enough momentum to become viable. If this were just another venture-capital-fueled attempt, it would be something marketers could ignore unless and until it became widely used. But with Google behind Sidewiki, it's a service we need to take seriously from the start.

Users Talking Back
When we put together websites, we get to control the message of our little corner of the internet--we have the final say on the material we present. If Sidewiki becomes popular, this will no longer be true. Fans, disgruntled employees and competitors can all start marking up our sites--yikes! But those brands that have embraced the Web 2.0 model will love another place where they can interact with their audience. Today's marketing goal is mindshare--how much of a user's attention span can you win over. The more you get visitors to think about your brand or your message, the more likely that they will buy or recommend your product or service. You need to be active on whatever online channel your audience is using.

Watching the Conversations
What's a good brand manager to do? The first thing is to make sure you have the latest version of Google Toolbar installed on your working browser (get it here) and that you have the Sidewiki service enabled (I've started a Sidewiki for this entry so if it's working you'll see the blue button in your browser).

Brand Management
Google allows website owners the first comment. If you are registered as the owner of a site via Google Webmaster Tools, then you get first say: when you post to the Sidewiki of a page you control, Google gives you the top spot. This is very good. Should you do it?

Probably not. At least not yet. I don't see people using Sidewiki yet. Most websites still don't have any comments. Even Google's projects often fail to gain traction and there's no guarantee that Sidewiki will take off. If your page doesn't have any comments, I wouldn't recommend that you make the first. If there are no Sidewiki entries, the blue button won't be there and visitors probably won't even think to comment.

If you notice that a visitor has started a Sidewiki for your site by leaving a comment, then it's time to log into your Google Webmasters account and leave an official welcome message. Even though you're second to the conversation, you will get first position thanks to your ownership of the website.

The introductory note should briefly welcome visitors. It will appear alongside your website so there's no need to repeat your mission statement, but it is a place where you can give helpful navigation tips and stress any actionable items that the casual visitor might miss. You might consider inviting visitors to sign up for your site's email list, for example.

The Future
Users can tie their Sidewiki comments into Twitter and Facebook accounts. They can leave video comments. If the service takes off there will surely be a mini-industry built around comment optimization. Spammers will get hard at work to game the system. But none is really happening now. Despite a bit of fear-mongering on marketing blogs, Google Sidewiki is a long ways away from being something to lose sleep over. 

More Information:

• Google Sidewiki page
• Sidewiki Bookmarklet (useful for browsers without Google Toolbar support)
  
• Google Toolbar Wikipedia entry
• Techcrunch on the Sidewiki debut
• Google Webmaster Tools

A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company's service. Unfortunately the page had no useful content, no call-to-action and no Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn't need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.

So you're ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here's five tips for building a self-marketing website!

One: Useful Content for your Target Audience Give visitors a reason to come to the site. Text-rich, changing content is essential. In practicality, this means installing a blog and writing posts every few weeks. You'll see measures like "keyword relevancy" increase instantly as excerpted text shows up on the homepage. Add videos and photos if your company or team has that expertise, but remember: when it comes to search, text is king.

Two: Give away something valuable or useful Many smart marketing sites feature some free giveaway right on the homepage: a useful quiz, professional analysis, a PDF how-to guidebook. A builder I worked with went to the trouble of posting dozens of floor plans & pictures to their website and compiling them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your contact information to get it. Once the free material has been compiled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!

Three: Ask yourself the Three User Questions! It's amazing how focused the mind gets when you actually sit down to define goals. Just about every website can benefit from this three-step exercise:

1. Who is the target audience?
2. What would draw them to the site? 
3. What do we want to get from them?

Get a group together to through your website page by page these questions. Brainstorm a list of changes you could make. You'll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quantifiable actions do you want visitors to take? It might well just be the successful completion of a contact form.

Four: Test Test and Test Again Many small businesses now get a lot of their customers from their websites. Your website is an essential piece of your marketing and publicity and you need to be smart about it. Compile together your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up  alternate designs incorporating the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Website Optimizer to put the alternatives through their paces. Which one "converts" better, i.e., which design gets you higher percentages in the Defined Goals you've set? Once you've finished a test, move on to the next brainstorming idea and implement it. Always be testing!

An extensive series of tests of one site I worked on doubled it's conversion rate: imagine your company doubling its internet sales? It is completely worth spending the time and effort to go through this process.

Five: Don't Be Afraid to Get Professional Help If you need to hire a professional to help you through this process you'll almost certainly get your money's worth! A recent projects cost the customer $6000 but I was able to document savings of $100,000 per year in his publicity costs! See my piece What to Look For in SEO Consultants for my insider-advice to how to pick a honest and competent professional web publicity consultant.

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:

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

Collected from LinkedIn:

Tom Ferrick, Journalist/Publisher, Phlmetropolis.com

Hired Martin as a Graphic/Web Designer in 2009

Top Qualities: Great Results, Personable, Good Value.

