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?

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…

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.

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

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.)

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.