Blogher Panel: Blog Design

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/30 at 12:02 PM • A Little Design -- Blogging Events

These are my notes from the morning session at Blogher:

Design isn’t just about looks – it’s about information presentation that makes sense. What’s interesting with blog design is that there is a different dynamic than from Web design, much less print design.

Lynda Keeler, creator of delight.com, spoke about creating several versions of the site, working her way through brand identity issues. She used Typepad because it is fast and easy, plus easy to post to. (She’s now migrating to Movable Type.) She set out to create a lot of images to break up the type and visually identify the blog. Her first attempt was very straightforward. As the blog became successful and got visitors, she redesigned to accommodate advertising. She went to about a thousand blogs and worked with a graphic designer to find the best layout for delight.com.

The next stage will be to recast delight.com as a way to share information not only from this blog, but from other blogs she has created. The plan is a site that gets information out there quickly, but gives prominent placement to advertising space.

She makes the point that blog design is about defining your own goals for your blog; each design solution needs to be unique. Plus, design revisions should shift as your goals and ideas for the blog change.

The important elements of design are:

  • knowing your goals
  • understanding your audience

Keep your topic in mind when thinking about your design. Don’t forget to plan for growth, and for a shift in direction, to the extent that’s possible.

Take a look at other blogs, especially those that have topics and audience in common with yours, for ideas and inspiration.

It’s key to remember that blogs are something that get visited daily, even hourly, and because of that usability and layout are critical. Create consistency so that your visitors know what’s new and hot; think about setting off that content with colored backgrounds, for instance.

Don’t forget that bandwidth is still an issue for a lot of people. Faster downloads mean happier visitors! Use text as a graphic element – colors, sizing, and style can make text pop in the way graphics do.

Lynda advises that dark backgrounds sometimes equal less legibility. The same is true for very small text, especially when you have an older audience.

Use pullquotes to set off a section of your text and give it emphasis, as in this section of this post.

Break your posts up into short paragraphs. This doesn’t mean you can’t write long posts, just that you should break them up.

Take a look at your site stats to get information about your visitors and what their technological setup is, especially screen resolution. Sitemeter and StatCounter are both free stat resources you can implement on your blog.

Gina Hughes blogs on Techie Diva’s Guide to Gadgets. To create the Web site she hired a designer to help design the brand.

While finding a designer, she looked for work that resembled her vision and ideas. The designer created an illustration that served as the only customization of the blog for three months. As she grew her audience, Gina reworked the design to reflect softness and femininity, with a welcoming feel for women and even for kids.

Recently she revised the design again to get a little edgier, adding more black and bright pink.

She advises you do your homework when you get started. Investing in design conveys that your site is credible, that it has potential, and will grow. Design can reflect your authority, personality, identity, and style.

I asked about how you rationalize spending money on design when many of your readers read your blog via RSS feeds and may not ever make it to your Web site. Gina said that design was important since many blog readers are a) unaware that they are even on a blog and b) not using RSS at all.

Lynda answered by saying that you should address this issue by writing compelling post titles that get people to click through to your blog – and then they’ll see your design.

A big topic of discussion was about whether there needed to be a differentiation between a Web site and a blog.

One suggestion from Heather Parish was for bloggers with smaller budgets and time is to do as much as you can with your blogging software’s built-in design customization (font colors, etc.) and to maybe just pay for (beg, barter, steal?) a custom banner to put on the top of the blog.

Gina Hughes followed up by saying that her design evolution followed the growth of the site; design spending scaled up as the site became more successful, though she also took full advantage of Typepad’s customization tools.

Mindy (The Mommy Blog) talked about the need to pay for design in order to build a brand so that she can be unique.

Staci Kramer of OJR asked about the key features of a blog that should be regarded as completely necessary: search, email this, and…? Becky Walters said that a print this feature is also key.

Techiegirl has links and resources if you want to learn more about blog design.

Incidentally, the wifi was down for all but the first few minutes of this presentation, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to post this. Kudos to Lynda and Gina for adapting in the face of not being to access and show their blogs!