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I'd like to talk today about social media and nonprofits. I've had a couple of interesting projects lately helping nonprofits put together Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Groups and Twitter sites. I think this is an exciting way to reach out to audience members.

Today: Email Lists

Over the last few years we've focused on email lists. We all have big email lists--tens of thousands of users, segmented all sorts of different ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seeming not spam.

Facebook Pages

A new era is coming with social media. A big change is Facebook Pages. These are geared toward advertisers although you don't need to have a Facebook advertising campaign to use them. In March 2009, Facebook redesigned Pages to act much more like typical user profiles: there's a wall, there's an activity stream, and you can associate different applications with them.

Two things about Pages are exciting. One is the activity stream. People who sign up as "fans" of your Page see what you're putting out in their individual stream. They'll log into Facebook and see that messages like "Jen just got engaged!" or "Joe is having a bad hair day" and that your organization is having some great event coming up this weekend. You're seen in the association of happy news from their friends. It's different from a spammish email because it's coming in with the context of their friends, which is very powerful for publicity.

The other nice thing about Facebook Pages is that they're public. A lot of portions of Facebook aren't but making Pages public means you can point to them from your website or other social media campaigns.

I think Facebook fan groups are going to be the new email list. They are the way we'll be able to reach out to people. I'm very excited about this because there's all sorts of easy multimedia possibilities. You can integrate with Youtube, with Twitter, with podcasts, etc., embedded for fans of your Facebook page to see as it's happening. This is much more exciting than some of the emails that we send out. They are also more interactive because fans can post things on your fan walls so you can have conversations on your sites.

Intimate, immediate, engaging

What the smart nonprofits are going to be doing is a lot of posting in a style that's authentic and intimate and less worried about being slick than we've typically been.

What I would love to see nonprofits doing is to get serious about video. I'm not talking about fancy video, hauling in videographers for six months shooting a three minute slick commercial. Get an inexpensitve video recorder and start doing five minute interviews with the people your organization serves. This will differ depending on your organization's focus. One advantage to simple videos is that you can convince even the busiest of your interviewees to take out a few minutes. You make these videos and post them to Youtube, Vimeo or directly to Facebook video. It doesn't matter where they hosted but you'll have to make sure they're embedded on your Facebook fan page.

Building our Facebook Fan Page

How to direct? You can direct in the emails you're sending out or through other sources. Twitter is a great way of directing people to what's happening: you send out a 140-character "tweet" with an interesting tease about the video you've produced and a link to the Facebook fan page.

The whole goal is to get Facebook fans. Once you're in as a fan, you show up in their activity streams. All the fans get to see the events you're organizing, the videos. If you have extra tickets to an upcoming event, post about it because people will see it immediately. It's a wonderful way to reach people quickly in a way that's not as intrusive as email (I suspect a lot of younger users are actually checking their Facebook homepage more often than their emails!).

The New Nonprofit Outreach

I'd love to see a lot more of these intimate, almost home-made videos going up on Facebook fan pages and using fan pages as a way of connecting with people. We can think of these as the new email list.

I would strongly encourage nonprofits to use all of these these media to reinforce their message and to find new ways to reach their audiences in a much more engaging, intimate way.

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Martin Kelley is a web developer and social media consultant specializing in nonprofits. This post is a loose transcription of his video, Nonprofits and Social Media. This essay is also available on the MartinKelley.com Facebook fan page.

Over on my O'Reilly Media blog, I've written "Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?," a look at where I think the third-party social media websites are going. Here's a taste:

The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.

This will change company's interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms--status updates, calendars, videos--but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media's evolving role.

This Quaker meeting sits along Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs and is making special efforts at outreach. They wanted a design refresh that would allow the heads of committees direct access to their section of the websites. With multiple log-ins and high content needs, we went with the Drupal content management system, which has become the CMS of choice for many non-profits.

The design is built from scratch with obvious nods to the Facebook look-and-feel: we wanted something that would seem both familiar and fresh to the young professional crowd that is this meeting's most obvious target audience.

Visit: Haverfordfriendsmeeting.org

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 comes from a presentation I made a few weeks ago where I addressed public relations staff for Quaker Schools. The main points about media openness and the need for public relations to embrace Web 2.0 are applicable to many scenarios, not just schools.

John Kindley is a lawyer in a solo practice in South Bend, Indiana. He came to me wanting a web design make-over for his self-designed WordPress site, along with some SEO advice and help with a form. John's a bit of a tinkerer so he's already moved on to a new design!

Visit: Kindley Law in South Bend Indiana

Client Testimonial:

"Martin provided great value in designing a website for my law practice. He was accessible and facilitated the process, despite our geographical distance, through email and telephone consultations. He was flexible in working with me to achieve what I was looking for within my budget." May 1, 2009

John Kindley, Lawyer.
Hired Martin as a Graphic/Web Designer in 2008
Top qualities: Personable, Good Value, High Integrity