Tag Archives: blogging

WordPress.com Twenty-Eleven Theme – deal breaker?

Blogging, , , , ,

As promised, I did some WordPress.com exploration on my blogs.  One of the changes I had in mind was to convert my XOXOQUILTS.COM from the Coraline theme to the Twenty-Eleven theme.  At first, I loved it!

  • The font is sexy.
  • The header is crisp.
  • The large image (1000 x 288 ) for the header – great real estate for unique images for each page and/or blog post!

How Twenty-Eleven appears as a blog – AWESOME!

I got everything set up and was really loving it, when I came to what I must admit is a deal breaker.

Individual blog posts do not have a template that allows for the widgets (images and links) to appear in the sidebar. They only show up when on the “blog” page, as shown above.

But when on an individual post (like what someone might see if they follow the link to the blog from facebook or Google Reader), the whole page is blank, except for the images and text of the specific article.

How Tweny-Eleven appears as an individual post – BLEAK.

After I’d set everything up, I really hated to go backwards.  I sought out the experiences of other users on the WordPress.com forum and on the WordPress.com Facebook page.

No one had a better solution – or even a realistic workaround.  The reasoning was given as “faster load time,” which is fair enough, but outside the scope of my publishing concerns.  At least, I don’t think there are quilting revolutionaries running around the streets using my latest quilt posts to determine sewing location, timing, and strategy!  Gosh, I almost wish there were!

So… I know I can be guilty of grabbing onto a small detail and wrestling with it until it becomes a major issue.   I decided rather than to keep poking at the problem, I’d let it rest over the weekend and see if I could live with the blank post template.

And you know what happened?  Over the weekend, KTSeams wrote a post on the East Bay Modern Quilt Guild blog linking back to a post on my blog.  Awesome, right?

But when someone followed the link, all they got was my one article… no widgets, no list of other blogs I follow, no suggestion to follow XOXO QUILTS via RSS, join me on Facebook, see images on Flickr, or join my mailing list.  What if I wanted to promote an Etsy shop??

Even the links to earlier posts, rather than using the titles I so carefully craft, simply say “previous” and “next,” as if caught in some modernist, non-specific database trap.

Without those blogging and social media tools, my blog posts are less-than-viral and more like an unsigned letter that accidentally shows up in your mailbox.  There’s no trail or path to let you know how to have an ongoing relationship with me or better yet, my quilts.

Interestingly enough, this has all taken me back to using the Twenty Ten theme, the default WordPress.com theme published in 2010.  It has all of the functionality I’m seeking, minus a little real estate for the header image, less sexy font, and I don’t quite like the way the name of the site and the tag line are written at the top.  But I can live with the aesthetic shortcomings if the function is right on.

So, I guess I’d call my test run of Twenty Eleven a research project and a lesson that can hopefully help others.  And there is good news.  I started monkeying around with the categories for posts, and I’m finding really exciting ways to incorporate that functionality into indexing my site.

Stay tuned… I’ll share more details soon!  Or if you want a sneak preview, head over to XOXOQUILTS.COM and check out the menu dropdown for +2011 QUILTS.  Let your mouse hover over the text on the menu as you explore.  Pretty cool, right?

More Blogging Tricks…!

Blogging, Business Development, CYN WORKS,

I’ve started a list of some new WordPress.com tools that I want to incorporate into my blogs. I’ll be adding them over the summer, and I’ll post about them here.  I think they’re pretty nifty tricks that will add a lot of benefits with baseline effort.

Summer 2011 WordPress.com Goals

  1. Switch my xoxoquilts.com blog from the Coraline theme to the new 2011 WordPress theme.  I’ve really liked Coraline, especially because it allows for two columns for widgets.  But I’m ready for a change, and I think the larger image space of the WordPress 2011 will enhance the way I can showcase my quilts.  I’ve already switched my client sample site over to 2011.  What do you think of the new header style?  Larger image!
  2. I also want to get more adventurous with the indexing capability provided by using categories and tags in blog posts.  Last week I blogged about having 13 quilt projects underway.  Over the weekend, I started envisioning how I could index (categorize) those quilts by name, creating an archive of all posts related to each quilt in an easy-to-access link.  Stay tuned… it’s easier to show than explain.  Plus, once you see it, I think you’re gonna want to do it too!
  3. Google calendars!  I’ve added this to a client’s site to manage their class schedule.  The site is in beta, so take a sneak preview here!  Oh, and actually, you can see how “categories” can be managed right on the Ashland Quiltz website — click on one of the widgets on the right of the calendar, like “Our Customers” to see how that brings up posts about their very creative customers!

