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!

Here are 4 steps to getting ready to create a site that will reflect what you do and help your business to grow.

Step 1. Get your site name (URL, domain name).
To get set up with a domain name, it’s a good idea to start by finding a hosting company with a good reputation that’s inexpensive and will also give you a way to reserve the domain name as well as host your future site. Yes, reserving a domain name is a separate service than hosting your site. Registering a domain name is staking your claim on the url to make sure a competitor can’t use it. Hosting a site is renting server space that the hosting company maintains, thereby giving your site a virtual home on the internet.
Here’s a pretty good list of hosting companies to start with.
When you go to a hosting provider’s home page, look for a domain check service, either on the home page itself, or as a link such as “domains” or “domain check”.

Oh no! The domain name that I wanted is taken already!

If yourcompanysname.com is taken, don’t fear. I’ve had a few clients that this happened with and they used yourcompanysname.net as an alternative. .Net and.com endings for commercial sites are pretty much interchangeable, but .org is for non-profit organizations. .Biz and .info aren’t used very often and so a lot of spammers use them and therefore, you should investigate alternative domain names. Your guiding mantra is “Easy to find, easy to remember”. Search engines will “grab” a site to display in search results based on a number of factors, but the site’s name is a big one.

For example, you might have been building a graphic design business based on friends and word of mouth and now you want to “hang your shingle” on the web and drum up some more business. You have been using the name Designs by Jane for a while, but when you go to reserve the name designsbyjane.com it’s already taken. Don’t panic and register designsbyjane.biz or designs-by-jane.com. People are conditioned to hear .com at the end of a site name and the .biz may confuse them. And people don’t like hyphens when they are typing a url into their browser’s address bar. Is designsbyjane.net taken? If not, that’s a good alternative. It still has a familiar sound to web users. Or, if .net is also taken or you have your heart set on a .com, try using your name: janedoe.com or, janedoedesign.com.

It really helps to have a name based on something people are highly likely to use when looking you up in a search engine. Someone who has heard your name will find you quickly if they simply type your name into a search or if they are looking for the service you provide, or the topic your site deals with, it really helps to include that in your web site’s url.

Step 2. Set up your site’s hosting.
A while back I wrote a guide to choosing a hosting company for people to learn about how to decipher all the bells and whistles that the hosting companies out there offer. Over the years I’ve seen some companies that seem to offer great deals and the site owner ends up tearing their hair out when they want to do anything to their site, and some good ones that offer an easy way to find help when it’s needed and packages that don’t force you to sacrifice services for a good bargain.

Rather than repeat the info in the guide, here’s a few FAQ’s that have come up over the years.

Q. I registered my url with a hosting company, but I want to host the site somewhere else. Can I do that?

A. Yes you can. When you have chosen a company to host your site, look for a way to transfer a domain. Otherwise, when you try to set up the url you want hosted, they will tell you it’s not available. The hosting company’s web site ideally has information on how this process will be handled. It usually involves changing the Domain Name Server (DNS for short) on the registrar’s end of things to point to the hosting company’s DNS.

Q. Can I have an email address that reflects my url without having to check on a different email address than my regular one all the time?

A. I have yet to come across a hosting company’s email account dashboard that doesn’t let you forward you@yourcompany.com to you@yourhomeemail.com.

Q. The hosting company I want to go with offers these templates for putting my site up quickly and cheaply. Should I just try to go with that?

A. Well, this is a tricky one ethically. As someone who makes a living creating web sites for clients, I can honestly say this: Some template systems are better than others. I have actually recommended this service to someone who was getting a lot of good word of mouth business via online listing services, but was so busy running their business that they knew they didn’t have time for a full-on website just yet. Then again, I recently met with someone who had done their web site through a major hosting company and we both almost lost our sanity trying to figure out what had happened to her template site’s dashboard. Since the template service was free, her site was not backed up by the hosting company and she realized that in order to make the slightest change, she needed to re-do her entire site’s template.

In the end though, everyone I know who’s tried hosting company templates always ends up running smack into the template’s limitations sooner or later.

Step 3. Think about what your site needs to do for your audience.
What is the main reason someone needs to go to your site? To hire you? To learn more about what you do? To buy what you are selling? Whatever that reason is, build your site around that. If you are going to have products for sale, you need to determine how you are going to implement a shopping cart. If you are going to provide information, you need to have a way for people to find it easily. If you are going to provide services for a potential client, they need a way to easily find out what those services are.

Step 4. Look at some sites that you want to emulate.
Sometimes they are your competitors’ sites, other times it’s sites you find really useful or, maybe it’s just sites that you and your friends/clients/colleagues rave about. Look at a few and make notes. What makes those sites effective? You can create an absolutely stunning site visually but if it’s not efficient for the user, they could click away before your fabulous flashy splash page even loads. If you can go to the site and find what you are looking for in less than a minute and a half, that’s a good site. Visuals count though. What’s my pet peeve? Sites that make you click in 4 different places to do what you most likely landed there to do. Good site design doesn’t beat around the bush.