Bluelime News
Apologies to Pacey + Pacey…. oops!
A few months ago we updated our portfolio with our latest project, UBC Vault. This website was a collaborative effort and we mistakenly credited the logo design to Johnny Kuan, when in fact the creative team at Pacey + Pacey Design were responsible for the UBC Library’s branding.
So apologies are in order!
And just to recap, here are the names of everyone involved in this project:
Pacey + Pacey – Branding/log
Johnny Kuan – Web Design
Christine Rondeau (me) – HTML/CSS
Joseph Lo and Ben Keen – PHP Programming
Miin Lim and Angelia Darnbrough – Consultation
And of course the team at UBC were extensively involved in testing, copywriting, etc….
Acheiving Work Life Balance
When I first started my business 5 years ago, I was always surprised to hear myself say “not at all, I’m a workaholic” when asked if I found it distracting to work at home. I always considered myself to be very lucky and grateful that I could stay focused and motivated even though, cooking, TV and laundry were there to tempt me. And I guess that’s what allowed me to build a successful business. By “not being distracted” and thus remaining focused, I managed to work hard, do lots of business development, networked and gained a good number of clients.
This year has been fantastic so far, but I’m finding myself in a conundrum; I’m friggin exhausted! I’ve been working so hard, I’ve forgotten to take the time to cook, watch TV and do the laundry… Ok, watching TV is not that big of a deal, considering the rubbish that’s on, but on average, I’m working between 55 to 70 hours a week and I’m burning out.
It’s time to get active
I’ve been swamped lately and frantically trying to stay afloat. As a result blog postings have been few and far between and I apologize. I’m still working like a fiend trying to catch up, but I think that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
As our company grows we’ve managed to secure bigger and bigger clients. Earlier this year, we’ve not only signed on to work on a government project, but four. It’s been very exciting to work on large scale projects that require much more planning and strategizing.
UBC Vault wins CCAE award
The UBCVault.ca website won GOLD award for e-Innovation from the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education. The UBCVault newsletter, eVault also won the Bronze Award for Best Newsletter.
Congratulations to the entire team at UBC for making this website a great success.
Karma yoga at Bluelime Media
One of my New Year’s resolution this year was to deepen my yoga practice and integrate yoga philosophy in my daily activities. I was already practicing 5 times a week, so I’ve now increased to 6 and sometimes 7, I attend workshops whenever I can with visiting teachers and went to my first yoga retreat a few weeks ago. I feel better than ever, but I still haven’t found an way to involve yoga in my Web work.
Ideally my goal would be to develop and create sites dedicated to yoga. I’ve had the pleasure to work with Barbara from Bluecitrus for many years now. When I first met her, she had just launched Chakravibe, an e-commerce website selling yoga jewelery based on the chakra colours. Built using OS-Commerce platform, the website functioned very well, but was difficult to update and maintain and the code was a complete nightmare to decipher. When Barbara approached me earlier this year and asked me to help her move the static pages to WordPress, I decided that if I wanted to get involved in the yoga community, this was a great first move.
Joseph and Ben took responsibility of the OS-Commerce component and moved everything to a sub-folder. I took care of re-creating the design using up-to-date HTML/CSS and removed all of the tables and set up the WordPress templates. I doubt that many people have noticed that the website has changed. Except for a few pixel adjustments here and there and the changes in url, the website is identical. We’ve also added a blog allowing Barbara and Teresa, to write posts and tell us what’s new. So far the results have been very positive. Barbara is very pleased that she can update the content and post new images and Teresa has been writing great posts.
Northern Voice is a wrap
This year’s Northern Voice was my second. I thoroughly enjoyed both events and look forward to next year. I suspect that 2010 will prove to be a bit problematic due to another event happening at that time of year but, hey, that’s still a long way away.
Following last year’s conference I told all of my clients who were blogging that they needed to go next year. So as soon as NV08 was announced, I sent them all an email and encouraged them to register. I think that I sent the email to about a dozen or so of my clients. Only one came, Heidi, which is a shame, but a start. I got the chance to speak to her about the event and I think that she enjoyed it thoroughly and, like me, left the event with lots of ideas.
Every year the organizers try to do something different and this year the Internet Bootcamp was on offer during the first day. I think that of all the talks that were given, this session was the most valuable for bloggers who are just dipping their toes in the blogosphere. As an educator Heidi is using the Web and social media to reach out to kids and teachers and help create a better educational systems. Heidi is already pretty tech savvy and has been blogging for a while, but these sessions were hopefully able to answers some of her questions.
I do hope that this session will return next year and encourage would-be bloggers to attend NV09.
See you next year.
How to widgetize your blog or website
Susie Gardner from Hop Studios gave a pretty good demo of how to add widgets to your blog today at Northern Voice. Widgets, also called plugins or badges, are little apps which consist of bits of code that once added to your blog or website, pull in external information. They usually appear in the sidebar of your blog. These widgets could pull the latest news feed from a site such as Voxant, the latest Dilbert cartoon, a list of books you are reading or meaning to read, the weather, or a series of flickr photos.
