Times Change

Some time ago I needed an X-ray. I went to the hospital reception and was told to follow the blue line on the floor. Great idea, however I needed several X-rays by the time I arrived, I had walked into so many trolleys whilst looking at the ground.

When I first started creating websites it would take several months to get sites listed on search engines. One would write a site, generally half a dozen pages or so, add a few keywords and a description to the code and wait for it to all happen. It was infuriatingly slow, there were debates as to whether one should submit sites to the UK and/or the US versions of the search engines and whether submitting to both would cancel each other out.

My recent record for site submission is about 40 seconds. That is from the time that I made a blog post live to being able to find it on Google. 40 seconds.

Nowadays sites are much larger entities, this one already runs into hundreds of pages, it’s a blog and although the posts all sit in a single page, that page is effectively a placeholder for as many posts as I write. Click on the title of the posts and you will see that they open up into their own page.

New World Order

Clearly there is a need to ensure order so that firstly people find your site through search engines and secondly so that once at your site they can find the information that they want. If one were to nip down to the local library and find that they had decided not to classify their books you would probably either,

1. Leave and go and find a more organised library
2. Find something unexpected but interesting to read

The same goes for blogs, ultimately your work will get lost in an ever increasing pile if you don’t implement a good system early on. OK so you aren’t going to implement the Dewey Decimal Classification system but you can and should implement some category system.

For Categories and Tags, Read Contents and Index

Quick Search (Categories)

A brief exercise. In the sidebar of this site you will see a drop-down called “Quick Search”. I could have called it anything and it says ‘Select Category’ on it because this is what the tool does. Your readers can use the category selector to filter out all of the bits that they don’t want to read and find the bits that they are interested in. It’s like the contents list at the beginning of a book.

Play around, go on, try it.

So your reader can click on the drop-down, find a subject that interests them and find they are presented with a subset of your posts.. It’s a hierarchical system eg Transport>Bicycles>Gazelle, all in all a very powerful tool.

I recommend that my customers start by considering a category structure as a paper exercise before a WordPress site is to be created. This is normally quite a difficult process that includes a fair amount of soul-searching and self-analysis. It is unlikely to be a completed item ‘at-the-off’ but it is essential. It will ask questions about what you do and what the site is to do and communicate.

Using WordPress to Create Categories and Tags

Once created on paper WordPress provides a number of ways to create and develop the category structure through the dashboard.

1. Under the “Posts” tab you will find a link to the categories page where you can add a new category either as a standalone item or as a sub-category with a parent. For instance the parent of ‘Cars’ in my system is ‘Transport’.
2. When creating a post, a categories box appears where you can either assign your post to an existing category, or create a new category. This is a particularly useful tool because your blog will develop and hopefully the category structure will develop too.

So to tags. We are now back at the beginning (sort of), you may recall that I mentioned keywords being applied pages. Keywords are words that people may use to search for. Whilst being related to categories they may not necessarily be the same.

As a simple example, Aston Martin is undeniably ‘transport’ but if you Google transport you will probably find information about busses and tubes. (yep- I’ve just checked it, you do).

Instead you might search for “luxury + car” and sure enough, page one Google a reference to Astons.

So in this example Transport is “Category” that Aston Martin might be in but “Luxury, Fast, car, James Bond, Aston, Martin” are the tags that people will use to find the post .

Again WordPress allows you to apply tags to your posts. These tags will act as keywords that will help people to find your posts through searches.

This probably all sounds hopelessly long-winded, it isn’t though. It will become second nature to you when writing posts. The bottom line is that you will help people find their way to your site and then find their way round when they are there.

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You Need Energy

We all need energy

Energy, in a word, energy. The difference between a blog and a static site is that the blog will generally develop and grow, but this won’t happen without some form of input. (my Mac grammar checker told me off for using that term the other day, told me it was jargon).

So what for does this energy take, what do we do to aid the ongoing development?

1. Blog. The first thing to is to actually write some posts, ideally fairly regularly. It’s not rocket science, why would someone visit your site if there is nothing new to read?
2. Keep a Focus. Yes this is a bit ‘do as I say, not as I do’. I have previously commented the eclectic nature of this blog, but… Keep a focus, yes of course embellish, express your human qualities, but make it clear what the boundaries are.

Hold on there, you haven’t done yet, back to the keyboard.

