The story begins with Cee Cee’s early years in Ohio, raising herself while trying to care for a psychotic mother who traipses around town in one prom dress after another from Goodwill. In her mother’s mind, these are the glory days of a pageant queen’s life in Savannah. To 12 year old Cee Cee, it’s  an embarrassment and the fear of how to hold their lives together…    Read More

If you are looking for Holiday Gift Ideas, consider the book above, or some of the other great books on the site.  My favorite this year is November’s Featured book on the home page:  Night Circus.

The Goals: Learning, SEO and Social Media Experiment, (and possibly get some passive income without investing much money).

As a developer, I’ve probably built or worked on several hundred websites at my current job.

As the company has grown and our offices have become more spread out, the exposure to elements of a project that are not part of development has naturally narrowed. (I do sometimes miss our “one room schoolhouse” office). Flyte has been on the leading edge of Social Media and I’ve become a convert, but haven’t done a lot with it beyond my Twitter and Facebook pages.

I thought it might be fun and interesting to see what my learnings would be while working through a new project of my own.

Lesson 1: Figure out your business first, then build a website for it. Not the other way around.

The idea:
Several friends and acquaintances have mentioned that while Amazon is a trusted online store, they feel overwhelmed by the busy home page and the number of choices. As a voracious reader, my friends often ask me what I’m reading and for suggestions. I also hear excellent book suggestions from friends and my boss.

My idea was to present selected choices through Amazon with quick pick book suggestions. Once people find they like the site suggestions it can become a quick way of picking a book and ordering it though Amazon, usually within the framework of my cozy website.

Since this was a learning project, my approach was like that of a number of people with new, very small businesses – with a not fully defined idea for making some money, and a preference for spending my time worrying about what the site looked like instead of how effective it would be.

After going back and forth with my build (for much longer than I should have) because I waffled between direct links to Amazon or an iframe associates store, I decided to really go for the social media challenge and use the iframe store within my content area. This means I’ll need to get really creative with Social Media, since search engines will not “see” the book content in the iframe store. Iframes are sometimes a necessary evil ­ but be aware of their limitations and build in other avenues to feed rich content to search engines.

Lesson 2: Visual look of design is important, but know your content, strategy, and information architecture so it can guide the design.

(And lesson 2b, which I already knew but apparently had to learn again the hard way – make sure you have the design locked down before you start the build).

• A site that is pretty will not trump the lack of good content or non-intuitive navigation.
• You can be unique and creative without getting your budget off track.
• I’ve been using an app for turning photos into ink and water color drawings and decided to use this to create illustrations for my site. After buying a few stock photos, and taking a few myself, I used the app to give a cozy welcoming feeling to the pages with faux illustrations.

I went ahead and made the site live. After all, if you build it they will come, right? My only promotion of it was to offer a sneak peak on my facebook page (soft launch) . As expected, I’ve had very few hits (I check my google analytics daily – there was one weird day where I suddenly had 42 visitors, direct traffic from Hennepin County, Minnesota – I have a vision of an entire classroom of people being given a wrong URL!)

The better approach

Now to see if targeting search engines and using Social media can make a difference.

Coming up with keywords: Word Tracker offers a free trial or you can use the free keyword tool at Google. I put in my generic search term – Book Suggestions. Wham! immediately it returned something I’m embarrassed to admit I hadn’t given a thought to – using the phrase Book Club suggestions. I was also surprised just how much difference a slight variation can make. E.g.: “book club reading list” had low competition, and global search number of 4,400. However, “reading book club” had low competition, and a global search of 246,000.

I came up with several similar eye openers and went back to my site, rewriting some of the content, navigation and titles to incorporate the terms. I admit, at times the text felt more awkward to me, but we’re giving keywords a try right?

Next I moved over some of my mainebabyboomer blog posts on books I’ve read to the new blog on The Cozy Library. Since I’m using iframes, the blog is going to become the main source of content that the search engines can find. Starting out with several posts gives it a kick start, and I’ll need to blog regularly each time I read a new book.

I’m writing this guest blog post for the flyte blog, hopefully encouraging YOU dear reader to come visit my site. [Insert shameless self-promotion here - go to http://cozy-library.com].

Lesson 3 – Know when phase 1 is done and it’s time to start phase 2.

I could go on tweaking the site and adding content forever, staying in “soft launch” mode. There will always be more SEO that can be done, more books added, more blog posts, more design tweaks. I want to comb through past flyte blog and Maine SEO blog posts culling out ideas to follow up. But that work can also be done after official launch. It’s better to get this website out and start promoting it – while I continue to go on reading flyte articles on how to use twitter, facebook, blogging and SEO to promote it. So….(drum roll)…Announcing the new site, Cozy-Library.com.

Postscript Learning – the spike in my google analytics turned out to be because I was doing cross browser testing using Adobe BrowserLab – be sure to take their IP out of the mix if you don’t want to skew your results.

Gloria Maher
Web Developer, Reader

Visit the Owl’s Head Transporation Museum

The antique autos here are works of art all on their own, but with some I couldn’t resist taking a little artistic license. The day we visited there was also an antique motorcycle rally. I’ve been meaning to visit here for years and glad that we finally did:

Visit an alpaca farm

Take a ride on the Maine Eastern.

Train travel is a very relaxing way to travel, and the trip from Brunswick to Rockland and back makes for a lovely day trip here in Maine.

Spend a relaxing day at a lake.

This photo is the calm before the storm – sunset on Beech Hill Pond the night before Hurricane Irene.

Click on the images to see a larger view.

You can find all these filters in the iTunes store.  Their names are: PhotoArtista – Oil, RomanticPhoto, and VintageScene.  You can find them by entering these names in the search field of the iTunes store (If you have not already, you should download at least iTunes version 10.)

I took a photo on my back deck, then applied various filters and came up with different views of the same photo. These photos are below, and in my next post I will go into more detail on the use:

Original Photo

PhotoArtista 1

PhotoArtista 2 – with color adjustment.

RomanticPhoto

VintageScene

More soon….but chores are calling.

A1 diner, Gardiner, ME

I’ve just returned from 3 days at a friend’s camp. We started off with breakfast at the A1 diner in Gardiner – fun to see a diner straight out of time and great food as well. Then we continued on up to Cold Stream Pond near Lincoln, ME, with beautiful spring fed refreshing (cold) water.

There are certain sounds and sights that bring up wonderful memories and create wonderful new stories to be told as future memories.  Is there anything more relaxing than the sound of gentle lake waves lapping against the rocks while diamonds bounce off the lake in early morning?  Or that special green and yellow when the sun honeycombs the shallow edges? We laughed, we ate, we enjoyed the lake and realized how truly blessed we are to be each others friends.  A thank you to Mary and Andrew for putting up with us (and teaching us to play Canasta) and to Pat, Eirwen and Martha and Carol for the laughter, stories and sharing my birthday!

Photo by Pat

This post has been moved to cozy-library.com.

This post has been moved to cozy-library.com.

All my friends have green thumbs.  Me…not so much.  I like the end result of wonderful flowers, just not the getting there.  A couple weeks ago one of my favorite people showed up with two boxes full of wonderful plants.   I had just rearranged my small deck with some new patio planters, but they were still sitting there sadly empty.   Martha not only brought plants to fill them, but also used her gardening talent to arrange and plant them.  Best birthday present in years (even though it’s still two months away).

Thank you Martha!!!   Check out my new patio  garden: