20 Reasons to Celebrate the New Year
At the beginning of 2007, I had just started this blog, and had just begun my quest to teach myself how to create WordPress themes. It’s been a fun year, and I could never have imagined (although I really hoped) that I’d get to a point where I could quit my dayjob to pursue design full time.
As we draw near to 2008, it’s time for me to speculate on how I hope the next twelve months will go – I’m sure there will be plenty of surprises, as well as plenty of challenges. It goes without saying that when you start your own business, you’ll get your fair share of both.
Well as you all know, starting January 1st, I’ll be on my own, which means a lot of things. Here’s a list of 20 reasons for me to celebrate the new year:
1. I can start going to bed before 1:00 in the morning, since I’ll be able to spend all day long working on my design projects.
2. I don’t have to wake up at 5:00 in the morning anymore to get ready for my dayjob.
3. I can now call my couch, the local Starbucks or Panera my future home of employment. Not that I’ll be working for them, but I’ll be working there. Something that I cannot wait for!
4. All Revolution themes will soon have dropdown menus and a tabber section that work across Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7.
5. The development of my next premium theme after Revolution should be finished – as the past few weeks it’s been collecting dust on my demo site.
6. I get to spend an extra one or two days a week at home with my 3 year old son. It’s time that I will definitely enjoy spending with him.
7. I’ll have time to go to Best Buy and buy a webcam so that I can finally start video blogging.
8. I can finally do something I’ve wanted to, which is spend more time reading other blogs, and commenting on them.
9. I might pursue an entire affiliate system for the Revolution themes.
10. My personal (or lack thereof) blog Shadowfeet will finally get some tender loving care.
11. There will be more free themes coming, one of which will be the current version of my blog right now.
12. Which means that this site will be under going a complete reboot with the intent of offering a much better user experience and a lot more (useful) content.
13. I plan to create a lot more video tutorials for the Revolution themes.
14. My hope of developing a WordPress theme/blog community with Michael Pollack of Solostream might actually happen.
15. I get to work on a very special/high profile project with my good friend Cory Miller.
16. I will be attending WordCamp this summer in San Francisco.
17. I get the joy and satisfaction of writing myself payroll checks!
18. Projects around the house will actually get done.
19. I can take on more custom WordPress theme designs, something I’ve really wanted to do since I’ve had to turn down so many of late.
20. I become a much happier person because I will finally be doing what I really love to do.
My 22 Best Design Tips Ever – Part Two
I was recently asked by Brian Clark over at Copyblogger to write something – if you read his post The Cosmo Headline Technique for Blogging Inspiration, you’ll understand why I’m writing this. Such a creative way to invite others to participate, and I am cordially accepting the invitation. Thanks Brian!
So, here are a few more tips that I have to offer – please note that the my intent was to make this a two part series, but now it will become three.
12. Brainstorm your design before you go to do it.
This one sounds pretty hokey, but believe it or not it works. I spend a lot of time “dreaming” up designs before I even sit down to start coding them. It’s really helpful if you have spend time envisioning what aspects of your design you want to focus on first.
13. Be flexible with yourself when creating a design.
I am certainly guilty of trying to hold myself to an original thought – there are times when I have a vision of what I want to do, but it doesn’t work out. Roll with the punches, and move on. I spend way too much time spinning my wheels trying to accomplish something I thought would look good but doesn’t.
14. Focus on a few complimentary fonts.
One major turnoff is going to a site that has an overload of fonts and font sizes. I’m definitely an advocate of variety, but you really shouldn’t have more than 2 or 3 fonts in my opinion, and varying sizes for headlines and body text is ok. Too many fonts can confuse readers, and simply doesn’t look good!
15. Use images in your theme.
I’m a big time fan of using images to compliment the way a theme looks. Whether it be background images, border or icons, having a little eye candy to dress up your site really helps make it stand out. It’s also great to use images in your posts, as it helps keep readers from thinking you have a boring blog. This is something that I am trying to do better at, because sometimes it takes time to find the right image, and it’s far easier to make a post and run!
16. Link to people in your posts.
This isn’t really a design tip, but more so one that might help you in the long run. People have a tendency to link back when they are linked to – it’s a reciprocation that could possibly help generate traffic to your site. Not to mention, I just find it interesting to see the sites/posts that people link to.
My 22 Best Design Tips Ever – Part One
I was recently asked by Brian Clark over at Copyblogger to write something – if you read his post The Cosmo Headline Technique for Blogging Inspiration, you’ll understand why I’m writing this. Such a creative way to invite others to participate, and I am cordially accepting the invitation. Thanks Brian!
So, what I’m going to do is write a two-part series on my best 22 design tips (including a few other random things as well listed in chronological order of my existence on the web.)
1. Obtain the domain name you want.
This was huge for me, because I knew the only domain name I wanted – which somebody owned. It never hurts to do a Whois search, because it’s likely you might be able to contact the owner and work out a deal.
