Business Blogging

Color Canvas

This is the second in a multi part series of articles on creating and building a business blog to extend the reach of your business. If you missed part one you can read it here –Creating and Structuring a WordPress Blog For Your Business.

Design Decisions

Design is very subjective and therefore not easy to make recommendations for. What may appeal to one person will not appeal to someone else. What one person finds pleasant another might find boring. The key is to design for usability, speed and identity.

My mantra is “Less Is More” and that’s how I try to guide my clients. Now that doesn’t mean that a design can’t be beautiful and have great looking graphics, the point is that your site has to be easy to navigate convey your message clearly and “speak” with your voice.

How do you do all that? Careful planning a good designer and patience. Of course you don’t have to use a designer and you can do it yourself, just take your time and research everything. There are many different resources you can use for ideas and inspiration. The first and one of my favorites is Smashing Magazine, you’ll find a ton of information on design, themes, best practices,examples and a lot of good advice. PSD-Tut’s is another one of my go-to sites when I need some inspiration or when I crave a new tutorial. It is mostly a Photoshop tutorial and howto site but you can walk away with some very good ideas. Another good web design stop is Net-Tut’s, yes they are affiliated with PSD-Tut’s but they have a different focus and look at other aspects of web design. At Huzzer Magazine there’s a good list of fifteen different websites to inspire ideas and creativity.

Color Considerations in Design

The use of color on websites is a never ending point of disagreement among designers and marketers alike so it is something you should give a lot of consideration. I like dark colors and textures, not really suited well for marketing but pleasing to look at if done right. Statistically speaking the majority of people prefer to read black on white, that is to say black text on white backgrounds, but I also think it really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you are going to publish a lot of readable content then yes I agree you should have dark text on a light background. If however you will mainly promote your product or service then I believe you do have some leeway, but as a rule of thumb, keep it dark on light.

You can also use colors to drive your visitors to specific actions on the page, like an optin for a newsletter (more on this later) or to a video or set of images or links. Color is also very helpful in creating your identity or voice. If you were to study art, you can always recognize a particular artist’s work because they apply their style, their voice, to every painting they create and you can do the same thing if you use color the right way. If you already have a brick and mortar business and already have a color scheme for your business cards and stationary it would be a good idea to extend it to your site to make it instantly recognizable to your existing customers.

When I create a WordPress site from scratch I try to relate a color to a product and work outwards from there. For example, let’s say Coke Cola came to me to create a blog for them. The whole world knows the red and white Coke Cola can or logo and it would be foolish of me to use beige and brown to create their blog, that just wouldn’t make sense. Or let’s take Levi’s jeans, blue denim, red text on beige for their waist label and a red on white Levi’s logo on the little pocket tab on the jeans. With Levi’s I can use a number of colors to create a compelling looking blog but I would stay within the recognizable brand colors they use on their clothing. If you go on over to the Levi’s site you’ll see a great use of different colors to make their site look very unique. Also take note of the dark background because that’s exactly what I meant when I was referring to using dark colors if promoting products or services. Coke Cola on the other hand created a great looking light colored site with splashes of bright red. These two sites give you a great example of how one site looks great because it’s dark and the other looks great because it’s light.

The Layout

The layout of your blog is just as important, if not more important, than the colors. This is where a lot of people fail miserably. First of all design and layout are two different things. The layout is how you structure different elements on the page and design means style, the colors and typography you use to create your identity. First of course you have to decide what elements you want to have on your page, especially your home page but also remember that you will have other pages and what might be a good idea for the home page may not necessarily be good for an inside page. That’s one of the reasons that most WordPress themes will have multiple page templates giving you more control over how your inside pages look and how the content is presented. You can also install some plugins to give you even more control over your sidebars and widgets. (I’ll get into plugins later in the series)

When working on the layout I use my most trusty tools, pencil and paper. It’s a lot easier to conceptualize and design your structure using visual aids and to me a simple legal pad and pencil is the best place to start. Once I geta rough outline of what I want to accomplish I then move on to other tools like Photoshop and Mock-up or Wireframe applications. One of my favorite is called Pencil (Ironic huh?) it’s a free application you can download or use as a Firefox plugin. Using an application like Pencil gives you the freedom to create the exact look you want. If you decide to hire a developer to install your WordPress blog for you it’ll make it a lot easier to convey your wants and needs if you create a mock-up of what you envision first.

Since every business is different everyone’s needs will be different but keep in mind when designing your blog layout that your content is the most important part of your blog. Most businesses that use WordPress for a blog or as a CMS, will have a home page that describes the business or product and have a separate blog page. If that’s what you plan to do then concentrate on what you want your visitors to know about your business or product. If you could only choose one thing about your business or product that you could showcase or describe, what would it be?

