There was so much to the experience I couldn’t possibly put it all into words. For now I’d just like to share my drawing “Making Space”.

This image came to me when Pam and Charlie discussed a concept raised by Michele Woodward: that rather than breaking out of our comfort zone, we should honour that it is there for a reason. At the same time, we can consciously expand it. We can do just one thing daily or weekly to stretch it just a little bit. Before you know it, the zone will expand to allow you much more room to shine.

As I worked on this drawing the idea of expanding my comfort zone became about making space on many levels: emotional, physical, time. The act of drawing this image helped me to absorb how intensely I need to make space for things that are important to me. Going to Lift Off and taking this week off made space for feelings and ideas that often suffocate in my usual busy-ness. I feel energized and excited again!

This theme of making space is so strong for me at the moment that I’m seeing it everywhere. How each choice we make affects these aspects of space in our lives. From the things we buy to how your business’s revenue model and pricing can affect the space to do great work.

So now I am committing to making space, bit by bit. Space for my comfort zone. For trying new things (and making mistakes!). For my creativity. For more of my whole self.

I owe a giant THANK YOU to Charlie, Pam, and Michele for inspiring this image and insights.

But what about you? What are you making space for? Whatever it is, I’d love to support you (even the tiniest bit) with this drawing. Right-click on these links to download it for:

• your desktop
• printing on letter/A4 sized paper (8″x9.5″)
• your iPhone

Happy space-making!

*Yes, you may notice this announcement is a little late out of the gate. I had it mostly written, then I was in mourning for a while so my excitement about everything went on holiday without me. Now back to our regular programming…

I’ve been building WordPress sites for over five years. In that time I’ve learned a ton about how to build almost anything a client asks for in their sites, either on my own, with available plug-ins, or with the help of a programmer to build custom plug-ins. I find it really exciting to cook up magical stuff this way. In fact I love it! And, I’m pretty sure my clients love the results too.

All that magic takes a lot of time, though. Lots of consultation with the clients, lots of planning, lots of time building the websites. So while I enjoy the process, and my clients certainly appreciate the great advice and personal attention, it’s simply not sustainable for me to treat every project that way. There’s only so much of me to go around after all. And some clients are at a stage in their business when the full-on process isn’t right for them.

The good thing is that over time I’ve seen some patterns in things my smaller clients need. They need something that reflects their business. Something flexible that they can easily manage and will grow with their business. They also need something they can afford without looking like they got it from the bargain bin.

Smoothies are designed to support a lot of these needs in a way that will really grow with the clients. Clients will not only get a great-looking unique website, they will learn how to expand it over time. They might eventually outgrow it and need a more custom site, but that’s OK. Their content will be in this solid WordPress structure, ready for a more custom design down the road.

I dreamed up Smoothies a while ago, and knew I wanted to have a graphic designer on the team who would complement my skills. I was thrilled when Sparky Firepants (David Billings) accepted my invitation to hang out our shingle together at HaveASmoothie.com. Throughout the process of developing Smoothies together I was really impressed by David’s business savvy and sheer creativity. If you’re looking for an illustrator or graphic designer I definitely recommend you check him out.

What does this mean for ThriveWire?

There won’t be a lot of change here, just more activity “over there”. I’ll be working on Smoothie client sites and over time I will be enhancing the Smoothie Base theme (I have an idea list about 10 miles long) and adding to the showcase of example sites.

If you’re a current client and you have a new Smoothie-suitable project, you’ll have the choice to work with David on the design part while I wrangle the geeky bits. (Which is a good thing because the dude is FUN.) Our services section now reflects these two different offerings to help people choose whether a custom or semi-custom site is a right fit for the project at hand. That’s about it.

If you have any questions or comments about it I’d love to hear them below or by email.

Sometimes you luck out and find the flow. Enjoy it and milk it for all it’s worth.

Quick and dirty can be more successful than you might think.

If you focus too much on one thing you can lose the bigger picture.

Take risks. Sometimes the results are a lot more fun. Yes, sometimes they suck too, but you never know until you try.

Notice how I walked the talk, and gave you imperfect photos? (Pats self on back). I hope you enjoyed this nonetheless

Speaking of trying new things…

You might have heard about the new semi-custom WordPress websites thing I’ve been working on with Sparky Firepants. We’re just about ready to launch, and super stoked about it! SO, here’s your chance to  get a sneak peak and a chance to be first in line with a nice discount. Hop onto our advance notice list and you’ll be hearing from us real soon.

