S e-mailed a link to this article to me and it's unbelievably apropos to our situation right now. We're currently considering setting up a website, using social media, etc to expand our search for our second child. As a private person, it freaks me out to no end to put so much personal information about ourselves on the interwebs, but this is the way adoption matches are happening.
We'll be putting ourselves out to the universe as a family looking for another child, using marketing techniques to try to find a match. We're in the beginning stages of development, and I've never put together a website before, so, any tips and tricks?
Act as if you're a prospective birth mother looking to find you. What keywords would you look for? Type those in your favorite browser and then start looking for other adoptive family websites. Start making a list: what do you like about those sites? Do they have video? A contact section? Links to fb and tw? Links to sites you like, etc.
ReplyDeletePictures contain something called exif. It's basically data about when the pic was taken, and if you have a GPS locator, where the picture was taken too. You can find out by right clicking on your photo and looking at the properties. You can also use freeware to remove all that metadata before uploading to your website.
Also look into getting a tracker for your website. Statcoun ter dot com is an ok tracker. This will help you determine if you are being seen by a wider audience, international (hint: scammers), or what browsers that most frequently see your site. Websites work better in some formats than others.
With the website, you also might think about using a blog format. It can be updated easily without having to edit a website each time. You don't have to go into great detail maybe just some short random thoughts about a happy day you had as a child, or some other topical story. It would give somebody a reason to read more than just a "dear birth parent" letter.
Think of any words that could describe you and put that into the metadata on your website to increase the hits. Then clear your cookies on your browser and search for yourself. You might find that this blog comes up, at which point you may decide to take private, at least for a period of time in which your adoption search is finalized.
I made the colors of the website match our profile letter just to keep things consistent. Make sure you reduce the size of your pictures for quick loading. We did a paid site and purchased a url from go_ Daddy, and I think it was worth it for the control we had in the look of the page. I think the other important thing is having a menu at the top or side of every page to make navigation easy. You may already know some of this but I thought I'd share it just in case. Good luck!
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