I think that’s enough to keep me busy for a minute.  If you have any other great WordPress.com ideas that I should be using, please share!  I still can’t believe this platform is FREE!!!

Oh, and if you live in the Bay Area and keep a blog, we still have 2 spots in our “Making Your Blog Professional” workshop on June 21!

Juggling Priorities at Warp Speed

Business Development, , ,

Whatever you think is most important, that’s what’s going to happen next.  Know what I’m saying?

It’s really all about priorities!  I’m having one of those days (or two … hopefully not three!) where just getting from the 5 am alarm to crashing at 11 pm is a juggling act of dealing with whatever issue has the most heat under it.  Work is getting busy; life is getting busy; I have a lot of dreams to accomplish.  It’s a bit chaotic at the moment.

I know a lot of people live like this all the time!  How?  I’m not so sure I have the answer to that!  I am one of those people who needs organization to function well.  I don’t multitask.  I organize and calendar projects, and then I do one thing at a time, focused and methodically until it’s finished.

This rising sense of panic I’m feeling reminds me of a boss I once had, who, when I’d tell her she was adding way too much to my workload, would say, “Oh, do you need me to help you prioritize?”  In the early days, I always said NO.  For one, I knew perfectly well that all she was going to do was to let me blow off a little steam and nothing at all was going to disappear from my plate.  And two, it irked me, as if her offering to take control of the decisions somehow meant that I couldn’t handle my job.

Oh, the pride of the young workforce…!

Now?  I’m looking around for someone to share this responsibility.  Who can help me?  I’d be glad for some help in deciding what will and what won’t get done!

I am asking myself:

  • Can I delegate or hire out?
  • Where can I push back deadlines?
  • Where can I take some shortcuts?
  • Who wouldn’t care if the work didn’t happen till next month?
  • What are my own prospecting and marketing commitments?  Are there things I’m doing that could be simplified?
  • Where have I made commitments that don’t take my own goals forward?  Are these commitments adjustable or is there a way to fulfill my promises and then make an exit?

The most important thing to me is that my relationships stay strong.  I am surprised how often I can speak to someone honestly and we’re able to renegotiate a commitment.  The same boss who used to offer to reprioritize my workload also gave me these words to stand by:  Approach all problems from a place of being humble but strong.

To me, that means taking responsibility for shortcomings and failings (real or perceived), and then putting forth my best effort to reach an outcome that’s acceptable to all involved.  It’s funny how much of life is really about being a capable negotiator.  And when you give your absolute best 90-95% of the time, it’s nice to know that you’ve earned a margin of forgiveness and understanding.  Because when you’re tight in your head about what hasn’t been done, every loose end becomes a part of the tornado of disorganized “to dos.” In that kind of chaos, it’s really hard — at least for me — to buckle down and put my attention on important, detail-filled work.

To get my current priorities in order, I have the print-out of my crazy to do list.  Things that must happen this week are highlighted in yellow and assigned an allotment of time.  There will be a few phone calls as projects are juggled.  Hopefully, by midmorning, I’ll have a newly prioritized, blessed list of action items.

Then I’ll be able to breathe, and start plowing through the list, one project at a time!

How do YOU handle the chaos that pops up in your life?

5 Reasons Why a Blog Is Better Than a Website

Blogging, Branding, Business Development, Power of Social Media, , , ,

Currently, I’m an admin on 28 blogs.  That means I see in detail  how 28 people are using their blogs to tell the world about their ambitions and their businesses.  Okay, 2 of those blogs are actually mine (http://cynworks.com – where you are right now! – and http://xoxoquilts.com).  So, taking that into consideration, I’m only looking at 26 other ways of thinking.

Still, I think that’s a decent sampling to be able to say without a shred of doubt, “a blog is better than a website.”  In fact, I assumed this point of view was so obvious, I wasn’t even going to write about it… until I had my meeting with my business development group tonight and saw that two of the group’s members are still running a blog PLUS a website.

