Website or No Website?

I am seriously considering changing my website anthonyfontana.com, which uses wordpress, over to only using my Facebook artist page OR a Google+ page. My site gets around 2,200-2,500 unique visitors per year. Most of this traffic, unfortunately, is not to view my artwork but to find out who I am or to read a blog post I’ve written. But usually only one or two blog post per year get more than 100 viewers.

So here are the pro’s and cons to switching from a blog site to a social site:

• Pro: Better photo galleries. Facebook and G+ both have better photo galleries than WordPress.
• Pro: Easier to manage. I’m in Facebook a lot anyways and already have multiple pages that I manage there. And with Facebook, there’s an app for that.
• Con: No blog. Well no traditional blog anyway. I can still post longer textual posts as Notes on my Facebook and regularly on G+ pages.
• Con: No importing my old blog content to either platform; since neither is a traditional blog. Although, this might not be a bad thing. Fresh starts are nice.
• Con: I only have about 219 followers (Likes) on my Facebook artist/celebrity page and zero on my currently non-existent G+ fan page. Do I want to spend time to build that? How important is that function of the site? How important is building my brand as an artist, technologist, educator?
• Con: No custom URLs for posts. So something that gets hit a lot like anthonyfontana.com/bio won’t be as easy to find it it’s buried in a Facebook info panel.
• Pro: No more WordPress updates. Something inside me cringes that the whole site will break (there’s precedence for this) when I update WordPress.
• Con: Two Anthony Fontana pages on Facebook. One for me, the person, and one for me, the brand.
• Con: No ownership. No export. Although you can export everything from your Timeline and personal profile in Facebook I can’t find this option for brand pages.

Anybody doing this? Has anyone given up on their regular site just to use Facebook or G+? At this point I feel like I’ve talked myself out of this move. However, I might be willing to give it a try. Try: “do or do not, there is no try…” This type of strategy may need an all-in mentality and I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I manage two other Squarespace.com websites and I thoroughly LOVE their interface. Another option to get away from WordPress would be to switch to a hosted solution there – which is more than what I pay right now.

A whole other post, but in general I love the look and feel of G+ much more than Facebook. Google has done a great job on the design of their social networking site. I’m sad to see that it’s not doing as well as hoped. I’d invest more in G+ if I had time or energy.

Guest post on official Facebook in Education blog

I was invited several months ago to create a guest post on the official “Facebook in Education” blog. My post went up today and can be found here (full link below). I’m happy to see that Facebook has vision and dedicated staff towards seeing this massive platform put to use in education.

As a Learning Management System the Facebook group enabled important educational exchanges, but there are a few additional features that could make this platform even more useful. The ability to see all contributions made to the group by a single person would enable a teacher to view all comments, links, pictures, videos and even “Like” buttons used by a student within the group page.  This would enable an instructor to easily track and measure student engagement. Adding the ability to make separate photo albums would enable an instructor to differentiate contributions posted from different classes. If Facebook groups also had the ability to add applications, a teacher could feed information from other sources, via RSS or SMS, directly into the group page. Finally, if Facebook had the ability to host document and slideshows, there would be no reason to use Google Documents or another document hosting service – students could read documents or view lecture slides without leaving the group page.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-in-education/using-a-facebook-group-as-a-learning-management-system/10150244221815570

This will be the one true…

Anthony Fontana blog.

I have kept blogs at:

http://themultichronicclassroom.blogspot.com/

https://blogs.bgsu.edu/anthonyfontana/

and

http://anthonyfontana.vox.com/

From this moment on… this will be the one place I blog. If I do keep another blog (like the one for The Net Jockey at http://thenetjockey.com/) I will repost those things here. Soon, this page will look like the rest of AnthonyFontana.com and be equipped with my Tweeters, 12secs, and more. Stay tuned.