1. Tag your posts. When you write a post use the “post tag tool” to create some relevant tags. This will help search engines make sense of your post, put it in the correct box if you like. Ultimately it will help people to get to the post.
2. Categorise your posts. Similar to above. A strong category structure is essential for the search facility to work properly. If you have a fairly wide working remit a good set of categories will help viewers mine down to what they are looking for quickly.
3. Social bookmarking. Submit your post. Make sure Twitter, Stumbleupon, and the rest know about the post. Tweet your own posts, this blog has a Share This button, and a Tweetmeme button that allow me to self promote pretty easily. Beware though, no one enjoys total self promotion and adulation, but, if your post helps others, or helps promote your customers then why not?
4. Give something for free. It may be advice, it may be something that will helps others without costing you too much time. What goes around comes around.
5. Blogroll. Well we used to call them links. Again this site has a few and one of the (many) strengths of WordPress is that you can categorise them. A good set of links is a resource to others and a gift to your associates.

So what will my competitors make of this, won’t I be giving my secrets away?

The bottom line is to get real. Your competitors may already know all about you, who your suppliers are who your customers are. I would suggest that if they do you must be doing something right already for them to know about you.

The alternative scenario, the competition hasn’t even heard of you. Now there’s a thought.

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Gratuitous Rory O'Brien Pic

OK, so this blog has been going properly for about 6 months now and it is interesting (at least to me anyway) to see what people have been searching for. As I write I have just noted “fully clothed swim” was a search string that worked for someone yesterday, not to be confused with “failed fully clothed swim” or drowning. ‘Don’t know what that was about.

In some ways I can be accused of taking the eclectic and making it niche with this blog. An ex colleague Mal Dickson once described it as,

“the eclectic ramblings of Andrew Butler”

Anyway I like to think that here is a continuous thread somewhere in here binding together a rich tapestry. From readers there is clearly a strong interest in Citroen’s (dS3), SAAB 900s, and clearly a number of people willing to help locate “Missy the Cat”.

A lot of people looking for Teo Jakob in Bern, who am I to argue? If you get a chance go, please say hello to Marion for me.

Probably the strongest sector is those interested in classic cycles and they seem to love the house of Cinelli. It would be tempting for me to pander to one of these groups and chase the numbers but that’s not what this blog is about it. In a way it is defined by its eclecticism. WordPress themselves in a codex about writing posts suggest,

Write about what you like

You’ve heard this a thousand times before and it sounds too cliched, but it is true. If you force yourself to write something that you don’t really enjoy, it will show. Perhaps you might not have a specific theme for writing when you just start, but that’s ok. You’ll become more focused later. Just enjoy the experience and write what you like.

Don’t hide your emotions

Tempting as it might be, don’t hide your real emotions. After all that is what a blog is about. If you want, you can stay anonymous and voice your feelings on whatever you are passionate about. You might have strong views on various subjects but let your readers know your passion. What is passion worth if you can’t even share it? You’ll actually love the discussions it can lead to. The discussions will broaden your own thinking and you might end up making some really good friends.

These words resonate with Richard Branson’s recent post on his own blog

I actually think the most successful businesses are the ones where people think like that. If you think ‘where is the gap in the market for me to make a lot of money?’ and spend your life like that the chances are you’ll fall flat on your face. You have got to have a passion for what you are doing.

In essence this is why I think that blog based websites are great for business owners. Most of them are passionate about what they do and a blog is a great way of speaking to your audience directly.

For me Design Credo is a business involved in using design to help communicate more effectively with wider audiences. Further to this design is a broad and varied subject with common themes, it would be wrong to ring-fence the sub sectors. Communication is a complex subject but I can see that people read this blog Australia, Texas, quite a few people in California. I could go on.

For now though I would like to offer a big thanks for the person in Dnepropetrovsk (Ukkraine) who spent some time reading these pages on July 18th. Perhaps you know the person from Poltava who visited a few days earlier on the 15th? Perhaps you are the same person, who knows?

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Many of my website customers forget how to create their posts for WordPress blogs that DesignCredo have created for them.

So, lets see how to,

1. Upload an image to WordPress
2. Create an HTML heading
3. Use a plugin to add a page title and snippet
4. Attach the post to a category and add a tag

This is a simple walk-through, easy enough to follow. It shows how to add some text, upload and insert an image.

In addition it offers a brief introduction to HTML, but nothing to worry about.

If the video seems blurry select a higher quality via the tab on the RH side of the control bar.

