Email Web Design

MartinKelley.com is a web design house based in Hammonton, South Jersey. Owner Martin Kelley has twenty years of real-world experience and practical advice for small businesses and nonprofits.

Call (609) 365-0123 or email at martink@martinkelley.com

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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:


Categories: Practical 2.0
Tags: Algorithm, Attention Economy, Brand Management, Brand Manager, Comments, Competitors, Conversation, Facebook, Fans, Google, Google Toolbar, Google Webmaster Tools, Marketing, Mindshare, Sidewiki, Techcrunch, Twitter, Web 2.0, Wikipedia | Edit
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:


Categories: quaker | Edit

Thanks for sending me your question! I try to respond back within a few hours. If you want to add some details, call or email me:
(609) 365-0123
martink@martinkelley.com

Categories: thanks | Edit
Collected from the LinkedIn:

"Martin has provided -- and continues to provide excellent service and consultation as a Web site developer. For my site on New York-based architecture and history, Mindfulwalker.com, I asked for some complex developments of and changes to a WordPress theme and the site installation. I received the service that I needed and more, and I'm very happy with the site today. Martin brings a variety of assets to his role: He is extremely knowledgeable and capable in programming and Web tools. He's also a good communicator, is very value-conscious about the service he delivers for the cost, and is understanding of client needs. Beyond this, Martin helped with some excellent tutorials as I took over the site. I plan to hire Martin again as I look forward to enhancements and additional developments for my site and business. Martin is excellent at what he does!" May 10, 2009

Susan DeMark, Journalist.
Hired Martin as a Graphic/Web Designer in 2007
Top qualities: Great Results, Good Value, High Integrity


"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


"Martin is not only highly competent as a Web site developer, he's also one of the most honest and trustworthy people I've ever hired. I highly recommend Martin." April 30, 2009

James Maguire, Author.
Hired Martin as a Graphic/Web Designer in 2006, and hired Martin more than once.
Top qualities: Great Results, Personable, Expert


"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.


"Martin has an outstanding grasp of everything there is to know about the internet. He is our "go-to" guy whenever we encounter something new and different, especially involving Web 2.0 and Search Engine optimization. He is also an experienced and skilled designer and has excellent PHP/CSS/HTML programming knowledge. Martin is a pleasure to work with in every respect!" May 1, 2009

    Barbara Raphael, Founder/Owner/Designer/Developer, Raphael Webscapes, LLC.
    Worked directly with Martin at Raphael Webscapes.
Categories: references
Tags: Architecture, Budget, Communication, Consultations, Go-To Guy, Graphic, Haddonfield, History, Honest, It Consultant, Journalist, Law Practice, Lawyer, Linkedin, New York City, Raphael Webscapes, School, Search Engine Optimization, Technology Directory, Trustworthy, Web 2.0, Web Designer, Website, Wordpress | Edit
I once read an insightful observation about the geo-location revolution that came about with the popularlization of cell phones: In the old days of POTS (your landline, literally "plain old telephone service") when you dialed a number you knew where you were calling but you didn't know who was going to pick up. With cell phones that was reversed: you knew who you were calling but you had no idea where they were.

Only, this wasn't quite true. To find someone you'd have to call their house, their workplace, their cellphone. What you were really calling wasn't the person but one of their phones. Much of the time you'd end up with voicemail.

Well, the promise of the geolocation revolution has been taken to its logical conclusion. I've finally gotten my invitation to Google Voice, formerly Grand Central, the personalized telephone switching service that the big-G is opening up to U.S. customers this summer. It's free and it gives you the ultimate in virtuality: a phone number that is not connected to any phone. When people call your Google Voice number, any number of phones start ringing. Which one you answer depends on your geography and convenience.

I have three phones set to ring on Google Voice calls depending on the type of call: my cell phone, my home phone and my computer (a Skype plan with it's own incoming phone number). If I'm dissatisfied with the phone I'm on I can press the star key to have all my phones ring anew and transfer the call seamlessly (a very addictive past-time).  It's a fascinating evolution of the phone into a virtual communication device.

Intrigued? You can sign up for a Google Voice invite from its site. It's not a perfect system. To use it most effectively requires changing your phoning habits and making a very serious switch. I suggest Lifehacker's guide "How to Ease Your Transition to Google Voice" as a good place to start.


Categories: Practical 2.0
Tags: Google, Google Voice, Lifehacker, Skype | Edit

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.

--------------

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.

Categories: Facebook , Niche Marketing , Practical 2.0
Tags: Activity Stream, Email, Facebook, Linkedin, Nonprofit, Outreach, Pages, Profits, Twitter, Youtube | Edit

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 gage 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.