P.S. If you’re looking for blog design, I might be able to help you with that.

Tags: blogher, bloghercon

 
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Blogher REALLY Is Going to Be Great

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/29 at 11:31 PM • Blogging Events

I arrived in San Jose thanks to a ride to my flight from Seattle from Tris Hussey and Arieanna Foley. (It’s a long story to explain why I had to fly to San Jose from Seattle from Vancouver, but frankly not a very interesting one.) I made my flight with seconds to spare and had an uneventful flight to a slightly smoggy San Jose.

The day continued to look at up when I was told that the Westin currently has complimentary wifi. So what if bottled water costs $3.49 when there’s free wifi, anyway?

The Blogher pre-conference orientation for speakers was great. The discussion guidelines and ideas promise that this conference really should be different from the standard 55 minutes from panelists with Powerpoints and five short minutes of questions. We have been urged to turn every issue back to the audience for input, and to determine the direction the discussion needs to head. Fingers crossed for me as I do the $$ and Sense panel at 3:30.

After the orientation, more than 200 (that’s my guess) of the speakers, organizers, and attendees adjourned to Andiamo for excellent Mexican food and conversation, and not a few Coronas and wine margaritas. I talked with Toby Bloomberg, Amy Gahran, Rahat Mahmood, Susan Mernit, Susan Getgood, JD Lasica, Mary Hodder, Lisa Williams, Julie Leong, Staci Kramer… the room was packed.

The feeling here tonight is so full of enthusiasm and collaboration, with people talking conceptually about the relationships blogging can build, and the way community connections spring up. I’m loving the emphasis on the social aspects of blogging, even among business bloggers. It’s a refreshing change from SEO, promotion, and traffic numbers, though all of that plays its role in this medium of ours. Perhaps I’ve just been more exposed to those topics lately…

I’ll try to blog tomorrow during some of the sessions, which will depend a bit on locating power outlets!

 
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Tomorrow: San Jose

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/28 at 09:04 AM • Blogging Events

image I woke up feeling particularly happy today but it took a minute to remember just why: I’m really excited about heading down to San Jose tomorrow for Blogher and all its associated dinners, meetups, and hoopla. It’s going to be great to meet people like Toby Bloomberg and Amy Gahran in person, not to mention the amazing organizers of this conference.

If you won’t be there, the good news is that you can still participate via chat. No doubt there will lots of folks blogging the conference, too, and I’ll try to put up a list of those folks as well as blogging a bit myself.

 
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Blog Copyright Theft

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/26 at 12:41 PM •

Worried about people using your blog content without permission? Read over MarketingSherpa’s collected tips on dealing with copyright violation on blogs.

Source: First saw this article referenced on Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger.

 
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Adding a Blogroll and Other Questions

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/26 at 12:10 PM • Blogging Tips

Here’s a question I got recently from new blogger Stan DeVaughn:

Hi, Susannah:  It’s day-1 for my blog experiment.  I’m following your guidance and trying out hosted solutions, starting with blogspot.  Problem here is that I want to include a blogroll and have some additional pages for details about me, my background, etc.  Can’t seem to do it with blogspot.  Is Moveable Type hard to use?  Thanks!  sd

And here’s my answer:

Adding elements to your blog sidebar is a pretty basic modification—at least in terms of wanting to do it! When I’ve seen people set up a blog for themselves, after writing their first couple of posts, the very next question is about putting things in the sidebar.

The “how to” on this varies from one blogging tool to the next. With Blogger, you must actually go into the blog template (click on the Template tab). Look for the Edit-Me tags inserted by the default template and add your own links to create a blogroll. HTML links are formatted like this:

<a href="http://www.buzzmarketingwithblogs.com">Buzz Marketing with Blogs</a><br>
<a href="Full URL Goes Here">Text that is clickable goes here</a>

Other blogging tools, like Typepad for example, have built-in tools that let you build a blogroll without going into the templates or writing your own HTML.

One final tip: some newsreader applications let you put the list of blog feeds you are subscribed to on your blog as a blogroll. I do this myself using Bloglines, and I find this especially handy because my blogroll gets updated automatically when I subscribe or unsubscribe to a feed.

