Tag Archives ⇒ websites

Site update

October 25, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Warn­ing: Geek to fol­low: Thanks to read­ers for their patience these past few days as I’ve trans­ferred Quak­er­Ran­ter to a new web host. My old account had mul­ti­ple sites on the same serv­er, includ­ing Quak​erQuak​er​.org and Mar​tinKel​ley​.com and every time there was a prob­lem on QR it would take every­thing down. After prob­a­bly a year of trou­bleshoot­ing and nev­er quite fix­ing the prob­lem QR is off on its own (on Blue​host​.com, I want­ed to see what CPan­el was like).

I’m also rebuild­ing the site to be more com­pli­ant with the new Mov­able Type tem­plate struc­ture, which moti­vates this new look. I still like the old min­i­mal­ist design ripped off of Kot­tke and might bring it back or might exper­i­ment with some­thing else that fits the new stream-of-life direc­tion the blog has been tak­en with its Twit­ter integration. 

I can’t real­ly blog about the most inter­est­ing finan­cial devel­op­ment of the day, which has to do with the end of a cer­tain wit­ness of fif­teen years but if any F/friends want to know feel free to drop me an email.

Off now to see if the town Hal­loween parade has been washed out by rain again (today is the rain date and it’s pret­ty sog­gy if not active­ly rain­ing). Expect pic­tures of cute boys in match­ing but­ter­fly outfits…

What Convergence means to Ohio Conservative

August 8, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Robin M’s recent post on a Con­ver­gent Friends def­i­n­i­tion has gar­nered a num­ber of fas­ci­nat­ing com­menters. The lat­est comes from Scott Sav­age, a well-known Con­ser­v­a­tive Friend (author of A Plain Life, pub­lish­er of the defunct Plain Mag­a­zine and light­en­ing rod for a recent cul­ture war skir­mish over homo­sex­u­al­i­ty at Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty). Sav­age’s com­ment on Robin’s blog fol­lows what we could call the “Cranky Con­ser­v­a­tive” tem­plate: gra­tu­itous swipes at Con­ser­v­a­tives in Iowa and North Car­oli­na, whole­sale dis­missal of oth­er Friends, mul­ti­ple affir­ma­tions of Christ, digs at the issue of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, a recita­tion of past fail­ures of cross-branch com­mu­ni­ca­tion, then a shrug that seems to ask why he should stoop to our lev­el for dialogue.

Snore.

What makes my sleepy response espe­cial­ly strange is that except for the homo­sex­u­al­i­ty issue (yay for FLGBTQC!), I’m pret­ty close to Scot­t’s posi­tions. I wor­ry about the lib­er­al­iza­tion of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends, I get cranky about Chris­t­ian Friends who deny Christ in pub­lic, and I think a lot of Friends are miss­ing the boat on some core essen­tials. When I open my copy of Ohio’s 1968 dis­ci­pline and read its state­ment of faith (oops, sor­ry, “Intro­duc­tion”), I nod my head. As far as I’m aware I’m in uni­ty with all of Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tive’s prin­ci­ples of faith and prac­tice and if I signed up for their dis­tance mem­ber­ship I cer­tain­ly would­n’t be the most lib­er­al mem­ber of the year­ly meeting.

I’m actu­al­ly not sure about Scot­t’s year­ly meet­ing mem­ber­ship; I’m sim­ply answer­ing his ques­tion of why he and the oth­er Con­ser­v­a­tives who hold a strong con­cern for “the hedge” (a sep­a­ra­tion of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends from oth­er branch­es) might want to think about Con­ver­gence. Of all the remain­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive bod­ies, the hedge is arguably strongest in Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing and while parts of this apply to Con­ser­v­a­tives else­where — Iowa, North Car­oli­na and indi­vid­u­als embed­ded in non-Conservative year­ly meet­ings — the snares and oppor­tu­ni­ties are dif­fer­ent for them than they are for Ohioans.

Why Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tive should engage with Convergence:

  • If you have all the answers and don’t mind keep­ing them hid­den under the near­est bushel then Con­ver­gence means nothing.
  • But if you’re inter­est­ed in fol­low­ing Jesus and being a fish­er of men and women by shar­ing the good news… Well, then it’s use­ful to learn that there’s a grow­ing move­ment of Friends from out­side Con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles (how­ev­er defined) who are sens­ing there’s some­thing miss­ing and look­ing to tra­di­tion­al Quak­erism for answers.

Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tives have answers and this Con­ver­gence move­ment is pro­vid­ing a fresh oppor­tu­ni­ty to share them with the apos­tate Friends and with Chris­tians in oth­er denom­i­na­tions seek­ing out a more authen­tic rela­tion­ship with Christ. Engag­ing with Con­ver­gence does­n’t mean Ohio Friends have to change any­thing of their faith or prac­tice and it need­n’t be about “dia­logue”: sim­ply shar­ing the truth as you under­stand it is ministry.

Yes, there are snares involved in any true gospel min­istry; strik­ing the right bal­ance is always dif­fi­cult. As the car­pen­ter said, “nar­row is the way which lead­eth unto life”. We are beset on all sides by road­blocks that threat­en to lead us away from Christ’s lead­er­ship. Ohio Friends will need to be on guard that min­is­ters don’t suc­cumb to the temp­ta­tion to water down their the­ol­o­gy for any fleet­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty. This is a real dan­ger and it fre­quent­ly occurs but while I could tell eight years of great insid­er sto­ries from the halls of Philadel­phia, is that what we’re here to do?

Let me put my cards on the table: I don’t see much of Ohio effec­tive­ly min­is­ter­ing now. There’s too much of a kind of pride that bor­ders on obnox­ious­ness, that loves end­less­ly recit­ing why Iowa and North Car­oli­na aren’t Con­ser­v­a­tive and why no oth­er Friends are Friends, blah blah blah. It can get tire­some and legal­is­tic. I could point to plen­ty of online forums where it cross­es the line into detrac­tion. Char­i­ty and love are Chris­t­ian qual­i­ties too. Humil­i­ty and a sense of humor are com­pat­i­ble with tra­di­tion­al Quak­erism. How do we find a way to con­tin­ue safe­guard­ing Ohio’s pearls while shar­ing them wide­ly with the world. There are Ohio Friends doing this and while I dif­fer with Scott Sav­age on some social issues I con­sid­er tan­gen­tial (and he prob­a­bly does­n’t), I very much appre­ci­ate his hard work advanc­ing the under­stand­ing of Quak­erism and agree on more than I disagree.

But how do we find a way to be both Con­ser­v­a­tive and Evan­gel­i­cal? To mar­ry Truth with Love? To not only under­stand the truth but to know how, when and where to share it? I think Con­ver­gence can help Ohio think about deliv­ery of Truth and it can help bring seek­ers into the doors. When I rhetor­i­cal­ly asked last month what Con­ver­gent Friends might be con­verg­ing toward, the first answer that popped in my head was Ohio Friends with a sense of humor. I’m not sure it’s the most accu­rate def­i­n­i­tion but it reveals my own sym­pa­thies and I find it tempt­ing to think about what that would look like (hint: krak­en might be involved).

A reminder to every­one that I’ll be at Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive ses­sions in a few weeks to talk more about the oppor­tu­ni­ties for Ohio engage­ment with Con­ver­gence. Come round if you’re in the area.
Also check out Robin’s own response to Scott, up there on her own blog. It’s a mov­ing per­son­al tes­ti­mo­ny to the pow­er and joy of cross-Quaker fel­low­ship and the spir­i­tu­al growth that can result.

On pricing philosophy

April 16, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Via 37Signal’s Sig­nals vs. Noise blog I came across a fas­ci­nat­ing post writ­ten by Bri­an Fling of Blue last year on pric­ing a project. I’d like to talk about it and to explain my own phi­los­o­phy. First a extend­ed quote from Brian:

I find it fun­ny… in a sad sort of way, that we often
start out our part­ner­ship with bluff­ing, no one say­ing what they are
real­ly think­ing… how much they are will­ing to pay and how much it
should cost… Though every book I’ve read on the top­ic of pric­ing says
to nev­er ever ball­park, I have a ten­den­cy to do so. If they can’t
dis­close the bud­get I typ­i­cal­ly try to start throw­ing a few numbers
from pre­vi­ous projects to help gauge the scope of what we are talking
about, call it a good faith effort to start the dis­cus­sion… While this
is very awk­ward part of the dis­cus­sion it is almost always fol­lowed by
can­dor. It’s as if once some­one starts telling the truth, it opens a
door that can’t be closed.

I com­plete­ly agree that can­dor is the only way to work with clients.
Maybe it’s the Quak­er influ­ence: we report­ed­ly pio­neered fixed pricing
back when every­one hag­gled, with the phi­los­o­phy that charg­ing true
costs were the only hon­est way of doing busi­ness. My offi­cial rates and con­tact page includes my list of “typ­i­cal costs” — essen­tial­ly these are the “ball­park esti­mates” that Bri­an talks about.