For the record this was the first attempt using a MacBook Pro with Quicktime to record. It was run through iPhoto before uploading to YouTube, ain’t macs great?

Breaking all of the rules it was unscripted and a single take. View it as a tester. You can also view the video here

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I am a slow speaker, I know I am but once many years ago this was really brought into focus when I was trying to teach a friend how to ride a drop handlebar bicycle. She fell off at the point that I had said “take your hands off the lower part of the handlebars” and never got to hear me say “slowly, one at a time and move them to the top of the bars”. She survived (we didn’t). The point was that the communication clearly failed.

Why Mining

Frequently I hear people say things like “I need a website” or “I need an A4 brochure”. Rather foolishly some might say, I usually engage in a bit of Why-Mining by asking “why?”

To aid communication the emphasis is on the why not the mining. Why-mining is an effective although slightly annoying tool. Quite simply people frequently tend to already hold many of the answers that they seek, they just need someone to stand in front of them and ask them “why?”

“I need a four page A4 brochure”
“Why?”
“Because my competitor has one”
“Why does it need to be A4?”
“Because thats what they always are?
“Why do you need four pages?”
“Dunno”

Eventually you will get to bedrock and even if this bedrock is “I don’t know”, that will be a good place to start.

The bottom line is that what we at DesignCredo are trying to find out is what is the customer’s story, the unique thing that they are trying to communicate to others.

Form Follows Function

Yes there are standards, paper size, press size, envelope size, but surely the function of a piece of print is to communicate a message, some information, your story, whatever that is. The same goes for websites or any other communication aid. Most websites offer an entry point and frequently a contact point. And yes your story may be similar to your competitors but hopefully it will be a bit different and that difference will be your selling point. And your story may fit neatly on one, two, four pages but it might not.

My Daddy Plays With Apples

Ask most children what their parents do and you won’t get much sense from them. When young I thought my father was in a jazz band when he in fact flew in aeroplanes. But then I thought that the man who came round to sell insurance was Lee Kuan Yew the prime-minister of Singapore where we lived when I was five.

The problem is that if one asks many adults what they do one may struggle to get much more in the way of sense from them. This is frequently the first great stumbling block when designing websites. Good people, able people, talented people often struggle to be able to say what they or their businesses actually do.

Initially I found this surprising but now I seem to have become somewhat resigned to it, I expect it to happen, I frequently pre-warn customers,

“You will reach a point where your new website asks questions about what you do”.

In truth there is a lot of trust needed between the client and the designer, quite often searching questions will need to be asked in order to get the website right. The designer really needs to know the ins and outs of your business in order to get the site working well. It is relatively easy to create a website. It is a much more considered piece of work to get the website to communicate the appropriate message.

Don’t Stop Me Now

Further to this websites need to be forward looking. It isn’t good enough to design a website for now, it will date horribly. In order to make your site future-proof you will need to trust your designer enough to share your plans and of course you will need to be able to articulate these.

DesignCredo specialise in WordPress sites. The appeal of these blog-sites is that they put the customer back in control. We offer expertise in setting the site up creating the look and extending the functionality of the site whether it is improving the PubSubHubbub capabilities or improving the SEO setup of the site. We have a lot of experience in making sites work effectively for search engines, we have faith in the WordPress platform. In addition we will probably encourage you to become more active in social networking, particularly Twitter. We expect content to be searchable on Google within seconds and minutes, we will help make your site perform.

However this means that ultimately our customers share the responsibility for making the sites work well. For us this is a good thing. Good businesses are thriving organic things that constantly develop. Why shouldn’t their websites be too?

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Why am I annoyed? Well, as I see it, a blog needs commitment and constant fresh content, that’s what I tell my customers and that’s what I believe. As the Wall Street Journal says;

Social Networking: Common Mistakes Small Businesses Make

– Bare Profile: Signing up for a Facebook account is the easy part. Before you blast emails to 1,000 of your customers and friends, a business should spend some time thoughtfully building a profile with an attractive photo, background and contact information.

– Too Little Personality: Lighten up. The social-media world is about engaging customers on a more personal level. Your “About Me” shouldn’t just be dry facts about your business. Make sure you add some personal touches. Humor often helps.

– Too Much Hype: Using social media shouldn’t be about blatantly selling a business. It’s about making connections and creating credibility so that people will like you and trust you and eventually want to buy from you. Use it to interact and meet new people – don’t get overly promotional.