By the way, a blogroll is a list of blogs that you read yourself. Putting this list on your blog is a reader service because it lets your visitors see where you get your information and lets them go there themselves.

Creating pages that aren’t part of your blog, but that you link to from your blog, is also another common request. Typepad lets you build an About page that is separate from the blog using the admin tool; other blogging tools, like Wordpress, have a built-in function that lets you add several pages. With a little HTML know-how you can create the page yourself and link to them. There is one common cheat that works pretty well, however: Put the content you want on that page in a blog post, and then link to the permalink URL from the sidebar of the rest of your blog. (This is pretty much the only way to do this in Blogger.) The page will look just like your blog since it is part of your blog; it’s simply in how you are linking to it that it functions more like a standard Web page.

And finally, to answer your question about Movable Type being easy to use: Opinions vary, of course. I find Movable Type pretty easy to use if all you want to do is post a new blog entry, but as soon as you want to customize it things do get a little more complicated. Installation is also a bit of a bear for the technical novice, but you can get it pre-installed with some Web hosting accounts. Expect a bit of “culture” shock if you go directly from Blogger to Movable Type! 

 
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Mark Hughes’ Buzz Marketing Book

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/25 at 01:23 PM •

Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff“Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk about Your Stuff” (242 pages). I haven’t read it yet, but it does sound like a great book for anyone trying to get a handle on this “buzz marketing thing.” (It’s a little weird that Hughes has decided that buzz marketing is actually one word. Nothing like doing weird things with spelling to knock your search engine results!)

“We donned our uniforms, felt our customer’s anxiety, solved our customer’s problems, saw what they looked like, heard what they sounded like. We got under their hoods and inside their heads.”

There’s a review of the book in today’s USA Today.

Disclosure: If you buy the book after clicking on the Amazon link to it in this post I’ll get a small percentage of the sale via Amazon’s Affiliate program.

 
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I Need Help!

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/22 at 06:03 PM • Not About Blogs

imageI saw this amazing iPod case on the Blogaholics blog when I was catching up on my feeds today and realized that I simply must have it! The problem is, it only seems to be available on a site that is all in some language I can’t read. I don’t think I’m quite up to figuring out how to purchase something from a site I can’t read at all, so I need help!

Has anyone seen this case for sale somewhere else (preferably in English)? Or, is there someone who reads whatever language is on the SolidAlliance.com site who could walk me through the ordering process? Thanks!

UPDATE: Several people have recommended Google’s Translate function, which does work until you actually get into the shopping cart. So that one is a no go, at least as far as I can tell.

 
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Asian Blogging Seminar

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/22 at 12:14 PM • Blogging Events

Exciting news for Paul Chaney and I: We’re going to be conducting a two-day blogging seminar and workshop in Singapore September 21-22.

The conference is being planned and organized by Maitre Allianz.

Corporate Blogging Conference
Sept. 21-22, 2005
Le Meridien Hotel, Singapore

If you are based in Asia, and want to attend, head over to the Maitre Allianz Web site to find out how to register. Paul and I are very excited about this event and we’ve worked up a great schedule for the two days. You can see all the details and the agenda in the event brochure (PDF).

We’re also looking for ways to incorporate the presence of blogging companies and technology, though I’ll have more details on how this might work later. However, if you’re interested in reaching business bloggers in Asia and want to hear about possible sponsorship/advertising opportunities when I have them, let me know.

Here’s some of the marketing copy Maitre-Allianz put together for the conference:

The Corporate Blogging Conference is all about getting you informed and effective in the blogosphere. This Conference is a must-attend for CEOs, managers, marketing and PR professionals who are interested in learning more about how blogs have been transformed to effective, cutting-edge marketing tools.

10 Reasons why you must attend this event

  1. FIRST Corporate Blog Marketing Conference in Asia.

  2. MOST renowned experts in this field.  A rare opportunity to hear from the author of popular Dummies book, “Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies” and the President of the Professional Bloggers Association.

