Web Developer Web Design

Collected from LinkedIn:

Tom Ferrick, Journalist/Publisher, Phlmetropolis.com

Hired Martin as a Graphic/Web Designer in 2009

Top Qualities: Great Results, Personable, Good Value.

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

Today: Email Lists

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

Facebook Pages

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

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

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

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

Intimate, immediate, engaging

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

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

Building our Facebook Fan Page

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

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

The New Nonprofit Outreach

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

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

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

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!

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).

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?

Web Designer, Content Editor, SEO Specialist

See also: Print Resume, LinkedIn profile.

SKILLS

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Consulting: Fifteen years of experience in nonprofit world. Much of this work consists of educating staff and leadership on effective use of online communication technologies. Current focus is on analytics, integrating social media, and helping nonprofits adopt content management systems.

Web Development: Proficiency in HTML, XHTML, PHP, CSS, PERL (CGI), MYSQL, Adobe Dreamweaver, Six Apart's Movable Type, Drupal, WordPress, t and related content management systems, along with Search Engine Optimization techniques and analytic tracking methods. Experience with various shopping cart backends for E-Commerce applications. Comfortable with Quark Xpress, Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, Joomla, and Javascript. Close follower of Web 2.0 developments.

Editing: Experience as Acquiring Editor for nonprofit publishing house; proficient at negotiations, copy editing, marketing.

Martin has given workshops and panel presentations on tech issues and on renewal movements in the Religious Society of Friends.

Biographies

TECH:
Martin Kelley is a Philadelphia area web designer who has been building online communities since 1995. An early adopter of user-created media, he was blogging in 1997 and picks up every social media service. In 2008 O'Reilly Media published "Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators," his first published tech publication. A professional web developer and consultant, he builds sites and writes about tech issues on MartinKelley.com.

QUAKER:
Martin Kelley is a South Jersey Friend with a love out of outreach and ministry and a passion for looking afresh at Friends' testimonies, language and practices. Before becoming an independent web developer, Martin Kelley worked for Friends General Conference and Friends Journal. He is the publisher of QuakerQuaker.org, a community site for the Convergent Friends movement. He thinks the Quaker message is more relevant than ever but worries we're not being bold enough to gather George Fox's and Isaiah's "great people."

Past Workshops and Presentations

Associate Teacher, Pendle Hill, for a weekend workshop "Convergent Friends and the New Monastics." Pendle Hill Conference Center Wallingford, PA. May 2010.

Speaker, "An Introduction to Convergent Friends." Salem Quarter Meeting. Greenwich, NJ. September 13, 2009.

Facilitator, "Friends Testimonies, What Canst Thou Say?" Two-part session. Young Friends Summer Gathering (Philadelphia Yearly Meeting). Camp Onas, Ottsville, PA. August 25, 2009.

Co-leader, "Reclaiming the Power of Primitive Quakerism." Weekend workshop. Ben Lomond Friends Center. Ben Lomond, California. February 2009.

Presenter, "Friends Schools and Web 2.0" (video). Panel discussion for Friends Council on Education. At Germantown Friends School, Philadelphia, PA. January 2009.

Presenter, Religion and Technology Teachers Peer Network (Friends Council on Education). December 2007. Center City Philadelphia, PA. Also available as Google Slideshow Presentation

Teacher, "Quakerism 101". four-session course for Moorestown Friends Meeting. Moorestown NJ. October -November 8, 2006.

Co-faciliator, On Fire: Renewing Quakerism Through a Covergence of Friends. Interest group, FGC Gathering. July 2006.

Invited Guest, Quakerism classes, William Penn Charter School. East Falls, Philadelphia PA. April 2006.

Leader, Food for Fire weekend workshop, New York Yearly Meeting's Powell House. Old Chatham, NY. February 2006.

Co-leader, Strangers to the Covenant (five sessions), workshop for high-school Friends, FGC Gathering. July 2005.

Teacher, Quakerism 101 (six sessions), Medford Friends Meeting. Medford, NJ. September-November, 2004.

Teacher, "Living in the Light" Quakerism 101 course (one session), Central Philadelphia Friends Meeting. Center City Philadelphia, PA. March 2003.

Contact

Email: martink@martinkelley.com
Phone: (609) 365-0123

See also: Publications and Media List

I was referred to a website the other day that barely exists, at least in the way that I see sites. It's homepage was built entirely in Flash, was completely invisible to search engines and barely functioned in Firefox. Domaintools.com gave it an SEO score of zero (out of a scale of one hundred). It's Google PageRank was three out of ten, making it less visible that my kid pages. But this was a website for a high-flying web development house, a company that works with some of Philadelphia's most prominent and well-endowed cultural institutions. Their client work isn't quite as invisible, but their website for Philadelphia's relative-new $265 million performance arts center has a PageRank equivalent to my personal blog--youch!

I think there's a lesson here. Prominent cultural institutions don't look at Google (and SEO-friendly developers) because they're big enough and well-known enough that they assume people will find them anyway. They're right, of course, but how many more people would find them if they had well-built websites? And what's the long-term vision if they're relying on their established reputation to do their web marketing?

It's perhaps impossible for a net-centric start-up to replicate a hugely-endowed cultural icon like an orchestra or ballet, giving some degree of insulation to these institutions from direct internet competition. But if these nonprofits saw themselves in the entertainment business, competing for the limited attention and money of an audience that has many evening-time possibilities, then you'd think they'd want to leverage the internet as much as they could: to use the web to reach out not only to their existing audience but to nurture and develop future audiences.

Are the audiences of high brow institutions so full of hip young audiences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?

Whenever I talk with fellow web designers, the issue of "SEO" invariably comes up. That's techie slang for "search engine optimization," of course, that black science of making sure Google lists your site higher than your competitors. Over the years a small army of shady characters have tried to game the search engine results.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In theory it's easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site they'll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write, write.

I'm looking to join a web design house, which means I've been interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me the best way to increase SEO for their clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I'm an idiot but it's absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over 100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many of the same results--blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug--your company's life is probably already filled with bloggable material!

I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I'd get a particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn't always pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk. Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a blog post. By the end of a year, I'm sure the volume coming from these obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday's Long Tail Strategy post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search engine's one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).

Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine, think about whether it's bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would come in and we'd spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.

Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area--to find my workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.

Humans are social animals. We're always blogging. It's just that most of the time we're doing it verbally around the water cooler with three other people. Learn to type it in and you've got yourself a high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was tagifying my personal blog over at "QuakerRanter.org." Every time I post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in such a way that results send the term through the site's search engine to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I've used that term.

Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we automate them). We don't necessarily know the categories that our potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239 entries but 3,860 pages according to Google. It's the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of this extra volume. This doesn't increase traffic by that nearly that much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.

Professional journalist James Maguire came to me with an existing site built in Movable Type. I'll redesigned the navigation, creating customized sidebars that changed according to the category. He's done great stuff with his site and it's well worth looking through. Favorites of mine: his video appearances on talk shows and his 100 Books Worth Reading list.

Visit: James Maguire Online.