Hats and Scarves Winter Warming Project

Hats and Scarves is a seasonal program of Living Earth. The program requests volunteers to knit hats and scarves and drop the finished items off at city-wide drop sites. The items are then distributed to various social service organizations in the county. I developed a website that allows project volunteers to post ‘progress reports’ and news about the project on its blog, acknowledge participating groups, and solicit donations and volunteer support.

• Implement Content Management System (WordPress)
• Web Design and Development
• Graphic Design
• Branding and Photography

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Barbara Ford, the driving force behind GAIA Workshops, is an activist, therapist and artist. She presents workshops, facilitates group processes and speaks regularly on issues of environmental advocacy, community empowerment and engaged spirituality. Her website provides information about her work, enables newsletter list-building and promotes her workshops and other activities. Her blog allows her to reflect on and explore issues of creativity, activism spirit and our connections to the world.

• Implement Content Management System (WordPress)
• Information Architecture
• Web Development
• Banner Design: Anne Mavor

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The East Los Angeles College Resource & Institutional Development Office helps faculty, staff and administrators manage special projects and increase financial resource flow in the college. Their web site provides comprehensive information about the grant process: searching for opportunities, how to apply for grants and grant writing. They also provide overviews and links to their currently funded projects.

• Implement Content Management System (Joomla!)
• Information Architecture
• Web Development
• Convert Photoshop Design to Code (PSD to HTML)
• Interface Design: Yegor Hovakimyan, Los Angeles

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The East Los Angeles College Foundation supports the programs of East Los Angeles College through advocacy and building community goodwill. Their website promotes the Foundation and publicizes its work; describes and honors its supported projects; recognizes its donors; and provides scholarship information and application aid to its constituents. The site had to look warm and inviting and be easily navigable to its visitors.

• Implement Content Management System (Joomla!)
• Information Architecture
• Web Development
• Convert Photoshop Design to Code (PSD to HTML)
• Interface Design: Yegor Hovakimyan, Los Angeles

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Mindfulness Living

Mindfulness Living is the website for Sri Lankan meditation teacher Deva Ratnakara. Deva is the head of one of the most well known mindfulness meditation institutions in Sri Lanka, Sadaham Mituru Samuluwa. Originally a static site, I ported it to WordPress to enable Deva to communicate more effectively with his visitors through a blog. It was also important that it be easy to update content and disseminate information about his retreats and teachings.

• Implement Content Management System (WordPress)
• Graphic Design
• Web Design and Development
• Photo Credit: Jay Goodfriend

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Socheata Poeuv

Socheata Poeuv, an award winning filmmaker and activist, is founder and CEO of Khmer Legacies, an organization whose goal is to create a video archive of the Cambodian genocide. Socheata had a Blogger site but needed more control over the design and features. Her new website helps publicize her work, promotes her speaking engagements and aids communication with friends and supporters. An additional requirement was the need for easy re-design or expansion as needed and updating by Socheata or her assistant.

What I Did

• Implement Content Management System (WordPress)
• Graphic Design
• Web Design and Development
• Banner Design: James Vogl

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Syntonic Microwave designs, customizes and markets microwave components and subsystems. I designed and developed their original website in xhtml and css roughly five years ago and was called in to port the site to WordPress.

The primary goal of the site is to bring product information to current and potential customers. The site was ported to WP 3.0 and a company blog was added to the original site structure. A slide presentation was added to each product category and Latest News in each product category was linked to that product line.

What I Did

• Implement Content Management System (WordPress)
• Graphic Design and Branding
• Web Design and Development

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Living Earth is a nonprofit organization supporting projects addressing global problems in a local, personal and spiritual context. I created a website that provides a soothing environment for visitors to stay abreast of upcoming events and to provide a platform for the director to blog about topics both of interest to her and relevant to the Living Earth community. The site required easy updating by non-technical volunteers and inexpensive expansion as the need arose.

What I Did

• Implement Content Management System (WordPress)
• Graphic Design and Branding
• Web Design and Development
• Integration of Social Media

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8 Ways to harness your blog’s potential.

Blogging, once the exclusive domain of internet extroverts sharing their lives with anyone interested, has become an effective and inexpensive part of an online marketing toolkit and a way for small business owners to get and keep their name out in front of existing and potential customers.

This study at the Hubspot Blog reported results that I found, on one hand, pretty astonishing and, on the other – considering what we’ve come to learn about business blogging – not totally unexpected.

The author, Rick Burnes, looked at just over 1500 business websites. 795 of had blogs, 736 didn’t. Here’s what he found: those that blogged had 55% more visits, 97% more inbound links and a mind-boggling 434% more indexed pages! From this study, done in August 2009, it’s pretty clear there are substantial marketing advantages to having a business blog.

But Who Has Time?

Even knowing there’s a big advantage, though, those of us with our energy already tapped out managing our businesses dismiss blogging as one more thing we don’t have time for. And blogging – in the short term, at least – does add some time to our work week. Looking at some specific benefits might help us take another look with an eye to placing it closer to the top of our ‘to do’ list.

With that in mind, I put together this list of eight ways blogging can help increase your market reach and attract new – or retain current – customers. It might even save some time over the long haul.

Establish Your Expertise

I’m going to assume you know about your business. When you write about it authoritatively, you go beyond offering products or services and show yourself to have in-depth knowledge of those products and services. This can help build trust and confidence in you and your business.

Differentiate Yourself from Your Competitors

While establishing your expertise, framing your knowledge about your products and services in certain ways can help show the difference between you and your competitors. Over time, visitors to your website and blog will see for themselves what makes you stand out from others engaged in the same business.

