Last year Carrie Stack of the Say Yes Institute and a certified Life Coach, asked me about helping her to launch a s site for her new project entitled EO. EO stands for Emotional Orgasm which is a term she and her business partner Michele Lazcano came up with to describe a moment when you connect with another person and the both of you realize that the connection has moved both of you forward to living your life fully.
I have to say I had a few EO’s of my own with this project. In collaborating with Katharine Navins of Tallow Studio for the visual aspects of the site, I came to realize that the “splash page”, long considered a no-no among designers, can actually be a very effective tool in focusing the user’s attention on the site’s various sections before they dive right into the content. Katharine’s use of the gentle blue and white gradient tile in the background and the clean look of the EO logo makes for a very soothing inital impression and prepares the viewer for a relaxing enjoyable time spent reading about Carrie and Michele’s vision of how we can all connect with each other and live our lives more fully.
One thing that was a fun challenge in developing the site was finding a way to display the beautiful navigational buttons Katharine designed without having to resort to javascript or tables. I found that giving the unordered list that contained the navigation its own id and then using relative positioning to place it on the page, then allowed me to style all of the links with some universal styles, such as visibility, borders, margins, padding and line-height (to fool IE into expanding the clickable area to cover the entire button). Then, giving each list item its own id gave me precise control over where the link was displayed via absolute positioning and also allowed me to display a different background (the various buttons) for each link.
Social networking, by its very nature, is also a big part of EOyourlife’s focus. In addition to the text links to Twitter and Facebook at the bottom of each page, I also installed the Add-to-Any plugin so users can easily share the site with friends. Also in use are the plugins; MailChimp/Analytics 360 to help maintain the newsletter email list and monitor site traffic, Cforms, for the site’s contact forms and All-in-One SEO pack to enhance the use of page titles and optimize the site’s content.
Check out EOyourlife.com and share the good vibes!
Posted 2 days, 20 hours ago at 4:13 pm. Add a comment
When Katharine Navins, Tallow Studio’s owner needed a Wordpress developer to bring her site design for Lovejoy Designs to fruition, she came to Jenn Mears Web Design with the page concepts and site architecture wonderfully laid out with a great eye towards color and balance. Utilizing a theme called Silver Dreams, I was able to re-create Tallow’s design and developed some page templates to match the various looks through-out the site. The biggest challenge came with the desire to present the Portfolio and Featured Products sections with an interactive gallery that allowed the user to click on thumbnails to view a full-size image on the same page. I decided to use Alex Rabe’s NextGen Gallery plugin with some extensive modifications developed by Arafatbd.net and several other members of the Wordpress community. After a few late nights and some wp forum stalking, the site finally came together. Love Joy Designs is a Boston-based interior design firm owned by Phoebe Lovejoy Russell, a designer with a great flair for color, form and function. Her throw pillow designs were especially fun ( a great bonus when you are tweaking a gallery of them at 1am!) and her blog, Design Lab, is sure to inspire readers everywhere.
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 8:33 pm. 1 comment
Author’s note: This is not the stuff that I do, but it’s what I should do.
5 Reasons to have a blog for your business
1. It’s environmentally friendly. Unless you are running a blog about your helicopter hunting/timber logging business venture. But not only is it green for the environment, it’s green for you. It takes up much less of your company’s business day since you no longer need to drive to cold calls, print out newsletters and manage mail merges.
2. It’s extremely cost-effective. Even if you feel the need to (ahem) hire a professional designer to “tweak your template” (more on that later), you should still save a ton of dough by not needing to do as much print advertising.
3. You will have an “auxiliary engine” to drive traffic to your company’s site. Put a link back to your company’s site. Use your blog profile tool to find local sites and bloggers and ask them if they are willing to trade links.
4. It can generate customer feedback and communication. Run a contest for your readers. Ask people for their opinion on your review of a local restaurant. Let people know you welcome comments by making that link more visible.
5. It’s fun! It’s a low stress way to promote your business without feeling like you are out there on a soapbox. Write what you enjoy writing about and they will come.
4 Do’s and Don’ts
Don’t be too negative too much. If you had a tough time with a client, or your favorite team/american idol contestant/politician lost, write about what you learned from it and respect others’ privacy and/or opinions.
