Need feedback? Ask the crowd.

As I was planning the presentation it seemed to grow more daunting every day. I don't know everything about WordPress, I'm constantly learning more, but even so, how could I cover enough in 90 minutes to give these folks a good foundation? What I realized was that I had to do some sort of messaging triage to focus on the most important topics. And I needed to identify which issues would be of the greatest interest to my audience. For the latter I would need to ask for input. So that is what I did.

I began by asking Stuart Smith, the leader of the Web Development SIG for his thoughts. As someone who knows his audience, and who had recently been digging into WordPress himself, he was able to give me some good insights. Next I thought it would be helpful to get opinions from people who already knew WordPress. This is when I turned to the crowd.

Ask your peers on LinkedIn & other social media sites

Answering questions on LinkedIn is a regular part of my personal branding and marketing strategy, so I've learned that the people there can be a great resource. Thus I posed the following question on LinkedIn.

If you were attending a 90 min. presentation on using WordPress as a CMS, what would you want to learn about?

I'm giving a presentation on WordPress to our local Web Developers group in a few weeks. In the past I've given 60 min. talks geared towards users, but this is aimed at a more technical audience. I'd like to cover installation, theme development, plug-ins and other functionality, but I also realize that 90 min. isn't really enough time to cover the breadth and depth of the WordPress Codex. So I want to focus on whatever points would be most useful to a Web developer (someone comfortable with HTML, CSS and a bit of PHP) who is about to do his/her first WordPress site.

If you're thinking about using WP and haven't yet, what would be helpful to you? Or if you're already comfortable with WordPress, what do you wish someone had told you before you did your first WordPress installation? Thanks for your input!

In return I received 13 answers suggesting topics including:

• Security
• Search Engine Optimization
• Parent/Child Themes
• Theme Frameworks
• Spam prevention
• Hosting Requirements
• Theme Customization
• Client Training
• Categories
• Plug-ins

I posed similar, albeit shorter, questions on Twitter and Facebook, and once all was said and done I had a full list of topics to prioritize. Given my limited presentation time, I crossed-off topics that would be too time-intensive, such as theme frameworks, and chose to focus on the basics of getting set-up and developing themes. I also touched on security, SEO, plug-ins and hosting (among other things.)

By now, the list was still too broad, but I felt I had a sense of what developers would want to know.

Presenting the message: so much to say in so little time

Screenshot of page from WordPress Sample Site

Knowing I would be covering a lot of material quickly, I felt I should provide resources that attendees could access later. So instead of using Keynote or PowerPoint, I chose to build a WordPress Sample Site as my presentation vehicle. This would allow me to go page by page, rather than screen by screen, while also leaving examples in place that people could refer to at any time. This also made it easier to demonstrate the features of WordPress as I could also show them things in the WordPress dashboard for the site, or in the php files for the templates.

I used pages on the site to explore key topics, such as the WordPress template hierarchy, and blog posts to share plug-ins and related tidbits. I'll continue to add to that blog as I find new plug-ins worth sharing. So what started out as a presentation has now turned into another site that I can expand and refine over time. If you have suggestions on plug-ins or WordPress topics I should cover, please share them below and I can start adding them to the Sample WordPress Site Blog.

The results

I still get nervous about speaking, and it can be hard to tell how a presentation really went. After all, most people are too polite to tell you that you bombed. But overall the feedback was positive, and the audience asked (and often answered) many good questions. Thinking back on the process, I may have come up with a decent plan on my own, but I think I came up with a better plan because I asked what people wanted. The responses I got really helped me in shaping the nature of the presentation, and gave me the confidence to feel I was on the right track.

When we think about crowdsourcing we think of many different things. We may peruse Digg or StumbleUpon to find the most interesting news or sites. We may ask friends on Twitter for tips on what router to buy. We may even use the crowd for project collaboration. And there will be times when we disagree with the crowd. That's O. K. too, it doesn't have to be a democracy. But if you ask the crowd for their input, it can be a great place to start—whether you're planning a presentation, a marketing campaign or a blog post.

CrowdSourcing Q&A Resources

• LinkedIn Answers
• Quora (Q&A on myriad topics)
• Stack Exchange

Fan Like me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm using content curation to share one link per day. At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful.

And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool.

As most of us know, the quantity and quality of inbound links has a pretty significant impact on search engine optimization. All other things being equal, if I have 10 inbound links to my site, from places like MIT, The New York Times and Apple and you have 10 inbound links from places like Joe's toothpick collectors blog, I'll be ahead of you in the search engine results pages.

So it is no surprise that people strive to attain those links—either by themselves or by hiring SEO firms who specialize in such things. Aside from the SEO value, inbound links also bring in referral traffic from sites that appeal to similar audiences.

Assuming you are producing great content—that people find valuable—there are a variety of ways to gain inbound links. Today I'd like to focus on the most basic approach, the direct ask.

Link requests are often ignored.

Webmasters and bloggers ignore the majority of link requests simply because the requesters don't give us a logical reason to follow through. For example, this request came in a few days ago.

"I visited your website and found it to be pretty useful content. I invite you to a link exchange (3-way link*) with our website (s)."

This was the extent of the message. The sender didn't include the link to the site, so I had no way of telling whether the site would be useful or not. The person also mentioned that this would be a link exchange. That's a common request, but I'm not going to give away a link just to get a link in return. If I link to a site, I do so only because it has information that I think you, my readers, will find useful.

* A 3-way link exchange is a gray/black hat trick meant to disguise a reciprocal link exchange from search engines. Since we only link to relevant sites we need not play such games.

Link requests that aren't ignored.

Visiting Case was redesigned earlier this year. It no longer includes this page, so I'm showing this screen capture of the old version for reference.

When I was Webmaster at Case Western Reserve University I received oodles of link requests because .edu sites are in high demand and we had enough content to appeal to a broad array of topical niches. People wanted me to link to everything from hotels and limousine services to other colleges and "get rich quick" blogs. But every once in awhile someone would suggest a link that was right on target.

One such person was the Webmaster for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA). He first contacted me to suggest some additional bus routes I might link to on the transportation page for our Visiting Case site. When he e-mailed me he sent me the recommended links to his site AND sent me the url of the page on my site where he thought the links should go. Knowing that these routes would be of interest to visitors, I immediately added them to the page in question. Over the years he would send me new links as routes were changed so that I was able to easily keep the information current.

I really appreciated his efforts because they helped me better serve my audience while also making sure that traffic directed to his site went to the right place. Adding the links was beneficial to all involved.

If you don't want your link request to be ignored, then it helps to follow in RTA's footsteps by initiating a link request that benefits both parties.

Choosing your victim Targeting sites that could link to you.

These cool vinyl critters are produced by Ducobi. I haven't done any package design since the late 1990's, but Lovely Package is a great source for design inspiration.

Let's pretend that you write a lovely little blog about package design.* If you were to embark on a link-building campaign you would probably start by identifying the top blogs and sites geared towards designers—people who would also be interested in your site. In particular you might look for sites specifically aimed at packaging.

After identifying a few plausible candidates such as Package Design Magazine and The dieline package design blog, you should then read through the sites to judge the caliber of the information, and to see if they are drawing in the same sort of readers that you seek.

Next you should ask yourself how your site, or a specific page on your site, would benefit their readers. If you can't come up with a clear and specific benefit then you are better off looking for other candidates.

If you do have a good benefit then you should also identify a place on their site where it would be logical for them to add your link. If no such place exists, it will be hard for them to fulfill your request.

* The folks at Lovely Package have never asked me for a link, nor do they need to. Their site has an Alexa Traffic Rank of 47,211 with 852 inbound links—which means it is already quite popular.

Asking for the link

Once you've made it this far, asking for the link is relatively simple.

The first step is to identify the person at the site who has the power to grant your request. This may be the Webmaster, content manager, an editor or someone else.

Then send that person a politely worded email in which you clearly yet briefly:

• introduce yourself
• describe the content and audience of your site
• explain why linking to your site would be beneficial to their audience
• specify the link you would like them to use
• suggest (not specify) keywords they might use for the link
• recommend a page on their site where you think the link would make sense, and
• thank them for considering your request

If they agree with your reasoning then you may very well get that link. If not then at least you'll know you made a sincere effort—rather than spamming them with a nonsensical request.

LInk Building and Related SEO Resources

I regularly add links such as these at the end of blog posts for two reasons. 1) They help guide you to additional information on the topic. 2) It helps me show appreciation to sites that provide helpful information. They didn't have to ask, they just produced worthwhile content.

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
• 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies
• Link building and SEO
• Link Building Pet Peeves That Drive Me Bananas
• Need a Link Building Strategy? Create Content!

Fan Like me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm using content curation to share one link per day. At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful.

And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool.

LeanDog's boat, the Keasarge, is docked next to the USS Cod Submarine just West of Burke Lakefront Airport. Clevelanders may remember it as the former Hornblowers Restaurant.

I just had the most amazing weekend at Cleveland GiveCamp, an event at which programmers, developers, designers, writers and others came together to build Web sites and applications for local non-profit organizations. The event was hosted at Lean Dog, An Agile Software Studio housed in a converted steamship, the Keasarge, and its on-land neighbor, Burke Lakefront Airport.

Throughout the course of the weekend 100+ volunteers produced Web sites and applications for 20 organizations. While the sites vary in complexity according to the needs of each organization, it's fair to say that these sites could have cost thousands of dollars each to develop without volunteer labor.

For some organizations this meant they were able to get their first site. For others it meant that they could have their sites rebuilt—in a manner that would help them maintain them on their own—so they could better communicate with their constituents in the future. For all it meant that the dollars that might have been spent on the Web could instead be put towards directly helping their cause.

