In album Visit to Fallsington Meeting 2010 (6 photos)
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Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ visit
July 9, 2011
A traveling bus museum visits Quakerranter HQ
November 8, 2010
This weekend we’ve had a museum parked in our driveway. It’s the “BUS-eum” from the Traces Center for History and Culture in St. Paul, hosting a traveling exhibit on German POW’s in the US during World War II. We were happy to host the BUS-eum’s Irving Kellman over the weekend in-between stops in Cape May Courthouse and Vineland. I asked him to give us the story of the German POWs on video.
As you might guess, there was a lot of Quaker connections in the 1940, with American Friends Service Committee involvement. Traces’ director Michael Luick-Thrams is a Friend and did his PhD thesis on the Scattergood Hostel, a refugee camp set up at the then-abandoned Friends school in Iowa. Many of the BUS-eum’s stops are Friends Schools, with public libraries being another common destination.
The visit was made with help from FGC’s Directory of Traveling Friends. I think this is the first time we’ve actually had a visitor after a decade of being listed there (most past inquiries have fallen through when they looked at a map and realized our distance from Pendle Hill, New York City or whatever other destination brought them east).
DiMeo Blueberry Farms & Nursery
June 9, 2010
The DiMeo family owns and operates several of the largest blueberry farms in the world, right here in the “blueberry capital of the world”: Hammonton, New Jersey. They have an existing website that is hand-edited. We created a second site using WordPress.
On launch it has much of the same content as the other site, but arranged into posts and categorized and tagged for search engine visibility. It also highlights the DiMeo Blueberry Farms’ Facebook, Twitter and Youtube outlets. I’ll be interested to see how it gets picked up by search engines and how visitors start to use it
Visit site: DiMeo Blueberry Farms
Cleaning Services Guide, E‑Book
August 22, 2009
A local client from Tabernacle in Burlington County came to me with an interesting project. He’s owned a commercial cleaning company for a number of years and has heard his share of horror stories about the cleaning services clients hired before finding him! This experience led him to write a PDF e‑book about how to hire the right cleaning service. What a great idea and a what a useful book this is for small business owners.
The site’s on a bit of a budget so it’s a simple design, with colors and general look-and-feel borrowed from a site the client likes. Simple editing comes via CushyCMS. When customers click to buy, they are sent to Paypal for the actual transaction and then forwarded to E‑Junkie, which provides the automated and integrated PDF download.
Visit the site: Office Manager’s Guide to Hiring the Best Cleaning Service
Impromput Hammonton area Friends worship
March 13, 2009
My F/friend Raye Hodgson is taking a train from Connecticut to South Jersey next week for a visit, and locals and would-be visitors are invited to my house for some worship! Raye’s involved with Ohio Conservative and New England Friends and seems to be doing a cool sustainable agriculture project these days (which I didn’t know except for Google!)
It’s next Thursday, the 19th at 7:30pm in Hammonton. If you want to join but don’t have my address just send me an email and I’ll provide details. There’s also a Facebook event listing for this. If enough people are interested we can have more occasional Conservative/Convergent/Emergent Quakerly worship in this part of South Jersey! If you can’t make it but are intrigued by the idea, let me know and I’ll keep you in the loop.
UPDATE: The worship went well, about half a dozen people showed up. If you want to be alerted to any follow-up worship opportunities in the Hammonton area send me an email and I’ll add you to my list.
No pictures please
November 28, 2007
Since I use this blog as a bit of a personal journal, to remember dates and happenings, I should dutifully note that last night was the time four year old Theo pushed two year old Francis off the footstool while brushing teeth, causing said Francis to fall precipitously against the bathtub and open a nasty gash in his chin. Three hours and a Martin/Francis emergency room visit later there were four stitches in the poor guy’s chin. I’ll spare you all a description of the initial mess or the difficulty of holding down a screaming child while the doctor tries to put the stitches in. Everything is fine now. And no, no photos or Youtube videos of the proceedings. Maybe I’ll snap a picture of the stitches so Francis can see just where that scar came from!
Marketing and Publicizing Your Site
August 8, 2006
“Build it and they will come” is not a very good web strategy.
Instead, think “if I spent $3000 on a website but no visitors came, did
I spend $3000?” There are no guarantees that anyone will ever visit a
site. But there are ways to make sure they do.
Much of web marketing follows the rules of any other mode of
publicity: identify an audience, build a brand, appeal to a lifestyle
and keep in touch with your customers and their needs. A sucessful web
campaign utilizes print mailings, manufactured buzz, genuine word of
mouth and email. Finances can limit the options available but everyone
can do something.
One of the most exciting aspects of the internet is that the most
popular sites are usually those that have something interesting to
offer visitors. The cost of entry to the web is so low that the little
guys can compete with giant corporations. A good strategy involves
finding a niche and building a community around it. Personality and idiosyncracy are actually competitive advantages!
It would be cruel of me to just drop off a completed website at the
end of two months and wash my hands of the project. Many web designers
do that, but I’m more interested in building sites that are used. I can
work with you on all aspects of publicity, from design to launch and
beyond to analyzing visitor patterns to learn how we can serve them better.
Making sites sticky
We don’t want someone to visit your site once, click on a few links
and then disappear forever. We want to give your visitors reasons to
come back frequently, a quality we call “sticky” in web parlance. Is
your site a useful reference site? Can we get visitors to sign up for
email updates? Is there a community of users around your site?
Making sites search engine friendly
Google. We all want Google to visit our sites. One of the biggest
scams out there are the companies that will register your site for only
$300 or $500 or $700. The search engines get their
competitive advantage by including the whole web and there’s no reason
you need to pay anyone to get the attention of the big search engines.
The most important way to bring Google to your site is to build it
with your audience in mind. What are the keywords you want people to
find you with? Your town name? Your business? Some specific quality of
your work? I can build the site from the ground up to highlight those
phrases. Here too, being a niche player is an advantage.
I know lots of Google tricks. One site of mine started attracting four times the visits after its programmer and I redesigned it for Google. My sites are so well indexed that if I often get visitors searching for
the oddest things. We can actually tell when visitors come from search
engines and we can even tell what they’re searching for! Google
apparently thinks I know “how to flatten used sod” and am the guy to
ask if you wonder “do amish women wear bras.” I can make sure your important search terms also get noticed by Google and the rest!