Categories: Analytics , Facebook , Niche Marketing , Web Design
Tags: A/B Testing, Analyytics, Corporate, Customer Relationships, Facebook, Marketing, Oreilly, Real Time, Social Media, Websites | Edit

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
Categories: Small Business , WordPress
Tags: Law, Lawyer, Small Business, Solo, Wordpress | Edit
screen-shotMy 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).

Why a New Browser?!?

Before I begin, let me recommend the Google Chrome online comic book for those with tech interests. Google does a good job explaining why they've joined the browser wars. At first glance it seems a needless move: they already fund much of the development on the open source Firefox browser. But Firefox, like Microsoft Internet Explorer and every other browser, is built around certain assumptions about how browsers process applications. Google is starting from scratch and thinking about the browser as an operating system running increasingly sophisticated applications (like Gmail). Chrome separates memory process and internet permissions in new ways.

Obviously, Google is going after Microsoft (the initial release of Chrome is Windows only)--not just its browser but its Vista operating system as well. With the expansion of high speed internet access and so-called "cloud computing," functions that used to require stand-alone clients can now be handled inside the browser. Email has probably become the most widely adopted browser applications but you can also do things photo editing and video recording through the browser. Google knows that once an application is running inside a browser, the operating system doesn't matter. Gmail works equally fine from Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux.

It is in Google's strategic interest to advance the state of browser technology and they do that with Chrome. But it is in the interest that everyone have access to these latest innovations and that all browsers can run the most sophisticated applications Google engineers can put together. So Chrome is open source and Google invites other browsers to incorporate many of its features.

First Thoughts on the Product:

The download was quick and easy (of course).

I was surprised that when installing it only offered to import my MS Internet Explorer bookmarks. My most complete and up-to-date bookmark list is in Firefox (synced among my operating systems by the excellent Foxmarks extension).

I went pretty immediately to Gmail. Google says they've rewritten a lot of the background rendering code from scratch and I was expecting to see instantaneous loading. Frankly, it seemed to load as quickly as it does in Firefox. Any apparent speed increase isn't immediately obvious (this is a testament to how fast they've managed to get it to load in all browsers).

speed-dialThe interface is very simplified: few buttons, tabs up top, no status bar. There's a lot of surprises here, like an automatically generated page with thumbnails of your most frequently visited sites (see image, right), an idea borrowed from Opera browser's "Speed Dial" feature (available through to Firefox users through the Speed Dial extension).

gmail-as-app You can also "Create application shortcuts" which turn services such as Gmail into client-like applications that sit on your desktop (screenshot right). Open them up from here and the normal location bar and browser buttons are gone.

There's a lot more to explore here. It's obvious that Google has put a lot of thought into this. I'm not going to dismiss any feature or oddity too quickly. They helped a lot of us rethink how we organize email using a single "Archive" folder instead of the elaborately-maintained folder hierarchy. Google actually have put out a number of half-baked and under-supported services (Froogle and Google Checkout come most immediately to mind) but it's clear that the Google Chrome browser is a very serious initiative by the company.

Will I Use It?

The big question, right? Actually, I won't use it much for now. For one thing, I'm a Mac user. I have a Windows XP virtual machine running most of the time courtesy of VMWare's Fusion. I'm sure Google has set a high priority to make Mac OS X and Linux versions of Chrome--they're whole strategy rests on this being woven into the browser lingua franca that keeps Microsoft's Vista at bay, remember?, but until that time Chrome won't be my natural first choice.

But I'm also going to miss my Firefox extensions. I forgot that the web has lots of ads (Adblock Plus). And I don't like the extra clutter of Gmail without Better Gmail 2 (just the "Folders4Gmail" feature of the latter saves my eye more scanning time than any speed tweak Chrome delivers). And these days the Web Developers Toolbar, Lastpass, FireFTP extensions are pretty essential to my work day.