Mark Schumann, one of the event organizers, drove this point home during the closing presentations. There he told us that the Suicide Prevention Education Alliance will be able to hire another staff person now that they don't have to spend money to build a new site. This will allow them to reach 3,000 more teens, out of which typically 150 will get professional counseling. Mark went on to explain that we can't know for sure how many of those 150 would have taken their lives without getting help—but I think we can all agree that if even just one life is saved, that makes a tremendous impact.

Each of the many charities served by Cleveland GiveCamp supports our community in important ways, so it was really impressive to see how the volunteers were able to help them continue those efforts.

My time at Cleveland GiveCamp

Macintosh, Linux and Windows laptops all saw their fair share of the action as teams worked on developing their projects.

Everyone who participated in GiveCamp had their own unique experience. The organizers have been working hard for months. I, on the othe hand, ended up turning up at the last minute. I'd first read about GiveCamp some months back, but at the time I assumed they needed programmers who knew more about developing applications and other things outside of my skill set. As we all know, one should never assume.

On Friday afternoon I learned that Susie Sharp had been asked to bring down extra volunteers to help document/promote the weekend's activities via social media. I tagged along with "Team Tweet" thinking I'd go see what was up and help live-Tweet the action.

We arrived at GiveCamp just in time to see them assign the developer teams to their non-profit organizations. Originally they'd hoped to have 70 volunteers working on 16 projects, but Cleveland spirit prevailed and they ended up with 100 volunteers who were able to work on 21 projects. At this point I still thought they'd be programming their own content management systems and applications, so I just went back to the boat to set up my MacBook Pro and plan out my Twitter strategy. The one skill group teams were short on was design, so I also let folks know that I could help teams with that as needed.

Almost everyone chooses WordPress

As the groups started planning their projects and choosing their development tools, something unexpected happened. 15 of them chose to use WordPress as the content management system for their sites. WordPress struck me as a good choice because it is relatively simple to implement, it's free, and the end-user interface makes it easy for the non-profits to update and maintain their sites.

Estina Goertz from the Cleveland Tenants Organization asks a question during WordPress training. (Photo by Susie Sharp)

Many of the teams who chose WordPress hadn't used it before. So it was natural that they would have some questions. I'm not an expert, but as many of you know, I use WordPress pretty much every day. This blog runs on WordPress, as does every site I've built in the past year. Their choice of WordPress gave me a new purpose, so I switched gears and took on the roll of roving WordPress troubleshooter. I also gave a presentation on Sunday afternoon to show the non-profits how to maintain and update their sites.

As mentioned, it is relatively easy to set up a WordPress site using a pre-existing theme. Many users can do this themselves. But these were not do-it-yourself level projects. Customizing a site to serve specific goals and functions is far more complicated. One needs to know a certain amount of HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL and may also need to know more elaborate programming. The sites the developers built fit into this category.

Some required more complex navigation, others had special uses for incorporating social media, many needed PayPal integration for online giving, one required an e-commerce shopping cart solution and another was part of a project that also integrated a new iPhone application with a Twitter feed.

WordPress 3.0 has great new features, but—it's really new

Iggy, one of the LeanDogs asks if it might not make more sense to use a WordPress query, rather than a plug-in, for a feature we've been discussing.

WordPress 3.0 integrates the former WordPress MU (multi-user) features as well as many options that make it easier for users to customize navigation and other page elements. But it's also very new. The official final release of 3.0 was just launched in June. I've upgraded many of my sites to 3.0, but I've not yet built a new theme that incorporates the new features.

Some of the developers based their projects on new 3.0 themes while others based them on older themes that will still run on 3.0. It was easier for me to answer questions for the latter group; in many cases I could just go back to my Mac and send them a snippet of code I'd used in the past. Or I could pinpoint which plug-in was involved and just point them to the settings page they had to adjust. It was great when someone asked me a question I could answer immediately.

But that didn't happen all—or even most—of the time. As they came to me with menuing—or other questions that were unique to 3.0—I looked over their shoulders as we tried to work things out together. Other times I hopped on Google and searched about until I found the documentation we needed to solve the problem. Once I found a solution I would e-mail it to the person who'd asked and add it to Delicious where I was sharing links for the WordPress developers. There were a few questions that completely stumped me, or that were outside my bailiwick, but in the end I think we were able to find work-around's or alternative solutions for most of the dilemmas that came up. And in some cases the programmers were able to build their own programs in lieu of plug-ins that didn't already exist.

In the end I think I learned as much as anyone and am glad that I'll be able to put what I learned to use on my next project.

Social media is great for communicating during events

When geeks put together an event, they know what tools to use. Participants needed to communicate with each other and we wanted to spread the word to the public about what the teams were accomplishing.

I used Tweetchat to monitor the #clegivecamp Twitter hashtag.

Keeping in touch on Twitter with #clegivecamp.

The organizers chose #clegivecamp as the hashtag for the event, so one of the first things I did was open a Firefox tab for http://tweetchat.com/room/clegivecamp in order to monitor what was happening. Throughout the weekend participants used this to post announcements; share links, anecdotes and amusing photos; and to converse between the two locations.

I also used it to find out where I was needed for WordPress assistance. If someone Tweeted that team 5 had a WordPress question, I could tweet back asking for the location and tell them I was on my way. If I was away from my laptop others would see the Tweet and someone nearby could let me know where I should go next. People also sent Tweets directly to me, but overall the hashtag made it easy to keep in touch, whether or not we knew each other's usernames or email addresses.

Delicious Bookmarks

Delicious is the social media tool I use most regularly. As I worked with the WordPress teams it quickly became obvious that I needed a place to share links and other information. At first I thought I might make a new blog post here, then keep adding to it. But that seemed like it could become unwieldy. Instead I created a delicious tag for #clegivecamp. Then whenever I found a plug-in, or piece of documentation that would apply to one of the projects, I would save it to delicious along with that tag. I also used secondary tags such as wp-plug-ins and wp-documentation to help differentiate between the saved items.

Throughout the weekend I posted reminders on Twitter and Facebook to let people know that these links were available. Then if someone asked a question, that I'd already researched, I could direct them to Delicious to find the documentation link I'd already saved. I also used this tag as a place to save user oriented documentation for those who attended my WordPress training session. This meant that I only had to give them one link to write down in their notes. They could then follow that link to find all the other links we discussed during the session. Over the next few days I will continue to add more links there as I recall/find those that would be appropriate for this group.

Facebook

Cleveland GiveCamp began the weekend with a Givecamp group on Facebook, but when Team Tweet began their social media promotion they thought they could benefit from the added features of a Facebook page. Thus Susie Sharp created the Cleveland GiveCamp page. Here Susie, Heidi Hooper, Jim Evans, Paul Schambs, Kasey Crabtree, Stuart Smith and others started posting updates and photos about the event.

As the weekend went on, the developers and non-profits added to this content with updates about their projects, announcements and other related information. As people have added to the page it has turned into a nice repository for information about the event. If you have a Facebook account, I urge you to "like" the page. This will help show our sponsors, the media, volunteers and others that you think it is a worthwhile event that should be held again next year.

Cleveland GiveCamp would not have been possible without its volunteers and

Leadership from the organizing team including:

• Jon Stahl
• Andrew Craze
• Mark Schumann
• Nick Barendt
• Laurence Mingle
• Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan
• Jim Gorjup
• Deb Stahl
• Kevin Stahl
• Jane Winik,
• and several others whose names I may have missed

and support from the Cleveland GiveCamp Sponsors:

• LeanDog, An Agile Software Studio
• Burke Lakefront Airport
• Hyland Software
• Rosetta
• DeVry University
• Microsoft
• IEEE
• CODE Magazine
• discount ASP.net
• Keller Graduate School of Management
• American Greetings
• Midwest Research
• Pantek
• Red Bull

Overall Cleveland GiveCamp was a tremendous success. The developers accomplished an incredible amount of work, ensuring that their non-profits can better achieve their goals. The camaraderie of the participants meant that we all had fun while working, and volunteers made sure we were well-fed and provided with sufficient quantities of caffeine to keep functioning. If you would like to learn more about GiveCamp or organize one in your own region, please visit the links below.

Cleveland GiveCamp Links

• Cleveland Give Camp Official Page
• Cleveland Give Camp Facebook Page
• Cleveland Give Camp Twitter account
• #clegivecamp - Twitter hashtag (live)
• #clegivecamp - Twitter hashtag (archive)
• GiveCamp main page

Fan Like me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm using content curation to share one link per day. At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful.

And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool.

Curators at the Cleveland Museum of Art took care to select the right pieces, placement and accompanying art when re-doing the museum's Armor Court.

The process of content curation is pretty simple. Basically one reads a variety of blogs, articles and sites on a given topic, then picks out the best ones to share, just as an editor might choose the most appropriate stories for an anthology of fiction, or a museum curator might choose the right combination of paintings for an exhibit.

In the early days of blogging, the process of choosing and sharing links to various noteworthy sites, was one of the most popular ways to blog. People have been curating content for ages, but the phrase "content curation" (in the context of social media) really only began to gain traction in 2009* and has been growing in popularity ever since.

Why curate content?

Some people choose to curate content because it takes less time than writing your own posts, but as you know we shouldn't be building our strategies around "shortcuts." Instead we should tailor any content marketing strategy to our end goals. Ideally you should be using content curation (if appropriate) to augment the self-created content you are using to communicate with your audience. I find content curation compelling because:

I learn in the process.

In order to build useful Web sites, and develop effective social media and marketing strategies, I have to keep up with changes in the field and continue to learn new things each day. I keep up with trends and information by reading blogs, listening to podcasts and conversing with peers on Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media channels. While doing this I also discover links that may be of interest to my own followers.

