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Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ website
DiMeo Blueberry Farms & Nursery
June 9, 2010
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
Visit site: DiMeo Blueberry Farms
Five Tips for Building a Self-Marketing Website
September 7, 2009
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:
- Who is the target audience?
- What would draw them to the site?
- 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.
Alliance Cemetery
July 28, 2009
I was hired to redesign the website of a cemetery that represents a fascinating slice of South Jersey history. In the 1880s, a group of Jews escaped Russian pogroms, came to America and started a “return to the soil” movement that led to the establishment of an agricultural colony in the small Salem County crossroads of Norma, New Jersey. Before long they established Alliance Cemetery.
The new Alliance website highlights the entrance gate. The cemetery has hired a surveying company to do a detailed map of the plots and we hope to add this in with a Google Maps mash-up when the data becomes available. A detailed history and photos are also in the works.
The design is hand-coded from scratch and is probably the most tasteful design of my portfolio. The pages themselves are editable by the client using CushyCMS and the Directions page has an integrated Google Map.
Visit: AllianceCemetery.com
Penncharter.com Media Pages
May 18, 2008
One element of a general social media consultancy project I’ve undertaken with Philadelphia’s William Penn Charter school is a dynamic media page. They had collected a large number of photos, movies and podcast interviews, but the media page on their site was static and without pictures. I worked with them to come up with media policies and then built a media site that automatically displays the latest Flickr sets and Youtube videos, all laid out attractively with CSS. The Flickr part was complicated by the fact that Flickr doesn’t produce feeds of sets and this required access to it’s API and fairly extensive Yahoo Pipes manipulation. The original podcasts were just uploaded MP3 files and I worked to collect them together via Odeo (hosting) and Feedburner (feed publishing), which then provides RSS and iTunes support. The actual content for the page is collected together on the Martinkelley.com server and embedded into the Penn Charter media pages via javascript. Other work with Penn Charter includes Google Analytics and Dreamweaver support.
Update: PennCharter redesigned their website in August 2009 and the Media Page is unavailable.
Client Testimonial:
“Martin has worked for our school to integrate Web 2.0 technologies
into our communication materials. Martin is highly-personable and his
is an expert in current technological approaches. This is a hard match
to find in consultants.” April 30, 2009Michael 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.
Nemos Aquarium
March 25, 2008
A multimedia website displaying the very colorful aquarium out near Norristown Pennsylvania. The Flickr photos are cached and display with Lightbox (a Slimbox clone) when clicked. Movies are included both as optimized-for-download WMV files and on a independent Youtube account. View Site.
Marketing and Publicizing Your Site
August 8, 2006
“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!
Christian peacemaker Teams News
March 23, 2006
On Saturday, November 26, 2005 four members of “Christian peacemakers Teams”:www.cpt.org were abducted in iraq. On March 20th the body of American Quaker Tom Fox was found; on March 23rd, the remaining three hostages were freed by U.S. and British military forces.
Here at Nonviolence.org, we have always been impressed and highly supportive of the deep witness of the Christian peacemakers Teams. Their members have represented the best in both the peace and Christian movements, consistently putting themselves in danger to witness the gospel of peace. Not content to write letters or stand on pickett lines in safe western capitals, they go to the frontlines of violence and proclaim a radical alternative.
While we can be grateful for the release of the three remaining hostages, we should continue to remember the 43 foreign hostages still being held in iraq and the 10 – 30 iraqis reportedly taken hostage each and every day. As iraq slips into full-scale civil war we must also organize against the war-mongerers, both foreign and internal and finde ways of standing alongside those iraqis who want nothing more than peace and freedom.
Here’s links to recent articles on the situation: https://delicious.com/martin_kelley/news.cpt-four.foxmemorial
And a personal note from Nonviolence.org’s Martin Kelley: I myself am a Christian and Quaker and one of our folks, Tom Fox, of Langley Hill (Virginia) Friends Meeting is among the hostages. I don’t know Tom personally but over the last few days I’ve learned we have many Friends in common and they have all testified to his deep committment to peace. Some of the links above are more explicitly Quaker than most things I post to Nonviolence.org, but they give perspective on why Tom and his companions would see putting themselves in danger as an act of religious service. I am grateful for Tom’s current witness in iraq – yes, even as a hostage – but I certainly hope he soon comes back to his family and community and that the attention and witness of these four men’s ordeal helps to bring the news of peace to streets and halls of Baghdad, Washington, London and Ottawa.
Action Step:
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