Feedback on your newsletter
You look for clues as to whether your newsletter is landing well, engaging people, right? But how many of the clues you look at are unambiguous? FIVE FORMS OF FEEDBACK 1. REPLIESYou get feedback on your newsletter when people “reply” to it and let you know what they think, yes? If that happens to you […]
Non-Profit Web Design & Pivoting in Crises: Refugee Resettlement Organizations
There are nine non-profit organizations in the USA that work with the State Department to resettle refugees. This past August, as the Afghan evacuation took place with the non-profits receiving very little advance notice of the change in schedule, they were all suddenly swamped with the huge number of Afghan evacuees for whom they needed […]
Amazon, Google, Facebook... Are you Listening?
The New York Times reported today that Amazon and Google are applying for patents to be able to legally listen in to random conversations through your home-based and mobile devices. Coming close on the heels of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytics data breach, this rather darkly adds to the growing unease with the sense that we’re all […]
Facebook has changed its algorithm again. The organic reach of pages is being moved to a little area called "Pages Feed" under "Explore". Plan B for managers of Facebook pages: either use Facebook advertising to continue reaching people's news feeds or treat your page as a different kind of resource.
Marketing and Higher Purpose Make a Great Couple
Richard Vevers switched from an advertising career to saving coral reefs and set up a non-profit organization which “uses the powerful combination of new technology, media, partnerships, and above all creativity to work at a meaningful speed and scale”. When you’re doing good work of any kind, getting the word out amplifies the benefit of what you are doing. Most non-profit organizations and artists would do well to develop a better marketing effort.
optimizing images for search engines
If you are having a website developed for you or if you are developing one yourself, it is worth paying attention to how the images that show up in Google image search get to be there. Not just for image-search but for the general search engine optimization of your image-rich pages.
how to use google analytics and search console: an introduction to the easy goodies
Two of the things I routinely do when creating new websites is set the site up with Google Analytics and register the site with Google’s Search Console. Google Analytics are far and away the best tool to learn about the actual effectiveness of your website. The first good thing about Google’s counting of visitors to your site is that, unlike many web statistics tools, Google filters out the robots and web-spiders that visit your site and only counts visits from humans.
on building a twitter following
In the process of experimenting with Twitter, I’ve become a little wary of the culture of “building a twitter following”. Here's why.
how to use twitter: a personal journey
I opened my Twitter account in February 2009 not because I was dying to become a Tweeter but because, being a web developer, I needed to understand it. I began by using it as a kind of personal archive of interesting web pages.
