Client Web Design

Over the last year or so I've been asked to do an increasing amount of Facebook consulting. Most weeks I get a couple of emails asking for help and asking how this sort of consulting works so I thought I'd explain my experience.

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

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

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.

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

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 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!

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

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

My Twitter followers will know I've been slightly obsessed by Google's new browser, Chrome, since word leaked that it was going to be released today (Tues, Sept 2). I've been hitting reload on the download site fairly obsessively. A few minutes ago my persistence was rewarded and I'm writing to you all from the new browser (here's the official release announcement).

This is part of my Beyond SEO series where I look at the myths and realities behind search engine optimization, with practical tips about publicizing your site and building your personal brand. Read all of my Beyond SEO articles.

The Google blog asks for user input into what makes a good SEO and reports that they've just rewritten their page that warns against rogue SEO artists and gives recommendations about what to look out for. It starts with their definition

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners.

The blog asks "how would you define SEO? What questions would you ask a prospective SEO?" I've been doing a lot more optimization for clients lately. What's particularly fun is running across the work of the SEO scam artists their competition have brought in. I've seen many instances where the other SEO firm has stepped over the bounds of fair practice and been penalized by Google.

Google's job and our job

I've always taken the approach that it's Google's job to give people the most useful and relevant return for their search and our job to make sure we have useful and relevant material and arrange it in such a way that Google can access it.

SEO is important but only in the context of smart web design and a coherent and well thought out internet marketing strategy. Firms that claim to do SEO without checking the analytics data and consulting with the client about their business strategy will not help the site in the long run.

What your SEO expert should be doing

I would agree with most of Google's recommendations of what to look out against. But what to look for? A quick list would include:

• A SEO consultant that looks at analytics data before making any changes. If the client doesn't already have Google Analytics running on the site I install it and wait a month before doing anything. I do that because you want:
• Quantifiable results. You should be able to see shifting use patterns if the optimization is working. The internet gives us precise figures and it's often very easy to demonstrate the value of the work you've done. Clients should have full access to the analytics and be trained enough to be able to independently verify the results.
• A consultant that frequently answers questions with "Hmmm..., I don't know." No one knows what Google is doing. You try something, then you try something else. Anyone who claims to know everything is scamming you.
• Someone who looks at your entire business model and asks hard questions about your internet strategy. What do you hope to accomplish with your site. Are there specific goals that we can measure?
• Think about your Inbound and Outbound strategies. Google will send people your way if you have useful material so think about what compelling content you can offer the universe. And once people come to the site you have to make it compelling for them to stay a while, subscribe, etc.
• The SEO consultant should make you sweat: anyone who says they can significantly boost your site without you having to lift a finger is fooling you. You will almost always have to add compelling content and it will take you committing staff time to the project (a good development team will look for ways to make this fit into your existing staff routines so that it's as painless as possible!).

Any others suggestions for what to look for in potential SEO consultants?

I was recently working with a client who has a large Google Adwords campaign, with an annual ad budget in the low six figures. He's been very careful about the keywords he's chosen and we've both poured over the Google Analytics figures to see how the campaign progressed.

It took a third party keyword tracking system to discover that many of the ads were being served up to wrong keywords in the Google searches. I want to keep the client's identity private, so let me use an analogy: say you're a boomerang maker and you've bought a campaign intending ads to show up for those who search "boomerang" in Google. What we discovered is that Google was serving up a large percentage of these ads for searchers of "frisbees" -- close, but not close enough for searchers to care. Few people clicked on the misplaced ad. We're talking serious money wasted on ads served up to the wrong target audience.

How did a carefully constructed ad campaign get on so many poorly-targeted searches? Google allows fuzzy matching under their broad match guidelines:

For example, if you're currently running ads on the broad-matched keyword web hosting, your ads may show for the search queries web hosting company or webhost. The keyword variations that are allowed to trigger your ads will change over time, as the AdWords system continually monitors your keyword quality and performance factors. Your ads will only continue showing on the highest-performing and most relevant keyword variations.

You can disable these broad searches using negative keywords (i.e., "-frisbee") and with specific keywords ("boomerang").

