Blog

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about blog organization. I’ve covered why you should bother organizing your blog, the basics of setting up your blog, and today I’m covering the ever misunderstood Categories and Tags. Categories Categories are the filing cabinets of the blog. You should define a reasonable set of categories that do not overlap, are not overly specific, and will cover most if not all of the content you plan to have on the blog. Six to ten is plenty for the majority of blogs, and it’s often good to define only a couple of…

Last week I discussed why you should spend time organizing your blog. This week I’ll start telling you how to go about organizing your blog, starting from launch. Is a Blog/Has a Blog If you’re launching a new website, think about the overall structure at the beginning to save yourself time and hassle later. Do you want the home page to be a static page, or do you want it to have your most recent blog posts? Is this a blog site, or a site with a blog? The answers to these questions will determine the information architecture of your blog;…

There are many, many reasons that people write blogs. A few of the most common are personal blogs, blogs for the purpose of drawing in traffic to a site,  informational blogs and photo blogs. While personal blogs may have the luxury of not paying attention to organization, the majority of blogs do not. Why is Organizing Your Blog Important? You certainly can choose to not make use of categories, tags, date archives and URL structure to organize your blog. You have that option. However, even for a personal blog I wouldn’t recommend it. You might want to be able to…

Q: OMG Facebook changed things and my reach has gone down the toilet and no one is seeing my posts and Facebook wants me to pay for Promoted Posts but I can’t afford it and this is killing my business! How can I get my Facebook Reach back without paying for Promoted Posts? –Posts Aren’t Getting EdgeRanked A: Okay, PAGE, calm down–it’s going to be okay. This article does an excellent job of debunking the issues surrounding Facebook’s latest changes. Here’s a quick recap: Facebook has historically NOT shown you all the posts of all the things in your news feed, even…

Just a bit late! September was a busy month personally, with a couple of weddings and every weekend booked solid. I’ll admit, blogging fell through the cracks, and here I am realizing that I didn’t post any new blog content in October. October found me partnering up with DSD Media Marketing, a great little company focusing on producing top notch video content at reasonable prices. Rhiannon at DSD thinks everyone’s website deserves a testimonial video or other video content! I’m looking forward to working with them, because they’re like the puzzle piece to my work. I do SEO, UX and…

It’s always a good day when I get to announce the launch of a new website, and this one has been a long time coming. The development of the Antonia Designs site has been plagued with vacations, indecision, and last minute changes as Antonia and I struggled to realize her vision within her budget. Ultimately I learned a lot in the process, which is always a good thing for me. The web is in no way static, and new solutions and options are always appearing when you least expect them. This was, for example, the first site that I built…

July was a very busy month! I joined a BNI group, which has been great for networking and marketing my business but has taken up a decent chunk of time. I’m also near-launch on a new website, organized a pretty smashing advertorial for a client who composes custom wedding music, and have been working on site reviews and new business development. I’m excited about working with some very interesting new people! In other words, writing on my own blog has been the least of my concerns. This month, I’m focusing on new business development while completing the aforementioned site launch,…

WordPress 3.4.1 appeared on most of the WordPress sites I work with over the last couple of weeks (this site included!). It brings with it a number of great new features, including: Live Preview for themes. This is going to make theme changes SO much less painful–you’ll be able to customize the new theme via the CMS before you launch it, reducing the ‘growing pains’ awkwardness of not having your theme look perfect on launch. Flexible headers: one annoyance I run into pretty often when working on a lightly customized theme is that the header size has to be changed…

Today, I started taking a course in Human-Computer Interaction. This is an area of great interest to me, and something I wish I had spent more time on in college, particularly given what I ended up doing after college. Hindsight is of course 20/20! I’m just now working through the introductory section of the course, so I’m sure I will have a lot more to say about the material in the future, but for now the most interesting thing about this course is that it is entirely online, in video format. It’s part of a new online course format developed…

Business news time! Tomorrow, I’ll be at a networking meetup in Manchester. Thanks to Schall Creative for the invite. Looking forward to meeting other small businesses in central NH, and hopefully some new potential clients! I’d love to work with more NH business. At long last, I have some proper business cards! After much procrastinating and waffling about design and styling, I just did it. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to have them reprinted due to a printing error, but the information on them is accurate and that’s the most important thing (phone number removed in this image). One of…