Even a nicely designed website can use a little extra. Silver Moon Trading Co. does a great job of demonstrating how a business owner can polish its online presence by editing her website’s AboutUs.org page.

While Silver Moon’s online store offers good photos and descriptions of the jewelry, owner and jewelry designer Ann Guarino shares comments from her company’s customers on her site’s AboutUs page. Those comments make it very clear what a new customer can expect: fast personalized service and jewelry made to the buyer’s preferences.

Ann Guarino uses the simplicity of the AboutUs page to direct people to important areas of her site by using external links. Take a look at how she links to the sections of her site that are about vintage jewelry, bridesmaid jewelry and other offerings she wants to emphasize.

There are some bonuses to editing your site’s AboutUs page. Once you’ve filled out all the information in the sidebar, written a nice header, uploaded your logo and written some good information in the Wiki section, you can get follow links for the page. Just email us at DoFollow@AboutUs.org, and we’ll review your site and the page about it.

As you edit, your site and your name will pop up on the AboutUs.org home page in the section headed, “Learn about websites, share about websites.” That’s another opportunity for AboutUs visitors to discover your site.

Those edits look even better when you use your real name to create your free account, upload a nice portrait of yourself, and CamelCase the name of your website.

Have you seen JumpOffTheLadder.com? It’s a blog by Toronto, Ontario, resident Carl Mueller that’s filled with tips for starting your own business, many of them related to promoting yourself on the Web.

We discovered Carl because he has been editing website profile pages on AboutUs.org, including the page about JumpOffTheLadder.com. Turns out that Carl has a few websites about careers, including Find-Your-Dream-Career.com and RecruiterSecretsRevealed.com, and he’s been creating great pages about them on AboutUs.org.

Carl wrote a blog post this week about how he uses AboutUs.org. We saw his tweet to it, and re-tweeted it ourselves.  We were delighted to see how well he understands the value of the website profiles, Website Visibility Report and articles about SEO and Internet marketing.

Well, apparently our customer service warranted another post. Carl praises the hands-on help he’s received from Kristina Weis and Asad Butt.

You, too, can get help editing pages on AboutUs.org. Just email us at Help@AboutUs.org. Or choose another way to contact us – we love to help you.

I’ve always thought Scott Olson was a clever marketer. He’s helped me understand some of the subtler points of marketing, and inspired me to write our article on video marketing.

Scott has launched a new site, FounderBuzz.com, that offers short video interviews with the founders of startup companies. Scott offers a quick intro to each founder and company, and asks exactly the questions I’d want to ask. The founders themselves are really engaging and human. Their enthusiasm for their babies – excuse me, their companies – is infectious.

Scott’s done a great job of using AboutUs.org to promote his new site. He created a great page for FounderBuzz.com, explaining what his site is and why he created it. In fact, it’s not unlike the interviews on his site in which he asks the founders what inspired them to start their companies.

But wait, there’s more. Scott also has a page for his consulting firm, MindLink Marketing. He’s linked the pages for his two sites to each other. Scott’s personal profile page is also very complete, and he links to both his sites and their website profiles with the LinkPair template.

Scott has woven a rich story about his websites on AboutUs. He’s giving himself the opportunity to attract visitors who come to AboutUs to discover new websites. Instead of landing on a page about one of his websites and getting just a small amount of information, they’re learning what Scott wants them to know.

AboutUs pages can also help people find your site more easily in search results. Once you’ve taken the time to add good information to an AboutUs page, search engines begin to find it – and then searchers can find it. Seeing a website appear more than once in search results not only ups the chances it will be seen, it also serves as a validation that the site is worthwhile.

Experienced marketers know something else, too. They know that wherever possible, it’s good to tell your story in your own words. AboutUs is a great place to do that.

AboutUs.org is home to a truly diverse community of website owners. We get proof of that every day when we look at the community editors who pop up on our home page.

Vesna Kovach, a freelance writer in Madison, Wisconsin, has created a beautiful website profile for her site, How To Cook with Vesna. It’s a wonderful introduction to her website, which offers clear instructions for various cooking techniques, nutrition information, and recipes for healthful, delicious food.

Vesna’s page is a great example of how to use AboutUs.org to promote your website. She offers a detailed but concise overview of what you’ll find on her site, and why you’d want to go there.
The information on Vesna’s website profile page is unique – it’s not just a cut-and-paste of text from the site itself. That’s what makes her website profile so valuable to AboutUs visitors.

