And now for my second act…
I spent the day at the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge today learning how to apply WordPress to website construction. The course was sponsored by BostonWordpress and given by the most wonderful (blatant plug here) WordPress expert Amanda Blum of howlingzoe.com.
From what I can see so far, WordPress is relatively simple to set up initially, but much more difficult to manage if you want your site to look distinctive. However there’s no question that WordPress is part of our web landscape now and will become the platform of choice when it offers the option of customized design.
So I’m signed up for two more courses and WordCamp Boston in the spring. And maybe I can maneuver a WordCamp in Phoenix this January if I play my cards right.
There’s another series of excellent training classes being given by Boston ?PHP?. Saturday I spent the day at an intermediate PHP class and I have to say my brain hurt by the end of the day. PHP is server side database scripting and you do need developer brain cells to manage it. But the instructor Michael Bourque assisted by Bobby Cahill were terrific and kept us involved and (mostly) on track.
So now there’s just HTML5, CSS3 and all social media left to master and I should be all set for the next 6 months.
Don’t do what I do.
I started doing something that makes branding people (except for me, of course) crazy. I’ve been playing with the WordPress themes and having a great time. But every time I do I give myself a new look (and walk away from my brand). And you know what? It’s been fun.
Maintaining your company’s brand is critically important to keep your customers’ recognition and perception of your company and what it promises. It’s almost sacred.
Yeah, yeah. My website does that, my business card does that. This week my blog is a messy desk.
How a web design goes straight to hell*
* This is the actual title. Very funny and only slightly exaggerated process of client relations. Thanks Chris Monaco of Tube Media for sharing this.
Chuck Ingala has arrived
It’s a new day!!!!
Just took Chuck Ingala through the process of setting up his website and it’s very exciting.
Is your blog the unpopular kid?
The very funny ladies from “Stuff Hipsters Hate” have done it again. I’m sure we can all find ourselves in their latest – “Is your blog the unpopular kid?“
Where, oh, where has the time gone…
It’s been over a month since I’ve written and I think I stayed away lately because I was feeling so guilty. But, in that time, my son graduated from college (which included all the traveling and parties), I joined a new BNI and have been getting to know a fantastic group of people, I officially and very proudly became a “Geek Girl”, and my business went from recession to overwhelming (and having gone through the last year and a half, I’ll never complain about being overworked again – well, maybe a whine here and there.)
But as my blog was being ignored, I was learning the fine art of tweeting and posting on Facebook. There’s some amazing information out there and I passed it on to anyone interested – and some not so interested. All I had to do was write an intro and I became an expert.
The Facebook pages were fun – I “like” a great group of people. As for Twitter…
1 – DON’T follow Guy Kawasaki. I know he’s brilliant but your account will be completely filled with his drivel.
2 – On that note, anyone I follow that fills my page is gone, unfollowed and outa here!
3 – I know you can customize your pages, but most of the customization is GORILLA UGLY. Please, don’t repeat your logo 30 times or display your last vacation photos in magenta. The clouds are really nice.
3 – You have to learn the codes. Now bit.ly was easy (the condensing program), but thanks and recognition is @, I believe # links it back to you, and much more vocabulary I have still to discover.
4 – LOG OUT, people. I stayed logged in for convenience and both my Facebook account and my Twitter account were hacked. It became very inconvenient.
5 – Learn the Twitter etiquette. When you do, you’ll start being accepted in the “in-crowd.”
And to put it all in perspective, here’s a funny article from a couple of very funny bloggers. “Don’t tweet that: How not to be a Twitter dork”.
Oh, so Soho..
I was following paths on my browser one day (the way I used to when we had the 30-volume encyclopedias when I was a kid) and opened a window to a site that just knocked my socks off – Design42day.com. Another click and I was on clearmag.com and instantly became a convert of online magazines. They had that cutting edge feel that Soho did before it became too trendy and that the Europeans have always managed so well.
In Design42day, the layouts are in the classic design grid, the navigation easy to manage, but the combination of revolving gallery of photos on my large column on my left and the different flash boxes on the two columns on the right seem more that I was a part of an event rather than reading a magazine. Also, except for the top navigation bar, all of the links are visual which makes following them that much more enticing.
Clear Magazine has it’s own grid but the effect of the home page is the same – bright colors and moving pictures. But Clear is more like a paper magazine in that there are articles and interviews that accompany some of the photography (yes, you can actually read it) and if you scroll down to the bottom you have the opportunity to subscribe to paper volumns.
Sometimes we get so busy in our assignments that we forget that this kind of experimental design is being done and evolving all the time. But for a few minutes I was strolling down West Broadway on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Gasp! Twitter gives out paper business cards
This is wonderful. From the SciTEchBlog, March 15:
Ever since Twitter made a big splash at South By Southwest in 2007, the micro-blogging site has seen a lot of milestones. The site has won support from celebrates like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, signed search deals with Google and Yahoo!, recently hired their 140th employee, and even had the 10 billionth tweet sent out early in March.
But the hip, San Francisco company was missing something that, in the general business world, seems rather basic: It never had business cards. Employees just gave out their Twitter names instead.
But that, too, has changed. At SXSW this year, Twitter employees are handing out paper business cards just like the rest of us. Instead of eggshell white, the company went with an earthy brown color for its cards.
