Three developer resources for the inspired-less

Inspiration is hard, and at times seems impossible.

There are times when everything I put together feels great; I have one of those Mozart moments where that first version is the best version and the last version. Then of course there are times when getting something as simple as a donate button or a 125x125 ad to look the way I want it to seems impossible. It’s simple to do, but when it just doesn’t look like something you want to take credit for – inspiration feels completely unattainable.

To reduce these moments of frustration (and the accompanying mouse banging) I made it a point recently to include design blogs and resources into my daily feeds and "reads", and while I’ve yet to put together any awe-inspiring donate buttons, the exposure has done a lot to get ideas boiling. I’d like to share 3 of my new favorite resources.

Webdesigner Depot

Of all the websites I cover, Webdesigner is the one I frequent the most. They’re consistent with getting an interesting post up every day, and they tweet (http://twitter.com/DesignerDepot) several times a day, often linking to designs/photos/images and tutorials I would not have come across unless I was following them.

Beyond being a design blog however, the real hook for me to this site is that everything isn’t just centered on designing, but design.  An example of this can be seen in a recent post titled “Apple vs Microsoft  - A Website Usability Study” [link]. Typically, comparison of these 2 companies puts their respective OS’s against each other (which in turn starts a flame war in the comments section with Apple fanboys and Microsoft users), but instead, this post compared their product websites. Each “pride themselves on producing cutting edge consumer and business products”, but which reflected it better on their website? Which had a better search function? Which showcased their products best? Which flowed best? But most importantly – why and how did they achieve it?

WebDesigner Wall

I often wish I knew everything there is to know about web design. To be like a Superman, tights, cape and all (while sitting at my desk), but instead of super powers, I’d be a super web designer. Back to reality though, there’s just no time.

WebDesigner Wall topics are wide ranging include product reviews, giveaways and job listings, but my favorite thing here are the tutorials, all categorized perfectly in their tag cloud. Topic tags include core elements like SEO, design trends and design processes – all easy to filter through and find on the sidebar. Now when I have 30 minutes to spare, rather than getting lost in Digg, I find performing their quick tutorials hugely helpful. (That is to say, Digg is my kryptonite, and WebDesigner Wall is my Lois Lane.)

Six Revisions

Six Revisions to me is less like a blog, and more like an online magazine.

Like the last two, it has tutorials and freebies, but it offers it in a more robust way. The articles are longer, that is, they’re usually more thorough and the freebies (mostly textures and Photoshop brushes) are displayes and hosted for download on their own site. My favorite thing about Six Revisions is that the topics, while still web design and development focused, are all so randomly relevant. That is, one day it’s an article about improving web development [link], another day about time tracking apps for billing [link], and then the next day they're providing links to shortcut and design cheat sheets [link].

Staying up to date with topics that come up often as a developer has been much easier with since discovering Six Revision. (It also helps that their founder is on Twitter (twitter.com/jggube).)

Keyword Madness Solved

These days, it seems everyone struggles with their keywords; they just seem to grasp at anything in their site's content that may have the slightest possibility of helping them generate traffic. I think people over thinking the problem, so I want to share one of my solutions for generating great keywords.

I use a site Keyword Spy which allows you to type in a site or keyword and get a large amount of relevant information that you can use to generate larger list and better target your audience through search engines.

If you type a keyword into the search box, the site will give you the number of search results for that keyword and the number of clicks a day it generates, along with the average cost per click on ppc campaigns, and the sites using that keyword in their ppc campaigns.

From there, you can dig deeper so you can look at the list of people advertising on that keyword and see what other keywords they are advertising on.  For example, I did a search on the keyword "water", which returned the results you can see in the image above.  Now looking down the list of those who pay for advertising on that word, we find several companies and nonprofits, so by clicking on one of those sites we can get information on just how that site is doing, its advertising items, including a list of the paid and organic keywords being used to generate traffic.

This is where is gets really handy, and where we answer the question which keywords to use. Keyword Spy will give you a list of the keywords combined with a rating for their return on investment, search ranking position, competition ranking, average clicks per day and the average cost per click for every keyword in the list.  This will help you determine exactly which keywords are going to help you more and which ones you are going to be competing a little more on.

Now for those using ppc campaigns to drive traffic to your site, you can even get a list of ad variations that articular site is using, which can help you get ideas for how to word your own ads.

Finally, it will let you export the list of keywords to either a text or Excel document so that you can save them and use them wherever you like, however you prefer.

Now Keyword Spy does have two levels of membership: the first is free, which is honestly all that I use since it gives you quite a bit of information there.  If you decide you need more, then upgrade to the Pro account, which is $139.95 a month.  But, for the average nonprofit just looking to drive more traffic and awareness, I think this is a bit extreme. Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think. It has always worked well for me.