When I put togeth­er esti­mates I base it on my best-guess informed
esti­mates. I start by tab­u­lat­ing the clien­t’s request­ed fea­tures and
deter­min­ing how I’ll achieve them. I then esti­mate how long it will
take me to imple­ment each fea­ture and use that to deter­mine a
first-guess for project cost. I then com­pare it to past projects, to
make sure I’m being real­is­tic. I know myself well enough to know I
always want to under­es­ti­mate costs – I usu­al­ly like the project and want
to make it afford­able to clients! – so I do force myself a real­i­ty check
that usu­al­ly ends up adding a few hours to the estimate. 

When I put togeth­er my offi­cial esti­mate I try to guess where
poten­tial bot­tle­necks might hap­pen. Some­times these are technical
issues and some­thing they’re more social. For exam­ple, a client might
be very par­tic­u­lar about the design and the back-and-forth can take
longer than expect­ed. If I think any­thing like this might hap­pen I
men­tion it in the esti­mate. Some­times as we work through the details of
a fea­ture I’ll learn that the client wants some enhance­ment that we
had­n’t talked about pre­vi­ous­ly and which I did­n’t fac­tor into the
estimate.

When I do see a par­tic­u­lar part of the work tak­ing longer than
expect­ed I flag it with the client. I try to keep them informed that
this will add to total costs. In many cas­es, clients have been hap­py to
go with the extra work: I sim­ply want to make sure that we both are
aware that the esti­mate is chang­ing before the work happens. 

I charge by the hour rather than on a per-project basis since I find
it to be a much more open busi­ness mod­el. Bri­an Fling’s post agrees:

The prob­lem [with per-project billing is that] one way
or anoth­er some­body los­es, either the client pays too much, meaning
pay­ing more than it’s mar­ket val­ue, or the ven­dor eats into their
prof­it… One ben­e­fits to hourly billing is the client is respon­si­ble for
increas­es of scope, pro­tect­ing the ven­dor and the cus­tomer. If the
project is com­plet­ed ear­ly the client pays less, pro­tect­ing the client.
This puts the onus on both par­ties to com­mu­ni­cate reg­u­lar­ly and work
more effectively.

I have very lit­tle over­head: a home office, lap­top and DSL.
This means my rates are very com­pet­i­tive (one client described it as
“less than plumbers and elec­tri­cians charge, more than the kid who mows
the lawn”). Being very care­ful with esti­mates mean that I often
com­mu­ni­cate a lot with clients before I “start the clock.” I’ve often
worked with them a few hours before the esti­mate is in and we’re moving
for­ward and of course some of this un-billed work does­n’t result in a
job.

Putting togeth­er fab­u­lous web­sites is fun work. It’s very much a
back-and-forth process with clients, and it’s often impos­si­ble to know
just what the site will look like and just how it will work until the
site actu­al­ly launch­es. Half of my clien­tele have nev­er had websites
before, mak­ing the work even more inter­est­ing! It’s my professional
respon­si­bil­i­ty to make sure I work with clients to fore­see costs, dream
big, but most of all to be open and hon­est about costs as the process
unfolds.

SEO Myths I: Analyze This

January 22, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Every web design­er under the sun talks about search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), but it amazes me to see how often basic prin­ci­ples are ignored. I’m in-between jobs right now, which means I’m spend­ing a lot of time look­ing at poten­tial employ­ers’ web­sites. I’ve decid­ed to start a series of posts on SEO myths and real­i­ties that will talk about design­ing for max­i­mum visibility.

I’m not going to focus on any of the under­hand­ed tricks to fool search engines into list­ing an inap­pro­pri­ate page. Google hates this kind of tac­tic and so do I. You get vis­its for hav­ing good con­tent. Good search rank­ings are based on good con­tent and the best way to boost your con­tent is to present your page in a way that lets both humans and search engines find the con­tent they want. Part one is on web­site analy­sis and tracking.

Don’t assume that your web­site is easy to nav­i­gate. One of the neat­est things about the web is that we have instant feed­back on use. With just a lit­tle track­ing we can see what pages peo­ple are look­ing at, how they’re find­ing our site and what they’re doing once they’re here.

