jennsweb.blogspot.com

Recently I looked at my client list and realized that I now have quite a few whose sites include a blog.  Some of them update the blog on a regular basis and send out an email to all their subscribers to let them know there’s something new to read.  Others put a new post up once in a while and then there’s the ones who wrote 2 or 3 posts in a rush when their site was first launched and haven’t updated since then.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being taciturn.  Hey, in New England it’s practically a virtue, but with so much online customer/company interaction these days, having a blog and never doing anything with it is like hiding in the stockroom when a customer walks in the door.

I think a lot of it has to do with the sheer vastness of the blog-0-sphere.  There’s a dizzying array of blogging platforms, services, widgets, feeds and gadgets out there that can make any busy business owner throw up their hands and retreat back into their snail-mail newsletter shell.  So, hopefully, I can help by breaking this complex idea down into its basic components.

Why would I want to have a blog in the first place?

Because it’s fun!  It really is.  Whether it’s finding a great site that would help your customers find useful information, great photos from your company cook-out, or even the news that someone at your firm had a baby, it’s a good feeling to put it out there for everyone to see.  It’s also a way to turn a problem into a positive thing.  When I’ve had to spend an entire afternoon searching for a solution to an issue on a client’s site, putting a post up that shows how I solved the problem not only helps me to have it “on-file” for the next time the issue comes up, it’s good karma to provide an answer where none existed before!

Some other great reasons to have a blog for your business are:

1: It’s good for the environment.  Remember the mailed-out newsletter?  I still get one from AAA every quarter and I’m usually so busy, it goes right into the recycling bin.  Instead of all that formatting and list merging, envelope-licking and stamp buying, a blog post, set to be emailed via RSS to a client who has opted for email updates, has a much better chance of actually being read and doesn’t use any paper!

2. It’s free advertising.  Sure, you could spend hundreds of dollars on print ads, even more on an Adwords campaign, but perhaps the most effective way to gain new business is to provide an online resource for customers to find out more about your business.  People are always happy (and grateful!) to receive free information.  Informed and happy is how you want people to feel when they come to you for business.

How do I get a blog?

There are many blogging “platforms” out there, but the 2 I am most familiar with are Wordpress (which runs this site) and Blogger.  Wordpress offers 2 options.  If you don’t want to deal with signing up for your own self-hosted (published under your own site name on a hosting company’s server) blog, then you can go to Wordpress.com and get a blog going there.

Your Wordpress Blog "dashboard"

If you have your own site already and you just want to add the blog to it, you can either install Wordpress in a subfolder of your site (and call the folder “blog”) and then just add a link to it in your navigation (example: jennmearswebdesign.com/blog), or you can set up your entire site in Wordpress and assign a page to contain the blog portion of the site.

(Editor’s note: Blogger now has a Pages gadget to add static pages to your blog.)

Blogger is now a service offered by Google.  A blogger.com blog’s URL looks like this:

http://salemliving.blogspot.com

If you have a Google account, just sign in and go to Settings, then Google Account Settings.  Blogger is listed there along with other great (free!) tools to enhance your blog.

Your Blogger Dashboard

By the way, getting a Google account is a very useful overall step to take a business owner.  It allows you to create a Google Maps listing for your business and get easy-to-access online email as well as being a foundation for many cool blogging tools such as Feedburner.

Feedburner lets you provide a way for readers to follow your blog.

What do I write about and how often?

For a straight-up business blog, it’s best to focus your writing on information related to your business.  For example, I have a client that’s a lawyer and their blog consists of posts about various court case rulings that affect their area of practice.  If you are in the medical field, it may be a good idea to write about medical studies and other news related to your particular area of medicine.  A blog is your opportunity to give your clients useful information that is tailored just to them.  You know your clients and you know when things need to be put into layman’s terms and phrased in ways that they will understand.