I can be a more effective resource on a topic if I share more than my own thoughts.

No matter how much time I might spend doing research, I will never have all the answers you may need about Web development, social media, marketing, etc. But if I pick through the noise—to find the best items to share on these topics—then I may become a useful go-to resource on these subjects. This helps my followers find relevant information more easily, and it supports my brand—by positioning me as someone knowledgeable enough to pick out what is useful.

Ways to find content worth sharing

As mentioned above I consume a lot of information in order to keep learning—and I find items to share as a part of that process. Setting up a system to find information on a given topic usually begins with a bit of preliminary research. This could involve setting up keyword searches on specific terms, subscribing to leading blogs, identifying pertinent podcasts, etc. Once you've done that you can then focus on monitoring the resources you've selected. Below are some of the ways I find content.

Blogs, E-zines, Aggregators

"Cats Who Code" offers good how-to tips. Here I may find articles to share with peers on Twitter or to save on Delicious for future reference.

I'm currently subscribed to hundreds of blogs and other online resources in Google Reader. There are so many that it is impossible to read all of the posts, but if I organize them by topics, such as social media or Web/tech, I can skim the headlines to find the posts that pique my interest. As I read through the posts I'll also note which posts seem most likely to resonate with my followers so that I can share those links in the appropriate places.

I subscribe to the obvious leaders in my industry such as A List Apart and Mashable, but I also try to subscribe to smaller niche oriented blogs and those that may only have a passing relation to my field. For example, I'm neither a video producer nor a film-maker, but I often find cool things on Motionographer that I can share on Twitter. Reading about design in other fields also helps me gain new perspectives when thinking about the Web, so blogs such as Lovely Package and Drawn! are also on the reading list.

Once I've identified a few blogs as being leaders in a particular niche these usually lead me to other blogs (that they may mention,) so in time the list just keeps growing.

Search Feeds

News readers aren't just for blogs. If I know I want to monitor a particular topic I can run searches in Google News search, Yahoo News Search, Twitter search, Google Blog search, etc. and subscribe to the resulting feeds. Similarly I can set up search columns in Tweetdeck on phrases like "Web design" or "CSS" to see what people are saying about those topics."

Podcasts

Listening to podcasts like CreativeXpert is a great way to gain knowledge and discover new bloggers worth following.

Podcasts are a great way to learn on the go and discover new blogs to read, articles of note, etc. After subscribing to podcasts in iTunes I can copy them to my iPod so that I can listen to them at any time, without being tied to my computer.

Many of the podcasts I listen to are an hour long and may feature multiple speakers. This allows them to dig deeper into specific topics than one could in a single blog post. Thus when I listen to This Week in Tech I may glean the latest insights on the Facebook privacy issue of the month. On Boagworld I might learn about a new wireframing tool or discover new methods for usability testing. These podcasts may also lead me to particular articles worth sharing, or after listening to a guest speaker I may decide I should also follow his/her blog.

Crowd Sourcing/Bookmarking/Social Media Recommendations

Sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious can be great places to find content that other people have liked or found useful in some way. While you can follow specific people on these sites, you can also browse by topics such as tech news or view commonly shared tags such as contentcuration.

People I'm following in social media channels

I've met a lot of great minds on Twitter (and other services.) The people I follow range from designers, developers and marketers to scientists and a sea captain. Many of these Tweeps are also curating content for their niche so I often discover new blogs or posts through the links they share in their Tweets, on Facebook, Buzz, etc. Some of my favorite blogs are those I've discovered via friends on social media.

Ways to share curated content

On my Facebook page I typically write a descriptive blurb about the link being shared. These are geared towards a mixed audience of clients, potential clients and peers.

There are a variety of ways to share the content you find. Some bloggers write link posts in which they share the top links they've found this week. Others might write a short paragraph about a post they've read, then link to the article. One can also share links via social media.

When perusing blogs, I'll share some posts via Google Reader Share. These feed directly to my Facebook and LinkedIn profile pages as well as my What I've Been Reading in the Blogosphere page. I also post links with short descriptive comments on Twitter and share one link per day on my Facebook page along with a paragraph of commentary.

With rare exceptions I do not cross-post the same links to each space. The links I share on Twitter are different than the ones I share on my Facebook page. I do this so that I can choose links specifically for each target audience and to avoid redundancy for those who follow me in multiple places.

Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and numerous other sites are also great places to share content links, with or without your personal commentary.

Just say no to plagiarism: do not republish articles without permission

While there are many ways to share content there are also ways you should not share it. When I was looking for more links to include with this article I found, Why Content Curation is BS, in which BlogBloke rightfully rants that content curation should not be used as an excuse for plagiarism. His post served as a good reminder that we should take care when we share.

There are bloggers who will copy the content they find to their own blog. Sometimes they give attribution to the source, other times they don't. Either way you should never copy someone else's content (or even paraphrase it) without getting their permission to do so. Doing so is a violation of their copyright. Most of you already know this, but it's an issue that is often confusing to new bloggers, so I thought it was worth mentioning.

In most cases it is perfectly acceptable to include one or more quotes from an article as part of your commentary, just as you might include quotes in a research paper, but don't quote a post in its entirety. A good way to share curated content on a blog is to start by explaining what the post is about, and why you feel it is worth sharing, then adding your own opinion about the subject along with a link to the original article. MetaSpring does a nice job of this in their monthly Blog Carnival posts. (They also contact the authors to ask permission and give them information about the upcoming posts, though their usage would be perfectly acceptable even if they didn't ask.)

If you are unsure about what is, and is not, acceptable, I've included links to copyright resources in A writer’s obligations: ethics, law and pragmatism, Part 1: Law. You can also learn more from Plagiarism Today which publishes both a blog and a podcast.

How are you curating content?

What other methods have you used to find content? Where and how are you sharing it? Are you posting article links to the news tab in your LinkedIn discussion groups? Are you sharing links via Tumblr or Posterous? Do you include curated links in your e-mail newsletter? Please share your experiences or suggestions in the comments below.

Content Curation Resources

The links I regularly share here at the bottom of my posts are another example of content curation. I include these to provide additional reading material on the topic. These links were found via Google Reader, Google Search and Delicious.

• Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King
• Content Marketing: Definitions of Curation & Context
• Curation nation
• The Content Strategist as Digital Curator
• The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators
• Why Feedback and Filters are Necessary in Social Media

* A Google search on "content curation" turns up only 282 mentions of the phrase in 2007, 568 in 2008, 17,400 in 2009 and 55,000 so far this year.

P.S. As I was going through Google Reader today I realized I'd left out a great example of content curation. Arts & Letters Daily is a service of The Chronicle of Higher Education. It compiles a great collection of intellectual fodder, adding 3 short blurbs with links to full articles each day. It also includes a list of the source publications it uses in the left sidebar. Added June 30, 2010.

Fan me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm using content curation to share one link per day. At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful.

And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool.

What do we do when a resource disappears, or changes in such a way that we need to reconsider our options? That is the question many of us are facing in regard to Ning, the social media service that let's you create your own social network. I'm currently a member of over a dozen Ning Networks, have created 4 and also have admin privileges on 2 created by others. So the Ning question affects me both as a user and as a developer.

Today I'd like to ponder how we prepare for service changes, how much we rely on external systems and related topics. I don't have all the answers, to this so I'll give some examples and pose some questions, but I expect that it will be your feedback that really helps us make decisions about services such as Ning. I'll also be asking these questions tomorrow, May 5, 2010 at 1:00 p.m. (e.d.t.) via #smchat, a weekly Twitter chat on social media. Please feel free to share your comments here or during the live chat.

Q46A*: What should we consider when a service changes or goes away?

First we panic. Then we recall that the Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe says "Don't Panic." So we calm down and think about the issues at hand. If the service is going away we need to examine our goals and determine what features we need in an alternative site. If the service is changing we must still examine our goals and consider whether or not the changed site will be able to accommodate them.

Back in 2008 I learned that one of my favorite social media services, Pownce, was going to shut down on December 15. In the frenzy to stay connected with Pownce friends, we rushed to explore other options, I created Pownce Refugees on Ning, others built their own sites, and soon we each had accounts scattered on services ranging from Soup to Vox. You can read more about this experience in my post, Social Media is People (but more enriching than Soylent Green*).

I'm a Web developer, so I could have built something from scratch, but I chose Ning to host Pownce Refugees because it was something I could do quickly enough to spread the word via Pownce before the shut-down occurred. While it didn't offer the same feature set, it offered enough options that we could continue to have the types of long conversations and media embeds that we'd grown used-to. Within a short period of time we had 100 members, and we were featured in the Ning Blog post, Former Pownce members find a new home. The site served as a useful home base, but over time it became less active. Now most of us communicate (with each other) primarily through Twitter, simply because it was the one service that everyone was already using. We missed the functionality of Pownce, but at least we were all on Twitter.

The heart of a social network lies in it's members. Ning, Vox and the Pownce clone, Schmownce (created by a fellow Pownce user) offered more features than Twitter, but they didn't have the same user base. Everyone (in our circle) was already on Twitter so it won simply because the people were already there. Other sites won as well. In an effort to make sure we wouldn't have to scramble again if Twitter died, many of us also friended each other on Facebook and other services so we'd have redundant connection points in play.

Q46B: The costs of maintaining community: remain on Ning or move.

Ning announced it's pricing plans today. The lowest cost plan is cheap enough that even tiny communities should be able to afford it. But they'll lose features they have now. #smchat could retain most of the features we currently use on the $19.95/year plan. Some of my other networks require more features and the other plans are more expensive. When deciding whether to stay or go we'll have to consider:

How many members will we lose if we move to a new network? Will there be exporting and importing tools available to help us migrate users to a new service with minimal attrition rates? Small networks such as #smchat may find it easier to transition to a new service than would larger networks.

