Im Web Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit: Philadelphia Metropolis

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

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

See it live: www.mikesprecisioncarpentry.com

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

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

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

A typical workload for a Facebook branding project is:

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

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

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

See it live: www.facebook.com/slimgoodbody

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

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

See it live: www.fwccamericas.org/friends

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.

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

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

Visit: Elisabeth Olver

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

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

Web Design Specialties:

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

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

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

I follow the tech world closely. I'm not particularly interested in the who-bought-who world of venture capitalists. Instead, I'm interested in the lived world where people are adopting new ways of communicating online and the practical implications that has for small businesses and niche marketers.

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