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Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

My most recent project was for a Boston area Women’s Life Coach who came from the publishing industry and has a strong leadership background not to mention super coach and consulting attitude. She will kick your butt and get you motivated as you would expect any good coach to do. This was a very exciting project for me because we encountered and overcame a number of challenges.

The woman’s coaching industry to quite saturated so we had to go about this strategically and knew that blogging was a huge part of how she will be able to gain some ground. One of the obvious challenges was that blogging was new to Pattie. The first step was for her to realize that she already has all of the knowledge and just needs to start sharing it. Interestingly that was the extent to the challenge other than understanding the platform for the new blog. We brainstormed a number of topics, researched her competitors and Pattie is now blogging regularly.

We also set up a new fan page on facebook as well as LinkedIn where we are piping in the blog’s RSS feed and have customized the profile to match the branding of the website. This is still a work in progress and any body getting started with a new blog and/or social media presence has to understand that you have to start somewhere and letting fear delay you will only keep you from your overall goals. Pattie overcame her fear of blogging and is a pro now. It takes time to build up your readership and followers but little by little you can do it.

A few takeaways: focus on content, lay out a plan, and start strong with blogging regularly. Build out your networks in relevant areas as not every social network will be appropriate. You want to write about topics and join groups where your followers are most likely to find common interest, share your content and link to it. After time, with good content built, people fill find you and business will boom…you don’t have to do it all, just don’t delay.

My most recent wordpress project was one that required a move from Blogger’s Blogspot to Wordpress. Check it out www.rungranolarun.com

Many bloggers often start out with Blogspot.com and then wish they were using Wordpress instead. The move is actually not too difficult.

Depending on the hosting solution that you use for your Wordpress, you may or may not be able to upload the Blogger’s blog directly. I use Bluehost (found it’s limitation) and had to use a workaround. Wordpress.com actually did the trick.

Here are the steps you want to follow:

1. Log in to or create a Wordpress.com account. Once logged in you want to find the “Tools” tabAfter selecting the tools tab click on “Import.” Within the import section you then select “Blogger”, then authorize. This section will take you to your Google Account for which the log in is the same as your Blogspot.com log in. If you are already logged in then this won’t be prompted. Google will then ask you again to authorize the connection so click “grant access”.

Once you have finished this connecting process. Your Import > Blogger access will now show you all Blogspot.com blogs that you have with that respective account. Select the one that you want to transfer to Wordpress.

Click “Import” and the process will proceed automatically. This however is where (if your Wordpress setup won’t allow it) you could get stuck. What happened to me was that I’d select import and each time only one post would import and then the process would stop. The workaround is to use Wordpress.com as I mentioned.

After the import is complete and you verify that indeed all of your posts and comments are uploaded you can then do the reverse (unless you are not self hosting, in which case you’d be done now). For those who are self hosting follow the steps under “Tools” > “Export” now. It simply exports Wordpress to a file that can then in turn be uploaded to your hosted wordpress account.

2. Before you proceed with the final import make sure that you have installed the Wordpress Plugin Blogger Redirector and that your permalinks are set to /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html which is the same format that Blogger uses. This way when you set the final redirect from Blogger all of your posts will redirect as well.

3. Test, test, test

4. Log in to Blogspot.com under “Settings” > “Publishing” > “Advanced Settings” and enter your new Wordpress domain address. Then save those settings.

Your final product just may look something like this

Hope this helps. I’d love to know what your experience with blog migrations has been.

No I am not getting married…but I was feeling that itch for a change. Ughhh it’s a designers bain, constantly seeking something new. I don’t seem to have that problem with any client sites, however my site never seems perfect enough. I guess that makes me a good designer?… always seeking perfection, which can be a pitfall…

Getting the urge to redesign is probably the #1 reason that people change their site and the #1 problem with redesigning…this may sound hypocritical, but “don’t redesign your blog just because you are bored with it.” It’s actually a natural occurrence and so you need to stick with it, because as your boredom increases users actually don’t experience that same feeling. They are happy with what you have, as long as the content is good.

With that said, I did change my heading a bit. Here’s the hypocritical part: my change was not a “redesign” per se. Besides just needing something new, I changed the heading for the following reasons (reasons that make it ok to change things up a bit):

1. I felt visitors needed more guidance, at first glance, as to what my blog was about. A snappy headline in addition to “Food For Thought” would do the trick, hence “thinking. blogging. engaging … Web 2.0″
2. I shifted images to keep the overall feel the same. Originally the “[rc]” box was on the left and now I shifted it to the right (obviously), but the overall look is consistent.
3. I tied in the image of the thought cloud to the icon imagery that I use in conjunction with my post headers throughout the blog.

Lessons to be learned: There are good and bad reasons for making changes on your site. Make sure you evaluate why you are making those changes. Test before you implement those changes. Make sure those changes are consistent with your overall look and feel. Have fun with it!