Nice But Not Necessary ... More Web Services

The more information that you can put on the web about you and the work you do, the more interested Makers will be in getting you to do work for them. Here are some options that you might find worthwhile

Blogs:

A blog is short for a "web log", and is a series of short postings that are each self-contained. Since blog postings are short and quick to write, a blog is easier to maintain and keep current than a website. Blogger, owned by Google, is a popular free blogging service, and Google Sites has a blog-like page as one of it's templates...here's an example from our sample web page.

Online Photo and Video Sites:

Makers will ALWAYs want to see pictures of your work, but it can be a lot of work to keep a website current. One option is to use one of the online photo hosting sites like Flickr, or Picasa that comes with a Google account. Picasa also has a free photo editing and organizing program that can make dealing with images much easier.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth much more! Most digital cameras these days have a video mode for taking short video clips, and there are lots of inexpensive video cameras available like the Flip camera. If you take video of your work you can post them for free on youTube and either link to them from your website or directly embed the video in a page.

One quick note on posting images or videos online: Make sure you add insightful "tags" to your images and videos when you post them, so that people can find them easily when searching. "100kGarages", "Fabber", and "ShopBotter" would be good ones, plus anything that descriptive of the work.

Social Networking:

There are lots of "social networking" sites that are used by businesses and interest groups to interact with their customers and potential customers. Facebook is one of the most popular...there's a "100kGarages Fan site" on Facebook ...along with Twitter for posting short, 140 character updates.

There's lots of information on the web about using Social Networking sites for business and a once again a Google search will turn up thousands, but the Enabling the Social Company pdf by the Enthusiast Group give lots of examples and ideas in an easy-to-read format. And Chris Brogan's list of 50 ideas on Using Twitter for Business will help get you thinking about the benefits of using Social Networking services for your business.

Keeping Track of How Well It's Working ... Google Analytics:

It's hard to tell how well your website is working unless you can track the hits and see both where visitors come from and were they go. Our friend Google offers a free tool called Google Analytics that lets you access an amazing amount of data about your site. If you've created a Google Site you can add Google Analytics directly from the settings menu, but it's easy to add it to pages that are hosted by other services as long as you have access to the pages