There’s value for Vesna, too. Because she created such a great, informative page, we’ve followed the links on the community wiki page How-To-Cook-With-Vesna.com. We’ll do that – after an editorial review – for any AboutUs community member who submits their website and its profile page to DoFollow@AboutUs.org.

Bonus points to Vesna for using her real name and for uploading a lovely portrait. We like to see real people editing AboutUs pages, and so do the rest of our community members.

We are doing an April series to talk about the importance of CamelCase in wiki. In this first post we outline the main reason why we do this at AboutUs.org.

We format domain names (websites) in CamelCase to make them easier to read. Here is a real life example I found on the internet:

Having the letters all lower case works for the internal workings of the internet, but it looks like programming code and we think it makes normal people’s eyes glaze over.

We think this is a lot easier to read:

PresidentOfTheUnitedStates.com

than: presidentoftheunitedstates.com

If you are familiar with CamelCase, show of your favorite examples – if you aren’t please ask questions or check out the next three CamelCase Wednesday posts in our series.

I’m in Porto, Portugal for WikiSym08 (4th annual), through Wednesday. Porto is a beautiful city in the north of Portugal, on the Atlantic Ocean. The photo in the banner above is of the hills overlooking the river. The entire conference will be visiting this spot tomorrow evening for port wine sampling, dinner and a boat ride.

This morning about 100 of us (we’re expecting 140, so they’re still arriving) heard a brief welcome and short words from the various chairpersons. They highlighted all of the really great research submissions, tutorials, workshops, keynotes, panels, and then handed the floor to me, for personal favorite part: OpenSpace. Starting from a blank wall, the participants organized a really fantastic schedule for breakout sessions. Since I put the schedule into the wiki it’s already grown, and I’ll be adding to it throughout the event. Check back on that link to see notes from sessions as they get posted.

One person missing this year is Ward Cunningham (originator of the wiki and AboutUs CTO). He’s given keynotes at the first 3 WikiSyms (San Diego; Odense, Denmark; Montreal). I’ve already heard rumors of Portland for WikiSym09, which would really be great for AboutUs and would make sure Ward was there again.

Last year, Matthew Haughey started a great conversation about advertising online and followed through by letting logged in people control more of what they see, or don’t see, on his MetaFilter*.

Hide:

Then earlier this year, wikiHow showed us how to give readers even more control by making it easy for you to choose whether or not you view advertisements on their site.

Following in their footsteps, AboutUs has released the “Show/Hide Ads” function on our website. Now you can hide or view our ads with the click of a button, whether you’re logged in or not.

A key element of working with wiki is that you know that you can do almost anything: add a picture, make a link, and now turn off the advertisements. Not only is the content of website editable, it’s the site itself, which offers a little taste of The Wiki Way.

Show:

I wonder if non-profit communities, like Wikipedia, would ever consider this method of funding by having the default turned off, thus allowing people to shop when they wanted?

*congrats to Metafilter for making Techvibes’ Portland Startup Index this month!

Kristina writes:

AboutUs is designed to make it quite simple to create a page about a business or organization, provided that it has a corresponding domain/website. In fact, you don’t have to do anything but search for the website in our “Find!” bar, and if the page doesn’t exist yet the AboutUsBot will create one for you to edit.

A lesser known fact is that because AboutUs is a wiki, pages don’t have to just be about another site, but can actually be a site of it’s own.

AboutUs can be a great place to give something a web presence in a much easier and economical way than a typical website. We may not be able to do some of the things that a traditional wiki host does, but the advantage with AboutUs lies in our already high visibility, and the fact that we exist to be a guide to businesses and other organizations.

Some examples include: Janoose the Goose, NIAYH, Thompson Homes Ltd., Florist in North Port, Learning Gardens Laboratory, and Valtech1 Home Inspection Services. (Also, some people have chosen to redirect their URLs to their page on AboutUs. See ChaosCafeAndParlor.com and RegulasJoyOfMovement.com as examples.)

There are two easy ways to create a new page on AboutUs. Either go to the URL bar and navigate to http://www.aboutus.org/TheNameOfYourPageHere, and then click “edit this page” or add a FutureLink to a page on AboutUs with the name of the page you want to create like [[TheNameOfYourPageHere]] and then click that link and add your content.

From: Genexbs.com Featured at AboutUs.org

What is AboutUs.org?AboutUs.org is a community portal, managed and built by community itself. It’s a unique way to build information on web; it’s the Wiki way.

CiteHealth is a valuable source for reports and information on United States health care providers. Their wiki page is rich with useful information about the various health related services and shows an excellent usage of gallery function to display sample reports.(View Comments)