I went to one good session today, by Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational. I think I’d rush through and not do it justice if I did that now so I’ll save it for later. Suffice to say it sparked some ideas for the semi-custom wordpress website packages I’m developing with Sparky Firepants.

Only one good session you say? That’s because the lovely temptress Sonia Simone invited me to the house she and others had rented in South Austin. It was nice to get away from the buzz-buzz-buzz of the conference center. Although I’m glad I got a badge for the conference this year, I don’t think I will again. I’d probably just come to connect with people at meetups and coffee shops.

The party was a fabulous diverse group of people, from fellow Canadian Nathalie, who teaches people how to switch to a raw food diet, to the full-of-wit copywriter Tei Lindstrom, to Karl who teaches how to “work happy now” and once had a mushroom business (who knew?!). Karl was as surprised as I was to be sharing his car with Darren after the party. There was the terrifically talented Martin Whitmore, the illustrator I worked with on Sonia’s Remarkable Marketing Blueprint, and Megan M., who helps people jump-start ideas. I got to pick the amazing brain of Kelly Parkinson, get to know Charlie and Angela better, and learned that the term cupcake isn’t used in the UK. But they, too, use the term muffin-top to describe a physical attribute. So I guess it really is a small world after all.

Tomorrow I’m stoked about the panel “Millionaire or Artist? Why not both?” with Amrita Chanda, John T Unger, Hugh MacLeod, and Mary Anne Davis. So hopefully, my brain will now let me sleep. G’night all!

The first session I attended was “We F*cked Up”, with a panel of web consultants discussing failure: recoverable and unrecoverable failures they’ve had, their definitions of failure, etc. Points that stuck with me:

• We need failure more than we need success. Failure breeds innovation, but success just breeds more of the same.
• Don’t be afraid to have the difficult conversations with your clients. Own your mistakes, apologize, know when to end a working relationship, etc.
• Greg Hoy talked about creating “snippet” designs, like 300px square instead of a full screen mock-up, for a project that had gone through too many rounds of revisions and still wasn’t feeling right to the client. The snippets let him try a whole bunch of ideas quickly, they hit on something the client liked, and then the design team was able to flesh it out more from there.
• When SEO consultant Wil Reynolds feels like his clients should have reached better results than they have so far, he calls them and tells them to stop paying for Seer Interactive’s services. The firm keeps working without pay until the client sees those results he expected for them.
• Reply-all is a dangerous thing when someone on your team has the poor sense to speak ill of the client. ‘Nuff said.

This afternoon I heard Ze Frank talk about The Creative Lifestyle. He’s one of those guys, it seems, who just can’t help but be creative. Even in conversation and answering people’s questions, he had us laughing a lot.

Ze makes a lot of creative things that he shares online: some audience participation, some just him riffing on yet another strange idea he’s had. He highlighted a few briefly:

• A childhood walk - where you find a walk you used to take on Google streetview, and narrate it.
• Angrigami – when he got his first really strong hate mail*, he didn’t know what to do with it. After a while he made origami templates with the text of the hatemail, and invited people to make beautiful things with it.
• The hate mail was received in response to 52to48 which are photographic gestures of reconciliation across the democratic-republican divide in the U.S. (about 52to48 )

Today’s keynote was danah boyd, an ethnographer who researches how people use technology. In a nutshell, she talked about how privacy isn’t dead. She implored those of us who make systems to understand people’s expectations of privacy. That information we make public isn’t necessarily something we want publicized. That the behaviour of tech companies making bad privacy decisions for their users (Facebook, Google Buzz being the cases in point), has real and terrifying implications for some of their users.

Aside from that, today I learned that Texan food is definitely different from what you get in my part of the world. I had a waffle cone with bacon and scrambled eggs in it for lunch, which seemed more my speed than the breaded, deep fried jalapeno sausage on a stick.

Tonight I’m looking forward to a meetup hosted by Chris Guillebeau and hoping to meet some of my online pals there. Time to get ready!