How much content do we have on the site? Does it exist in multiple formats? Is there a way to cleanly export it so that we can also easily import it to another site? Or will we have to download and copy our content manually? Ning plans to provide us with tools for migration in the future, but we don't as yet know how they'll work.

Can we, as site owners, afford the cost of whichever Ning plan offers the services we require? Would our members be interested in contributing to those costs? Can these costs be offset by advertising or sponsorship? As an example, the University Web Developers network is currently sponsored by OmniUpdate. We have 3,225 members, so I would think OmniUpdate would want to keep sponsoring the site under the new plans. (I'm not an administrator for this site, but this would be my guess.)

Can we, as site owners, afford the cost of an alternative plan? Ning's most expensive offering is $49.95/month. Or you can save a bit by paying $499.95 for a full year. While that will seem expensive to many, it's far cheaper than hiring someone like me to build a WordPress/BuddyPress alternative. If you have the skill set to build your own network, that may save you money, but you'll still need to invest your time. Our Lake Erie Moose Society is thinking about WordPress, but we're a blogging group, so we were planning to create such a site for people to experiment with anyway...and we have several members who can contribute to the project of building the site, so I won't have to spend as much time on it as I would if building it by myself.

What other free options are available? Posterous announced that it would work on building an import feature so that Ning users could transition to that service. The features are quite different, but such options might be worth considering. One of the options mentioned for #smchat has been to use a group Wiki. What other options should we consider for #smchat and/or other networks?

Q46C: Knowing that free services may disappear, is it worth it to rely on them?

Or is it safer to stick with sites we build ourselves so that we don't become dependent on others that may not always be available? I think this really depends on the needs of your network. I can build my own sites, but I've still created Ning sites because they save me time. I don't use them for everything but the feature set and ease-of-use has made Ning a useful option. Building custom sites costs time and money, so I think we need to evaluate the risks and rewards of using platforms like Ning on a case-by-case basis.

Building your own site isn't an option for everyone. Those who use online services can mitigate the risks by providing alternative channels. Our Lake Erie Moose Society also has a Facebook page and a LinkedIn Group (we don't use that much). The Ning site is home base, but the others provide back-up communication channels and help us to reach out to people less familiar with Ning. (Some of our members have been following us on Facebook without ever visiting the Ning site.)

Q46D: What opportunities does the elimination of free Ning networks offer to others?

Posterous announced they will be building a Ning importer. WPMU has announced a Ning to BuddyPress importer plugin. I plan to experiment with WordPress and BuddyPress so that I can build networks for those seeking self-hosted alternatives. It's too early to tell how/if Ning's plans will benefit Ning users and the company, but it also creates an opportunity for others to reach out to Ning users with alternatives. Movable Type, for example, could try to gain more customers by offering importing recommendations to Ning users who might want to use Movable Type with Motion as a Ning alternative. Who else can benefit from this change? What should they be offering current Ning users to entice them to user their service instead?

Conclusions

As of now I've not decided what I'll do with each of my Networks, though I expect to keep at least one on the Ning platform. Each has different user needs that may be served with differing alternatives. We'll also be learning about more options in the weeks to come. What about you? What would you plan?

*On #smchat we number the questions by session. Tomorrow's chat will be our 46th, thus I've numbered my questions as 46A-46D.

Ning Resources and Examples

• Introducing Ning Pro, Ning Plus and Ning Mini
• Ning FAQ's on new plans
• Cleveland Social Media Club on Ning
• Lake Erie Moose Society on Ning
• University Web Developers on Ning

#smchat follow-up (added May 5 ~ 11:15 p.m.)

We had great participation during today's #smchat about Ning. I've posted a follow-up to the chat, including a copy of the chat transcript, on the #smchat Ning site under: Q46: What to do about Ning?

Fan me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm sharing one tip per day, usually as a short paragraph with a link to something interesting I've found in the blogosphere.

At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful. And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool. (I also have links to more accounts on My Social Media Profiles page and am now also babbling on Buzz.)

After writing my last post, I went offline for 2 weeks to skibble across the Atlantic, where I saw Gaudi's wild architecture in Barcelona, the aftermath of floods in Madeira, and the enormous Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca—among other things.

When I came back I returned to thousands of e-mails. My inbox was so cluttered that I'm still wondering what messages I may have missed.

Thoughts of clutter sometimes lead to thoughts of cleaning—or so I'm told. When such thoughts coincide with the chirping of birds and the sprouting of flowers, that means spring cleaning.

Spring cleaning is traditionally a time to take stock of our surroundings, get rid of the detritus and freshen up what's been getting stale over the long winter. Admittedly, this is not my area of expertise when it comes to house cleaning, but it is a task we should apply to our Web sites, particularly if you've not been caring for and feeding your site throughout the year.

Where to start: How effectively did your site achieve its goals?

Runners in the Barcelona Marathon. Did they achieve their goals? Only their times will tell.

Back when you first planned your site you (hopefully) had a purpose in mind. Today is a good day to look at your results. If your goal was to sell more widgets, how did you do? Did the site bring in traffic that converted to leads or sales? If your goal was to recruit students to your graduate program, how did that work? Did the site impact their decision?

Through a combination of Web analytics, leads from contact forms, applications, sales, etc. you should be able to measure your success and gauge how well your site contributed to that success. If you see room for improvement, you'll want to take a close look at what worked and what didn't and focus on enhancing the areas where you can make the most impact. Some of you may need to rewrite copy and offer more calls to action. Others may need to enhance SEO or improve site navigation. Different problems will require different solutions. For ideas that may help, try perusing my:

• Planning Your Web Site Tutorial
• Marketing Articles
• Writing Articles
• SEO Tips

Do your old goals still apply?

When I started this blog the goal was primarily educational. While that goal remains, my site now is also meant to attract potential clients. Whether your site is for a business, university, non-profit or your own personal use, your situation may have changed in the past year. Think about whether your own goals have changed and what you might add or change on the site so that it can continue to support both your needs and those of your site visitors.

Changes in technology

Trixi's are electrically assisted pedal cycles you can ride in Malaga, Spain. On your Web site, you don't always need to use the latest technology, you just need to use that which works best for your site visitors.

Generally speaking (very generally) the Web works pretty much the way it always has. If you view a site built in 1993 in a modern browser it will probably still work to one degree or another. But the technology has also evolved. Newer browsers are beginning to support HTML 5.0 and CSS 3. Designers are experimenting with those standards, while also trying to ensure that the sites they build degrade nicely when viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0.

Where does your site stand in terms of current technology? Does it support the browsers used by your visitors? Does your site use deprecated code? Are you still using tables for layout? Was it optimized for IE 6 in a way that it will break if viewed in IE 7 or Firefox? Are you supporting mobile devices? Should you? Have you incorporated social media features? Are you embedding audio and video in the most effective manner? We have far more options today than we did when the Web began, but that also means we have more potential for conflict. A flash-based site won't run on your new iPad and your CSS3 rounded corners won't be visible in IE6.

Your site has its own unique requirements and probably doesn't need all of the latest bells and whistles. If you don't need to support mobile just yet, or aren't designing for the iPad, then don't worry about that. The important thing is just to make sure that you are using the features and coding that work best for your target audience.

General maintenance

When you first launched your site, you and everyone else involved probably read each page countless times. But typos's and other minor errors may still lurk. Now that some time has passed proofread the site again with fresh eyes. You'll be surprised at what you might find. This is a good opportunity to catch spelling errors, or tweak some copy so it flows more smoothly. While you're reading through the pages, check your links. to make sure they still work. If a page has moved or a site has been deleted you will want to replace it with a working link. You may also decide to add links to newer or more comprehensive resources in addition to those old links.

As you explore your site, put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Does your content still make sense? Are things missing that you didn't notice before? Looking at the site again after a long time can give you a fresh perspective and suggest ideas that you may not have thought of last time around.

Out with the old, in with the new? Not necessarily.

Market: Agadir, Morocco. This donkey may seem old-fashioned, but there is no reason to replace him with something new. As long he remains fuel efficient and can haul produce, he's still serving the needs of his owner—just as your historical content serves the needs of your site visitors.

Some people worry that having old pages on a site makes it look like they've not bothered to update it. But the age of a page doesn't matter as much as the information it contains. If your products page still lists that 20lb hand vacuum you stopped manufacturing 5 years ago, then yes, it's probably time to remove it. You don't want people trying to buy things you aren't selling. But you could also move this information to an historic products section where you include appropriate support materials, such as a .pdf of the user manual. This could be helpful to current customers.

I'm a bit of a pack rat, so I hate to get rid of anything that might be useful, but as you review your site, you too will notice that some older information still has value and is worth keeping. Here are some examples:

Factual information that doesn't change.

If your office has been in the same location for 20 years, then the page listing your address and phone number is probably still accurate. For pages like this, just give them a cursory review to see if all the information is correct and if anything is missing that might help your readers. For example, if you don't have a map, this may be a good time to add one. If you have out-of-date photos of the office, then perhaps a few fresh ones are in order. But otherwise that page may remain accurate for several years to come.

Press releases, news and articles

Press release are timely in nature, but they also provide an historical record of the news your organization has produced. These pages may contain valuable information that tells readers about your track record for innovation, the progress you've made, the endurance of your group, etc. Some organizations like to remove older news stories because they think that visitors will accidentally come across an article from 1985 and think it's current.

But there is an easy solution for that, especially if you maintain such documents using blogging software or other content management tools. Just make sure any news content contains the date it was published. Then you can keep this content in online archives that make it easy for visitors to browse while still showcasing what is new and what is not. In many cases this information is helpful not only for outside readers but also for your employees. If they're trying to find out more about how you launched product X in 1998, or who was the head of IT in 2001, this gives them a good start.