That may seem like a silly bit of news, but first consider the context. At SXSW, everything is going digital. Instead of handing out cards, many tech professionals just download a smartphone app called i-Nigma and then scan a barcode on other attendee’s name tags. That person’s contact info automatically downloads onto the phone. Others use an iPhone app called Bump, which, when two phones are tapped together, exchanges a business-card’s worth of data through the air.
A Twitter spokesman poked fun at the idea of business cards even as he listed the benefits of paper-based networking.
“This antiquated thing called ‘business cards’ is a helpful way for some of us to bridge our online and offline worlds with potential employees, partners and the thousands of developers who make Twitter applications,” said company spokesman Sean Garrett.
So, is paper really the new mode of social networking? Next thing you know, maybe Twitter employees will be spotted in ties.
Hi, Ho, Hi, Ho, it’s inbound we all go!
I received something in the mail today. An antiquated, dead-medium PAPER DIRECT MAIL package sent to me from GOOGLE AdWords. Yes, a famously online, inbound company soliciting business with a traditional direct mail letter package.
That doesn’t surprise me. Constant Contact got an amazing response from a highly segmented PRINT direct mail campaign.
All I hear these days is social media… SEO… inbound marketing…cut your expenses and double your ROI… I’m sure you’ve heard it too. I’m not knocking inbound – we couldn’t do business without it. But there’s still a great value to outbound as well. Yes, it’s diminished and yes, it’s changed. But the greatest value is when inbound and outbound work together.
So back to this simple letter package I received from Google. Letter in #10 envelope, non personalized, no apparent response device and no customized URL – nothing special. But it has a fantastic offer and it’s sending me to a landing page that reinforces the offer, and has step-by-step instructions on how to start my free AdWords trial, AdWords basics on a video, and sign-up tips if I need them. And my benefit? It will bring me more customers. Well, I was sold.
Direct mail outbound has become very sophisticated. It can segment and pinpoint your market and customize messages and offers. So when you get leads on your landing page, they’re qualified leads and your conversion rate is much higher. And now that PURL (personal URLs) have become popular in outbound DM, there is more of an integration and it’s presented in a very compelling way. Who can resist going to a landing page with your name on it?
I urge clients not to adopt one or the other, but see what’s appropriate for their specific business. Because used properly, they all play well together.
Serif vs. San Serif – that is the question
Serif vs. san serif is an argument that’s been raging since I became an art director in 1974. There are creative people that will only allow one or the other, clients that don’t agree with them, studies proving both cases, and a lot of us in the middle that would like to use the fonts that looks best in the design.
Rule of thumb in the last 10 years is that serif is more readable in print because we learned to read from school books that used the appropriately named Century Schoolbook font, and san serif is better for digital since that’s the way we learned to read our online content. Direct mail aficionados are even more adamant about serif because the success of a DM package rests on the recipient’s ability to read it so the stakes are much higher.
In the years that I’ve listened to this argument, I have not been able to take a stand. There are both serif and san serif fonts that I will not use unless the safety of my family is threatened – the main one being Helvetica. I know that font has been revered since Bauhaus introduced it but I just think it’s ugly. Ugly, unreadable and overused. And I don’t take a stand because each font has a unique personality which must be appropriate to the design it is used in and to the audience it is reaching. Online the only limit should be the availability of online fonts.
For serif print, there is nothing like the elegance of a Goudy or Rotis Serif and I just used an Ultra Bodoni in a logo that gave me the shivers it was so beautiful. As for san serif, Meta Plus or Scala Sans make me feel like I’m with someone who’s the life of the party. Online, a Georgia and MS Trebuchet give me that same feeling – sweet and clear and brings a smile to my face. You choose fonts the same way you choose what you’re going to wear: Does it look good? Does it give the impression I want to give? And most importantly, do I like how it looks? The choice can be calculated but more often it is an emotional one.
I read articles like “Organic Launches ‘Crealytics’ to Study Impact of Serif Fonts” that talk about using analytics to determine designer’s use and reader’s acceptance of font choices. Some excerpts:
We went through a series of rigorous customer observation exercises and noticed some startling results, one of which was the use of serif over san-serif fonts. We saw customers respond with much higher font scores when we used serif fonts like Georgia – in fact the longer the serif the higher the score returned. Could decades of Swiss design been so wrong?
One interesting additional trend that we saw was when we attached Geographic tags to font usage. In New York and Miami we found that Helvetica was much more acceptable, maybe because these locations were closer to Europe? Customers commented that they could literally feel the “Euroness” of the design. One customer commented “…it just seemed cooler than those stuffy old serifs like you get in the New York Times. In fact those make me feel a little sick.” Conversely on the west coast customers in San Francisco gravitated towards serif fonts like Baskerville. One customer commented “they are just so much more friendly, I feel like the words are talking to me when I see a serif. My children seem happier too.” Studies in LA were inconclusive, other than the fact that the larger the size, the better the response-score.
I can only say: “Oh, give me a break…”
To see this article and other interesting words of wisdom about Internet Connections, Building Stand-out Brands and the upcoming Masters, go to read Paul Wackell at Imagine Web Designs.