Sparky Firepants explores: What do people think about when they want a website? (click image for full size)

For a while now I’ve been designing a package for semi-custom WordPress websites (I promise it has a more exciting name than that, but it’s still hatching!). And when I say “designing”, I mean doing bits of research, brainstorming, coding, and photoshop-ing in between my regular client projects. Suffice to say it’s been slow and always pushed to the bottom of my to-do list.

After much pondering and churning and over-thinking in my own little vacuum, I did a couple smart things.

First, I had a coaching session with Charlie Gilkey. His eloquent questions made me feel okay about where I was at. More importantly, they also lit a fire in me to launch this thing a.s.a.p.

Second, I got in touch with David, a.k.a. the brilliant Sparky Firepants, to see if he’d like to collaborate on this wee adventure with me.

Oh-my-god-am-I-ever-glad-I-did-that!

You see while I’m weighing the pros & cons of software development tactics, which features the themes should have, how I’m going to deliver on Big Idea X or Y, David goes right to the root of it all: the customer. What the heck do they want, anyway? When they think about getting a website, what’s on their mind? (You can see his exploration of the idea straight from his sketchbook, above right.)

Which isn’t to say that I hadn’t been thinking about the customer, of course. But I’d been coming at it from different angles. So when I saw this exploration in my inbox, I was inspired to share it with you. To say: Great things happen in a team when each of you spark different ideas and perspectives.

As you can imagine, it’s a whole lot easier to keep the ball rolling when you’re excited by each other’s ideas and pushing the envelope together.

As wonderful as it is being self-employed, working mostly one-on-one with my clients, I know that the old cliche two heads are better than one is true. So I’m really looking forward to sharing this-thing-our-two-heads-are-cooking-up with you.

Makes you wanna go out there and collaborate with someone, eh?

They come to see what you’ve got for them. What problem (of theirs!) you might solve. What inspiration/information you can offer through your words, pictures, or sounds.

Still, the design of the site matters

Knowing that impressions of your credibility can be formed by viewing your website in as little as 1/20th of a second, it’s safe to say that your website’s design still influences how people receive whatever you’re offering. In that amount of time one can only get some impression of the site through major design decisions like colour choices and perhaps graphic style.

In a sense, your website is like a picture frame: it should support and complement whatever it is you’re displaying. It shouldn’t be the main attraction, distracting from your picture.

Photo by Thom Watson / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Prius Power Button

There are hundreds of tools to connect you with the information you choose to follow, and for the most part they deliver a mixed bag of inconsistently useful stuff. So what’s a girl to do but stay “on” almost constantly, grazing for those tasty or nutritious bits?

I have become an information glutton.

In addition to the amount of information I *must* process to do my job well, I spend a lot of spare time consuming information from Twitter, Facebook, membership sites, and the various blogs they all link to.

All the while, beating myself up that I haven’t blogged in ages myself..

I go in circles: Who am I writing for anyway? For my clients? Sometimes. For friends? They’re all in the same boat as me. TOO MUCH TO READ. What have I got to say that’s new? It’s all been said, it’s all out there already…

And yet, I keep reading (or more truthfully, skimming) other people’s blogs, glad to hear their voices and perspectives. Nodding my head, if not commenting, at the discussions going on there.

The point? The web is big. There’s room for all of us.

If I value what others are contributing, if I admire their successes, who am I to stay silent when I’ve got something to say? It reminds me of this quote (which I thought was Nelson Mandela but apparently was by Marianne Williamson):

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. …as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

But, I have to make room for me.

I think the challenge for me now is turning off the information taps more often, so that I’m not drowning in others’ voices. So that I become thirsty to hear my own voice. To make room for me, so that I can share that voice with whoever cares to listen. To paraphrase Marissa: there is value in switching off.

Another challenge is to silence (or at least quiet) my internal editor. The one that says this post is not useful/profound/interesting/polished enough to publish. The reason for those partially written drafts waiting to see the light of day (this one waited 2 weeks!). The reason I often read other blogs but don’t add a comment because my critic says I’ve nothing of value to add.

And I think I’ll start by publishing this now, whether it has a nice tidy ending or not.

"Don't be in such a hurry" by Toni V

Tonight I got an email from a friend asking if I could help his brother out. The brother in question had a request from a publishing company to see his website, as they might want him to illustrate a book. Awesome, right? Yeah, except the brother doesn’t have a website.