Recurring Events

If you hold an annual conference or other recurring event, consider maintaining archives of the event site for each year. While this year's site may showcase the location and speakers for the current year, the archives can tell the story of past years. Discovering who spoke before, watching videos or slides from past events, and other details can help readers decide whether or not to attend. Such archives also demonstrate that the event has a history of success, and as with news items, these archives offer information that may be useful to newer employees.

Evergreen Content

Evergreen content refers to information that is more timeless and less likely to go out-of-date. For example, my article, Voice and Tone: Writing to reflect your personality as well as your message (Part 1), still brings in search traffic 3 years after it was written, because the ideas within still apply today.

Reflections on social media networking and marketing, on the other hand, was written more recently but references social media services that no longer exist, such as Pownce. While some of the content in the article is still relevant, other parts are outdated.

Including evergreen content on your site is a good way to bring in traffic, because people will continue to search for such information for years to come. When they find your site, and discover it also offers other useful resources, they may also stick around to explore it further.

Don't break the Web when/if you delete pages

Closed roads during the Barcelona Marathon prevented our taxi from reaching our hotel. Thankfully the subway provided us with an alternative way to reach our destination. Similarly 301 redirects can help guide your visitors to theirs.

The Web, by nature, is interconnected by links. When we delete pages, we also break any links that go to those pages, thus causing confusion to visitors who follow the links and headaches for those who link to us. If a page is out-of-date and you want to delete it, see first if there is a way to make it more current.

If not, then you may want to set up a 301 redirect that will automatically take users (and robots who index the Web) to a more appropriate page. Another option is to add a disclaimer explaining that the page is an archival page with out-of-date information. This can include manual links to other pages you recommend users visit instead. Users who are guided to more appropriate materials, rather than to a 404 error page, are more likely to find what they need and continue to explore the site.

I have a blog, so my site is already up-to-date.

If you have a blog on your site, and you write with some degree of regularity, then you have a huge advantage over those who maintain more static Web sites. You've been adding fresh content all year, so it probably does include current information. But what about the other pages?

Are your entries and archives easy to browse? Perhaps what worked last year is less manageable now that you have so many more posts. What about your About page? Does it reflect your current editorial policy? Are there other pages you could add that would enhance your user experience? While frequent blogging keeps you involved with your site, a spring review let's you view the site anew and may give you ideas to make your blog even better.

The colors on our site are so 2005, we need a full redesign.

Don't panic. A site review may make small problems look bigger than they seem. The key here is to maintain perspective and look for issues that truly impact your goals and the user experience. While out-of-date product descriptions can be a problem, out-of-date colors may not be. If people aren't applying to your program, don't blame the visuals. They may need some sprucing up, when time allows, but your content and calls to action are probably the areas that need the most help. Craigslist, for example, isn't winning many design awards, but it continues to be a popular and productive site. As the site owner, you may be bored with the look and feel of your site, but that doesn't mean the same is true for users.

While you may be tempted to start over with a full site redesign, in most cases you don't need one. If your site is supporting its goals, and visitors seem happy, then just focus on small corrections, updates and improvements. If the flaws seem to be adding up to a nightmare, then you may want to do a more thorough analysis, but there's no reason to look for a catastrophe unless it really exists.

Regular care and feeding of your Web site

Web sites are like pets. You can't just stick them in a cage and ignore them. (No stuffed animals were harmed while shooting this photo.)

Ideally we'd all maintain and care for our sites on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. How often we should do this depends on the nature of our goals, our content and the scope of our sites. Alas for many of us time slips away, or we don't have sufficient staff to keep up. Others spend the little time they have just updating the necessary bits and may not have the opportunity to really review the site in terms of its overall performance.

A spring cleaning review gives us the chance to really look at how our site is doing as a whole, and to approach it from a fresh perspective. After we've gone through the process we can also get a sense of whether our normal maintenance and review schedule is on track or whether we have to make time to care for our site more frequently.

How is your site performing?

Are you able to maintain it as often as you like? Do you have tips to share with others? Do you measure your results on a regular basis? What did you learn from your last site review? Please share your ideas and questions in the comments below.

Resources for the care, feeding and maintenance of your Web site

• 5 Lists Every Web site Owner Should Keep
• Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools (This is actually a guide for student researchers, but could add perspective to our own site reviews)
• Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Spring cleaning doesn't usually require a full redesign.)
• Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering! (added insights into your users' experience on your site)
• Web site Maintenance Musts

Fan me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm sharing one tip per day, usually as a short paragraph with a link to something interesting I've found in the blogosphere.

At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful. And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool. (I also have links to more accounts on My Social Media Profiles page and am now also babbling on Buzz.)

P.S. All the photos in this entry were shot on my recent holiday. I've not posted many yet, but there are a few more in my Spain, Morocco, Portugal collection on Flickr.

The first post. It's hard to believe I used to write such short entries. (Some of you probably wish I still did!)

Starting this blog was one of the smartest things I've done. To be honest though, it's not something I began on my own, nor did I anticipate how it would evolve over time.

To celebrate the anniversary of this blog (which actually occurs on February 28th), I thought I'd share a bit of its history and reflect on how the blog and I have adapted to changes in the Web and the interests of you, our readers.

A communications need—in search of a solution.

Five years ago Kevin Adams and I were the Web team for the marketing and communications department of Case Western Reserve University. In the second half of 2004 we'd rolled out a new site design as part of a university-wide rebranding effort. Our mission was to maintain the home page, build (and maintain) new sites within the campus Web presence and work with departments across campus to help them do the same with their own sites.

To this end we had periodic meetings with campus Web folk, and answered many an e-mail question or phone call, but this wasn't enough to keep up with the demand for support. Our campus community included hundreds of Web maintainers, of varying skill levels, who had questions ranging from how to edit HTML to how to develop content that would best support their marketing strategies. We needed a more efficient way to serve this audience.

As part of the new site roll-out we had created a Web Toolkit where we shared template files, and various reference materials, but as a static site it seemed an unwieldy place to post announcements or other bits of advice. We needed a system that would let us organize the information more effectively. Thankfully such a system had just been created.

Case launches a campus-wide blogging initiative.

I used the Case blog system to develop a variety of sites ranging from the Community Outreach site to the Case News Center. In July, 2008, I presented Blogs, The many voices of a university at EduWeb 2008 to demonstrate the ways that Case (and other schools) were making use of blogs in the classroom and beyond. You can get a sense of how Case continues to use blogs by visiting Planet Case, a site that aggregates all the most recent posts from the system.

In November 2004, Case's ITS group began alpha testing a campus-wide blogging system using the Movable Type platform. In January 2005 they opened up the system for campus-wide beta-testing, allowing any university students, staff, faculty or alumni to create their own blog(s).

Having previously experimented with blogs on Blogger, I watched the project with interest. Then one day Jeremy Smith, who runs the blog system, called me up to see if I might be able to create a new template design for one of the senior staff. Soon thereafter I had a test account set-up where I could experiment with creating this new theme.

Although I was a regular blog reader I'd not really spent much time thinking about blog construction. As I played with my designs, I found they weren't quite living up to my expectations. I was trying to visually re-style an existing blog structure, when I should have been rethinking the entire interface. Thus the results (such as this example) just didn't feel quite right.

I was learning that the blogs required a different way of thinking in regard to the user experience and navigation system. So I set those first designs aside and focused on learning more about blog structure and the code behind it.

At some point in that process I realized that the blog system was just what Kevin and I had been looking for.

The birth of the Web Development Blog

I don't recall the exact conversation but one way or another Kevin and I agreed to start blogging. Since I'd already been tinkering with the system, I took one of our campus templates and rebuilt it as a blog theme. Once that was ready I wrote our first post. You can view a copy of that post as it appears here on this blog, or the original post on the Case system.

As you will notice the post was surprisingly short. I introduced the reason for the blog, suggested users add contact information to their site footers and listed the hexadecimal colors for the Case Web templates.

Over the next few months Kevin and I continued in that vein, offering basic how-to tips such as setting up password authentication or redirecting pages and posting announcements, book reviews or links to interesting blog posts. As we added more content, the blog began to serve a customer service role. While campus Web maintainers continued to call us, they could now also go to the blog to find answers to many of their more common questions.

Broader mission and the birth of longer posts

When meeting with campus clients to talk about their new Web sites, I often started the conversation by asking about their goals and target audience, much as I do today with current clients. Alas with over 300,000 pages in the Case realm, and just me and Kevin to advise, we weren't able to sit down and have these conversations with everyone. As I was working with the department of pharmacology on their new site it occurred to me that I could write about the Web planning process and post it on the blog. This way users could walk through it themselves if Kevin or I weren't able to meet with them.

On July 1, 2005, I posted So you want to build a Web site, the first chapter of what turned out to be my Planning Your Web site Tutorial. Over the next few months I kept adding chapters while Kevin kept posting smaller articles on various tips and tricks. Kevin spends much of his spare time playing the trumpet in polka bands, while I'm often compelled to write, so it came as no surprise when I turned out to be the more verbose contributor to the blog.

As time went by I found that sharing the Web site tutorial with clients, before we met in person, helped to save us time in the planning process and ensure that we were all on the same page. I also found that people outside of Case, both in academia and beyond, were beginning to read our posts.

As people commented and asked questions we started writing on a wider range of topics. Instead of focusing strictly on issues pertaining to building sites, I also started writing about related topics such as marketing and graphics.

In 2006 we both wrote a combination of how-to articles such as those on editing images but also branched out into more general topics such as discussions on writing styles. By 2007, I'd also begun covering topics related to what we now call social media. In May of that year Kevin left to work on the corporate sector, so I continued the blog on my own.