I just can’t get my mental arms around that.  I mean… WHY?  To understand this better, I thought it might be interesting to look at this in terms of business goals.  Right?  Surely, very few of us are narcissistic enough to just want an online temple to ourselves.  We want a site to help us reach business goals like:

1.  I want people to come to my site to see my (art) work.

A blog is custom-designed for the very purpose of creating traffic.  The postings by date spark search engines to crawl your site for updates.  Publishing your blog on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In add ways to draw more attention to your site.

Also, a blog is designed so that you can add galleries/portfolios as pages.  There is zero reason to keep your portfolio on one site and your blog on another.  Here’s a sample of how easy it is to integrate a gallery into a blog>>  — be sure to click around and look at the drop-down menu for “gallery” to see how everything functions seamlessly.

2.  I want to customize the look and feel of my site.

Blogs like those available from WordPress.com have over 90 FREE templates.  Then you can add additional customization through a graphic you create for the header or adding widgets to the sidebars.  You can also manage customization through the way you create and size the images that will be posted on your site.  For instance, look at my xoxoquilts.com blog,  based on the Coraline theme.

The header is a drawing created in Illustrator.  Every time I add a new post, I size my images to be exactly the same dimensions and add the xoxoquilts.com logo to the bottom right, creating a sense of continuum throughout the different storylines.

The images on the right side are created in Illustrator and added as “widgets” which means they show up on every page of the site.  They’re even set up so that if you click on an image, the embedded link can open in a new tab or window.

3.  I want to manage the font style and size on my site.

I have to take a deep breath before addressing this.  Really?  I mean, really?  If you think the font style is going to make or break your business, you cannot possibly be looking at the big picture.  Add to that, most browsers (like Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox) are set up so that the person who owns the computer is choosing their preferred font when viewing a website.  That’s right – you don’t necessarily even get to pick what font people see when looking at your site.

If you want to see how this works, go find the “Preferences/Content” part of menu in your browser.  Mine is set to the default of Verdana, size 16.

And if you really care, you can actually choose some free customizations for fonts on WordPress.com using a product called typekit.com.  If your computer is set so that you can see my custom font on this site, I’m using LFT Etica Display Web.  I used it to test out the product.  However, what I know is that people come to my site for good, honest, trustworthy information and maybe a touch of humor.  They don’t come here to admire my fonts.  Showcasing fonts is not my business model!  Is it yours?

4. I want to control the information on my site.

This is really one of the best reasons to use a blog.  They are super easy to learn how to use the dashboard for — much like using an email client like Outlook or Entourage or learning how to use all the stuff you can do on Facebook.  You can’t break it!  And though you can choose to pay someone to administer your blog, it’s really not necessary.  It’s very easy to do yourself!

5.  I want my site to represent me in a professional manner.

Okay, I do really get this.  In a big way.  I look at probably 15-20 new blogs every week.  I  like to cruise around the web and see what people are doing.  And I’d agree that there are lots of messy blogs out there – poorly organized information, useless or outdated widgets, hard-to-figure-out purposes for pages and/or links, plus some really unappealing bios and bio photos.  But you know what?  I think these people behind these blogs would probably run sloppy “websites” too.

Having a clean, focused, meaningful site is not about the tool.  It’s about the clarity of thought and the editing ability of the person who is behind the site.  A blog is like a garden.  It needs nurturing, trimming, and weeding.

To keep your potential customer’s attention, you need to give them a big wow every now and then.

A big wow means giving something personal, meaningful, insightful, or something they can’t find anywhere else.  For some bloggers, this means contests.  For some, it means insider information.  For some, it means inspirational content or images.

What do you have that will make people want to know more about you and your business?

?

Get Off Your Email! and other time-savers 4 u

Blogging, Business Development, Selling Art, , , , , , ,

One of the topics that came up at our latest business development group meeting this week is having so many ambitions and so little time to accomplish them.  Sound familiar?

I jotted down some notes from our discussion to share here.

FIND TWO MORE HOURS IN YOUR WEEK!

Get off your email!

