Social media is a term you’ve probably heard but if you haven’t it broadly means allowing users to engage with website content and each other. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are known as social networking sites because their primary purpose is to allow people to make contact and share thoughts, comments & content. Other sites like The Guardian or YouTube allow comments to be added around their content thus making their content ‘social’. So why not let your website users comment on your content, share ideas & thoughts etc. In other words, use the features of social networking on your own website.
One of the ongoing annoyances for committed users of the web is the number of user profiles we need to create to engage with the all these websites. Fortunately, Google’s recently launched social networking platform, Friend Connect allows us to embed social networking tools into our websites without the need to ask users to create a new profile when they want to use the features.
Adding the various free widgets will allow you to create a plug & play community for your website without the barriers usually associated with setting up and using a social network. You won’t need any programing skills but you will need (ftp) access to your server to set it up.
If you want to share large files with your suppliers (videos, photos, artwork etc), the best service I’ve found is drop.io. There are lots of file sharing services out there but what’s so great about this one is that it is totally free (up to 100MB per file), its quick and doesn’t require registration or other annoying shenanigans. If your data is particularly sensitive you can password protect it at no extra cost. The premium versions of the service allow much larger data storage and shorter url’s (not that the 7 characters of the free version are too long). Quite simply there’s not much more you could want from an online file sharing service. If you think there’s something better please let me know.
If you’re planning a new website or an update to an existing site, its a good idea to think through what sections are going to be included and how the website’s going to grow over time. This used to be done with PostIt notes and a pen but the sparkly free service over at WriteMaps is so much easier and you don’t loose your afternoon’s work when the wind blows through the window!
Of course in this web 2.0 world its a free service, allows you to work collaboratively with your team and the interface is simple. Perfect!
If your site is looking a bit tired and perhaps rather dull, using a few images to break it up is a great idea. Typically, stock images can cost a lot to licence for online use, however a number of websites offer good quality stock images for free.
One of the most well known and a site I have used several times is Stock Exchange. The selection is good and the quality is certainly good enough for most projects especially if you spend a bit of time editing the images for your specific application. Make sure you check the licencing terms of any image you use as sometimes the photographer will require you to tell them where its being used (usually for interest sake more than anything else).
Another great source of images is searching through Creative Commons licenced shots. Flickr’s advanced search provides options towards the bottom of the form, for searching only those images which can be licensed (via Creative Commons) for use on your website.
Everyone knows listening to your customers is a vital part of developing your product offering. However, in the traditional world its a bit tricky and can be very costly. Well, in the online world its a lot easier and (obviously?) you can get it done for free. SurveyMonkey is one of the better services for setting up a questionnaire and the free service allows you to ask 10 questions of up to 100 people. Take a look it might make a massive difference to actually hear what your customers really think!
Capturing ideas and suggestions from your customers or potential customers is a vital part of developing your product and customer base. Its really easy to take a more structured approach to customer feedback by using the excellent Uservoice. The service is currently free (while its in beta) and I suspect it’ll move to a ‘freemium’ model once its live. Users can leave new suggestions for you or vote for the features that they feel would best enhance your product offering. By including a snipet of code on your website you can add a button to allow customers to add feedback with the click of a button without actually leaving your site. Once you choose to implement an idea you can interact with contributors via the service which really does create the kind of reactive “we’re listening” kind of feel any good business wants.
I’ve just been looking for a decent web based image editor for cropping and scaling images without having to buy desktop software. Well I found Picnik and what a beauty she is! It allows you to do all the basic features of Photoshop with some of the more advanced stuff like filters thrown in for good measure. If you need to scale some images for your website look no further than this excellent free app.
I had to find a solution for a client who wanted to be able to upload news articles to their otherwise static website. Having looked at options like Adobe Contribute and not really seen the benefit, I thought Blogger’s FTP publishing setting must be worth a look. Sure enough, you can customise the template to simply output a list of news articles without all the usual blogger stuff on the page. So you’re really just using Blogger’s interface and article management tools…which as you’d expect from Google are very user friendly. Once you’ve FTP’d the finished pages to your server, you can then either include these lightweight pages in a news page by using a server-side script language like php or asp. If you don’t have access to a scripting language on your server, you can simply use an iframe to embed the content. Slick, free and very quick to set up – winner!