But Google does not make it easy to see just where your ads are going. You have to set up a special Search query performance report. It's really essential that anyone doing a large Google Ad campaign set up one of these searches and have it automatically emailed to them every month. Google clearly wasn't tracking the "performance" of its broad search on this client's ad. I'm particularly disturbed that we didn't see these misdirected keywords listed in the Google Analytics tracking reports. It is dangerous to use the same company to both sell you a service and to report how well it's been doing.

Credit where it's due: it was the excellent long-tail blog content service Hittail that gave us the information that Google was misdirecting its ads. See my previous Hittail coverage.

Web 2.0 tools have changed the boundary lines between techies and program staff in many nonprofits over the past few years. At least, they should have, though I know of various organizations that haven't made the conceptual leap to the new roles.

OLD SCHOOL: Webmaster

Let me explain by talking about my own changing work role. Even a few years ago, I was a paid staff webmaster. You could divide my work into two large categories. The first was techie: I managed server accounts, set up required databases, designed sites. I got into the HTML code, the PHP, the Javascript, CSS, etc.

The other was content: when program-oriented staff had new material they wanted on the website they would email it to me or walk it over. I would put in my work queue, where it might sit for weeks if it wasn't an organizational priority. When it came time to add the material I would boot up Dreamweaver, a relatively expensive program that was only accessible from my laptop and I would put the material onto the website. Needless to say, with a process like this some parts of the website never got very much attention.

At some point I start sneaking in a content management system for frequently-changed pages. This seemed very hackish and not good at first but over time I realized it greatly speeded up my turn-around time for basic text content. But the organizations I worked for still relied on the old model, where staff give the webmaster content to put up.

NEW SCHOOL: Web Developer

Nowadays I'm a web developer, a freelancer with an ever changing list of clients. I typically spend about a month putting together a site based on a content management (like this) or automatic feed system (like I did for Philadelphia's William Penn Charter School). I do a certain amount of training and while I might add a little content for testing purposes, I step back at the end of the process to let the client put the material up themselves. I'm available for questions but I'm surprised about how rarely I'm called.

Here's two examples. Steadyfootsteps is a blog by an American physical therapist in Vietnam. When we started, she didn't even have a digital camera! I gave her advice on cameras, started her on a Flickr account, set up a fairly generic Movable Type blog with some custom design elements and answered all the questions she had along the way. She went to town. She's put tons of pictures and embedded Youtube videos right in posts. Here's a non-techie who has contributed a lot to the web's content!

Penn Charter is a school that was already on Flickr and Youtube but wanted to display the content on their website in an attractive way. I pulled together all the magic of feeds and javascripts to have a media page that showcases the newest material.

They're very different sites, but in neither instance does the client contact me to add content. They rely on easy-to-use Web 2.0 services: no specialized HTML knowledge required.

NEW TOOLS, OLD MODEL

I got an email not so long ago from an old boss who manages a monthly magazine. Her site has been radically rebuilt over the years. Dreamweaver is out and content management is in. They use Drupal, which my friend Thomas T. of the Philadelphia Cultural Alliance tells me won the recent popularity contest among nonprofit techies. This is great, a definite step forward, but what confused me is that my old boss was asking me whether I would be interested in returning to my old job (the successor who oversaw the Drupal upgrade is leaving).

They still have a webmaster? They still want to funnel website material through a single person? Every staffperson there is adept at computers. If a physical therapist can figure out Flickr and Movable Type and Youtube, why can't professional print designers and editors?

My hourly rate ranges from two to five times what she'd be likely to pay, so I turned her down. But I did ask why she wanted a webmaster. Now that they're on Drupal it seems to me that they'd be better off switching from the webmaster to the web developer staffing model: hire me as a freelance consultant to do troubleshooting, staff training and the occassional special project but have the regular fulltime staff do the bulk of the content management. I'd think you'd end up with a site that's more lively and updated and that the cost would about the same, despite my higher hourly rates.

I've heard enough stories of places where secretaries have come out of the shadows to embrace content management and have helped transform websites. I'm the son of a former secretary so I know that they're often the smartest employees at any firm (if you walk into an office looking for the expert on advanced Excel features you'll surely find them sitting right there behind the receptionist desk).


