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.

Getting familiar (without getting overwhelmed)

If you’re new to social media or even a particular aspect of it, it can seem like a foreign country — one with strange language, etiquette and tools. It’s a good idea take on only one platform at a time (blogging OR Facebook OR Twitter). Also, begin when you can afford that bit of extra time, know that you’ll be spending more time than normal to start with it, and relax about that.

Some resources for learning about social media

• Practice Building 101 – a free e-book. It’s geared at health practitioners but a lot of the principles apply to anyone trying to wrap their head around this stuff.
• Friends with Benefits: a Social Media Marketing Handbook – soon-to-be-released book by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo. As owners of Capulet Communications they’ve been into marketing with social media since long before we had a name for it. This’ll be good.
• The Unconventional Guide to the Social Web by Chris Guillebeau and Gwen Bell. This package comes in several bundles of e-book, audio and some video and promises lots of inspiration about how people are using social media in their lives.
• If you’ve already started diving into all of this, and are feeling at all overwhelmed by it, check out Sonia Simone’s How to get any work done (when connecting is your job). Sonia’s great suggestions are the reason this post is getting done now and not “soon”

OK, maybe you don’t want so much theory or foundational stuff, but you just want some more tangible ideas on how to make these things less of a time suck. I’m with you! Here are some things I’ve tried, and I welcome you to share any of your tips in the comments.

Twitter

• Adjust your notification settings. You can decide whether you want an email every time someone new follows you and every time you get a direct message. I used to immediately check out new followers on twitter when I got that little email notification, and OMG what a time suck that can be. You can turn these off, or just choose not to look at them right away. Maybe set up a filter in your email so you’re not distracted by them coming into your inbox. If you do turn them off you probably won’t notice new followers unless they tweet with your username in it, if then.
• Use the favourites button. You can mark any tweet as a “favourite”. Lately I’ve been using this as a way to remind myself of an interesting link that I don’t have to follow NOW. If you click on every interesting thing posted in your twitter stream, you can literally spend all day in twitter + surfing. Now I mark those as favourites and read them later.
• Use a Twitter program/client. Once you’re comfortable with the environment at twitter.com, you might explore the various ways of connecting to Twitter. There are programs you can install on your computer (though I haven’t tried them). I like to use Hootsuite. It’s made for people who want to manage multiple accounts, but what I like about it is:
  • Nothing to install – just log in to hootsuite.com from any computer and I get the same experience, without the hassle of installing software.
  • Multi-column view – instead of clicking on twitter.com’s @tzaddi tab to see who’s talking to/about me, I can display that column all the time next to my general stream.
  • Custom columns – I can save a search on a particular topic as a column to watch. So right now I have one that’s displaying anything on the topic of #wcpdx, a conference I’m attending this weekend. It also has a Featured tab/group to which I’ve added some of my favourite tweeters. If I don’t have time to check my full stream, I can switch to that tab and keep up with a few conversations among important contacts.
• Open carefully – I have my web browser open pretty much all day with multiple tabs open for the things I’m doing. If I leave the Hootsuite tab open, I’m a lot more likely to check in and waste a few minutes. So, I try to close it when I’m not consciously choosing to spend that time on twitter.

Facebook

• Adjust your notification settings. (Sound familiar?) For goodness sake, if you let Facebook email you everytime one of your “friends” sneezes you’ll go nuts. Go into the settings and tweak it to what works for you. It’s not perfect – I’d like more options, myself – but it’s a start.
• Hide the crap. If you look at your Facebook newsfeed and see something or someone that doesn’t interest you, you can hide some of it. Hold your mouse over the top right corner of the item, and a little “hide” option will show up. It’ll let you either hide that person altogether, or if it’s an application like a quiz, you’ll be able to hide any more items like that. I personally hide every darn quiz that shows up in my feed. Call me crazy but I really don’t care which 70’s rock star or desert my friends are like.
• Be careful about de-friending. Even though Facebook won’t tell someone if you remove them from your friends list, they may still notice. If you’re they’re just too noisy in your feed, hide them instead. If it’s more of a privacy/relationship-gone-bad kind of thing, well, I suppose you do what you have to do.

No matter when you choose to fit social media into your day, I hope some of these tips might help you streamline and make the most of that time. I also hope you’ll share tips of your own in the comments.

So, what challenges or tips do you have around fitting this stuff in?

I definitely don’t claim to be an expert on security. But I have found the following to help me sleep a bit better at night and make events like upgrading or even possible hacking less stressful. I hope you’ll share any tips or questions of your own in the comments so we can all learn from each other.

Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.

The number one thing you can do to improve security with any software that’s connected to the internet is to keep it up to date. WordPress developers are constantly working to improve the tool and it’s security is a part of that. The current version and the version previous (2.83, 2.84) are both secure against this hack attack.

I used to be a lot more nervous upgrading WP sites than I am now. Occasionally it’s painful (if you’re on a really old version, relying on plugins that are no longer compatible, or have a pain-in-the-butt webhost), but usually it’s pretty seamless. If you don’t know how to do the upgrade yourself, talk to your web person, your geeky buddy, whomever, and get it done. The most recent versions of WordPress have an automatic upgrade built in so it might be simpler than you think. And if you’re on a really old version, see below for a killer upgrade offer from Mark Jaquith.

But first: backup

If you’re about to do an upgrade, you should back up: your database, your theme files, and ideally your uploads folder. A proper upgrade shouldn’t overwrite your theme or uploads, but it doesn’t hurt to have a backup on hand, right? Unfortunately that auto upgrade tool built into the latest versions of WordPress doesn’t do backups for you. So, here’s some tools I recommend for backups:

1. If you’re on an older WP version, grab the automatic upgrade plug-in. It creates a backup of both your files and your database before doing the upgrade, and usually makes the upgrade pretty painless. If you’re on a more recent version then you don’t need this for the upgrade part of the task.
2. Either way, install a plug-in for backing up your WordPress database. This is crucial because the database is where all the text content of your site is stored. WordPress DB Backup plug-in can do it either on-demand, or on a schedule. I install it on all my sites and have a backup emailed to me or the site owner weekly. (The backup can be stored on the server but it’s not recommended.) Note that you must also have some space on your server for it to do it’s thing, so if you’re running a really budget/lean webhosting account you’ll want to look into that. I had a client contact me with a failed upgrade because the auto backups he thought were successful had created 0kb files – his server simply didn’t have the room to create the files.
3. You might also find this file backup plug-in handy for backing up your theme, uploads, and plug-ins. I haven’t tried this one so if you have please let us know what you think of it in the comments.
4. UPDATE: A great set of instructions for setting up backups with gmail and a different plug-in, WP-DB Manager.

Now that you’re all up to date and backed up, consider making some tweaks to enhance security.

Usernames & Passwords

1. The first thing I do after installing WordPress is create a new administrator account. Then, I delete the “admin” username. I figure if the hackers don’t know the username of my administrator, it’s that much more difficult for them to get in.
2. Change the display name for usernames. On the user profile, you can set how your name will display in your theme. So when the post says “Written by Joe”, the username that Joe logs in with can be “masterdisaster” or whatever. One less clue for hackers.
3. Choose a secure password. This one should go without saying, but we’ve all done it: overly simple passwords used over and over again. I’ve recently improved this habit by adopting a password pattern for all my administrator accounts. Basically you make up a pattern that has a slight difference on every site’s password. I find this has been really helpful for making unique passwords I can remember. So it could be something like:
   1. a meaningful number (digits from an old phone number or address? a special date?)
   2. some characters from the site name, perhaps the first or last few. e.g. for gmail.com it could be “gma” or “ail” or some variation
   3. an acronym or a word that you’ll remember, and perhaps this has a number in it, like “sl33py” or something

Make sense? What do you do for secure passwords?