  3. AFFORDABLE investment for this a highly value-added, comprehensive and practical Blog Marketing conference.  To miss this event will only cost your company even more!

  4. NEXT BIG thing in marketing – With a person to person interface, it combines the Internet platform and word of mouth marketing which is honest and powerful.

  5. PHENOMENAL GROWTH. 300 million Internet users in the Asia Pacific region. Singapore is ranked 13th in the world and the penetration rate of Internet users is 60.2%

  6. TOP companies like General Motors, Sun Microsystems, Disney, IBM, Edelman, Boeing, John Wiley & Sons, and many more have already started blogging! Why wait?

  7. INDUSTRY LEADER has the first mover advantage and will set to command a high percentage of the market share. Be the first!

  8. ENHANCE your company’s key functional roles to grow market share and profits by leveraging on the Internet platform and harnessing the power of Blogs.

  9. COST-EFFECTIVE form of marketing to increase credibility, build brands and thereby upping sales of your company

  10. LATEST marketing tool. News and figures from media are pointing the way to this.

 
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While My [Ukelele] Gently Weeps

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/22 at 10:04 AM • Not About Blogs

I’ve had such a busy week that a fun Friday post seems like a requirement!

Today, for your listening pleasure, I offer Jason Shimabukuro playing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” On a ukelele. Really well.

Enjoy!

Source: Found this on MetaFilter.

 
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Lengthy overview of blog software

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/15 at 09:24 AM •

My review of several popular blog software packages was published on the Online Journalism Review site yesterday. The best thing about it—I think—is the comparison chart, which allows you to look at common blog features and compare them across several blogging tools. It’s doomed to be out of date almost immediately, so be sure to check it out soon!

OJR: Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?
Blog software comparison chart

 
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In-depth Review of Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/11 at 10:19 AM • About the Book(s)

My fellow panelist at Blogher, Elisa Camahort (we’ll be talking $$ and Sense), has taken the time to write a lengthy review of Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies. She makes some good points about things I could do better in a revision, but is also finding the book useful. It’s always a good sign when a reviewer says she’s dogeared certain pages!

She offers numerous handy suggestions, tips, tricks, suggested vendors etc. I have already implemented some of Gardner’s suggestions and found a new, better site meter based on recommendations in this book. I’m going to go find an iTunes Now Playing plug-in because she brought it to my attention. The next time I launch a blog I just may try one of the software tools she suggest. (Even though I already use four different tools, I’m always looking for the one that will do everything...and let me do it with minimum hair-pulling.) And I think I have a great place to start to explore adding audioblogging to my blogs, based on her section on that.

Thanks, Elisa!

 
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Whither Podcasting?

Posted by Travis Smith on 07/06 at 09:51 PM •

Apple has just released iTunes 4.9, which has podcasting integrated. Several months ago, in response to Darren Barefoot, I posted a bunch of reasons why podcasting was going to stick around and be a hugely successful technology.

My prediction seems to be true.  Podcasting—the process of distributing serial audio files automatically to subscribers—certainly seems to growing more and more popular.

But I have a sense of foreboding about this latest development. As podcasting gets so popular so fast, some issues arise that aren’t so good for the overall reception and future direction of podcasting.

Quality of audience

I’m not going to be snooty and say that the average podcaster only ought to have “cool people” to be listening to their audio shows.  But podcasts have the ability to create a community out of listeners in a way that traditional radio does when it’s at its best.  If you want to grow a strong community, a large wave of unschooled visitors can drive away regulars, who quite naturally like to feel they know the people around them, people who behave the same way they do. As any good restaurateur knows, you want to keep your regulars happy or you’re going to end up in trouble in the long run.

Education of Audience

Having a large pool of new listeners also changes the way you have to approach your podcast.  Online, newcomers can gradually be introduced into the pool by those who already know the community mores and traditions, and if you only have to deal with a few at a time, you don’t have to bore your regular listeners.  The people who listen to Car Talk, for example, have a certain vocabulary and set of expectations, and Clik and Clak can rely on that when they talk on their show.  By contrast, imagine the effect on your regulars if you have to reintroduce yourself at the beginning of every audio show.

