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NBD News
August 15, 2008

This month in NBD News

Welcome to the exciting second edition of NBD News! In this month's issue, I have a new featured client, Kids Think Big. This month's Explainer and What's Next sections are closely related, discussing "social bookmarking," and how you can use it to promote your site. In Web News I recommend the latest version of the Firefox web browser.

Featured Client: Kids Think Big

Jeanine Behr first contacted me in November of last year, shortly before her first book Think Green! would be rolling off the presses. The book was being published under her new company, Kids Think Big LLC, for which she needed a logo, business cards, stationery, and a website, ideally all up and running before her book hit the shelves. Though it was a tight schedule, Jeanine and I worked well together to develop the logo, which easily lent itself to business card and stationery layouts. The logo also set the tone for the website, which is friendly and playful, while still looking clean and professional. Most of the website was straightforward to implement, such as the About Us and Press pages. But Jeanine also wanted to sell her book online, and for this I used a service called e-junkie, which provides a fairly simple and affordable plug-and-play shopping cart, allowing users to check out with Paypal or Google Checkout. The website was substantially finished by mid-December.

Jeanine and Kids Think Big are having tremendous success, with Think Green!  in its second printing. I am currently working on adding a section to the website, for the new Kids Think Big Ambassador Club, which will include a photo gallery of Think Green! readings and events.

Explainer: Social Bookmarking

Most internet users have heard of and use bookmarks. When you find a website or blog post you like, and think you may want to return to it later, you can bookmark it. Your browser maintains a list of your bookmarks, and if you have a lot of them, you may organize them into different folders.

Bookmarks stored in this way are accessible only to you, and you have no access to other people's bookmarks. But your collection of bookmarks could be a valuable resource to another person who shares your interests, and likewise you might find interesting new sites in that person's collection. Enter "social bookmarking." By storing your bookmarks online, social bookmarking websites allow you to:

  • share bookmarks with friends, a specific network, or everyone
  • have access to them from any computer
  • organize bookmarks using tags (read my blog post explaining tags)
  • on some sites, such as digg.com and stumbleupon.com users can rate the bookmarked sites, theoretically causing the best ones to rise to the top

You can check out a list of the top 30 social bookmarking sites, or read a more thorough description of four popular ones, on my blog.

What's Next: Share This!

With so many social bookmarking sites out there, which ones do you include on your site, without fuss and clutter? One handy solution is a free service called Share This (www.sharethis.com). With this service, you can choose to show the 20 most popular sites (or you can customize the list) all within a single unobtrusive link that says "Share This". When a reader decides to share an article, they click on the Share This link, and a small window pops up (see image - smaller than actual size), where they can select the particular service they want to use to share the article. An added bonus is that they also have the option of sharing via email. 

Readers can always bookmark your page on any site they choose, but including shortcuts to favorite social bookmarking sites makes it easier and quicker. If you're interested in incorporating Share This into your blog, or have questions about social bookmarking, send me an email!

Web News: Firefox 3 Released

I'm a little behind the times on this one, as Firefox 3 was actually released in mid-June, but I wanted to try it out myself a bit before recommending it. A while back, I wrote a blog post pleading with folks to stop using Internet Explorer 6, as it is an ancient browser that wasn't any good to begin with. If you still haven't upgraded, now is a great time to go get Firefox 3 and say goodbye to Explorer forever. Even if you are using IE7 or an older version of Firefox, you may want to consider the switch:

  • Firefox 3 uses less of your computer's memory and loads web pages faster than most of its competitors (read a full review on pcmag.com).
  • You can use the address bar (where you see http://...) to easily navigate to bookmarked and recently visited sites
  • Firefox has a built-in spell checker, which is really handy when writing up blog posts (or newsletters for that matter)
  • You can easily import your preferences and bookmarks from any browser