EvoBloggito

Video: Ever Wonder How Those Little Images Appear Next to Comments?

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jul 28, 2009; Category: Communication, Marketing, Usability; Tags: Communication, Usability; No Comments

Make your comments on blogs and community websites more personal with your Globally Recognized Avatar: GRAVATAR. Many sites enable gravatars, which means yours will automatically appear next to your comment when you use the email address to which it’s attached. You will rarely have to even think about it. When you want to change it, just upload a new image: it replaces the one you were using everywhere it appears.

To get a gravatar, visit www.gravatar.com.

Book Review: 18 Rules of Community Engagement

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jul 27, 2009; Category: Book Review, Communication, Marketing; Tags: Marketing, Online Community; 2 Comments

In the growing body of information about how to grow and manage online communities, Angela Connor’s 18 Rules of Community Engagement is among the best. The book is full of common sense and good advice from someone who has been there, done that, and continues to do it. Angela is a successful community manager, growing golo.com to more than 11,000 members in 18 months (currently more than 13,000 members). GOLO is a vibrant online community sponsored by Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill-area WRAL TV.

Some of the most thought-provoking information is in “The Basics” section that precede the “Rules.” The section is full of interesting information, like whether or not a community will form just because you make a platform available (nope), and why communities so often fail (most community managers focus on what the community can do for them instead of how to best support the interests of the community). Ms. Connor also writes about what community managers do, and what kinds of attributes they need to be effective in engaging and growing their community.

The rules themselves (e.g., don’t be pushy, stroke some egos, provide useful information and content) are mostly common sense. But common sense is often the first casualty of online communication, and these reminders of common sense dos and don’ts (and some things you might not consider without reading the book) can save you a lot of painful learning-the-hard-way. They’re all amplified with Angela Connor’s real-world community management experience and several links to websites that relate to some of her research or illustrate various points, which makes the book a very interesting read (allow a couple of hours for the nearly 90 pages).

Given the quality of the information, it’s bargain-priced at $19.95 for the book ($17.95 at Amazon) or $14.95 for the ebook. I reviewed the ebook, and the only complaint I have is that the publisher did not bother to reformat the book for easier onscreen reading. In order to make the text big enough to be easy to read onscreen, I had to constantly scroll the page. Finally, I printed it out and read it on paper. This, of course, undermines the value of the many links. But it’s a minor complaint about a really useful book, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to community managers and bloggers (who are community managers, though often of a smaller scale).

Find out more about the book at Growing Successful Online Communities.

Which is Better: Posting in Drips or Bursts?

Author: Guest Author; Published: Jul 20, 2009; Category: Blogging, Guest Post, Marketing; Tags: Blogging; 4 Comments

Note: This is a guest post written by Jan Felt. The author is a blogger at CyberFootprint, and a marketing and communication enthusiast. You can check out his blog, or follow him on Twitter.

This post won’t make you a better lover, just as it won’t make you rich or famous. Don’t switch to YouTube yet, it is going to be interesting. Let me share with you an insight into subconscious blogger behaviour that will help you to become a better, more self-aware writer.

A debate is going on whether regular posting guarantees success. In short, it doesn’t. Knowing that good content is what makes you or breaks you in the cyberspace, I’ve decided to study the approaches to posting and share the conclusions with you. There are two main points of view on writing frequency: drip feed and burst posting.

Drip Feed

Regular every day posting helps you to capture the readers and condition them to come for more information every time they open their browser or RSS reader. The obvious advantage of this type of posting is an increased chance to expand your readers base by following and reacting to current events. That drives traffic and attention to your blog.

The downside of this type of writing is an easy disappointment of the readers, should your posting frequency falter. The readers will come a few more times to see what has changed. If they find nothing new, they will abandon your site completely.

Bloggers are afraid of losing readers, so they often compromise the quality of their content only to put out a half-baked post. They are able to skim on the surface of many issues and topics, but the time pressure often detracts further pursuit of deeper analysis.