But if a native Mac version was released? And if Firefox extensions started being rewritten for Chrome? I just flipped back to my regular browser to check something and even after an hour with Chrome, Firefox felt so heavy and clunky. It is possible to see Chrome could a serious contender for my attention.
Categories: Practical 2.0
Tags: Bookmarks, Browser, Firefox, Fireftp, Gmail, Google, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Lastpass, Linux, Mac Os, Opera, Twitter, Vista | Edit
The NYTimes has a piece by an IBM employee who has largely freed himself from email by consciously using whatever social networking tool would be better at moving the conversation forward, whether it's IM, wikis, or even (gasp!) the telephone. This line stood out for me:
I have had continuing support from my management in this effort, because I've been able to prove how much more I can accomplish by answering a question, and posting it on a blog, for example, than I can by answering the same question over and over. I still help people, but in a more open and collaborative fashion. Other people can join in the discussions -- maybe they will have a better idea than mine.
This is exactly how I try to describe the blogging philosophy in the business world. Don't think of the blog as another chore that needs to be added to your already overwhelmed to-do list. Instead, think about it as another communication tool so it becomes a seamless part of your ongoing work. This will no only help work flow, but help give your blog an honesty and approachability it wouldn't have if you thought of it as simply another marketing piece.
Categories: Practical 2.0
Tags: Blog, Business, Email, Nytimes, Telephone | Edit
And a shout-out back to HitTail folks who linked to my article on Adword shenanigans by naming me a superstar! Everyone Loves HitTail: HitTail Helps Superstar Blogger Martin Kelley Save Money. Is it getting hot in here?

I will say that these guys are really good trackers. I sometimes think if I said "hittail" in my sleep I'd awake to an email thanking me for the mention. I'm always surprised at how many companies don't follow their own public commentary on them across the internet, but Hittail certainly does.
Categories: Analytics
Tags: Adwords, Hittail, Link, Trackers | Edit
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.
Categories: Analytics , Beyond SEO
Tags: Adwords, Analytics, Hittail, Performance, Report, Search | Edit
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?
Categories: Drupal , Practical 2.0 , Web Design
Tags: Css, Dreamweaver, Drupal, Flickr, Javascript, Movable Type, Penn Charter, Philadelphia, Php, School, Web 2.0, Web Developer, Youtube | Edit

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.

Categories: Practical 2.0 , Windows to Mac
Tags: Calendar, Flickr, Freshbooks, Gmail, Hp, Laptop, Remember The Milk | Edit
I live within a half-hour's drive of Woodstown (08098) and know it well. My wife were married there at the local Friends Meetinghouse and every couple of months I stop off at the coffeehouse there to see if they have soy milk to make me a latte. I built the site for the Salem County Special Services School District whose offices are in Woodstown. Initial email and phone consultations are always free; if you decide to use my services then I'd be happy to come visit with you in person.
Categories: woodstown
Tags: 08098, Education, New Jersey, Salem County, School District, Web Design, Woodstown | Edit
I live within a half-hour's drive of Atlantic City (08401), Absecon (08201) and Pleasantville (08232). My wife's a proud Absecon native and her father grew up in Pleasantville (if your a native and a certain age then you probably know him from softball, bowling leagues or McGettigans!). Initial email and phone consultations are always free; if you decide to use my services then I'd be happy to come visit with you in person.
Categories: atlantic-city
Tags: 08201, 08232, 08401, Absecon, Atlantic City, Atlantic County, New Jersey, Pleasantville, Web Design | Edit
I live within a half-hour's drive of Moorestown (08057). I even commuted there for a short time when I thought a six week class at the local Friends Meetinghouse. Initial email and phone consultations are always free; if you decide to use my services then I'd be happy to come visit with you in person.
Categories: moorestown
Tags: 08057, Burlington County, Marlton, Moorestown, Mount Holly, New Jersey, Seo, Social Media, Web Design | Edit
I live within a half-hour's drive of Mt. Laurel NJ (08054). Initial email and phone consultations are always free; if you decide to use my services then I'd be happy to come visit with you in person.
Categories: mt-laurel
Tags: 08054, Burlington County, Moorestown, Mount Laurel, Mt Holly, New Jersey, Seo, Social Media, Web Design | Edit
I live within a half-hour's drive of Cherry Hill (08002, 08003, 08034). I often do some work in nearby Haddonfield for Raphael Webscapes. Initial email and phone consultations are always free; if you decide to use my services then I'd be happy to come visit with you in person.



Categories: cherry-hill
Tags: 08002, 08003, 08034, Camden County, Cherry Hill, Haddonfield, New Jersey, Salon, Web Design | Edit
I know beautiful Haddonfield NJ (08033) well. I work as occasional designer and SEO specialist on Barb Raphael's Webscapes awesome staff. With them, I've been lead designer for local projects like The Haddonfield Foundation and Solo Hair Boutique and I helped with Web 2.0 extensions for HaddonfieldNJ.org and other local municipal sites.

Initial email and phone consultations are always free and I always love an excuse to visit the coffee shops on King's Highway!
Categories: haddonfield
Tags: 08033, Camden County, Cherry Hill, Haddon Heights, Haddon Township, Haddonfield, Haddonfield Foundation, Haddonfieldnj, King'S Highway, Municipal, New Jersey, Raphael Webscapes, Seo, Solo Hair, Web Design | 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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