From the Lab: 10 Tools to use for your Website Outreach

In no particular order, here's a list of ten tools you can use in your website outreach efforts. You can link to these, embed them on your site, or use them in addition to your standard website. We use these to put in more interactivity and functionality on a site.

We're always testing new functions and invite you to make a list of the types of functionality you want on your own website prior to contacting us for an estimate.

1) Viddler. http://www.viddler.com

This site allows you to create a video directly from your webcam, and store it in high quality on your account.

Twitter widget

2) Twitter Widgets.

https://www.twitter.com/goodies/widgets

Embed these into your website to keep people updated with your latest tweets.

We do some mashups of these, for example if you want to have multiple people's tweets on one website, you can specify which tweets go where.

We also use a combination of:

http://www.cotweet.com to schedule tweets and handle multiple accounts, 

http://www.TwitterFeed.com to send blog RSS fees to different Twitter accounts, and

http://www.ping.fm to auto-post items to specific accounts, including Twitter accounts.

I really think Twitter is a great solution for live, real-time, topical search on a specific item, trending topic, or person.

3) Voki.com

http://www.voki.com allows you to create an avatar and use it in your website. Good for interactive learning sessions. I could see this being very good for a language tutoring site, or a site where the primary audience is children. Lots of different avatars are available.

4) Facebook Fans pages and Facebook Groups. 

Yet another mixed bag. The Fans page is currently what Facebook encourages you to sign up with, and it's good for posting updates; however, I still like the Groups functionality for the ability to send messages to all the members.

Here's our 10K Webdesign Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/10K-Webdesign/179521834143

5) Wallwisher

http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/monicadear

Wallwisher sample

Another fun little tool to allow open postings on a graffiti-type wall - people can post text or a link to existing images, video, or audio.

The more we do work with the open-source community and educational and informational companies, the more I think this type of anonymous and no-login-necessary environment is good --- you can leave messages and self-organize for events or items of interest.

6) Flickr for photosharing

http://www.flickr.com

Flickr Sample

Great for organizing images for those of you who have image-heavy sites, such as realtors, property managers, photographers, and the like. You can offer a pre-assigned "tag" and allow photographers to tag their own photos, then have them appear in a pool that you can then publish on your website. 

Set up your badge: http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne

7) Soundcloud

For music samples http://soundcloud.com/monicadear

Soundcloud sample

Good for musicians and those who need to receive audio from clients. You can set up your own tracks and also a dropbox to accept other people's music.

8) Yelp

This review site is still a standby for posting reviews, so if you are a brick-and-mortar business, consider asking your customers to review you here.

http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=QCgfezk_UD3Q3Tz2APieCg

9) Ning networks

If you absolutely must set up a network and don't have a budget to host it and maintain it yourself, consider using the Ning platform to quickly launch your community site. Sample functionality includes discussion boards, groups, comments, member "walls", photo galleries, videos, blogs, and an event calendar. 

Pricing: http://about.ning.com/plans/

Sample Ning site

Sample of Ning sites where I participate are:

http://www.techhui.com

http://www.thebossnetwork.org

10) Posterous.com for Blogging

This is currently my favorite blogging software http://www.posterous.com (along with the old standbys http://www.wordpress.com and the newer http://www.tumblr.com)

What I like about Posterous is how easy it is to use. You can post by e-mail. You can schedule posts. Posterous automatically formats and "handles" images and videos. It is also very easy to "autopost" and "push" your content from your Posterous blog to all your other social networks. For example, I post to my personal blog and that pushes to my Twitter feed, Facebook page, and Wordpress, Tumblr, and Xanga accounts. Easy, nice, and simple.

Also consider buying your domain name directly from Godaddy.com or our domain registrar http://www.10khosting.com, and then setting up your domain name to point to your posterous account. I do this with: http://www.monicasflores.com