Build Your Brand

A blog offers an inexpensive and effective way to communicate your business’ value, vision and passion. Visitors who see your business logo presented consistently together with timely and useful information develop a sense of security, stability and trust and begin to associate those with the value you provide.

Build Community

The web today is all about building communities. A blog creates opportunities for us and our customers to interact in an informally professional way. By providing an avenue whereby customers can comment on your posts andengage with each other, a sense of community can build around your products and services. These built relationships tend to strengthen customer loyalty and introduce new, potential customers to you.People want to do business with people and your blog puts you, a real person, in a relatonship to your customer.

Attract Prospects and Develop New Business Opportunities

Blogs with useful and freshly-added, regularly updated information about products and services generate additional visitors and better search engine rankings. Remember, new visitors come to your site because they’re looking for your products or services. When you give them what they’re looking for, that’s an additional opportunity to generate more leads.

Improve Search Engine Ranking

Fresh and original web content is what search engine spiders feed on. Websites that are updated frequently get crawled by the search engine spiders more often. Your website earns more authority and better search engine ranking.

Cut Your Marketing Expense

Blogging is relatively inexpensive. Once your blog is setup, the expense to maintain it and keep it updated is measured in the time you put into it.

Manage Your Reputation

You are your reputation. A blog gives you the opportunity to interact directly with clients to address any problems or concerns they might have about you or your business. The ability to integrate other social media such as Facebook or Twitter increases your ability to develop positive customer relationships or monitor and address any negative or incorrect comments made by customers or competitors.

So, that’s some of the advantages of blogging that I’ve discovered. How about you? If you already blog, how has that helped you in your business? And if you’ve yet to begin, what is it that holds you back? What would help to get you going? Share your comments below.

{photo courtesy Flickr user sticky star fish}

Heeding my own advice!

I’m getting a new portfolio up on my website – today! I decided to use WordPress’ Custom Post Types to create it and began looking around the web to see how others had handled this. I found and read a few great articles like the one over at Ash Blue, and then I opened my text editor and began writing code. Suddenly I remembered, “Hold on! I don’t have content for this”.  A bit of a letdown …

One of the frustrations I have working with some clients – and a top one cited by other web developers I meet – is not having content on hand before beginning a design or adding new functionality to a site. So I always stress the importance of getting content together while we’re still in the discussion and planning stage of the development.

So, when I started to get excited about adding my portfolio to my site, I thought I’d take my own advice.  I knew that getting my content prepared first – the images I’d use, the text to include – was going to help a whole lot to determine the layout for the page.

Using my portfolio page as an example, let’s look at how deciding to prepare the content first saved me from a frustrating and potentially time-consuming process.

What’s the Plan?

I wanted to display the page with no sidebars. I also wanted to have a decent sized, readable, image floating to the right of a site description. The text block should have the name of the site, a brief description and the client’s requirements, a list of the skills I used, and a link to the live website. This closely followed the Ash Blue layout and that of other web portfolios I like.

After a bit of doodling, I settled on the following content requirements for the page: I’d use roughly 100 words for the text block and – given the styles set out in the main stylesheet for the rest of the site – that text would use 15 lines in the space I mapped out. Having this information allowed me to target the size of the images I’d use. I didn’t yet have the images, so I went to each site, took a screenshot and moved them into Photoshop to re-size and optimize. I then wrote the blurbs for the text blocks. Now, with content in hand, I was ready to move ahead with the page.

Of course, I could get a sense of how I want something to look, throw it together, and then tweak the design and content as I proceed. In fact, I’ve often had to do that to keep projects-sans-content moving forward. There can be drawbacks of that approach. What are some?

1. It can be expensive.

   Repeating Tasks Twice

   Using ‘dummy’ text as a placeholder takes as much time to paste in as would entering ‘real’ text. I’d just have to replace it later, so no need to do it twice!

   Unnecessary Re-design

   Some design tweaking is often necessary. But if my page is laid out to accommodate 100-125 words and the client delivers 180 words of content per section, it can mean costly hours of editing text and having it approved, and/or tweaking the design to accommodate re-sized text blocks. This lost time is easily avoided by planning. Having the content up front shows me the area I need to fit the text. In the case of my own page, I crafted the text as I needed it the first time.

   Unnecessary graphics work

   As with dummy text, I can put a ‘rough design’ together using placeholders for images. But why do it? With a design idea and the text content written, I know what size photo I need. No need to put in trial-and-error placeholder sizes that need to be replaced later.

2. It can be frustrating.

   Hair pulling for client and developer

   Wrestling text or images into a pre-determined design is annoying to a client who has already spent time writing content the first time.

   Redesigning portions of a page to accommodate longer or shorter text blocks is difficult for a designer concerned with how the design works visually in the context of the whole page or site.

3. It slows down the production schedule.

   Late launch dates can cost!

   Waiting for text or photos while the website is in production can push out the expected launch date. If that date is keyed to a marketing campaign or if the site is promoting an important upcoming event, a late launch can hurt.

   Picking up the thread breaks the development momentum for the client and the developer and often adds time to the overall budget.

So, it’s important to recognize that content is an integral part of the website design. There are ways to work around not having all of the content in place before getting underway. But each of those workarounds add unnecessary time and expense to the project.

By taking the advice I give my clients about having content prepared as early in the project as possible, I was able to put my portfolio together in half the time it would have taken otherwise. When considering the impact of having or not having content available as you begin a new project, I wonder what your thoughts are. Leave a comment below.