Burst Posting

Posting in bursts, on the other hand, gives you the time and energy to create high-quality content at the expense of timeliness. The significant advantage of this approach is no burnout syndrome to worry about, because the pressure to maintain continuity at all costs is much lower.

The disadvantages of this sort of posting are apparent—the lack of timeliness and lost opportunities to write about stories you might have missed. Be aware that readers’ patience and attention span are limited, so if you have to make up for low frequency by posting high quality content.

Finding the Optimal Approach

It is difficult to precisely determine what strategy will work for you. As a rule of thumb, I can say that you should post at least once a month regardless of what strategy you decide to follow.

Everything about your blog, even the posting frequency depends on your readers. Get some time to know them and then determine the optimal amount of posts per week or month. If you are not sure, ask them in a satisfaction survey. Send them an e-mail or ask them to fill in an online survey. As long as you listen to your audience, you will never get it wrong.

Do Static, Set-it-and-Forget-it Websites Still Have Value?

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jul 14, 2009; Category: Marketing, Search/SEO, Zeitgeist; Tags: Local Search, Marketing, Zeitgeist; No Comments

It seems as though this question could be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” (I would argue “no”), but a conversation I had yesterday with Chris Madrid of New Mexico Community Capital’s IMPACT New Mexico program helped me understand two things: 1) that a static website can still have some value as an “online brochure.” and 2) how far we have to go in New Mexico in terms of businesses understanding not just “how” to leverage the web, but “why.”

Certainly I understand that for small businesses just starting up, a website may not be their first priority. In terms of cash flow and number of hours in a day, they may be at capacity in just getting their business on its feet. But businesses have to do some marketing. The problem is many business owners have little or no expertise in nor understanding of marketing. As a result, they end up with a yellow pages ad and a banner in front of their place of business. If they’re lucky and they have great products or services, they will get enough word-of-mouth to allow them to survive. Some kinds of businesses, like restaurants, can even thrive on that formula. For many (perhaps most) businesses, that’s not enough.

So what value does a static, seldom-if-ever-updated website still provide? Assuming someone knows the name of the company or the URL of their website, they can find their way to it (not likely Google will be much help in finding it by searching on anything other than the company name). To some customers, having even a static website adds credibility to the company as long as the information on the site is not obviously outdated (if things appear badly dated, however, it can have the opposite effect).

If a static website looks nice, is easy to navigate, and tells a coherent and compelling story about the company and it’s products or services, prospective customers who find their way there may, in fact, decide to do business with the company. This is the nearly two decades old “online brochure” model of online marketing. It’s better than no website, but it’s never worked great (not even in 1993, when I launched my first website) for one simple reason: it doesn’t attract much search traffic. Which means not many people ever see the website. It’s like buying a television ad that runs at 3 am.

This is a strategy that absolutely depends on driving people to your website by putting its URL on business cards, yellow pages ads, mentioning it on radio spots, etc. Those techniques, with rare exceptions, have never resulted in much traffic for business websites.

So, static websites, if kept at least marginally updated, are better than nothing. But that misses the point. Marketing, rather than a (sometimes expensive) frill, is an absolute necessity for almost all businesses: it’s what keeps the customers coming. The online marketing game isn’t about providing cred to the 5-6 people per week who see your online brochure. The online marketing game is about getting found online by the hundreds and thousands of local people searching online for local products and services offered by your company.

Fundamentally, search engines have changed the game by focusing on local search results. It used to be that in order to see local results, I had to type in “Santa Fe” after whatever I was looking for. No more. Search engines now deliver local results (if any) based on your IP address, which indicates your geographic location. This both takes advantage of and fuels a trend in the growing use of search engines in looking for local products and services. If your website is not a search engine magnet, you’re missing out on business. It’s that simple.

Static websites are rarely (if ever) search engine magnets, no matter what might be done to make them more search engine-friendly. Blogs and actively updated websites with content management systems often are, if done with search engine optimization in mind. So you tell me: do static websites still have value?