Now it being a Friday night and me being generally booked about a month in advance, I decided to give him some tips on how to build himself a half-decent site ASAP. So without further ado I’ll expand upon those tips here…

A few resources for free/cheap starter sites you could set up yourself

For the most part these are services I’ve come across but haven’t used. If you have, please consider leaving comments about your experience with them.

• the behance network – you could set up a profile like this illustrator’s http://www.behance.net/corcoise (lovely work, isn’t it? mmm)
• carbonmade.com is specifically for creative portfolios like this one. I like that it gives you a clean layout to display your work. However every time I view one of these I’m frustrated by the poor link from a project view back to the main page of a person’s portfolio. You have to hunt too much for that little tiny arrow top left next to the person’s name. (Yeah, I bet you missed it too, huh?) Why not make the person’s name a link to their main page? After all, one of the first rules of web design is don’t make me think. But hey, it’s free unless you want to upgrade to their $12/month plan.
• squarespace.com – I didn’t realize the fabulous Gwen Bell’s site runs on SquareSpace until I looked at their examples. So that goes to show you that it’s not necessarily cookie-cutter stuff because Gwen had a designer customize hers to be unique. They offer sites you can edit yourself starting at $8/month.
• WordPress.com – If you’ll want to blog, and especially if blogging will be a big part of your strategy longer term, then definitely consider starting at wordpress.com. It’s not nearly as customizable as when you run WordPress on your own webhost (“self-hosted”, the kind I like to build), but it’s a great start. You can have one going in a few minutes, choose from multiple themes, and customize those to some degree. You can also buy cheap upgrades for a bit more customization etc. The best part is that when you decide to blog elsewhere, you can easily export all your content in a format that can be imported into your new blog. Portability of your content is really important if you spend a lot of time on it.
• Flickr – If I were a photographer or illustrator I’d also consider just setting up an account at Flickr. You can set up “sets” and so on, like Martin Whitmore does. Flickr is free with an upgrade for something like $25/yr.

Any of those options would get you through a start-up nicely, then you could consider if you need something different once you get your feet wet. Of course if you decide you need a customized WordPress site, I’d love for you to get in touch.

If you’re going to rely on any of these services which offer a paid version, I encourage you to upgrade if only because a service you’re paying for is more likely to be viable long-term. The last thing you want to do is build up a site and have it go “poof” because they couldn’t afford to keep the lights on anymore, you know?

Before you run out & tell everyone about your new site, go get your .com

So most of these services will give you a web address (a “domain” or an “URL”) that’s longer and more complicated than the ideal (e.g. johnsmith.wordpress.com or behance.net/johnsmith). That kind of sucks. Worse, if you publicize an URL like that but want to move later you’ve shot yourself in the foot.

Step number one should be to register a domain for yourself, e.g. yourname.com. If you do that at netfirms.ca or netfirms.com for about $10/yr, then, for no extra charge you can set it to point to the portfolio you’ve made elsewhere. That way you can advertise your .com and not be tied to any of those services long term. When people click on a link to yourname.com they will end up at yourname.wordpress.com or whatever. (There’s lots of places you can buy domain names, but those are ones I think are pretty user friendly with minimum upsell junk and good customer service. GoDaddy for instance makes you jump through tons of NO-THANK-YOU-ALREADY hoops to get your domain name, super-tacky graphics, and is reviled by web masters everywhere for being more difficult to work with than it needs to be. Just sayin’ )

I’m sure there are other options out there, but these are the ones that came to mind for me. Know of others? Any questions? Let’s hear it in the comments.

I discovered tonight (via @raanan) that NASA is not only using WordPress, but using it so much they have created user guides for their departments. How cool is that?

There’s a lot of other high profile and amazing sites using WordPress listed the WP Publisher Spotlight. Here’s a few I found interesting:

• UBC’s Place of Mind – a UBC community site to aggregate content from blogs, YouTube, Flickr, etc.
• The Ann Arbor Chronicle – an online newspaper from Michigan. My favourite part is “Stopped. Watched.” — quick updates from members of the community.
• The Tasty Kitchen – a community website for recipes. It’s using BuddyPress, a group of plug-ins that turn WordPress into a social networking site (sort of like a niche Facebook).

There are so many more interesting publishers, from the Wall Street Journal, to the UK Royal Navy and Prime Minister’s sites, to Martha Stewart. The WordPress Publisher Spotlight is worth a look to see the breadth of possibilities with the platform.