These widgets can be a fun way to add content to your website. The only downside of adding these, is that you have to dabble in the code a bit which can be scary at first. Additionally if you’re blog is on a hosted platform such as WordPress.com or Typepad, you may not be able to add these.
So how do you go about adding a widget?
First let’s select a widget. Of all the widgets mentioned during the presentation, I found polldaddy.com the most interesting. As the name would suggest polldaddy allows you to create polls.
- First you need to go to their site and sign up for an account. This is done very easily simply by filling your name and email. (Don’t you love people who don’t ask you for every possible detail?)
- Next, hit create a poll.
- Type in your questions.
- Type in your answers,
- Select the “look” of your poll.
- Hit save and Voila!
You will then be sent to a new screen with code which may look scary, but here’s the catch. You don’t need to know how it works. Just copy and paste it. That’s it. And here’s the poll I just created:
Now, for this example, I’ve copied the poll in the body of my text. I don’t really want to clutter my sidebar with more stuff, but if I wanted to, I could have a permanent poll anywhere on my site. The beauty of this widget is that simply by login in to my polldaddy.com account and creating a new poll, the poll on my website is automatically updated.
I mentioned earlier that widgets usually appear in the sidebar of your blog. This is where dabbling in the code gets a bit tricky. If you’ve set up your own blog and have access to the presentation, you can go to the template editor, locate the sidebar.php and add the widget code in there. If you are like me and using WordPress which you’ve downloaded and customized, you can also use the widget editor, but be careful and make sure that you back up all of your files, just in case you mess things up.
I should also point out, that if you copy and paste code into the body of a post, like I just did, save the post and come back and edit it, chances are the code for your widget will need to be updated. The visual editor in WordPress seems to alter the code every time you save and edit. I’m not sure why, but it just does… So just add your code once you are happy with the post and no longer need to edit.
Have fun.
Bluelime Media may need to rebrand…
One of the biggest changes that we’ve seen this year is that clients are no longer asking for a static website but instead want to maintain their own site. This has been great, but now I think that we’ll have to change our name to something like WordPressLime Media. The number of WordPress (WP) sites we’re churning out is huge. The exciting thing about working with WP is seeing how far we can push the design. We work with a lot of different graphic designers here and it’s been challenging at times figuring out how we can convert their ideas into WP templates. Here are the latest ones we’ve been working on:
Survey says: Hot nerd girls take on geek topics
A few weeks ago we asked you to complete our survey and you did. We’re happy to announce that the winner of our survey is Don. Not only did Don fill out our survey but he made us laugh tremendously with his list of suggested topics:
- Hot Nerd Girls that take on geek topics
- I call it Social Networking / You Call it Stalking
- Debbie does Vista but rebounded with Leopard so why does everyone call her a Cougar?
- Amy takes calls from Rehab: Was it Ruby on Rails this time?
I’m not sure that we’ll be able to provide you with articles with such flair and panache, but we did gather a lot of useful information and we now have a better idea of who you are and what you want. In 2008 we’ll write more about the following subjects:
- examples of our work
- website optimization and SEO and traffic building
- newsletter tips
- social networking
- fresh ways to use the web and great examples
- html and css examples
- news technologies and online tools
- book reviews
Almost all of you mentioned that reading about our latest work was what you wanted, so we’ll make sure to cover all of our projects. We’ve also made a few connections last year and invited “experts” in their field to write guest posts. Liz from Market Navigators, has already contributed great marketing articles and copywriter/SEO consultant Louise and Brand Strategist Isabelle will be contributing articles very soon. We hope that with their help, we will be able to provide you with a great list of resource.
2007 was the year I fell in love with WordPress
A few posts ago I mentioned that business had changed at Bluelime Media. Here’s how. We started working with WordPress almost three years ago now but only sunk our teeth during the later part of this year. I owe it all to Haig Armen and Mark Busse over at Industrial Brand. I met with them back in the summer and we talked about possibly helping them out with some WP build. Mark assumed that the entire Bluelime website was done using WP. Only the Bluelime blog was using WP and at the time I had no idea how the whole site could be built with WP and just dismissed the idea. But I just couldn’t get the idea out of my head and if you’re reading this post from an RSS reader, you may want to check out our site. During the Christmas holiday while you we’re no doubt enjoying the festivities, I worked on setting up the whole site in WP. It was much easier than I thought and the result makes for a website that is much easier to maintain and update.
Of course this would not have been possible without the experience that we’ve gained this past few months. Setting up websites using WP just made so much sense. We use to build a lot of customized CMS. We’d set up the database and then build an admin interface, but WordPress just makes all that work disappear. Interestingly enough, WP can be used for sites who don’t even need to look like blogs. Threads Gazette is such a site. When setting up this website, we created a page for the home page, while posts from three different categories make up the content for the showroom, classifieds and events section. The Belvedere Senior Living website was created by setting up various pages, while the news section is the only one that using the “blogging” feature.
The best thing about WordPress is the number of plugins available. Every time myself of Tzaddi have thought, “how can we do this”, a simple search of the codex allowed us to find someone who had the same idea as us. I can’t help but feel a sense of power when working with WP and look forward to continuing building sites using this blogging platform.