– Not Enough Fresh Content: Engaging others through social media needs to be an ongoing, frequent process. You can’t just build a profile and let it sit idle. Preferably you want to be refreshing your content regularly (daily, if possible) so people come back for more.

There it is, number four, hands up. Guilty as charged, and the stats prove it, readership drops off if you don’t keep moving on.

Recently I have been given the same advice by a couple of professionals. Bodie and Doyle? Nope, Accountant and Solicitor. The advice?

Do as I say, not as I do…

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Search Engine Marketing is a must if you are to going to get people to view any website. Nowadays everyone seems to be an SEO specialist, at least they do in Exeter and Devon, I imagine it is the same throughout he UK.

I am more aware of the abilities of WordPress than other blogging platforms so this is what I will use as my reference point. I have to say that I am totally enamoured with WordPress, I think it is great, but first a bit of general knowledge.

WordPress comes in two distinct flavours

1. .com Most people start with a free WordPress blog which you can start straight away and I would recommend you to go and sign up. If you blog a for a while and chose to migrate to self-hosted this can be easily done.
2. .org If you have access to hosting then self-hosted blogs open up a world of possibilities. You will need hosting with a database which is necessary to store all of the posts, images, comments and information about the site. My hosting supplier now throws one in with even the starter hosting package. You don’t really need to understand about databases (MySQL) but it can be quite interesting looking around, seeing how all of the data and information is organised.

WordPress can be thought of as a modular entity.

1. Core
   The site itself, everything that is needed to make it work. This includes a user friendly interface that will allow you to update the site without knowing about web deign.
2. Themes
   There are a huge number of available themes that make the basic WP blog look different (1 column, 2 column, colours styling etc.)
3. Plugins
   These add to the functionality of the blog, they make it do more things, (display images in galleries, add contact forms, etc. )

Search Engine Friendly Blogs

It helps if your blog has a focus and a appeals to a niche. Write with a clear view of your target audience, in particular what your readers are looking to find and what words they would use to search. Incorporate these words in your text. These keywords are fundamentally important.

WordPress plugins add to the functionality of the blog. In particular there are a range of SEO aids such as;

• XML sitemap generator
  This will enable the blog to develop an XML site-map that helps Google and other search engines locate the pages in your site. (you can get a plugin to create a people friendly site-map such as the one on this site).
• HeadSpace
  This lets you create a good page title and meta description. These two items are very important. Gone are the days when ‘Home’ was a good page title, it needs suitable keywords. The Meta description is what will generally appear in the Google snippet, the bit of information that appears when your page has been found on Google. This should be descriptive and keyword rich.
• Share This buttons
  Make it easy for people to share your site. Not strictly SEO stuff but it all helps.
• Twitter feed and Tweetmeme buttons
  As with Share links Twitter is a great way to network.Don’t underestimate the power of other social media such as Twitter and Facebook, cross-link your accounts try to keep a similar focus with to your blog, otherwise you will fail to appeal to your niche. There are a huge number of sites that will do the job for you, have a look at the Google search results for designcredo. There are loads of re-tweets and niche re-tweet sites in this list. Good news!
• WordPress Stats
  Statistics are your source for data that lets you find out how many people use your site and how they find you. You occasionally will find unexpected results.

I will finish with one further plugin PuSHPress (a PubSubHubbub Plugin For WordPress by Joseph Scott)

This plugin adds PubSubHubbub ( PuSH ) support to your WordPress powered site. The main difference between this plugin and others is that it includes the hub features of PuSH, built right in. This means the updates will be sent directly from WordPress to your PuSH subscribers.

I have recently mentioned PuSh with WordPress and my experience is that WordPress is quite PuSHy as it stands. I am currently developing a WordPress blog for a customer (several as it goes) but the one that is nearing completion has found it’s way on to Google already. This is a tad annoying because the location that it was Googled at is not it’s final resting place so in this instance the PuSHy little blog has caused me a bit of work. For now I will leave PuSH as a topic to return to.

The bottom line is that blogs should no longer be seen as SEO problems, my experience is quite the opposite. Within a couple of hours notification of the first draft of this blog had been returned to me via Google Alerts (SEO, Exeter) but in the same alert I was informed that the post had already made an appearance on another site. Don’t forget, this is organic search engine marketing my investment is time not money.