Javascript Trackers:

My most advanced sites are cur­rent­ly using four dif­fer­ent track­ing meth­ods. Most uti­lize javascript “bugs,” tiny snip­pets of code that send indi­vid­ual results to an advanced soft­ware track­ing sys­tem. I put the code inside a Move­able Type “Mod­ules Tem­plate” which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly import­ed to all pages. Installing a new sys­tem is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Tem­plate and rebuild­ing the site.

  • AXS Vis­i­tors Track­ing System
    This soft­ware installs on your serv­er but don’t let that scare you: this is one of the eas­i­est instal­la­tions I’ve ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can nar­row it spe­cif­ic pages on your site, or even par­tic­u­lar search engines or search phrases.
    There’s also a option to view the lastest traf­fic by vis­i­tor. I love watch­ing this! You can see how indi­vid­u­als are using the site and where they’re nav­i­gat­ing. I’ve been able to iden­ti­fy dif­fer­ent types of vis­i­tors this way and under­stand the com­plex­i­ty of the audience.
    It does­n’t seem like AXS is not being devel­oped any­more. The lat­est sta­ble ver­sion came out over two years go, which is a shame.

  • Hit­Tail
    This ser­vice watch­es search-engine links and makes rec­om­men­da­tions for new key­words. I wrote about this ser­vice yes­ter­day in Blog­ging for the Long Tail.

  • Reeferss​.com
    This is a sim­ple sim­ple bit of soft­ware. Like every oth­er track­ing sys­tem it keeps track of refer­rers: search engines and web­sites that bring traf­fic to your site. But unlike the oth­ers that’s all it does. Why care then? It pro­vides a real-time RSS feed of these vis­i­tors. I bring the feed into my “Netvibes” page (a cus­tomized start page, see below) and scan the results mul­ti­ple times a day.

  • Google Ana­lyt­ics
    The inter­net’s gate­keep­er bought the Urchin ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny in April 2005 and relaunched the prod­uct as Google Ana­lyt­ics short­ly there­after. This is becom­ing an essen­tial track­er. It’s free and it’s pow­er­ful, though I haven’t been as impressed by it as oth­ers have. See its Wiki page for more.

Internet Trackers:

It’s easy to find out what peo­ple are say­ing about you online.

  • Tech­no­rati
    This ser­vice tracks blogs but you don’t need to have a blog to use it, for Tech­no­rati will tell you where blogs are link­ing. Give it your URLs (or those of your com­peti­tors!) and you’ll know when­ev­er a blog­ger puts in a link to you. You can also give it key­words and find out when a blog uses them.

  • Google Blog Search
    Google can also let you fol­low blog ref­er­ences or key­word men­tions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type “site:www.yourdomain.com” into the main Google search page and you’ll see who’s link­ing to your site (or to the com­pe­ti­tion). There are lots of oth­er ser­vices that track blogs and men­tions – Sphere, Blog­lines, etc. They all have dif­fer­ent strengths so try them and see what you think.

  • Feed­burn­er
    The best RSS mas­sager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They’ve recent­ly intro­duced page track­ing soft­ware too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it’s as good as Feed­burn­er’s oth­er offerings.

Keeping on top of this flow of data:

It’s easy to get over­whelmed by all of this infor­ma­tion. Most of the track­ing ser­vices pro­vide RSS feeds (See The Won­ders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a cus­tomized start page, to pull these all togeth­er into a sin­gle page that I can scan every morn­ing. Here’s a screen­shot of part of my Netvibes track­ing page – the full page cur­rent­ly shows four­teen track­ing feeds on one screen:

So why is tracking important to SEO?

With track­ing you find out what peo­ple are look­ing for on the inter­net. This helps you cre­ate pages and ser­vices that peo­ple will want to find. You might be sur­prised to see what they’re already find­ing on your site. Some examples:

  • Ana­lyz­ing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bring­ing in high Google traf­fic. I looked at these pages again and real­ized they did a good job of describ­ing the com­pa­ny’s mis­sion. I con­se­quent­ly redesigned the site home­page to fea­ture them and I made sure that those pages con­tained direct links to its most impor­tant services.

  • When I start­ed work for anoth­er client I looked at their site and sus­pect­ed that they’re most impor­tant arti­cles were not being seen – vis­i­tors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of track­ing con­firmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to con­vince the exec­u­tive direc­tor that we made some small mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the design. Hav­ing this strong con­tent linked right off the home­page helped bring in Google traffic.