Between building Web sites and advising clients, we'd never had much time to blog during office hours so I wrote many of these posts in the evening. Writing on my own time also allowed me the freedom to experiment a bit more with what I wrote. By this point I knew my audience extended beyond campus, so while much of my focus was on Web communications as they pertained to higher education I also wanted to include information that would be helpful to other audiences. And, instead of just writing things to help people build better Web sites, I wanted to address related issues such as promoting and marketing those sites. Topics like search engine optimization and social media were a natural addition to this content mix.

Life after Case

Last year after working at Case for almost 10 years I left the university to venture forth on my own. I knew the blog would continue to be an important communications tool, so I brought it with me to this site, while leaving the original files there for archival and reference purposes. I installed WordPress in a directory on this domain, created a theme to match the rest of my site, exported the blog entries from the old site then imported them here.

While I still sometimes find an odd link that goes back to the old site, the process worked surprisingly smoothly—considering that I was not only moving files but changing from Movable Type to WordPress. For a few weeks during the transition I cross-posted to both blogs then on February 23, 2009 I posted The Web Development Blog is moving! as the last post on the old site and began posting here full time.

Starting a new business takes time, so I've not blogged as often this past year as I'd have liked, but for the most part the editorial policy for the blog has remained similar to what it was at Case. Most of my clients are in small or medium sized businesses so I'm writing a bit more with an eye to the corporate sector. I'm still interested in the higher education and non-profit worlds, so I also use examples from those sectors, and read posts from BlogHighEd to keep up with what's happening in academe.

The role of the blog

What began as a simple way to communicate with clients has turned into much more. I think it worked out because Kevin and I started blogging to serve a specific goal, we didn't blog just to blog. As a result, The Web Development Blog has served as a marketing tool, helped me to establish my personal brand and given me the opportunity to connect with bloggers, clients and others with an interest in Web related issues. And of course it gives me a place to wax forth on whatever Web related ideas I may be pondering in a given moment.

But as much as I like to write, none of this would matter if you weren't out there reading. So now, as I near the anniversary date of the blog, I'd like to thank you all for reading, commenting, reTweeting, etc.

And of course if you have any ideas on things I should cover in 2010, please feel free to share them below.

Social Media Marketing Blog

I am now also a co-author of the Social Media Marketing Blog with Wayne Smallman and Emily Cagle. There we'll be focusing on social media marketing tips such as my first post, Listen, learn and leverage your brand via LinkedIn Answers. That site is also home to Wayne's e-book, The Beginner's Guide to Social Media.

Fan me on Facebook - Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm sharing one tip per day, usually as a short paragraph with a link to something interesting I've found in the blogosphere.

At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful. And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool. (I also have links to more accounts on My Social Media Profiles page and am now also babbling on Buzz.)

View Listen Now, Talk Later on Slideshare.

Back in high school we took a senior class poll in which we voted on who was "most likely to succeed," "most likely to end up in jail" and so forth. Your school probably did the same thing. The answers were then printed in the yearbook. In our yearbook, Julia Talsma and I were listed as the responses for "talks least, says most." I don't recall who won "talks most, says least," but was glad it wasn't me.

The same idea applies to social media. "Talks most, says least" is not going to make you popular* on Twitter, Facebook or most other social spaces.

*Popularity isn't our goal, but we do want to forge connections with our audience. They are more likely to listen to us if we also listen to them.

Alas, many individuals and businesses see social media as an extra publishing channel. Our species seems drawn to fast easy solutions, and publishing an RSS feed out to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. seems easy. It is. But it's not always productive. The true value is found in two-way communication. If we start our social media efforts with listening activities, we can learn how our audience perceives us (if they do) and what they want to hear. Then, when we're ready to speak, we'll know what to say.

What we listen for varies by our goals. In a recent client training session I focused on how we could use listening for that client's specific niche. But there are some general principles that can be adapted to a wide variety of use scenarios. On January 25th I gave a presentation, Listen Now…Talk Later: Listening as the foundation of your social media strategy, to our "Local Entrepreneur & Social Media Network Meetup Group" (run by another client) in which I discussed listening in this broader context. After reading this you may find it helpful to peruse those slides as they include screenshots and other examples of what I'll discuss here.

Listening for brand, product and service monitoring.

For marketers and public relations professionals, monitoring is nothing new. They've used clipping services to monitor brand and product mentions in mainstream media, conducted focus groups and surveys among customers and target audiences, and otherwise monitored feedback and opinion for years.

Monitoring our brands and products is important for a variety of reasons. Whether you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or an individual freelancer, monitoring can give you insights into:

• Brand/Product/Service awareness (name recognition)
• Brand/Product/Service perception (what do people think of who you are and what you offer)
• Customer Satisfaction (how happy are current customers)
• Your Competition
• Your Industry
• Opportunities for product/service/customer service improvements
• Opportunities for sales and lead generation
• Market needs (gaps in the industry which you may be able to fill by providing a new product or service)
• Liabilities (product faults, bad press, potential communications crises...), etc.

Now that we're in an era when customers blog and share opinions via Twitter—and media outlets publish their content online—monitoring is easier than every before. Rather than paying for expensive clipping services, we can search online ourselves. If the budget allows, we can also use commercial monitoring tools that can give us far more data than we've had in the past.

In this video a somewhat unscrupulous boss finds a new opportunity to take advantage of buyers after social media listening uncovers a customer service problem related to cow making equipment.

When you listen to what mainstream media and the public have to say about you, your competition and your industry, you can then apply that knowledge to everything from your marketing strategies to product development. For example, If you manufacture machines that make plastic cows, and your listening habits tell you of a growing need for plastic pigs, you can retool your equipment to produce pig making machines and get a jump on your competition.

Or, if a user has found fault with your plastic cow making equipment, you can fix the problem for that customer and put your engineers to work to make sure that it doesn't happen again. If the customer has complained publicly, you can also publicly share how you solved the problem to your customer's satisfaction—thus resolving the issue before the customer feels compelled to share his complaint so loudly that it becomes the most watched video on YouTube.

Listening is only half the battle. You still have to make plans for what you'll do with what you learn. But if you listen, then you can plan…instead of having to react in an emergency when it may be too late.

Listening for content curation.

Just as we listen to what customers think about our products, we can also listen to learn more about their interests. If we can find out what intrigues them, then we can create content strategies designed to serve their needs as well as our own goals. Listening also helps us select the content we share on our blogs and through our social media channels. Many companies just blog about themselves. Their Facebook status updates all relate to product news, usage tips and announcements. If you're Apple this type of content could be interesting enough to draw in readers. But if you manufacture plastic cow-making equipment it probably isn't.

By listening to your target audience (plastic cow and other novelty toy manufacturers) you can find out what else they want to hear. Perhaps they've shown an interest in toy trends or the development of new polymers that can produce more resilient cows. If you keep listening you can find blog articles, news stories and Web sites that appeal to their interests and share them through your social media channels.

When you become the go-to source for the information they seek, you give them a far better reason to follow you than if you only shared information about you.

Listening to converse

Imagine this conversation on Twitter. Here a dog food manufacturer quickly offends his new follower by talking at him, instead of to him. (No dogs were injured in the making of this video.)

The easiest people to listen to are the ones with whom we already have a connection. These include the people who comment on our blogs, the people we follow on Twitter, the friends we make on Facebook, Ning, etc. If we want to make friends, share information with peers, convert followers to customers, and so forth, we can begin to forge these connections by listening to them.

On Twitter this means reading your stream one or more times per day and responding to Tweets that are relevant to your industry or interest. If you have a Facebook Fan page this means visiting your page daily to respond to comments and posts made by fans. How often you do this depends on your own situation.

To those familiar with social media this seems obvious, but for those more accustomed to traditional publishing channels, this is a new idea.

When I was working at Case Western Reserve University I created the Case News Twitter account to share our latest news and press releases. These were (and still are) automatically posted to Twitter via Twitterfeed. I then started following Tweeps who might be interested in the university and followed back those who followed the account (with the exception of spammers).

Once a day (usually during lunch) I would skim through the stream to see what people had to say. If it was something related to Case or academia I would respond. In doing so I could answer questions, wish students good luck on exams, thank alumni for donating, etc. I also added event and other postings of interest that weren't included in the automated news feed. Doing this helped me connect with followers and gave me a better sense of what they wanted to hear from Case. It also showed readers that someone was listening and would respond if they wrote to us.

Many organizations just post without listening. This works fine for services like Twitter accounts that post weather updates. But for organizations that want to use social media to build business, posting without listening and responding can send a message that you don't really care what customers think. It can also lead to a rather boring Twitter stream that customers don't find interesting enough to read. This isn't unique to Twitter. The same principles apply to Facebook, Ning, YouTube, MySpace and others.

If you follow a large number of people you won't be able to read everything. But if you check in once or more per day, read all replies and skim the rest of the updates you'll easily find opportunities to converse.

How to listen: news, social media and related searches

Tools and services such as Radian 6 and Social Mention are designed to help with monitoring, but you can also learn a lot through targeted searches. By searching on brand and product names, keywords related to your industry, competitor names and related topics you can find news stories, blog posts, social media comments, discussion boards and other online resources related to what you are monitoring. Here are a few (of many) possible sites to use for social media and related searches.

• Addict-o-matic (social media monitoring)
• Board Tracker (discussion board search)
• Delicious (social bookmarks)
• Digg (crowdsourcing)
• Google News
• Google Blog Search
• How Sociable? (brand visibility scores - more useful for comparison w/competition)
• Reddit (crowdsourcing)
• Same Point (social media search)
• Social Mention (social media monitoring)
• StumbleUpon (crowdsourcing)
• Twitter Search
• Whos Talking (social media search)
• Yahoo Advanced News Search

You'll notice that some of these are typical search sites while others may include bookmarking and other services. Which of these is best for you will depend on your goals and your industry. Generally you'll find that you can choose a select combination of tools that suits your particular situation. Subscribing to blogs in your industry is also a useful way to find out what topics are hot in your field and discover articles you may wish to share with your followers.