2. Come up with a plan before you write your first post.
This is actually something that I didn’t do, but wish I had – I spent the first few months of my blogging trying to figure out what it was I wanted to blog about. I took my visitors (what few there were at the time) on a roller coaster from personal blogging, to poetry, to design tips and back – a few times.
3. Create the design of your blog/site before you start.
The truth is that people are attracted to the design just as much (if not more) than the content of a blog. Yes, I believe that content is king, but what keeps your readers coming back isn’t just the writing you produce, but also the readability and layout of the blog.
4. Research similar blogs that are in your niche.
Because I have a knack for wanting to be different, this is something that I personally choose to avoid – primarily because I enjoy setting trends. However, it’s important that if you have a blog on tech/gadgets, that the overall feel of your site makes people feel like they are on a blog that will discuss those topics. Having colorful rainbows and other neat imagery on a site that discusses iPhones might be a tad distracting.
5. Don’t copy the look of another blog in your niche.
This one is huge, because the last thing you want to do when trying to establish readership is to be known as a copycat. Yes, it’s easy to be inspired by people like Michael Arrington and Darren Rowse, but I guarantee you that your potential readers will know what their sites look like, and will feel you are not a credible (not to mention lame) source of new information.
6. Take risks with what you do.
I’m not encouraging you to do something crazy here, but people are attracted to those who try new things, and do something innovative in their industry. Trend setters are known to be pioneers in their field, and there’s nothing better to be known as the one who started something.
7. Don’t overdo advertisements on your blog.
There are a lot of people who make this vital mistake at the beginning of their blog, and it can kill potential readership very quickly. Just because bloggers like John Chow and Jeremy Shoemaker have a lot of advertisements on their site, doesn’t mean that you should. They get away with it because they have a very loyal readership, and quite frankly deserver to be compensated for all of the time spent on delivering their readers quality content.
8. Make your RSS/email subscribe section prominent.
I was encouraged by my friend Daniel Scocco over at Daily Blog Tips one day to place my RSS/email subscribe in a better spot. The truth is, at that point, I had just rebooted and didn’t even have one on the site – a total oversight. People who like to visit your blog want to follow your content in a way that’s convenient for them to read, so why not make it easy on them and allow them to find you subscription information?
9. Write posts that inspire reader comments.
One of the things that keeps a blog “alive” is constant communication between site visitors and the blogger. I’ve noticed that when I write something controversial, there is a great chance I’ll get more people commenting. The more people comment on your blog, the better chance you have of others doing it as well. Worst case scenario, if you are looking for a way to have people comment, do something lame like I did and invite your visitors to delurk.
10. Avoid writing really long posts.
One thing I personally don’t like doing is spend a lot of time reading one post – if you have that much to say about something, try breaking it into a few posts, or make it a series. Although people are attracted to good content, you may also lose your visitors’ attention by making them scroll down the screen a hundred times.
11. Stay on topic.
This post is an example of NOT staying on topic. I was asked to write about my best 22 design tips ever, and it turns out the first 11 were more on blogging in general. I did this on purpose, to see if anyone would catch it – a fun experiment. I promise that the next 11 will be more design oriented, but I just wanted to start off by talking about the basics of the blog before going into the detail.
Mad Libs Blog Style – Chapter 1
After years of being a project manager for an architectural firm, I finally decided that it wasn’t truly making me happy and I wanted to spread my wings. Although I wasn’t Dooced from my job, I knew that I had high ambitions. I wanted to be a Blogebrity, so I packed my bags and decided to give it a Whoorl.
Since I was born in southern California, I knew that was the only place to go – some people think I was a Dad Gone Mad, but that wasn’t the case.
I started to think that my life was becoming Meaninglis and I just wanted to be like everybody else and become an Undercover Celebrity.
So I hopped on a plane and headed out to the City of Angels, a place where I knew that Pink Was the New Blog and where those who wanted to become a Pro Blogger could possibly catch their break. After all, this was the place where you could find Daily Blog Tips and even become a WordPress Rock Star.
After my plane landed, I took a taxi over to the closest Starbucks, where I ordered a Chai Tea Latte and put on my Creative Curio thinking cap. Now I wasn’t just your typical Geek with a Laptop, rather my education and degree in Essential Keystrokes meant I could type fast and blog frequently. But before I wanted to start cranking away as a Copyblogger, I thought I’d give my old friend Professor Engadget a call.
Well, he wasn’t at home, and since I needed to get some other things done, I packed up my bags and went to the local Blurbomatt to do some laundry. After throwing in a load, I grabbed a copy of the Blog Herald to see if I could temporarily land one of the prestigious Wordpress jobs while I was waiting for my big break. Besides, making a little Shoemoney on the side would help pay the bills!
Just as I opened up the Job section, something totally amazing happened…
(Stay tuned, as a new chapter Mad Libs Blog Style will be posted every Monday!)