Betsy Cazden’s new site

January 5, 2007
· Martin Kelley

I’m pleased to announce that my lat­est free­lance project has just launched: Betsy​Caz​den​.com. There’s noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary about the tech­nol­o­gy behind the site or its design, but the Quak­er geek in me is so hap­py to see it. Long-term read­ers will remem­ber my excit­ed post Fel­low­ship Mod­el of Lib­er­al Quak­ers, writ­ten after read­ing Bet­sy’s Bea­con Hill Friends pam­phlet Fel­low­ships, Con­fer­ences, and Asso­ci­a­tions. Bet­sy is one of the small num­ber of Quak­er his­to­ri­ans will­ing to take on con­tem­po­rary his­to­ry and her obser­va­tions can be quite insight­ful. I hope she’ll find an even wider audi­ence with this site and the blog that she plans to add soon.

Munching on the wheat

September 2, 2006
· Martin Kelley

There have been a few recent posts about the state of the Quak­er blo­gos­phere. New blog­ger Richard M wrote about “Anger on the Quak­er blogs”:http://quakerphilosopher.blogspot.com/2006/08/anger-on-quaker-blogosphere.html and LizOpp replied back with ” Pop­corn in the Q‑blogosphere?”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2006/08/popcorn-in-q-blogosphere.html.

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

Simple Design does not mean simple execution

August 23, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Every
web­site should try to serve a clear set of pur­pos­es. Even a personal
blog has a tar­get audi­ence, one’s friends or fam­i­ly per­haps. While a
good site looks sim­ple, it is often very com­pli­cat­ed “under the hood.”

Google
went from being a grad school project to the world’s most important
search engine by ditch­ing the design clut­ter of its com­peti­tors for a
very clean home­page with max­i­mum white space. This effect focused one’s
atten­tion on the search func­tion. More PhD’s are said to work at Google
than at any oth­er com­pa­ny in the world, yet the com­pli­cat­ed engineering
and the tremen­dous com­put­er infra­struc­ture that brings that logo and
search box to your com­put­er is invis­i­ble to the aver­age user.

Even web­sites with­out PhD design­ers need to mar­ry a sim­ple outward
appear­ance with a more com­pli­cat­ed set of cal­cu­la­tions around intended
audi­ences. The aver­age vis­i­tor looks at one or two pages on a site and
then hits the back but­ton. Often they’ll be fol­low­ing a search link and
look­ing at a page buried deep in your site. They’ll be there seeking
out spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion and you only have about twen­ty sec­onds to
pitch your site and keep them there. You need to give them a very
con­cise descrip­tion of your­self or prod­uct and you need to entice them
with relat­ed material.

Any site that con­sists of more than three pages presents visitors
with more infor­ma­tion than they can han­dle. Good design works to funnel
vis­i­tors to the spe­cif­ic con­tent they are look­ing for. It’s relatively
easy to get a first-time vis­i­tor but suc­cess­ful web­sites keep them on
your site and give them rea­sons to return. The key to this is defining
your audi­ence and pre­sent­ing your mate­r­i­al with them in mind.

Once you’ve iden­ti­fied your con­stituen­cy and built your design, the
next step is release. You don’t want to pan­der to a poten­tial audience,
but instead con­verse with them. It’s fine to mix dif­fer­ent ele­ments of
your life togeth­er and to write cre­ative­ly off-topic once in awhile.
There are a thou­sand gener­ic web­sites crammed full of use­less bu
zzphras­es and unused fea­tured. What you want is one that will have a
voice, that builds a niche that no one else might ever have identified.
When it comes time to pro­duce con­tent, for­get all the slick marketing
cal­cu­la­tions you’ve done and let your quirk­i­ness shine.

Call for Tom Fox memorials

March 17, 2006
· Martin Kelley

John Paul Stephens has asked if I could help com­pile a list of online trib­utes to our Tom Fox, the fall­en Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er for FreetheCaptivesNow.org’sTom Fox Memo­ri­als page. I’ve start­ed a list, now up on Quak​erQuak​er​.org, that I’ll keep up for a few months. Any read­ers who know of some­thing that should be includ­ed should either email me at martink-at-nonviolence-dot-org or tag it “for:martin_kelley” in Del​.icio​.us. Thanks. Here’s my list so far:

h3. See also:
* “FreetheCaptivesNow.org”:http://freethecaptivesnow.org/
* “Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er Watch”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/christian_peacemaker_teams/ over at Quak​erquak​er​.org
* “My posts on the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er witness”:/martink/cpt
* “A real­ly nice page on Tom over at Elec­tron­ic Iraq”:http://electroniciraq.net/news/2302.shtml