Brian McGinnis

In an internet world with over 300 million internet users on facebook, and millions more on other social networking sites such as Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube to name a few; one would be insane not to look at this potential audience and ponder how they can attract these visitors to their website.

While in the process of re-launching this website, I had to get some clarity of what my vision would be for this site.  Originally when I launched this website back in 2004, I wanted a domain to practice my web design skills, test out content management systems, practice with hand-coding and stylesheets, and a storage place on the web that was all mine.

Over the next few years, I used the site as a showcase of web design and development projects as well as being a tool for soliciting new business. At the height of my freelance business, I was maintaining over 20 websites.

As I entered 2009, I found that I was really in a position that I no longer wanted to solicit new business projects.  I actually have withdrawn my participation from many ongoing projects due to time constraints and other commitments.  I do still take on select projects from time to time, but did not need a website going for that purpose.  So, what would the new vision be for this website one would ask…

I have recently decided to launch my site as more of a blog site where I would write articles on relevant topics of interest.  I wanted my site to be able to showcase photography from my travels and sailing competitions.  I wanted to integrate as much social media into my website as possible to solicit feedback and to promote the visibility of my website.  I also wanted to create content that would be beneficial to its readers and not as much a journal of my personal life, even though I acknowledge that will be a significant portion of the site as well.

Over the past 6 months, I have been tutoring people at the Westhampton Free Library as part of their Library Geek Program.  I found that many people there are interested in learning similar things and just have difficulty finding a trusted source of information.

Over the past 6 years while working at the Village of Westhampton Beach, I have maintained over 60 computers, dealt with surveillance cameras, maintained their website, and done a tremendous amount of network administration. I have also done a fair amount of freelance work in these areas.

I have close to 30 years of sailing experience, teaching for almost a decade, and competed internationally in Olympic Classes Regattas and World Championships.  I have always had a passion for sports, recreation and leisure, and fitness training.

With all this life experience and an established network of people in my life, I knew I had the background to write articles that could be beneficial to people.  The remaining question was how to get the word out, and how to enable visitors to participate in the process.

Building a community is a common goal for many websites. In order to do this successfully, Visitors need to be able to do a few things when they visit your website in order to get involved in the process. Among the desired interactions are the ability to login easily, provide feedback through commenting, share content and bookmark your site, and read your content in a manner that is preferred by them such as email alerts or getting postings delivered on their favorite BlackBerry/iphone/newsreader applications.

To accomplish these tasks on this website, I have integrated a few third-party applications to make my life easier and enhance the visitor experience. The first thing I wanted to be able to do is enable email alerts, I utilized a service called FeedBurner which is currently owned by Google. This service is excellent. It will send subscribers and email digest of articles posted on a scheduled basis if they wish or to subscribe to your newsfeed in their favorite newsreader application or online service.

Next, I utilized a wordpress plugin call sexy bookmarks that provides the Share the Love logo at the bottom of each post on this website and has visually appealing buttons that allow visitors to share articles to their choice of social networking sites. These sites currently include Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Delicious, and Google Bookmarks.  Sharing is caring…

My next task was to allow users to login via their choice of social media profiles so that they could skip having to create a new account to make a comment or provide feedback on this site, they can simply login via their existing social media credentials.  So far, I have chosen to use Gigya Socialize which enables users to login using either their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or Yahoo accounts.  I also integrated Google Friend Connect which allows users to connect via their Google, AOL, or OpenID accounts.  These are all ways to increase engagement on the website.

My next few steps will be finding ways to further integrate my site with the popular social networking sites out there.  I am currently looking at ways to connect my site effectively with my Flickr, Picasa, or Facebook Photo Albums. I will look into video sites such as YouTube for further integration opportunites.  I will be looking for further opportunities to promote my blog on the world wide web, especially utilizing the social networking sites.

Be sure to sign up for email alerts or bookmark this site to your favorite social networking sites while you are visiting.  More coming soon.