The link to this Simpsons Coke commercial was the most popular message found when searching Twitter for "coke" today. (The Superbowl was yesterday, so it makes sense that a Coke ad would dominate the search results.)

When searching it is worth noting that it is easy to get false positives. If you are "Coca Cola" then most of your results for that phrase will be appropriate—but a search on "Coke" may also bring up posts that have nothing to do with refreshing fizzy beverages. Key word terms and phrases can be equally vague. A search on recruiting may bring results ranging from employment and military recruiting to student recruitment and recruiting for cults. But if you specify something like "executive recruiting" you can get more focused results. You may need to experiment a bit to find keyword combinations that provide the results you seek. For Twitter searches you can also compare your results for plain keywords and commonly used hashtags. #recruiting, for example, is popularly used as a hashtag for recruiting related to employment.

Subscribing and sharing via RSS Readers

Many of the search tools listed above will provide you with an RSS feed for your search. Feeds allow you to subscribe to your search so you don't have to conduct fresh searches each time you want to listen.

For those unfamiliar with RSS, such feeds function like magazine subscriptions. If you subscribed to the print edition of National Geographic, then a new issue would show up in your mail box each month. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, new articles show up in your feed reading software as they become available.

Google Reader is one of the most popular feed readers. Once you sign up for a Google Reader account you can subscribe to blog posts and search feeds and organize them by topics for easy viewing. To read the articles you just check Google Reader on a regular basis as you would check your e-mail account.

Slides 22-30 in the Listen Now, Talk Later presentation include a video and screen shots that demonstrate how one uses Google Reader. Google Reader is but one of many readers available, but most work in a similar manner. NetVibes is another popular choice. Some users also use e-mail programs such as Outlook to subscribe to feeds.

To listen is to learn

Listening takes time, but with the right tools we can find manageable ways to listen. What we learn will then guide us to better serve our audience. Now it's my turn to listen to you. I've only covered the broad strokes of this topic here. If you have more tips and ideas for social media listening, please share them in the comments below.

Social Media Listening Resources

When I pick the related links to share in my blog entries, I try to choose articles that will expand on what I've written, or offer a different perspective or insight, so that you can delve deeper into the topic. While some are found through Google I also find them using the listening strategies I've discussed in this post. The following were found via blogs I subscribe to, Twitter searches, Delicious and Google searches.

• 5 Simple Twitter Listening Tips Every Marketer Should Know by ReadWriteWeb's Elyssa Pallai
• Framing Your Social Media Efforts by Chris Brogan
• Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
• Listening Literacy For Nonprofits by Beth Kanter
• The Five W's of Social Media Listening by Chuck Hemann
• The Importance of Social Media Audits by Jeremiah Owyang

Fan me on Facebook - Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm sharing one tip per day, usually as a short paragraph with a link to something interesting I've found in the blogosphere. At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful. And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool. (I also have links to more accounts on My Social Media Profiles page.)

Note to local northeast Ohio readers: The Lake Erie Moose Society is holding its monthly meeting tonight, February 8, 2009. If you blog, or are thinking about blogging please feel free to join us.

There are a variety of ways one can measure such things, so I've chosen two methods to select the top 10 blog posts and have included all posts—not just those written in 2009. As it turns out, five entries made both lists, while 10 appeared only on one list. Three of the entries this year were also included last year in, 2 Top 5 Lists = 1 Top Ten List: My most read Web Development Blog entries from 2008.

Happy New Year from snow covered Cleveland!

Top 10 most popular posts according to the WordPress Popularity Contest plug-in

I discovered this plug-in earlier last year after reading Ari Herzog's post, Enhance Your WordPress Blog with 23 Plugins. Ari also used this methodology for his recent post, Top 9 Blog Posts Written Here in 2009—which just happens to include his post, Guest Interview with Heidi Cool: How a University Experiments with Social Media. So thank you Ari for a year's worth of great idea sharing!

The Popularity Contest Plug-in measures the popularity of posts based on a combination of factors including: Permalink Views, Home Views, Archive Views, Category Views, Tag Views, Feed Views, Comments, Pingbacks, Trackbacks and trackbacks.

Users can adjust how much weight is given to each factor. I just used the default values. Since comments are acquired over time and some of my posts are evergreen content (material that isn't time sensitive) this ranking may not be truly reflective of 2009 readership. The posts on this list include entries made as early as 2005, so some of the comments were also made before 2009.

1. An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Making sense of semantic HTML: an introduction for clients and new Web designers
3. Enhance your reputation & increase traffic by joining discussions on other blogs
4. Goal-driven social media strategies & tactics: how are you interacting with your target audience?
5. So you want to build a Web site
6. Twitter chats: if you can’t meet in real space, meet in real time.
7. 8 things to consider when redesigning your Web site—let’s start with WHY?
8. Is Flash evil? No, but Flash-based sites can be a marketing nightmare.
9. A writer’s obligations: ethics, law and pragmatism, Part 1: Law
10. Raising your Web site rankings

Top 10 most popular posts according to Google Analytics page views

This list is probably more reflective of 2009 traffic because it is based solely on pages views from last year. Naturally there are other factors one could consider, but for this list I thought I'd keep it simple.

1. An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. 8 things to consider when redesigning your Web site—let’s start with WHY?
3. Twitter chats: if you can’t meet in real space, meet in real time.
4. Your Flash site won’t seem so cool if visitors can’t use it.
5. Is Flash evil? No, but Flash-based sites can be a marketing nightmare.
6. Goal-driven social media strategies & tactics: how are you interacting with your target audience?
7. Converting Word documents to HTML
8. Blogging as the backbone of a social media strategy
9. 5 Tips to ensure your readers can read your HTML e-mail messages
10. Embedding YouTube Videos the Standards Compliant Way—SFWobject 2.0

While creating top 10 lists provides a fast way to churn out a new blog entry, the process also gives us insights into reader preferences. As bloggers we can use this knowledge to plan future articles that will also resonate with our readers. The "how-to" articles such as "converting word documents" and "embedding YouTube videos" seem to be consistently popular over time, so I should probably take this as a clue to write more in this genre.

If you want to dig deeper into your results, you can also compare your popular entries with your social media activities—to see if they were promoted more often than others. For example, So you want to build a Web site is the first entry in my Planning Your Web Site Tutorial. I frequently share this link in the Q&A section of LinkedIn and with clients, so I know some of this traffic is a direct result of those activities.

Top Commentators for 2009

While I'm perfectly happy to write for the sake of writing, it's nice to know that you folks are out there reading, reTweeting and commenting. Some posts garner more comments than others, but it's always fun to see the conversations evolve. The following list shows the most active commentators for 2009.

1. Tom Goering
2. Ari Herzog
3. Tashfeen
4. Kyle James
5. Artful Dodger
6. Greg Bowen
7. David
8. Ron
9. Michael Stoner
10. dave
11. David
12. Ron
13. Paul Falgout
14. Mark Keating
15. Escorial
16. Seo Tampa
17. David Sher
18. Tonya

This list was compiled using the Show Top Commentators plug-in. I included more than 10 because some people made the same number of comments. While a few of the people on the list are those who may have stumbled upon the blog via search or by following a link, a good portion of these folks are friends I've made through social media such as Pownce and Twitter. The list also includes fellow contributors to BlogHighEd, some of whom I've had the pleasure of meeting in person.

These connection points offer a good example of how social networking works. We listen more closely to the people we're more connected with, thus we may comment on their blogs more often and vice versa. Our Tweets and Facebook updates also help alert our friends when we have new entries. I subscribe to several of the blogs penned by the folks on this list, but I'll often see their posts in Twitter (and click through to read them) before I see them in Google Reader. There are some excellent writers in the bunch so I encourage you to explore their sites.

I'd like to thank all of the commentators for contributing their ideas to the blog this year, but in particular I'd like to thank Tom Goering of NavyCS. Tom started commenting on the blog several years ago. We've since connected on both StumbleUpon and Twitter, but I think it's rather cool that he's kept up with the blog over time and continued to be an active commentator.

Thank you Tom and all the other readers and commentators who continue to give me reasons to blog. Happy New Year! - Heidi

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Sometimes navigating a blog can feel like wandering through a maze.

For example, let's pretend we're going to visit a typically organized blog about trees—to see if we can learn something new about Dutch elm disease. We go to the site and see that there is a category for elms with 32 entries. When we click on the elm category we are taken to a page with the 5 most recent posts. These cover topics such as Hairy Fruited Glaucescent Elm, the use of elm wood in coffin-making, Winged Elm and so forth, but not Dutch elm disease. So we go to the bottom of the page, click the "previous posts link" and go to a page with 5 more entries. We then repeat the process until we find the article we seek—or we give up and use the search box (if there is one).

As you can imagine all of this scrolling and clicking can make it rather hard to find things. But it doesn't have to be this way. By making a few adjustments to our template themes, we can alter categories to list headlines instead of full posts, we can create tag pages to let people browse specific topics—as they might peruse the index of a book, and so forth. Below are a few tips on things you can do to make your blog more browsable.

Blogging Platforms Vary

Different blog platforms offer different levels of flexibility when it comes to customizing your site. Most of these tips will require some experience with HTML, CSS and PHP. If you are using a hosted blogging service such as WordPress.com, Blogger or TypePad you won't be able to edit as much, but you may be able to find other themes that offer some of these features.