Other tips & links

• You might also want to turn off the ability to register for a new user account on your site if you don’t need it. I’d left it open on an old personal site and the other day I got an email that someone had registered (as a subscriber) on my blog. Makes me just a little nervous someone was probing for holes.
• Think twice before installing plug-ins which could introduce security holes. There’s no certification process for plug-ins unfortunately, so if it’s not been vetted by many people, you might want to hold off installing that shiny tempting thing until it has.
• Mark Jaquith, a lead developer on WordPress itself, no less, is offering a great deal on upgrading your site.
• Matt Mullenweg (WordPress’s founder) has explained the attack and more in this article: How to keep WordPress Secure.
• The Blog Herald on Password Security
• If you need a random, impossible-to-remember but secure password, try Good Password.
• UPDATE: here’s a thoughtful article from John August on blogs and baking bread. (via @NathanBowers)

So, what about you? Any recommendations or tips to share?

Recently my Pilates instructor mentioned that she’s looking for an admin assistant, in part to do Facebook for the centre. In this conversation I heard two thoughts commonly expressed about Facebook and Twitter:

1. “I just don’t have time for all that.”
2. “Facebook is like another kind of email.” (By which she meant, a means to broadcast messages to her clients.)

I believe there is a more effective way to think of these things we broadly call “social media”.

Twitter & Facebook are neighbourhood coffee shops*

Tweets from people I follow**

Imagine that the stream of your friend’s status updates are like conversations in a coffee shop, going on all around you. Some of them are interesting, so you listen in. You might even join in. Other conversations you’ll ignore entirely, and that’s okay. You don’t have to keep up with it all.

Just as in real-life coffee-shops, these conversations allow you to keep up with the local pulse, maybe learn something, make connections. Sometimes these conversations lead to action. This action can be of many kinds: social, activist, and dare I say it, commercial.

Imagine you’re at the coffee shop and you just happen to need a new hairdresser/web designer/carpenter. Coincidentally you meet one there, or hear glowing praise of one and voila, your job of sifting through the zillion possibilities in Google just got easier. Or if you are a carpenter, taking a break at your regular coffee shop? Great, you might have a new gig because the barista made an introduction or recommendation.

Can’t imagine this type of connection happening through social media? Think again. I personally have met clients “out of the blue” because they found me in my facebook neighbourhood, and have secured a number of projects because I strengthened otherwise loose ties while hanging out on Twitter. Will that be true for everyone? Of course not. But depending on your business and client demographic, some kind of social media effort is bound to pay off somehow.

*This isn’t a new metaphor -  in Twitter Demystified & Debunked Havi Brooks calls it your neighbourhood bar/cafe hang-out. I find most bars annoying, and I think cafes have more of a likelihood of business taking place, so I prefer to think of it as a cafe.

**Those tweets are from @CharlieGilkey of Productive Flourishing // @kimianak, blogger, food lover, writer’s agent, Quebecer // @HiroBoga, intuitive healer // @rebecca_leigh, Brisbane copywriter

You make time for coffee breaks, right?

So here’s the thing. You don’t have to make a ton of time for this, or do these things all day. You could just drop in to Twitter or Facebook while you’re having your break or your morning coffee. In 15 focused minutes a day you can make some of those cool connections or build upon ones you already have.

Really? 15 minutes?

I’m the first to admit that these things can be a real time-suck. But I also think that 15 focused minutes would be better than just not doing it at all. The challenge is first: getting the hang of it all if you haven’t already, and then, keeping the time limited. Especially on Twitter I find there is an endless stream of distractions interesting-ness to tempt you.

I’ll follow this up with some resources and tips on getting the hang of and making the most of it. Meanwhile, it’s coffee talk time. Talk away below. What do you think about all this? What are your tips, questions, experiences…?

Coffee talk show on Saturday Night Live (Wikipedia) with Mike Meyers, Madonna, Rosanne Barr

P.S.  The image above used “coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee….” as a source. Flickr has such great coffee images. Over on my personal blog I posted some of the coffee images I considered using before making my own.