FINALLY: WHAT'S UP WITH DRUPAL?

I'm trying to join the bandwagon and use Drupal for a upcoming site that will have about a dozen editors. But there's no built-in WYSIWYG editor, no little formatting icons. Sure, I myself could easily hand-code the HTML and make it look nice. But I don't want to do that. And it's unrealistic to think I'm going to teach a dozen overworked secretaries how to write in HTML. The interface needs to work more or less like Microsoft Word (as it does in Movable Type, CushyCMS, Google Docs, etc.)

Most Drupal sites I see seems from the outside like they're still old school: staff webmaster through whom most content funnels. Is this right? Because if so, this is really just an institutionalization of the content hack I did six years ago. Can anyone point me to lively, active Drupal sites whose content is being directly added by non-techie office staff? If so, how is it set up?

One element of a general social media consultancy project I've undertaken with Philadelphia's William Penn Charter school is a dynamic media page. They had collected a large number of photos, movies and podcast interviews, but the media page on their site was static and without pictures. I worked with them to come up with media policies and then built a media site that automatically displays the latest Flickr sets and Youtube videos, all laid out attractively with CSS. The Flickr part was complicated by the fact that Flickr doesn't produce feeds of sets and this required access to it's API and fairly extensive Yahoo Pipes manipulation. The original podcasts were just uploaded MP3 files and I worked to collect them together via Odeo (hosting) and Feedburner (feed publishing), which then provides RSS and iTunes support. The actual content for the page is collected together on the Martinkelley.com server and embedded into the Penn Charter media pages via javascript. Other work with Penn Charter includes Google Analytics and Dreamweaver support.

Update: PennCharter redesigned their website in August 2009 and the Media Page is unavailable.

Client Testimonial:

"Martin has worked for our school to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into our communication materials. Martin is highly-personable and his is an expert in current technological approaches. This is a hard match to find in consultants." April 30, 2009

Michael Moulton, Technology Director, William Penn Charter School.
Hired Martin as a IT Consultant in 2007, and hired Martin more than once.
Top qualities: Personable, Expert, High Integrity.

This is a fairly standard Movable Type blog for a Friend (Quaker) based in the West-Philly neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA. The most unusual element is that the client wanted two separate blogs: one meant for daily posts and the other for more weekly posts (it's all set up in MT via categories). This also shows the use of Slidoo for a photo banner head. The pictures are all pulled from a particular set of her Flickr account. Visit site.

I just purchased a MacBook and have the joy of learning a new set of routines and programs, all while reconfiguring my services again. I've used Macs in various work settings but the bulk of my development time has been on Windows, most recently XP.

I will recommend VMWare's Fusion for other Windows users making the switch. Fusion is an $80 program that lets you run Windows through Mac (you have to pay for a fresh version of Windows, a copy of XP put me back $200 at Staples). Apple has an alternative called Boot Camp which lets you install Windows so you can start up in it when you start your computer. This presumably runs faster (there's no Mac OS overhead while in Windows) but Fusion is much more practical since I'm using simultaneously with my Mac programs. The speed is fine, even with lots of Mac programs running. Fusion is also more flexible about disk space allocations.

I'm quite amazed about what it can do. Netflix's Watch Now service is unavailable for Macs but runs fine through my Fusion-powered Windows XP. The Rhapsody music client also works and I'm listening to music as I'm running my Mac programs. In an amazing feat, I was able to use Rhapsody to sync songs on my Palm T/X via USB cable. This is Windows XP running atop Mac OS X syncing digital rights managed-protected data with Palm OS over USB. Really amazing that it all worked!

I'm sticking with Windows XP because of all the nightmare stories I've heard about Vista, but also because it uses less memory and so will run faster. Also, I know XP very well and don't really relish the thought of learning a whole new system in addition to Mac OS. I'm presuming that over time I'll use Windows less and less and will just have it for browser cross-checking purposes and to run the occasional Windows-only software like Rhapsody and Netflix.