If you work for yourself, no one is paying you to answer emails or write emails.  A lot of us who come from art or writing backgrounds LIKE to write.  Great…!  Take that energy to your blog.  When inspiration hits you and you want to share it with someone, ask yourself:

  • Could this be the seed of a meaningful blog post?
  • Would more than one person I know benefit from this discussion?
  • Could I find an image or two and turn this into a short article that says something about my brand/perceptions on the world?

If so, stop writing that lovely email directed to one or two people, and write a blog post!  If you have the inspiration today, but you aren’t scheduled to post for another 3 days, write it now and use the calendared publication option available in WordPress.com to have it publish in 3 days.

If you had someone specific in mind when you wrote the post, shoot them a quick, friendly email and ask them to read and comment on the blog.

It’s a little bit of a mindshift, but I promise, this practice will help you find at least 2 more hours in your week!

Here are some of the other ways I’ve carved more time for growing my business by reducing my email time:

1.  I only deal with work emails during client business hours, which for me is M-Th, 9-5 pm. I tell my client this up front, when we are talking about working together – no surprises! Then I turn on the “out of office” autoreply at the end of my Thursday workday.  If a client wants to talk to me any other time, I request they call or make an appointment.  I’m happy to take a brief call about something important any day of the week or weekend. This took me a month to create discipline around, but it has been hugely worthwhile because my email is no longer treated as a free help desk for tech assistance.

2.  Keep email responses friendly and brief.  Use the phone for detailed discussions.  Really.  Because no one reads our lengthy emails as carefully as we write them!

3.  Try turning off the auto-receive for incoming email.  I have to manually ask my mail client (Entourage for Mac) to bring my email to my inbox.  This saves the dozens of little email notices that used to drift in all day long from popping up on my screen and distracting me when I’m working for a client on a project.

4.  Respect the time of people on the other end!  Edit an email down to a core message and try to be as clear as possible in what is being offered or asked.

5.  I send a copy of important emails to myself if I need to remember to follow up in a day or two.

6.  Keep the inbox clean!  For me, it works to have a folder for each client.  I can drag all emails pertaining to a client to his/her folder and only look at them when working with that client.  I like how Entourage organizes email by date received.  Once or twice a week, I will make sure that I have no more than 3-5 old emails sitting in my inbox.  If I’ve saved an email to for research or to read a linked article and haven’t read it in a week, then I just discipline myself to delete it anyway.

Some other areas of time-savings our group discussed tactics to manage:

  • Finances, taxes & billing
  • Organizing client-related databases and paperwork
  • Creating and using studio time
  • Online research/blog reading

I’ll hit these in my next couple CYN WORKS blog posts.

BTW, I love having this business development group!  If you have been thinking about creating a support group of people who are in your business and are geographically near you, I highly encourage you do to it NOW. Here’s the link to show you how our group started >>

My productivity and focus has gained momentum just in the three short weeks we’ve been meeting.  And my joy in working as well.

And I know it’s not just me, because Alice Beasley sent this message out to our group last week:  “I just want to thank you all for making something that I dreaded (the marketing aspect of art) into something I now look forward to.“

Save Katie a Seat, Oprah!

Blogging, Power of Social Media, , , , , , ,

Is there anything you feel so passionate about that you would put everything you have — heart, soul, time, and imagination — into making it happen?

Like you want it really, really badly?  Like you wake up thinking about it, go to bed scheming to get it, and all the sudden, you’re making YouTube videos about it in your car on the way to work?

Yeah, like that badly!

If you’ve ever felt like that, then you’re going to love my friend Katie.

She likes Oprah.  Okay, LOOOOOOOOVES Oprah.  Katie feels like her life has been so positively influenced by Oprah that she absolutely MUST see her live.  Yesterday, she launched her own grassroots campaign to make it happen!

Check Out Her Social Media Campaign!

Feel her passion?  Pass on the word. Like her Facebook page.  Help this woman get a seat (or two) for Season 25!

Katie’s Mission in Her Own Words

My name is Katie Lance and I am a HUGE Oprah fan! It has been a life long dream of mine to get ticket to the Oprah show. I have tried everything – emailing the show, calling, checking the website for open reservations, submitting ideas… just about everything! Now that it is the LAST season – it is time for drastic measures!