Try to find a rhythm and stay with it. One interesting post a week is better than 7 entries that vary on “My Starbucks-Fueled Mini-Rant”, but keep your content as fresh as possible without sacrificing quality for quantity.
Be useful, or funny, or ahead of the crowd or any combination. Being creative doesn’t hurt either. Think about what kinds of questions your clients have had lately and how you can answer them.
Don’t blitz your readers with “bells and whistles”. We’ve all been to that site where so many “awesome”(bandwidth-hogging) features needed to load that we didn’t go past the home page.
3 Blogging Terms to Know
RSS: Almost synonymous with the term “Feed”, RSS stands for (in my opinion) Really Simple Syndication. It’s an easy way for your readers to keep up with your blog and make sure that they know when you have something new on the site. Of course, it’s up to your readers to decide to follow your blog, but putting a widget in your template (see below) suggesting that your readers to subscribe really helps things along.
Template: This is the term blogging services use for your blog’s layout and overall design. If you really want a distinctive look for your blog, such as colors based on your logo and custom backgrounds, etc, you should the editing options for your template before you go with it.
Widgets/Badges: Basically, those “bells and whistles” I was warning you about earlier. Like a good spice, use them only if necessary and they will work for you, not against you. Some examples of widgets are “Archives” that list your posts in chronological order, and Google’s Adsense which will place text ads on your blog by “sensing” the site’s content. (Which still doesn’t explain the Maalox ad that kept appearing on Jennsweb a few years ago.) Badges are items such as Flickr, which can display your Flickr images in a little window, and Twitter, which can display your most recent updates on your Twitter account.
2 FAQ’s
What should I blog about?
Almost anything. A post can be a photo, a story, an interesting link or all three combined. Don’t cast your net too wide. Think about the blog’s description (that little phrase underneath a blog’s title) and see if your entry would be something that someone finding your blog would find interesting as well.
How much time should I devote to this?
If you run a business, then you know how the word “busy” got in there. The best approach is the one that fits around your schedule. Blog on your coffee break if you want. As long as you get in the habit, don’t obsess over how much time you spend on it because…
#1 Rule: Have fun with it!
Remember, it’s not the annual report to the stockholders. Because who gets excited about reading those?
Posted 4 months, 4 weeks ago at 8:49 pm. Add a comment
Bing.com is a new search engine that is being touted as the next big thing, at least that’s what Microsoft is hoping. They’ve pumped metric tons of money into marketing it as Google’s new competitor, but the jury still seems to be deliberating about that. Still, as Bing buzz builds, it couldn’t hurt to get listed on their local listings right?
I’ve talked a few clients through the process of registering their business with Google and, based on that experience, the idea of talking someone through the same process on Bing is a little more daunting, but doable. Here’s a comparison of the user experience for each site:
Google’s Home Page:
The process:
Step 1. Get a Google Account, if you don’t have one already.
Step 2. Go to Google.com and click on “Business Solutions” below the search terms window.
Step 3. On the next page, click on “Local Business Center” in the bottom half of the page.
Now you are all set to start listing your business with Google. One precaution: Make sure you are near your business phone so you can verify your listing with Google’s automated call to your business phone. They will call with a PIN that you will need to verify that this is actually your business.
Bing.com’s Home Page:
The Process:
Step 1: If you haven’t already, sign up for a Windows Live account (click on “Windows Live” in the top left corner of the page to get started)
Step 2: With your Windows Live email and password on hand, go to Bing’s home page and select “Maps” from the search options listed under the main search field.
Step 3: In the Maps page search field, enter either your business name or your location and business category.
Step 4: In the listing of search results, scroll all the way down until you see the words “local listing center” in page gray and click on that to get started with your listing.
Now for the real way to do this.
Go to: https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx
-and sign up from there.
I only listed these steps out to illustrate the fact that Bing’s method is; 4 (non-intuitive) steps as opposed to Google’s 2 somewhat obvious ones and that trying to explain this to a client over the phone is not high on my list of fun and easy activities. The only bright spot in all this is that, at the end of the sign-up process, Bing.com promises to send you a letter for verification about your listing as opposed to a phone call that can take some people by surprise.
Posted 8 months, 2 weeks ago at 5:55 pm. 2 comments