Quick Tutorial: Simple PHP and CSS to Highlight Current Navigation Section

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jul 12, 2009; Category: CSS, Design/Development, Information Architecture, PHP for Designers; Tags: Design/Development, Information Architecture; 9 Comments

Good website navigation not only helps visitors find the information they are looking for, it also tells them where they are on a website. This is especially important in light of the fact that people may arrive anywhere on a website via search or a link from another website. They will appreciate some indication of what section of the website they are in; sort of a “you are here” marker.

Essentially, we want to tell the navigation list that, if the navigation section is ‘X’, then this particular navigation list item should have a "current" class applied to it, which would allow us to style that item to highlight the navigation section. But the last thing we need, if we’re busy and have better things to do, is to edit the navigation on each page individually: every time we add or remove a page or change a navigation item name, we would have to update the navigation on every page.

We can make our lives easier with PHP. Remember, PHP executes on the server: you must upload your files to a PHP-enabled server to see it work. It will not execute on your desktop unless you have a local server set up. But if so, you are way beyond this little tutorial…

Below is the HTML for a very simple list-based navigation, and below that, the accompanying CSS. See the demo here»

The demo navigation should look like this:

The HTML

<ul class="navigation">
<li><a href="index.php">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="what.php">What We Do</a></li>
<li><a href="who.php">Who We Are</a></li>
<li><a href="why.php">Why We Do It</a></li>
<li><a href="need.php">Why You Need It</a></li>
<li><a href="contact.php">Contact Us</a></li>
</ul>

The CSS

ul.navigation { margin:0px; padding:0px; list-style-type:none; }
ul.navigation li { display:inline; margin:0; padding:0; }
ul.navigation a { float:left; display:inline; font-size:14px;
     font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none; white-space:nowrap;
     padding:2px 10px 2px 10px; background:#fc0;
     border-left:1px solid #fff; }
ul.navigation a:link, ul.navigation a:visited { color:#000; }
ul.navigation li a:hover { color:#fff; }

Create a PHP include from the navigation list and place a call for it on each page.

This include is placed on each page in place of the navigation list with the following call for the include:

<?php include("includes/navigation.php"); ?>

This calls for the include, which was named “navigation.php”, and placed in a folder called “includes”.

Add PHP code to the list items in the include file to display the “current” class when called for:

<ul class="navigation">
<li<?php echo ($navsection == 'home') ? ' class="current"' : ''; ?>>
  <a href="index.php">Home</a></li>
<li<?php echo ($navsection == 'what') ? ' class="current"' : ''; ?>>
  <a href="what.php">What We Do</a></li>
<li<?php echo ($navsection == 'who') ? ' class="current"' : ''; ?>>
  <a href="who.php">Who We Are</a></li>
<li<?php echo ($navsection == 'why') ? ' class="current"' : ''; ?>>
  <a href="why.php">Why We Do It</a></li>
<li<?php echo ($navsection == 'need') ? ' class="current"' : ''; ?>>
  <a href="need.php">Why You Need It</a></li>
<li<?php echo ($navsection == 'contact') ? ' class="current"' : ''; ?>>
  <a href="contact.php">Contact Us</a></li>
</ul>

Add styles to highlight the navigation items when list item has "current" class applied.

ul.navigation li.current a:link, ul.navigation li.current a:visited
     { color:#fff; background:#000; }
ul.navigation li.current a:hover
     { color:#fff; background:#c00; }

One last thing: put the appropriate navigation section info on each page.

At the very top of the HTML page, prior to the doc statement, add the following 3 lines of code:

<?php
    $navsection = 'home';
?>

Note that this particular example would be found above the doc statement on the home page. Because it matches the navsection statement attached to the home page list item on the menu, that list item displays with the “current” class.

This technique works well on the top level of list-based drop-down menus as well, though I have found that it’s easier to attach the "current" class to the link rather than to the list item. CSS, of course, must be adjusted accordingly.