Archive for the 'Resource' Category
Google Calendar for your Website
Louise’s great suggestion for putting your business on the Google map reminded me of another way to use Google’s tools for your business: a Google Calendar. You can share your calendar with selected viewers, say, to keep your family or partners in the loop. If you want the whole world to know when your Tupperware party is, you can make your calendar public to anyone with just a few clicks. (Do they still have Tupperware parties? OK, maybe you want to list your naughty toys party instead. Whatever floats your boat…)
You can take it even a step further, and include a public calendar in your own website to list your events or schedule. When you sign up for a Google Calendar you can create more than one calendar — so if you had a Bed & Breakfast, for instance, a calendar for each room could show when it’s booked.
There are certainly more advanced and customized ways of doing some of these things, but this is some great functionality if you’re on a budget.
How to add a public calendar to your WordPress site
If you’re comfortable with the teensiest bit of HTML tweaking this is really easy to do.
- Create a public calendar at google.com/calendar
- Make a page in WordPress
- Go to the Google Calendar Details screen and copy the code for including the calendar in your website
- Paste it into your WordPress page. Note, you’ll need to switch from Visual view to Code view in your WordPress editor. You may also need to adjust the width and height to fit your page layout.
Your website calendar page will be kept up-to-date because it loads all the events you add within the Google Calendar interface, each time your page is visited.
That’s it. Neat trick, eh?
Creative Culture & Success in Business
Adaptive Path (a user experience design firm in San Francisco) has a wealth of articles on their site which, as a designer, I find interesting. Many articles are of interest to a broader business audience – such as this interview with Chris Conley.
Conley notes Pixar as a great example of creative business success which “basically create[s] a new billion dollar franchise every four years or so”. Truly an amazing track record. He discusses what makes them so successful, which boils down more or less to:
- strongly adhering to a higher purpose - in Pixar’s case “To create great stories”. Fabulous storytelling is more important than fancy computer graphics. Mission and focus is paramount.
- dynamic leadership & a talented team - every project is led by a director-producer pair that brings complementary strengths to the table and is responsible for the project’s outcome in different ways. Their team is made up of artists and technologists that can make their work better through critique. A strong team is diverse and challenges each other.
- a highly iterative and tangible process - experimenting and sketching begins on day one. There is no waiting for mounds of research or scripts holding back the creative process. The great story they’ll tell gets figured out along the way. You needn’t have it all figured out from the start, get out there and do something.
Finally, Conley says
If corporations were to adopt these principles, behaviors, and values in their innovation-oriented work, they would be orders of magnitude more successful.
There are some good ideas in that list which resonate with me. What do you think?
Finally the perfect web design showcase!
When designing websites there are always a few components that are more difficult to design. Navigation, icons, call to action items, forms and headlines come to mind. When setting up blogs, headlines, comment forms and the entry metadata is often just straight from the design template. Looking at different websites and blogs is a great way to be inspired but finding the right site takes a lot of time and effort. After reading Smashing Magazine article today, I came across Elements of Design, the alternative web design showcase. This wonderful resource is the design showcase of Christian Watson. Instead of displaying great looking websites, he provides us with snippets such as great icons, headlines, pull quotes, calendars, search boxes and even code display. I’m bookmarking this site right now and subscribing to their RSS feed!
46 Productivity Tips
The 46 Must-Read Productivity Tips for Freelancers on FreelanceSwitch is full of great stuff. In fact there must be hundreds of tips if you click through to read all the links in the article. But really any business person can benefit from some of these ideas.
Here are five of my favourites:
continue reading »
Facebook is surprisingly useful
Recently a friend of mine sent me an invitation to join her network on Facebook. I ignored it at first, thinking back to my first experience with the social networking site; I had seen how my college-aged step-daughter uses it. She and her friends post tons of photos and notes for each other, mainly centering around recent parties etc. Theirs is a socially active world with time to spare, compared to mine. So Facebook didn’t seem like it was a place for me.
But recently the site has broken past it’s college bounds and people from all walks of life are signing up. I was convinced to try it out after reading reviews by Alexandra Samuel and Rob Cottingham.
Make sense of your favourite links
I have a confession to make: I am a pack rat by nature. (My family will not be surprised by this. Maybe it was those tender years of growing up on a sailboat, where you can’t keep much of anything.) When it comes to “Bookmarks” or “Favourites” — those web links you save in your browser as you surf — this tendency means a lot of folders full of saved links. Many folders means lots of places to lose all those great links.
Change Everything
It’s interesting that Christine’s latests posts on this blog have to do with change, because I’ve been thinking a lot lately that 2007 seems like a year of change for many people. Is it just me, or is everyone in the midst of or considering massive life changes? Maybe it’s that phenomenon that happens when you first become aware of a new word — suddenly you hear it everywhere.
I’ve recently moved to Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast, and left my “secure” large-corporation job for the adventure of working from my home office. And even though I’ve planned this for years, it surprised me how stressful even positive change can be. Combine all the new things your brain has to process (”Honey, where do these go?”, “Oh, we need a flashlight to take a walk after dark here…”), and you have one tired camper! It’s a good thing I’m fitting so much fresh air and beach time into my schedule.
If you’re thinking about making changes in your life, check out ChangeEverything.ca. It’s a community of people who are making changes in their lives and communities. You can read how others are doing, adopt the same challenges they’ve taken on, offer advice to others… Reading what others are doing can be inspiring, humbling, and eye-opening. Take for example the challenges faced in living plastic-free for a year.
ChangeEverything.ca is an arms-length initiative of VanCity Credit Union. It’s also a great example of the power of “Web 2.0” and social networking in action.
Freelance Switch: Community and Resource for Freelancers
Since making the switch from chemist to web developer, I can’t tell you how much I enjoy getting up in the morning. Aside from not having to handle toxic chemicals on a daily basis and smelling that ghastly lab-smell, I also don’t miss the commute, lunches from vending machines, unhappy coworkers and office politics. Starting my own business is by far the best move I made so far (after marrying my husband of course).
Launched just a few weeks ago, freelanceswitch.com is a website that offers loads of hints and tips for freelancers. Advice on how to take care of yourself while working long hours, managing your increasingly long list of usernames and passwords and reviews of the different types of pitching and decision-making clients are just a few of the articles that you can find.
It’s a great resource for anyone wishing to quit their job and start working for themselves. Not only is the site full of great information, it’s also beautifully designed. I wish I had access to this type of information when I launched Bluelime Media.