A traveling bus museum visits Quakerranter HQ

November 8, 2010

This week­end we’ve had a muse­um parked in our dri­ve­way. It’s the “BUS-eum” from the Traces Cen­ter for His­to­ry and Cul­ture in St. Paul, host­ing a trav­el­ing exhib­it on Ger­man POW’s in the US dur­ing World War II. We were hap­py to host the BUS-eum’s Irv­ing Kell­man over the week­end in-between stops in Cape May Cour­t­house and Vineland.  I asked him to give us the sto­ry of the Ger­man POWs on video.

As you might guess, there was a lot of Quak­er con­nec­tions in the 1940, with Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee involve­ment. Traces’ direc­tor Michael Luick-Thrams is a Friend and did his PhD the­sis on the Scat­ter­good Hos­tel, a refugee camp set up at the then-abandoned Friends school in Iowa. Many of the BUS-eum’s stops are Friends Schools, with pub­lic libraries being anoth­er com­mon destination.

The vis­it was made with help from FGC’s Direc­to­ry of Trav­el­ing Friends. I think this is the first time we’ve actu­al­ly had a vis­i­tor after a decade of being list­ed there (most past inquiries have fall­en through when they looked at a map and real­ized our dis­tance from Pen­dle Hill, New York City or what­ev­er oth­er des­ti­na­tion brought them east).

DiMeo Blueberry Farms & Nursery

June 9, 2010

DiMeo Blueberry FarmsThe 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



See also:
DiMeo Blue­ber­ry Farms on Mer­chant Cir­cle, Youtube, Face­book and Twit­ter.

Cleaning Services Guide, E‑Book

August 22, 2009

Office Managers Guide to Best Cleaning ServiceA 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

Impromput Hammonton area Friends worship

March 13, 2009

My F/friend Raye Hodg­son is tak­ing a train from Con­necti­cut to South Jer­sey next week for a vis­it, and locals and would-be vis­i­tors are invit­ed to my house for some wor­ship! Raye’s involved with Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tive and New Eng­land Friends and seems to be doing a cool sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture project these days (which I did­n’t know except for Google!)

It’s next Thurs­day, the 19th at 7:30pm in Ham­mon­ton. If you want to join but don’t have my address just send me an email and I’ll pro­vide details. There’s also a Face­book event list­ing for this. If enough peo­ple are inter­est­ed we can have more occa­sion­al Conservative/Convergent/Emergent Quak­er­ly wor­ship in this part of South Jer­sey! If you can’t make it but are intrigued by the idea, let me know and I’ll keep you in the loop. 

UPDATE: The wor­ship went well, about half a dozen peo­ple showed up. If you want to be alert­ed to any follow-up wor­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties in the Ham­mon­ton area send me an email and I’ll add you to my list. 

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No pictures please

November 28, 2007

Since I use this blog as a bit of a per­son­al jour­nal, to remem­ber dates and hap­pen­ings, I should duti­ful­ly note that last night was the time four year old Theo pushed two year old Fran­cis off the foot­stool while brush­ing teeth, caus­ing said Fran­cis to fall pre­cip­i­tous­ly against the bath­tub and open a nasty gash in his chin. Three hours and a Martin/Francis emer­gency room vis­it lat­er there were four stitch­es in the poor guy’s chin. I’ll spare you all a descrip­tion of the ini­tial mess or the dif­fi­cul­ty of hold­ing down a scream­ing child while the doc­tor tries to put the stitch­es in. Every­thing is fine now. And no, no pho­tos or Youtube videos of the pro­ceed­ings. Maybe I’ll snap a pic­ture of the stitch­es so Fran­cis can see just where that scar came from!

Marketing and Publicizing Your Site

August 8, 2006

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“Build it and they will come” is not a very good web strategy.
Instead, think “if I spent $3000 on a website but no visitors came, did
I spend $3000?” There are no guarantees that anyone will ever visit a
site. But there are ways to make sure they do.

Much of web mar­ket­ing fol­lows the rules of any oth­er mode of
pub­lic­i­ty: iden­ti­fy an audi­ence, build a brand, appeal to a lifestyle
and keep in touch with your cus­tomers and their needs. A sucess­ful web
cam­paign uti­lizes print mail­ings, man­u­fac­tured buzz, gen­uine word of
mouth and email. Finances can lim­it the options avail­able but everyone
can do something.

One of the most excit­ing aspects of the inter­net is that the most
pop­u­lar sites are usu­al­ly those that have some­thing inter­est­ing to
offer vis­i­tors. The cost of entry to the web is so low that the little
guys can com­pete with giant cor­po­ra­tions. A good strat­e­gy involves
find­ing a niche and build­ing a com­mu­ni­ty around it. Per­son­al­i­ty and idio­syn­cra­cy are actu­al­ly com­pet­i­tive advantages!

It would be cru­el of me to just drop off a com­plet­ed web­site at the
end of two months and wash my hands of the project. Many web designers
do that, but I’m more inter­est­ed in build­ing sites that are used. I can
work with you on all aspects of pub­lic­i­ty, from design to launch and
beyond to ana­lyz­ing vis­i­tor pat­terns to learn how we can serve them better.

Making sites sticky

We don’t want some­one to vis­it your site once, click on a few links
and then dis­ap­pear for­ev­er. We want to give your vis­i­tors rea­sons to
come back fre­quent­ly, a qual­i­ty we call “sticky” in web par­lance. Is
your site a use­ful ref­er­ence site? Can we get vis­i­tors to sign up for
email updates? Is there a com­mu­ni­ty of users around your site?

Making sites search engine friendly

Google. We all want Google to vis­it our sites. One of the biggest
scams out there are the com­pa­nies that will reg­is­ter your site for only
$300 or $500 or $700. The search engines get their
com­pet­i­tive advan­tage by includ­ing the whole web and there’s no reason
you need to pay any­one to get the atten­tion of the big search engines. 

The most impor­tant way to bring Google to your site is to build it
with your audi­ence in mind. What are the key­words you want peo­ple to
find you with? Your town name? Your busi­ness? Some spe­cif­ic qual­i­ty of
your work? I can build the site from the ground up to high­light those
phras­es. Here too, being a niche play­er is an advantage. 

I know lots of Google tricks. One site of mine start­ed attract­ing four times the vis­its after its pro­gram­mer and I redesigned it for Google. My sites are so well indexed that if I often get vis­i­tors search­ing for
the odd­est things. We can actu­al­ly tell when vis­i­tors come from search
engines and we can even tell what they’re search­ing for! Google
appar­ent­ly thinks I know “how to flat­ten used sod” and am the guy to
ask if you won­der “do amish women wear bras.” I can make sure your impor­tant search terms also get noticed by Google and the rest!