It is my hope through social media – my videos, tweets, and Facebook posts that I will catch the eye of Oprah and/or her team so I will get a chance to see Oprah’s show before the end of Season 25. Please spread the word – save me a seat Oprah!!

Award

Most Creative Way to Get Oprah Tickets – 2011 :-)

Blogging Better: Categories and Tags

Blogging, , , , , ,

We talked a lot about categories, tags, and how to incorporate them into widgets in our advanced blogging workshop that took place on Tuesday afternoons at New Pieces Quilt Shop and Gallery in Berkeley, CA.

After all, if you’ve committed to posting an article per week, by the end of a year, you will have a full library of 50+ meaningful articles. Posting these in date order is a valuable PR tool, drawing people to your site on a regular basis. But how can you create even more value out of the time and thought put into writing a good post?

The first plan is to create an indexed library of your posts using categories and tags. I’ll show you how. Then I’ll show you where they appear on a WordPress.com blog, and then I’ll refer you to another blogger who I think has made a marvelous integration of her artistry and blog function.

How to Categorize and Tag

My thinking on this has been that categories and tags in blogging could be compared to the index of a recipe book. The category would be a general subject, like “chicken.” The tags would then list all the ways a chicken could be cooked, like “soup,” “fried,” “baked,” or “salad” and connect the reader to the page of the book where that particular recipe (article) is located.

Chicken
Baked_______________ p 420
Fried________________ p 306
Salad________________ p  12
Soup________________ p 153

To carry on the cookbook metaphor in your blogging, each time you write a post about chicken, you would select the category “chicken” and select the tag appropriate to the style of cooking before you publish.

Benefits of Categories and Tags

The first place your readers benefit from this organization is in a Category cloud or Tag cloud, assuming you add those widgets to your WordPress.com site. If you want to see this in real-life action, scroll down to the very bottom of my blog, and you’ll see my Category and Tag clouds in the footer.

The second benefit is that some search engines crawl your site for categories and tags. This technique of crawling seems to change every time I read a new article about SEO. If you want to know today’s Google standards, check out Google’s webmaster tools.

The third benefit – and I really think this is the long-range benefit to aspire to – is that you can start creating indexed links on your site to the collected articles under a single tag.

For instance, I’ve written several posts with the tag “New Pieces Quilt Shop.” If I click in my tag cloud on the term “New Pieces Quilt Shop,” a page with all relevant posts is generated: http://cynworks.com/tag/new-pieces-quilt-shop/

I now have a URL that I can use to link to that “library” of posts. I could use it in many ways, such as:

  • Within the text of a page as a text link
  • As a link from the main menu (using “custom menu” functions)
  • As a link from a widget on the sidebar

A blog that I think does the last option particularly well is bigBANG studio.

Look at the lovely little icons she has put in her widgets. She’s also included text headers that explain where those icons link to.

Now, she’s on a different system, so I believe what WordPress.com calls a “tag,” her system is calling a “label.” But the effect is the same difference. If you click on the icon she’s calling “Painting Posts,” you will arrive at a URL designed to “search/label/work.” Pretty nifty, right?

Certainly, that indexing of your articles is worth the effort of thinking through defining a few key categories and 5-10 frequently used tags, right?

Want Your 2011 Blog Ready To Go… Like PRONTO?

Blogging, Business Development, CYN WORKS, , ,

Consider this offer, then.   I want to jumpstart my business in 2011.  That means I need to help you kickstart yours.

If you have photos of your work, a bio floating around on your computer, and ideas about art you want to share with the world, what are you waiting for?

Order your WordPress.com site NOW.  Details >>

You could be in blogging business in no time!

And we’d get to work together, which I promise can be pretty motivational, too.

Can Passion Sell? Illustrated… here!

Blogging, Business Development, , ,

As promised… to the participants in the blogging workshop I’ve been leading at New Pieces in Berkeley, here are a few of my favorite blogs in the design arena.  Each of these developed from scratch… a simple blog about the blogger’s passion.  Then, as all ideas do when they’re nurtured, they blossomed into beautiful blogs about identity, design, life, passion, and yes… product.Some of the blogs are more about direct sales; others showcase a creative person’s identity, often becoming “the brand behind the brand,” if you know what I’m saying.  I follow each of these via RSS feed and check in with anticipation to find out if there’s a new post to inspire me in my work.
In choosing which blogs get premium locations on my igoogle homepage, I lean towards those that really make me think, like Elizabeth Barton’s Art and Quilts, and cogitations thereon, or those that have really creative approaches to using pictures and images to illustrate how people make lifestyle and purchasing decisions… the rest of the blogs here!