My blog uses a self-hosted installation of WordPress.org. In it's prior incarnation at http://blog.case.edu/webdev, it ran on Movable Type 3.121 so those are the platforms I'll reference here. (If you are using Movable Type 4, you may need to check the MT documentation. Learning Movable Type is also an excellent resource.)

Alphabetical Index

I added an alphabetical index to my blog several years back because I wanted an easy way to see a list of all my entries on one page. My archives page at that time broke entries out by month so they weren't all listed together, but I also felt that it would be easier to browse things in alpha order.

As it turns out, I visit this page almost every day. If I'm on LinkedIn or Twitter and want to share a link to a specific post—as part of my response to someone—I go to the alpha index to find the link.

Movable Type

Adding an alpha index on MT is pretty easy. When you create the new page for your index, just add the following code:

<MTEntries lastn="300" offset="0" sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">
<ul>
<li><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink archive_type="Individual"$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a> <span class="smalldate"> <$MTEntryDate format="%m/%d/%Y"$> - <MTEntryAuthorNickname></span></li>
</ul>
</MTEntries>

If you look at the code you'll see the options are fairly intuitive.This produces a list of entry titles with dates and authors. (In the early days I had a co-author so I felt it would be useful to identify the posts by author). I set lastn to 300 because the default setting would limit it to a smaller number of headlines. Thus I just chose a number greater than the number of articles I had at the time. Periodically I would increase this number to allow for more posts.

WordPress

WordPress is wonderful in many ways, but when I started learning WP, after years of using MT, I discovered that it can be a very different beast. I couldn't find some easy little snippet of code to pop into my template. After a bit of time spent glaring at the WordPress loop and doing Google searches I ended up using the AZIndex plugin by English Mike. This plug-in offers a variety of options such as making an index for specific categories, making an index that excludes categories, indexing pages instead of posts, etc.

Category Lists

If this were a food blog, I might assign an article on cooking rib roast to categories such as "meat" and "roasting," a sub-category of "beef" and a tag of "rib roast".

Category pages and lists are only useful if you assign your posts to the appropriate categories. Too many categories can be just as confusing to visitors as too few.

I like to think of categories as general sections—like you might see in a grocery store. You might have categories for meat, produce, dairy, etc. For specific topics within a category you might create sub-categories such as pork, vegetables and cheese. Then to be more precise you can use tags such as bacon, peapods and Brie. This seems like the ideal way to organize one's posts. My blog is not set-up the ideal way—I have too many categories and they need to be cleaned up.

Once you've assigned your post to the appropriate categories you can think about how you will present those to visitors. Many blogs will list all the categories in a side menu (on WordPress this is often done using a categories widget). A surprising number of blogs don't list them at all. Since I have too many categories, I list them on a separate categories page so they don't clutter up my sidebar.

Creating a Categories List on Movable Type

On the old blog I added the categories list using the following code. I formatted it as a definition list just in case I ended up using subcategories or descriptions.

<h3>Categories</h3>

<dl>
<MTTopLevelCategories show_empty="1">
<dt><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a> (<$MTCategoryCount$> entries)</dt>
<dd><$MTCategoryDescription$>

<MTSubCategories>
<MTSubCatIsFirst><dl></MTSubCatIsFirst>
<dt><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a> (<$MTCategoryCount$> entries)</dt>
<dd>
<$MTCategoryDescription$>
<MTSubCatsRecurse>
</dd>
<MTSubCatIsLast></dl></MTSubCatIsLast>
</MTSubCategories>
</dd>
</MTTopLevelCategories>
</dl>

Creating a Categories List on WordPress

To make the list for WordPress I created a new template file called categorylist.php in which I put the following code:

<?php
/*
Template Name: categorylist
*/
?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div id="midbox">
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<div id="maincontent">

<h2>Categories</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats(); ?>
</ul>

</div>
</div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

I then uploaded the file to my themes directory. Next I went to the WordPress dashboard and created a new page called Categories. I left the entry box blank and selected "categorylist" as the template to use for the page. After that I added the link to the page in my side menu by editing the sidebar.php file.

Category Archive Pages

As I mentioned in the beginning, many blogs include complete posts on their individual categories pages. These can be harder to browse, so I prefer to use lists. For example, if you visit the SEO category archive you'll see a list of blog entries on the topic along with the date they were posted and the number of comments on each. One can also set up such lists to include an excerpt for each entry to give visitors a better sense of the topic.

Creating Category Archive Pages on Movable Type

Category archives are a standard feature in Movable Type. I edited mine to use the following code:

<h3>Entries in "<$MTArchiveTitle$>"</h3>
<p class="photoleft"><img alt="feedicon16w.gif" src="http://blog.case.edu/webdev/2007/05/14/feedicon16w.gif" width="16" height="16" /></p>

<h2><a href="rss20.xml">RSS Feed</a></h2>

<MTEntries>
<$MTEntryTrackbackData$>

<MTDateHeader>
<h2><$MTEntryDate format="%x"$></h2>
</MTDateHeader>

<h5><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></h5>
<p><$MTEntryExcerpt$></p>

</MTEntries>

In this case I used headers and paragraphs rather than a list format. Technically I should have used an <h6> instead of an <h2> for hierarchical reasons. I think <h2> just happened to be available while <h6> was already designated for something else on the site. If you visit the SEO Category page for this example you will see that the list includes the entry excerpts. I've also included an RSS feed at the top for anyone who might wish to subscribe to the feed for just this category, rather than for the whole blog.

If you have individual category feeds you can also use that content to republish them in other places. For example when I was at Case Western Reserve University, we would use the Alumni category feed from the News Center (which I built as a Movable Type Blog) to publish those headlines on the Alumni Web site. (They are no longer doing that on the new site.)

Creating Category Archive Pages on WordPress

WordPress uses the archives.php file to control category (and other) page archives. If you wanted to modify your category archives but leave the others as they are, you could save a copy of this as category.php and edit that file. Here on this blog I simply edited archives.php to add my RSS feed and to list entry titles rather than full posts. Mostly this is just a matter of removing
<?php the_content(); ?> so that the posts won't be included.

If you visit the SEO Category page for this example you will see that the list only includes the titles, date and number of comments.

If I had instead changed <?php the_content(); ?> to <?php the_excerpt(); ?> then you would see excerpts under the titles.

Since the code is a bit long to post here, I created a page showing the code from archive.php for your reference. WordPress provides a great deal of flexibility with these files. You can learn more in the category templates section of the WP Codex.

Tags

As I mentioned earlier tags are a good way to mark posts as belonging to a very specific topic. For example if I put this post in the blogging category, it may be appropriate to tag it with WordPress, Movable Type, alpha index, categories, browsing and navigation. Then users looking for posts mentioning these topics can find them in my Tag index.

SEO plug-ins such as All-in-one-SEO can also use your tags as keywords.

Tags on Movable Type

Tags were introduced to Movable Type in version 3. On the blog system we had at Case.edu, they were used interchangeably with categories (which is why my blog is still so category heavy). So when my blog was on that system I did not have a separate tags page, though some people were using tag clouds on their blogs. Rather than showing you a piece of code I've not actually used myself, here are some links to tag related resources for Movable Type:

• Tag Cloud on PHP in Movable Type 4
• How to Make a Subject Index Using Tags

Tags on WordPress

If your blog uses a widgetized theme, there is a widget to add a tag cloud to your sidebar. My blog isn't using widgets because I'm customizing my sidebar by hand. And, as with categories, I didn't want to clutter up the menu so I put it on a separate tags page. Naturally this will become more useful after I clean up and reorganize my categories and tags, but it's good to have the page ready.

To make this page I created a new template file called taglist.php in which I included the following code:

<?php
/*
Template Name: taglist
*/
?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div id="midbox">
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<div id="maincontent">

<?php query_posts("cat=26");
$tag_list = wp_tag_cloud('format=array&orderby=name&order=ASC&smallest=1
&largest=1&unit=em&number=0');
if (!empty($tag_list)) {
echo "<h3>Web Development Blog Tags:</h3><ul>";
foreach ($tag_list as $key => $tag) {
echo "<li>$tag</li>";
}
echo "</ul></div><!-- end tags -->";
}

?>

</div>
</div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Since I wanted an alphabetical list of tags, rather than a cloud I set it to use orderby=name and set smallest and largest to be the same size. In a cloud one would normally make largest use a larger size. Then I formatted it to use an unordered list to present the tags.

Next I added a new page called Tags List in the WP dashboard, just as I did for the categories list, but this time I set it to use the taglist template.

Let's make our blogs more browsable for 2010

Whether building a regular Web site or a static blog, I think it helps to give users easy pathways to your content. The above suggestions are but a few of many ways you can make your blog more browsable. Other features can include breadcrumbs, next/previous links, etc. You can even create special topic pages in which you gather together a group of related posts, such as I've done with my Planning Your Web site Tutorial page.

There are also many methods for implementing such features. You might choose to do the same things using a different bit of code, or a plug-in that suits your needs.

If your blog currently uses the typical format that shows post after post after post, try exploring it from your readers perspective. Wander around and see how it feels to browse. Your content is different than mine, so as you explore you may come up with some fresh ideas that I've not thought about. Or you may have already implemented navigation features that make your blog more browsable.

How else might we improve the blog navigation experience? What problems have you encountered, on other blogs, that might be fixed by a few navigation adjustments? Please share your thoughts and ideas below.

Happy Blogging in the New Year!

Other writer's thoughts on blog navigation

• Add Google-Style Page Navigation to your Category and Search Pages
• Blog Navigation and the Ongoing Challenges that Arise
• Blog Navigation WordPress Plugins: Related, Recent, Most Popular Posts and More
• How to Blog Design Style Guide
• Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

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