Josh Can Help: Helpful web strategy links for July 10th

This is a new thing I’m going to be doing every Friday. I bookmark and Tweet out a lot of different links for various reasons. I keep everything generally related to understanding web strategy for small businesses but I’ve been known to tangent a bit. Every Friday, I’m going to collect the best links I’ve saved and sent out and list out the ones I think the are the most useful. If you’re interested in receiving this list every Friday via email, get send me a quick note and let me know… I’m judging interest now!

Saved on Delicious: Privacy Policy Generator

Documents like terms of use pages and privacy policies can be easily overlooked by groups wishing to get their web site live as quick as possible. It seems like a bunch of legalese and who wants to deal with that? Well, I’ll be honest, it’s usually the last step but I understand the importance of putting these together. Your privacy policy tells website users what information you collect and what you do with that information. For most minor websites, the most you collect and use is an email address and a name. Even if that’s it, you should still be telling people both inside and outside of your organization what you’re doing with this information. This handy little form asks you all the important questions and then generates a document that can be posted on your site. It’s so easy now, no excuses!

Saved on Delicious: Sara’s Sanctuary animal shelter

Sara’s Sanctuary is run by an amazing woman who cares for her animals more than anything. I’ve never seen such dedication to a certain cause in my life. If you look at her site, it’s hurting a bit. It’s hard to navigate, poorly coded, overly-complicated, and not geared towards the most important thing: getting help for the sanctuary. Sara’s is 100% donation run and money is tight. I took on this pro-bono project as a way to flex my web strategy muscle and see what I could do to improve her donation income. Stay tuned for a fresh, new design, a new Wordpress structure, and some great social networking additions. Also, if you’ve got a few dollars to spare, Sara’s could use it!

Saved on Delicious: Facebook for Business SuperGuide

I think I found this through Twitter but it definitely made it to my bookmarks page. This page has about [insert big number here] links to articles, videos, blog posts, and PDFs on the subject of Facebook. I’m a fan of Facebook (no pun intended) for personal interaction and making sure that my friends and family see a little bit of what I do professionally (I love personal referrals). Marketing my business on there, however, has never been a priority for me. I think Facebook is great for some and not terrible useful for others. If you want to figure out which group you’re in, I’d start on this page.

Twitter links

17 Remarkably Professional Looking Free Fonts: I’m a sucker for free fonts and I’m continually impressed by what’s out there. That’s not to say that I won’t buy one when I need it but a lot of the time you can get by with the free stuff.

Create letterpress text using only CSS: This is a very creative use of CSS to get a certain text effect. A little technical for most (meaning people who aren’t using CSS everyday) but unique to be sure.

Transparency (or Lack Thereof) on Kohl’s Facebook Fan Page: A cautionary tale about using Facebook correctly. If you’re going to post on your own page, that’s fine but BE HONEST.

Building Respect for Usability Experience: For the usability geeks out there, another fantastic article from the Nielsen group about teaching other (stubborn) folks about usability.

Wolfram Alpha for Web Designers: Short and sweet article showing a few things Wolfram Alpha, the new, intelligent search engine, can do for web designers. Fairly basic information but nice to have it at your fingertips.

Five outstanding corporate blogs: very well-thought-out analysis of, well, five outstanding blogs. Chris picked some great examples and showed that corporate america DOES have what it takes to compete.

That’s all for now! Your feeedback is, as always, appreciated. So are your own web strategy links so comment away…

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