Yes, yes, time is money I know…

At Design Credo we design websites. We are equally as happy to set up a blog for you. This includes researching theme styles, editing them to suit and branding your site. We will install and configure the plugins and most importantly guide you through the interface. Give us a call (07790 322176) or contact us here.

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Dorsey's 2006 sketch of Twitter

The original product name or codename for the service was twttr, inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS short codes are five characters. The developers initially experimented with “10958″ as a short code, though later changed it to “40404″ for “ease of use and memorability.”[7] Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): “just setting up my twttr”.[9] wikipedia.org

The First Tweet

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I heard this on t’wireless last night, World Service. It’s worth a listen just to remind ourselves of the phenomenal change that has happened since Sir Tim Berners-Lee started the ball rolling in 1991.

(A great quote by Andrew Keen around the 18.25 mark.)

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Stone Age Computer

The same goes for news. Yes there is still a town crier in Topsham, where I live, he has a nice little label on the back of his nice little Rover. On Saturday we go to the paper shop because it makes us feel that the weekend is with us. True we could turn the telly on for news, but, now with computers and RSS feeds news can come to us, on demand, in the flavour that we desire.

We also get notification of our friends’ lives to compare, contrast and fret over with Facebook. We get those necessary minute by minute updates via Twitter and interesting oh so essential insights through blogs. We can feed our (British) obsession for the weather and convey our day to day endeavours to the wider world through a fully synched Google-iCal-Nokia-Suite-calendar-widget-thingy.

Then we can sit worrying because we know we have forgotten some aspect of this helpful technology but don’t know which. In the past we worried about the gas or the tap being left on now I suppose it is ‘is my firewall operating?’ We can also add a certain piquancy to our annoyance when the various online alarms start going off just after the meeting that we have just set off for has been cancelled, via text of course.

But all this technology can be useful and fun, it just needs a bit of management and this is where start pages come in.

Manage Information with Start Pages

Most suppliers will happily offer some sort of portal that you can access your emails through. This will be a web page that can set set as the home page for your internet browser. Frequently though they are advertising-heavy affairs that slow your computer if not your life down. The trick is to integrate all of the information that you want. It has been said that screens are the real estate of the desk, and this is true, but real estate (whatever that is in English) shouldn’t be squandered.

I am a sinner, I am not tidy by nature. If I could capture the special ability of my desk detritus to replicate and transfer this to farming I could transform the lives of billions. I keep trying, (we are the people who try). One aspect of this endeavour is my start page. Through it I can check Twitter, Facebook, I have a calendar which is available and synched to my phone and my computer. I have a to-do list that I am very bad at to-doing. If I can’t be asked to look out of the window, or if the desk detritus has been particularly prolific, I can check the weather online. In addition I get BBC news headlines and I have an RSS reader all on one screen.

In addition all of this information is pulled together on any computer that I choose to log on to, anywhere. Lets, prioritise;

1. Calendar: To be honest mine is not ideal, it will only iSync one way* but I add my details online, the Mac then syncs itself to it so I have an offline record and my smartphone synchs to the mac. ( *I won’t go in to the ins and outs of the sync process here). I am considering MobileMe though.
2. To Do List: Top of the to-do list is get in the habit of using the to-do list
3. Social Networking: Make your own call whether or not you buy into this. I have just glanced across to my second monitor that shows the start-page and can see that Sarah Beeney had a “flippin delicious supper”. I assume from the use of “flippin” and “supper” that she is “jolly posh”. My.
4. RSS feeds: Hands up, I was late to the table on this one. There are a huge number of people out there with genuinely interesting things to say, and the best thing is they do, online, regularly. Find an RSS reader and start subscribing. if you don’t like what you get unsubscribe. I get design tips, coding tips and plain stupid humour.

Information on the screen where it works best for me

When I chose a start page I needed one that would allow me to place the information on the screen where it works best for me. I wanted one that didn’t take an age to load because I was getting all manner of advertising that I didn’t want. Sometimes some of the widgets that I add don’t work as well as they might, generally though if you are looking for interfaces for Twitter, Facebook and the like there is a choice so find a better one if you aren’t happy.

If I want to I can change the look of the page but for me less is more this whole exercise is about functionality and communication.

Google (iGoogle) and Yahoo allow you to set up start pages easily. Less well known are netvibes and pageflakes, and on a wider scale Apple’s MobileMe offers a huge amount of functionality although in this case at some cost. You will however need to invest a bit of time to find out which is best for you but in the log run this will be a worthy investment.

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