Ways of Sharing Video Online

It is pretty common for everyone to want to share videos of what their organization is doing so that their constituents and volunteers can keep actively involved in the efforts.  So today I figured I would give a few options of how to share a video on your site, which is best for you is really based on your needs and specific circumstances.

The first is YouTube.  I think by now almost everyone is at least familiar with what YouTube is and how it works but for those who are not let me explain.  YouTube is an online service that will allow you to create an account which you can upload your video to and share it with the world across the interenet.  The reason I like to use YouTube is that it is very viral, meaning videos spread fast and have the ability to be shared really anywhere else online while not causing you to deal with huge bandwidth costs on your hosting server.

Another nice way to host your videos online is Vimeo. Vimeo offers some features similar to YouTube in that they will host the video and provide an embedd code so that others can show your video on their own site.  While this helps to spread the video Vimeo unfortunately does not have as large of a community as YouTube which can cause it to spread a little slower.

Finally you can host the video yourself.   For this I prefer to convert the video to work with an FLV format, and use the JW FLV Player to run the video.  I like this player for how easy it is to set up and get running on a site.  It is not as simple as YouTube or Vimeo but in the instance where you cannot for whatever reason place the video on a third parties platform this is a great solution.  The basics of setting up th eplayer are to upload the files that control the player, the video and then insert a script into the code of the page you want to display the video.  Realizing this may not be an quick task for those with little to know coding experience they have created a great installation guide with code you can just copy and paste where you need it.

Of course there are more ways to share videos online and play them on your site, these are simply the ones I use the most often. 

6 Resources for Nonprofit Blog Post Ideas: Got BlogFlow?

So your organization has thought about all the reasons your nonprofit should blog and you've decided blogging is for you. Things have been going well for a while, but now you've hit a dry spell. You don't want to abandon your blog, but you're having trouble maintaining blog flow and ideas aren't coming to you as easily.

It's been said a thousand times that content is king so here are 6 resources to get your organization's blog back on the horse and help you maintain your blog flow with continuing ideas.

1. Your Audience

Your readers are a great place to start when searching for blog post ideas. Your constituents have a unique perspective on your mission and will appreciate you addressing issues they have noted are important to them. For starters you may try highlighting an idea or question raised by a reader in the comments of a previous article. This goes a long way towards developing an invested readership for your blog.

Another idea is to expand further on an article from your organization's newsletter that you know was popular with readers from your analytics data. Since you know the initial article was popular you can be confident that readers will appreciate your delving into that particular issue further, especially if you approach the issue from a novel perspective on your blog.

2. Social Networks

If your organization is already active on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook you can easily ask your followers what they are interested in learning about and what kind of posts they would like to see from your organization. You can also ask a question to your followers and share the responses you get in a blog post so blog readers can reflect and react out loud in the comments with you to the responses you present.

Twitter in particular can be a rich source of ideas that you can tap into even if you aren't active in the network. Using search.twitter.com you can input search terms relevant to your organization to view recent tweets filled with ideas, questions, links to articles, and multimedia relevant to your mission. If you're stuck for an idea, Twitter can be a great resource to get your thinking started and give you something to chew on for a post in a pinch.

3. AllTop

Alltop is a site from Guy Kawasaki where you can easily explore different topics and see the work of many active bloggers in one place. Sifting through the site is bound to spur your creativity or help you find something interesting to use as a jumping off point. The site likely already has categories relevant to your organization's issue area and there area also categories in good, nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, human rights, and green.

4. News Media

Another place you can turn to if you when you're strapped for an idea for your organization's blog is current events. Check out national newspapers or local newspapers if your nonprofit is locally based. Also don't forget about magazines and industry publications that may be hanging around your office somewhere. It's likely that many of your constituents subscribe to the same or similar publications. Developing your perspective about something going on in the world or the implications of a current event on your organization's work or the relevancy of news to your industry of issue area as a whole is likely to draw the interest of your audience as well. This is an opportunity for you to develop your blog's voice and demonstrate your organization's ability to think strategically about your environment and future.

5. Your RSS Reader

Use an RSS Reader like Google Reader to subscribe to relevant feeds. You can subscribe to the blog feeds of other nonprofits working in your issue area, experts working in your field, nonprofit news sources, and other sources so you always have something relevant to read to jump start your thinking. RSS feeds are also one of the easiest ways to ensure you don't miss news in your industry or new programs from your competitors in case you need to respond quickly to your constituents.

6. Borrow Ideas

Of course you can always cheat and borrow or riff on an idea from someone else. Many people write about blogging and ideas and lucky for you they have shared lists of blog ideas that they hope others will borrow from. Here are just a few from creative folks like Chris Brogan, Skellie and some further advice on beating blogger's block from Orna Ross to get you started.

photo by eyeliam