Bandwidth

KCRW went from 5,000 subscribers to 100,000 subscribers overnight.  Can the average blogger handle that sort of growth in audio downloads?  Enough said.

Choice

Given the choice between a new voice and a brand name, many people will choose the brand name.  New voices that may have been getting a chance to build audience, will be buried under established, mediocre audio programming repurposed from radio.  Or, given a choice between too many same sounding alternatives and one traditional brand, people can avoid choosing anything new, instead of giving the one new choice a shot.  If choice grows even faster than audience, potentially great podcasters might never find the audience they need to be successful and happy.

Technology Lock-In

Once you have a 500 pound gorilla like iTunes in the market, it can become a lot harder for smaller software developers to innovate, because even if they offer a genuine improvement, it has to be compatible with the gorilla’s system.  Otherwise, any smaller competitor’s gain in market share from the benefits of the new functionality is going to be balanced by a loss of those who (have to?) stick with the gorilla’s functionality.  I’m not in any way advocating that software companies go out of their way to build incompatible podcasting programs.  But certainly there are stages in a software type’s growth when changes that break older versions can become necessary, and it’s a lot easier for the overall market to adapt when multiple programs are sharing the market.

Attitude / Mind Share

This one’s a very hard one to qualify, because it’s so squishy.  And I know that, yes, podcasting is called podcasting because of the iPod.  But with iTunes now forcing* podcasting to the forefront of everyone’s music listening, there’s a very strong association being created between Apple and podcasting.  And there’s a whole lot of baggage tied to that association.  Some people will ignore this, some will love it, but there’s clearly going to be a shift in the perception of podcasting now that it’s going to be seen more and more as an Apple-driven technology, down to the names of the tags in the podcasting document.

* I say forcing because I think there’s no way to stop Podcasting from being the second item in the iTunes Playlist pane, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Apple is going to be promoting podcasting in a big way.

Conclusion

Will iTunes be good for podcasting?  It’s too complex a question to have a single answer.  Thinking back, was Internet Explorer good for web sites?  Overall, of course it was.  But if Microsoft had delayed entering the browser market by another two years, we might be looking at a very different Web today.

 
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Be Wary of Wireless

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/06 at 04:59 PM • Not About Blogs

Like to blog on the road? Be careful of those unsecured wireless networks!

St. Petersburg Times article: ”Wi-Fi cloaks a new breed of intruder”

Smith, who police said admitted to using Dinon’s Wi-Fi, has been charged with unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony. A pretrial hearing is set for July 11.

At the end of the article there are some tips on securing your wireless network from being used by others, for good or evil.

 
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The Next Wikis

Posted by Travis Smith on 07/05 at 09:41 AM • Not About Blogs

I’ve been having a lot of fun, using in, and thinking about wikis. I have some ideas about the next generation of wikis and ...

{What’s a wiki?}

Oh, sorry.  It’s a Web site that is read/write, not read only.  In other words, you, the reader, can edit, add, delete, move, annotate, deface, restore, modify and correct any part of it that I allow to be edited.

{That sounds hideous!}

Well, you’d think so.  But that’s because you’re not thinking about affordances.  Affordance is the idea that people tend to do with an object, the thing that the object makes easiest to do.  In other words, if I hand someone a gun, they’re more likely to shoot it then they are to use it as a hammer.  Hand someone a baseball bat, they’re going to swing it, not whittle it.  And evidence shows that if you give people a well-designed wiki, they have a tendency to improve it, not scrawl all over it.

{But that’s so not the way the real world works.}

Actually, I think it is.  Think of self-organizing lending libraries in a small town, or guest books in a hostel, or bathrooms walls in funny bars where they let you draw on the stalls.  Sure, sometimes there’s a little bit of crudity in there—but people also do really creative, interesting things.

In a more general sense, look at community gardens, or open mike nights.  Yeah, sometimes someone does something destructive, but if the thing is design to maximize positive effects and minimize bad behavior, some very positive results occur.