The reason I come back to these blogs regularly is that there is an artist on the other end… a person seeking truth about their art, seeking an audience, and seeking growth.   They’ve turned their talent and their curiosity into successful careers.  They share a part of themselves when they post.  Even when they’re selling a product, they’re sharing the journey of their artistic and career path.  I get inspired when I see their successes; I relate when I see their challenges.  When they do good work, my work gets better too.
To see more about each one, click on the image, and that will take you to the real blog.  I hope you get charged up.

And… of course there are zillions of other great blogs out there that I’m not mentioning.  Please don’t fault me.  I’m just sharing my current faves!
Have you been thinking about using blogging to take your passion online?  I can help you… from getting started to building the site for you.  Contact me and let me know what’s on your mind!

Review of Blogging Workshop @ New Pieces in Berkeley

Blogging, CYN WORKS, , , , ,

We did it!  The first blogging workshop for people who love fabric (at New Pieces in Berkeley) happened yesterday!

It was a great session — intimate, full of conversation, and interactive.  What I really liked was that each blogger came with her own goal for blogging in 2011.

BLOGGER GOALS

  1. Grow the blog into a website that can showcase a full portfolio of her completed work, going back nearly 10 years.
  2. Communicate with extended family with stories about life, travel, cooking, and sewing.  She wants to spend less time writing individual emails and also have a way that more of the family can participate by adding comments or maybe even adding their own posts and pictures.
  3. Create an online place where all of the members of her quilting minigroup can post pictures of their work and then share the site with friends, family, and people interested in knowing more about their quilts.  She’s also designing a business card to pass out.
  4. Take two websites half started on other platforms (one is a godaddy template and one is written from scratch in Dreamweaver – ouch!) and move them to WordPress.com.  Her goal is to spend less time learning technology and more time creating, promoting, and selling the work.  (like, like, like!)

Can you imagine how excited I was to have all these different people talking about how to reach those goals?  You know I was thrilled.

I ASKED THEM

  • Why do you think a blog will be the best way to meet your goal?
  • What kind of time do you have to put into your blog every week?
  • If you didn’t have a blog, how would you communicate your message?
  • What kind of photos do you have to work with?
  • Are you willing to learn to use a photo editor – either one you have on your computer or an online service like photoshop.com?

Wow, did I mention photoshop.com??? I’ve heard others talk about it and finally realized I need to see how it works so I can recommend it.  What a great tool!  In just an instant, you can edit the large photos your camera takes (yippee – keep those for print media!) and resize them to the web.  ONE CLICK.



WHAT ELSE?

Well, the big what else is… the conversation about promoting an idea, an art project, or a clothing line turned into a conversation about branding and marketing.  Are you surprised?  I say, Why not?  We have 8 weeks to meet every Tuesday to encourage, learn, and practice!

THEY ASKED ME

  • Should I name my blog after my art group?
  • How long should the name be?
  • Is it better to name my blog by my product or by my name?
  • How do I get people to read my blog?
  • How much should I write?
  • How often should I write?
  • What if I don’t really like to write? — can you imagine? wink, wink!

We talked about how to check for a custom URL to match the blog address, how to sign up to start the blog, and how to deal with text and images.  Really, though, until you try these things, it’s all theory.  It takes practice.  That’s the homework.  Try it yourself and come back next week for more.

I even woke up to a very nice note in my email from one of the new bloggers.  She wrote:  Just wanted to say thanks again for having this series. I can tell already that it will help me crystallize my thoughts on how to proceed. So many choices!

If you missed the first session and want to drop in for another, please do!  Here is the syllabus so you can get the links to the tips we discussed.

Going forward, each session, I will ask, “What do you want to accomplish today?”  That way, each time is fresh.  There is no beginning or end, so come any Tuesday in January or February from 4-6 pm.