Of course not every entry needs to be cut and dry information about your field.  Posts can be about things that are happening in your life like how much fun you are having coaching your daughter’s softball team, or a great new restaurant you ate at the other night.  Having a month-long special in your store?  Put up a post on your blog and then publish updates throughout the month about how sales are going.  I publish a new post when I launch a new website and it lets people know what kinds of clients I have and how I approach different web design situations.

How often should you write on your blog?  This is a pretty open-ended question.  The best answer is to sit down, think about your schedule throughout the week, and try to find 15-30 minutes somewhere that you can use for updating your blog.  Blogs that are updated on a steady basis are the ones that quickly develop loyal followers.  It’s not quantity, it’s quality.  A single well-written post with cool pictures and links once a week is 10 times better than a gaggle of half-baked, info-light random blurbs.

Good tip: If you are worried that you will end up staring at a blank editing window, come “blog-time”, take some time to write down at 10 different ideas for posts and save them for a rainy day.  I keep a notebook throughout the day when I’m working and it really helps when I have writer’s block to flip through and find the different ideas scattered throughout the pages.

How can I get people to read my blog?

Tell people that it’s there! If you already have a client email list, then send out an email with the link to the blog in it. Just be sure you are comfortable with how your blog looks first and you’ve got at least 2 or 3 (proofread!) posts on the home page already.

Be sure to include a way for people to subscribe to your blog via email. (By default, all blogs offer a way to “check in” for updates via an RSS feed but unless your audience is particularly tech-savvy, they won’t likely choose to do so. Also, most people check their email at least once a day. Your blog’s feed service will check your blog periodically and send out an email to a subscriber if you have posted new stuff.

Also, if you are on any social network that lets you post a profile, add your blog’s URL to your profile. Provide a “feed” of your blog on your Facebook profile or page and people can visit your profile and get updated on your blog in one visit.

Basically, the easier you make it for people to read and follow your blog, the more your blog will be read.

Best Blogging Practices

Be succinct

Title your posts wisely.  Web crawlers look for keywords primarily in page titles which, for a blog post is the title of the post.

Pictures keep people reading.  Just make sure you are using them legally.

Keep your content organized and easy to search through.  Using tags and categories (basically assigning relevant keywords to a post) will make it easier for readers to browse your blog (and keep browsing!)

Open a dialogue with your readers.  Was this post helpful for you?  Not anything you didn’t know already?  Do you have more questions?  Send me some feedback below!

PatsyAnn.net: Welcome Page

Jenn Mears Web Design has just launched a site for Patsy Ann doll enthusiasts that was designed for Marblehead resident, Debbie Essig. After collecting Patsy Ann dolls, furniture and ephemera for many years, Debbie decided to combine her love of this unique doll of the Depression Era with her gift for creating vintage design doll clothing into a site that would showcase her extensive knowledge of Patsy Ann as well as providing a way to sell her unique hand-made outfits online.

PatsyAnn.net's navigation bar

Debbie wanted to emulate the style of Effanbee’s 1930s advertising flyers, so I needed to incorporate vintage Depression Era graphic elements into the overall design. I found the Fairfax Station font to be a good choice for the main header as well as the side navigation and the page headers.

Patsy Ann with vintage clothing and accessories

I built the page template based on the Silver Dreams theme (available at Wordpress.org), and it was a highly adaptable, lightweight theme that provided a solid foundation to bring Debbie’s vision online.

Mona Hersey, the proprietor of To Do! Ta Done√, a personal assistant/home organizing business, hired me to do an overhaul of a site that had started out as a hosting company generated template. 
Since Mona’s business is all about helping people to clear the clutter and confusion out of their lives, it made sense to use a cleanly organized theme such as Corporate Globe by Rankerz SEO Services. I was able to develop a new template via CSS that used the To Do! Ta Done√ colors of light green and violet and also incorporated hints of orange from the original theme. The end result is a site that is organized, colorful, easy to use and that showcases a great local business!

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!

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.