{I think I understand.  Go on.}

Well, I’ve been contributing to Wikipedia and to OJR and I started thinking about where Wikis are going to go.

{And?}

Well, I think wikis now are essentially interactive RTF files.  And there are lots of other types of files that ought to be wiki’d.

{Such as?}

Well, for one thing, I really want to see a wiki spreadsheet.  Imagine being able to have a wiki page with columns and rows where you could modify values and formulas interactively.  Think what this could do for committee budget calculations.  Think of how this could be a great news tool.  OR think of how this would be a great way to keep track of money on a group vacation—everyone enters their expenses, taking turns tweaking the sums and the formatting and presto, you’ve got a handy way for everyone to see what they owe.

{And?}

Garageband / midi files ought to be wikiable.  Imagine an evolving musical document that you could listen, perhaps on your iPod, even “subscribe” to so you always have the latest version.  It could evolve over time, like a whale song.  The vocalist could change, and you could add in some blues guitar, or modify the tempo a bit.  Audio is an order of operation more difficult to handle than text, but it could happen.

{Seems like anarchy.}

Or even worse, socialism!  But it’s not.  It would be unwieldy for groups of thousands to all try to modify an audio file at once, but not all wikis have to be massive.  A wiki for university class of musicians might produce some amazing fabrications over the course of a semester.

{What about images?}

Images are tricky.  They’re more atomic—you can’t remix the red or the shadows of a picture and still have it work.  But think of Flickr.  It seems to me it’s as close to an image wiki as anyone’s come yet.  When you start thinking of Flickr as a self-organized image wiki where contributors are adding metadata, sorting by every conceivable scheme, and then creating interesting uses for that rich data, it’s very wiki-like, without being an actual way to edit each other’s photos.  And there’s even some of that—someone posts a photo, someone else grabs it and photoshops it.  I have seen groups where someone starts with an image, someone else changes it and reposts it, and so on, and so on.  Put a proper wiki interface on that and there’d be some interesting, perhaps Fark-like applications.

{Ooh, this is getting interesting!  What about video?}

Before we get to video, let’s go in a different direction.  What about calendars?  Evite and Yahoo Calendars are far too structured.  Apple has a few calendars listed, and seems to be picking up more and more on the benefits of letting users build the things they want themselves (podcasting and iTunes lists, for example)

Upcoming.org has many of the right ideas—anyone can list an event, classify it, etc.  But it doesn’t go far enough—there’s no way to modify the front page of the site, to add tags or categories through the data, to create new lists, and to tie more information into the system—photos and audio and…

Online calendaring hasn’t yet been wikified.  But when it does happen, it’ll be amazing.

{What about video?}

Yes, yes, I hear you.  Video is tricky because of several current limitations: size of files, processing power needed and bandwidth.  But the bigger problem, I think, is that successful video projects often call for a singular vision, from a single person.  It takes an awful lot of work to keep continuity in a video project, far more than it takes to do it in print.  This applies to video-like file formats: flash files, Powerpoint presentations, etc.

But there are uses for video wikis.  The spoof site Crying While Eating, for example, could have been done in a wiki format.  You could have a video wiki of comedians, or a video wiki of recipes, showing how different people make their best dishes.

Our Media is going that way—but like Upcoming.org, it doesn’t have the flexibility in bunching and sorting the material yet.

{That’s too bad.}

Frankly, it’s amazing that so many wiki-like applications are happening so quickly.  I think no one would dispute that humans like to create things, that they like to share things, that they value knowledge and like to feel like they’re participating in something greater than themselves.  Sure there are exceptions, but wikis are no passing fad, they’re a tool that’s going to be a growing part of the online landscape.

{Any other wiki thoughts?}

Yeah, I couldn’t figure out where to work this in above, but the next time I teach, I’m going to have a class wiki and put all my teaching notes there.  I mean, if that doesn’t appeal to students, I don’t know what would.  Imagine a class situation where the class as a group helped to make the perfect set of notes.  It’d be great.

{Have you ever been around students?}

Yes, I know, it’s a little optimistic.  But if they don’t take advantage of it, I can’t help that.

 
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