January 31st, 2012
Companies spend thousands of dollars on branding and logos. Ohio-based identity designer Adam Ladd showed his 5-year-old daughter popular logos and asked her to comment on them. Some of these are most likely familiar to her and thus her comments aren’t surprising, but others are very interesting. This video reminds us that we can learn so much from children.
November 11th, 2011
One of the most important steps when building a website is writing the content. You can have the best brand in the world, the most amazing animated gifs and photos, if your words are crap, your site will be crap.
Here is a great video illustrating the point.
September 21st, 2011
It’s inevitable. You build a site or pay someone to do this for you, insert all your content, do some testing, launch and finally breathe. Everything is great, wonderful and you’re so pleased until you start getting emails saying something like:
“I searched for your site but couldn’t find it.”
Now why is that? Why isn’t Google picking up your site?
One of the first thing I do when launching a WordPress site is use the Google XML sitemaps plugin. With just one click, this plugin allows you to submit your XML sitemap to search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com allowing them to better index your blog.
Now this alone won’t guarantee you a number one spot on Google. In fact nothing will. SEO is much more complex than that and needs to be looked at constantly.
Common Craft have been making videos explaining technology for numerous years and today they released another one explaining Search Engine Optimization. Their videos are always brilliant and this one is no exception. I was most please to see hear Lee mentioning dodgy links. Paying for inbound links and attempting search engine manipulation will only make you look untrustworthy.
August 30th, 2011
Tags and categories are a great way to organize your blog content. Categories allow you to group posts together like dishes in a menu; while tags are more specific, like ingredients of a dish. I’m often asked if one should use both. The answer, of course depends on your needs. The Bluelime Media blog at the time of writing has 254 posts, 11 categories and 51 tags. I’ve tried to keep things organized and keep having to tweak things, but I think this number is appropriate for me. A much larger blog, like TechCrunch, which publishes multiple times a day, would need many more tags and categories.
Contrary to what some people may tell you, your tags and categories are for your users and NOT Search Engines. Adding as many tags to your blog posts as possible will not improve your search engine ranking, so please be kind to your users and keep them in mind.
WordPress makes it very easy to add tags and categories. The following video by Micheal Pick walks you through the process.
August 24th, 2011
If you are new to WordPress, one of the first thing you’ll need to learn is how to write and publish posts. This short video by Michael Pick covers this topic very elegantly. The video is a few years old and your dashboard may not look exactly the same, but the principles are the same and this should give you a great starting point.
July 19th, 2009
I’ve participated in a few “Ask The Experts” panels in the past few months and couldn’t help but notice that Social Media is quite the hot topic right now. People are very keen in learning how to use Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc… Most attendees are curious about how it works, why anyone would invest the time and energy, what’s the ROI and if it’s the right avenue for their business. These are all good questions and there are simply no easy answer. It really depends on who your audience is and where they are.
A funny thing happened to me last Friday which demonstrates how complicated and unpredictable it is to explain the power of Social Media.
I have a Twitter account and follow mostly designers and WordPress developers. This allows me to find out about latest tips, tutorials and website development news. Cameron Moll posted a tweet to a “mesmerizing” YouTube video which caught my attention. I clicked the link and watched a video taken at Kuroshio Sea which is the 2nd largest aquarium in the world.
The video is indeed breathtaking, but I was curious about the music. I watched and listened to the video a couple of times and wanted to find out who was singing. Using my iPhone, I Shazammed it and got the name of the song, band and album. A quick search on YouTube led me to a video of Barcelona singing live in San Diego. I watched a few more videos and decided to visit Barcelona’s page on MySpace. Listened to a few more clips and then I was off to iTunes and bought the album.
I’m not sure that a marketer could have predicted this, but I’m convinced that Social Media is worth investing in.
February 14th, 2009
Earlier this year the folks at Automattic launched www.WordPress.tv, which is a new website to learn about all things WordPress. I just had a quick look and it looks like the list of videos is quite extensive (Click the how-to link for the list of videos. Personally I’m not sure this tab is appropriately labeled, but hey, I found the list.) The site also has a WordCampTV section where you can watch videos, slides and listen to audio clips.
This site is definitely worth bookmarking and investigating further.
December 11th, 2008
Named after Jazz Musician John Coltrane, WordPress 2.7 was released yesterday and promises breathtaking beauty and inspiration. I haven’t downloaded yet, but will do soon….
In the meantime check out the promotional video. It’s pretty sexy.
September 24th, 2008
The web wouldn’t be what it is without the ability to search. My home page is set to Google and use it to search for everything. Finding information is often quite tedious because there are so many web pages out there. Luckily a few tricks are available to allow you to refine your search.
Lee Fever at Common Craft has created this wonderful video explaining how web searches work and offers tips on how you can avoid being swallowed up by the web.
Web Search Strategies in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.
September 27th, 2007
With the popularity of YouTube growing, entrepreneurs are understandably excited by the potential of the medium. I’ve consulted with people who are looking at taking their basic web sites to the next level of web marketing, and heard things like “We’ve got to have video. Video is so popular now.” To which I say: maybe. It depends on the video and how you use it.
Unless the video content on your site is somehow great, nobody cares about that video except you and maybe your Mom.
“Great”, on the web, means meeting a need. That need can be to have a laugh, to learn something, to be inspired.
In other words to truly leverage video on the web, you have to create videos that will draw your customers to view them. At it’s best, the video will help new people discover your website.
A fun example of this is The Human Flipbook by the restaurant chain Ebert & Gerbert. This is so creative & wonderful, it was mentioned on a site that I subscribe to. Because the video was embedded in the page at Do Something Pretty I didn’t even realize I was watching a commercial until the end. By then, I was so impressed I didn’t mind.
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