Last weekend I found myself with the scenario no solo web designer wants to be faced with: a dead laptop. It was eighteen months old and while it was from Hewlett Packard, a reputable company, it's always had problems over overheating. Like a lot of modern laptop makers, HP tried to pack as much processor power as they could into a sleek design that would turn eyes on the store shelf. They actually do offer some free repairs for a list of half a dozen maladies caused by overheating but not for my particular symptoms. When I have a free afternoon, a big pot of coffee and lots of music queued up I'll give them a call and see if I can talk them into fixing it.

Once upon a time having a suddenly dead computer in the middle of a bunch of big projects would have been disaster. But over the last few years I've been putting more and more of my data "in the cloud," that is: with software services that store it for me.

Email in the Cloud

I used to be a die-hard Thunderbird fan. This is Firefox's cousin, a great email client. I would take such great care transfering years of emails every time I switched machines and I spent hours building huge nested list of folders to organize archived messages. About a year ago Thunderbird ate about three months of recent messages, some quite crucial. At that time I started using Google's Gmail as backup. I set Gmail to pick up mail on my POP server and leave it there without deleting it. I set Thunderbird to leave it there for week. The result was that both messages would be picked up by both services.

After becoming familiar with Gmail I started using it more and more. I love that it doesn't have folders: you simple put all emails into a single "Archive" and let Google's search function find them when you need them.You can set up filters, which act as saved searches, and I have these set up for active clients.

Why I'm happy now: I can log into Gmail from any machine anywhere. No recent emails are lost on my old machine.

Project Management in the Cloud

I use the fabulous Remember the Milk (RTM) to keep track of projects and critical to-do items. Like Gmail I can access it from any computer. While messing around setting up backup computers has set me back about ten days, I still know what I need to do and when I need to do it. I can review it and give clients renewed timelines.

An additional advantage to using Remember the Milk and Gmail together is the ability to link to emails. Every email in Gmail gets its own URL and every saved "filter" search gets its own URL. If there's an email I want to act on in two weeks, I set up a Remember the Mail task. Each task has a optional field for URLs so I put the the email's Gmail URL in there and archive the email so I don't have to think about it (part of the Getting Things Done strategy). Two weeks later RTM tells me it's time to act on that email and I follow the link directly there, do whatever action I need to do and mark it complete in RTM.

Project Notes in the Cloud

I long ago started keeping notes for individual projects in the most excellent Backpack service. You can store notes, emails, pictures and just about anything in Backpack and have it available from any computer. You can easily share notes with others, a feature I frequently use to create client cheatsheets for using the sites I've built. Now that I use Gmail and it's URL feature, I put a link to the client's Gmail history right on top of each page. Very cool!

Another life saver is that I splurge for the upgraded account that gives me secure server access and I keep my password lists in Backpack. There's a slight security risk but it's probably smaller than keeping it on a laptop that could be swiped out of my bag. And right now I can log into all of my services from a new machine.

Keeping the Money Flowing from Clouds

The latest Web 2.0 love of my life is Freshbooks, a service that keeps track of your clients, your hours and puts together great invoices you can mail to them. I'm so much more professional because of them (no more hand written invoices in Word!) and when it's billing time I can quickly see how many unbilled hours I've worked on each project and bang!-bang!-band! send the invoices right out. Because the data is online, I was able to bill a client despite the dead computer, providing my exact hours, a detailed list of what I had done, etc.

Others

Calendar: I always go back and forth between loving Google Calendar and the calendar built into Backpack. Because I can never make up my mind I've used ICal feeds to cross-link them so they're both synced to one another. I can now use whichever is most convenient (or whichever I'm more in the mood to use!) to add and review entries.

Photos: Most of the photos I've taken over the past four years are still sitting on my dead laptop waiting for me to find a way to get them off of the harddrive. As tragic as it would be to loose them, 903 of my favorite photos are stored on my Flickr account. And because I emailed most of them to Flickr via Gmail most of those are also stored on Gmail. I will do everything I can to get those lost photos but the worst case scenario is that I will be stuck with "only" those 900.

Your Examples?

I'd love to hear how others are using "the cloud" as real-time backup.