• was fairly inexpensive and quick (wanting them to arrive before an upcoming conference)
• therefore I could design and order myself (and I wouldn’t call myself a print designer)
• was nonetheless a well-designed product on a decent card-stock (thin cards suck!)

I was inspired by some moo.com readymade cards by Benrik with quirky phrases on them such as:

You seem like a serious business person. Let’s collaborate.

I love how these inject fun into the interaction of giving someone your card.

A sampling of my new business cards, printed on Moo's recycled paper stock

With this inspiration, I designed some 2-sided cards with my logo + particulars on one side and on the other, various quotations. I chose quotations that fit with the name ThriveWire and also with entrepreneurship and social media: loosely they’re about energy, ideas, and conversation.

They’re a hit!

I’m having a lot of fun picking out a card for someone I’ve just met, taking a guess at which one will resonate with them. People seem to enjoy the idea a lot. At a recent event I had people asking for more than one and showing them to their friends for some great word of mouth. And they’re sparking great conversations… which is awesome, because I really, really hate small talk.

About Moo

Moo became famous and well-loved for their minicards. You can upload multiple images for each set you order, so you’re not stuck with just one design. Photographers and crafters especially adore them – as is illustrated by the moo groups on flickr.

The quotations I laid out were done using a Moo Photoshop template. You can simply lay out text using Moo’s website, but I wanted to have more layout & font control. The templates are kind of hard to find so here’s a link:

Moo format guides / templates / handy thingamajigs

Moo’s Green Paper

I debated quite a bit about whether to order them on Moo’s recycled paper or not. I have some older Moo minicards on regular stock and they’re just perfect in terms of thickness and sheen. I couldn’t find a lot of reviews about the green stock. In the end I went with my conscience and ordered the green stock.

My verdict on Moo’s green paper:

• Nice thickness. A bit thinner than the minicards but I think that thickness would be overkill in the larger format.
• It has no sheen at all. The matte is nice but it means you might want to use more intense contrast or colours than you could get away with on the regular paper.
• The white is not as white as could be, it’s a little grey in fact.
• There’s occasional flecks in the paper.

I’m still really happy with them but I think next time I would consider using a little mention of the recycled paper on the card, because otherwise the flecks seem like a flaw to me.

Kudos to Moo

Moo has taken their friendly brand right through the whole chain of interactions and their customer service is absolutely wonderful. Even the email confirmation of your order is entertaining. It’s from “Little Moo, Print Robot”, who reminds you if you need special attention, that he’s just a little piece of software — followed by instructions for contacting live humans.

The order arrives with nice little touches like a sticker saying “Yay!” and “Quick, schedule a meeting. Your new cards are here!”

My cards took longer to arrive than estimated on the website. By the time I got them (too late for my conference, doh!), it was clear Canada Customs was to blame. They must have thought the label of “business cards” was a euphemism or something because they had opened the package to inspect.

The upside was that when I got my follow-up survey asking how the product was I told them it hadn’t arrived yet. The Moo rep didn’t grill me with questions, he simply put in an order for a reprint and asked me to confirm my shipping address. I confirmed. Later that day I went to the post office and the original order had finally arrived. I let him know right away, but since they’d already gone to print I got the second order FREE. No hassles, no duty, no shipping charges. I was very impressed with their handling of the delay.

So what about you?

If you want to to try Moo out for yourself, ask/google around for discount codes. There are some out there for first-time buyers. I’ve found others at Retailmenot too.

Now that I’ve shown you mine, will you show me yours?

This one is by Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist — a student of the brain — who had a first hand experience of a stroke. She wrote a book called A Stroke of Insight about her experience.

Her talk really makes me understand the difference between right and left brain in a much more visceral way than I ever did before. It makes me understand my need for creative endeavours all the more. In fact, the need for all of us to foster these experiences for the good of our souls and our planet. What do you think of it?