Next, what do you want your visitors to do? Obviously if you’re selling a product you would want them to click a “Buy” button. Think about that, how will you highlight or showcase your product? If you’re offering a service do you want them to fill out a contact form or maybe call you? No matter what it is that you want them to do it has to be so clear that they don’t have to wonder what to do next. You have 5 seconds to to make this happen, if within 5 seconds it’s not clear to them there’s a good chance they will click out. That may sound like an exaggeration but I assure you it’s a fact that if a visitor to your site doesn’t clearly understand what to do within a very short period of time they will move on.

The bottom line is this, you want your most important information to be above the fold, meaning that your most important content should be visible and not have to be scrolled down to below the bottom of the browser window.

Your Optin Form

One of the most important parts of your layout is your optin form. This is a mistake that a lot of people make when creating their first blog or site. You must understand that when people are surfing the web and gathering information they are unlikely to buy from you on their first visit. Statistics show it takes seven times seeing your offering before a they buy. Gathering your visitors names and email addresses gives you the opportunity to market to them through email and remind them of your product or service. Now that doesn’t mean that as soon as you get their email address you email them seven times and your going to make the sale. You have to cultivate a relationship, email them some valuable information, keep them informed about changes in you industry or to your products and as you cultivate a relationship with them then email them about a special sale or offer, just as a “thank you” for being on your list. But email marketing is big part of doing business online and deserves a lot more attention than a paragraph, possibly a series of articles (hint hint). Sign up with an autoresponder service like Aweber as soon as you have your site ready to go live. Please don’t wait or ignore this like so many people do who later come to regret not working on this very important aspect of online marketing.

Summing It Up

Blog design doesn’t have any set rules you have to go by but rather more theory and concepts than anything else. You have to research, find inspiration and use common sense when designing your WordPress Blog. Always try looking through the eyes of your visitors; Is what you’re designing going to make sense to someone when they land on your home page? Is your information clear and concise? Is your blog pleasant to look at? Does it convey your personality or business ideals? If you have a mission statement it’s a good idea to let your customers know what it is so consider publishing it on your site’s “About” page.

Design is very personal and while you should seek out help and advice you should also make sure that it represents what you want it to represent. I hope all of this makes sense to you but if you check out the sites I referenced and read more about web design and usability I’m sure you’ll come up with the right combination of content, layout, colors, bells, whistles and whatever else you decide on.

Up next I’ll discuss WordPress Themes and traffic. Originally I planned on covering themes and traffic in this article but it turned out to be a lot longer than I expected and I’m assuming you’ve already had enough:)

This is the first part of a multi part series on creating a presence and extending the reach of your business with a WordPress blog. In this part however I’ll be discussing the concept more so than WordPress itself.

There are a number of things you need to decide before even thinking about installing WordPress so lets take them on one by one.

What is Your Goal?

Of course the simple answer is, to attract new customers. However, that’s not what I’m referring to here. What you need to decide is what kind of information do you want to present to your visitors? Do you want to use your blog as a lead capture? Do you want to sell something through the blog, a service? A product? Or do you want to provide information that would be beneficial to your customers and visitors?

You also have to determine who your audience is going to be, who you should be targeting. This is very important and something that a lot of businesses just starting out seem to overlook. They try to make themselves attractive to a very wide audience which in and of itself is okay but the problem is that there are other websites that are already established in your niche and have a head start on you. You have to drill down and target a smaller subsection of your general audience. For example: Let’s say you sell classical music cd’s. You wouldn’t want to try and target the general music listening audience but rather classical music lovers. You can probably drill down even further. You may know for example that the average age group for classical music lovers is 40 to 65, they more than likely make over $100K per year and so on. These are the kinds of things you must know before creating your blog. Please keep in mind I used the numbers just as an example and have no idea if those statistics are correct.

If you want to use your blog as a form of lead capture, how will you do it? People today are not fast on the draw when it comes to giving up their email address and name so you have to give them a reason to want to do it. Decide this ahead of time, what can you offer that would have enough value for someone to want to give you their contact information?

This one people seem to have some trouble with. What action do you want them to take? This may sound simple enough but your design will depend heavily on this answer. Actions can be anything, entering their email address into a newsletter subscription form, buying a product or service, reading a specific article or page, calling a phone number, giving you email addresses of friends (ie: recommending you), using social media to promote your article for you, etc etc etc…Only you can decide what it is that you want your visitors to do once they hit your home page.

Research

Now you have to do your research. You already know about your niche/business so obviously I’m not talking about that. I am referring to keyword research. Before you even decide on a domain name you should, nay, you must do keyword research. A huge number of people don’t do this and end up regretting this important step. Obviously if you already have a website, especially a successful or moderately successful site and you’re just adding a blog to it then this isn’t for you, but for everyone else this is a huge step and yes a big deal. An excellent place to start is the Google Keyword research tool and it’s free.

First you have to make sure that whatever domain name you choose is not infringing on any copyrights or trademarks. I unwittingly did exactly that when I registered my very first domain name for a blog I wanted to do about the Ubuntu operating system. So I say from experience, be very careful when choosing a domain name.

Now, back to keyword research and choosing a domain name. A lot of people try to create cute or funny or creative domain names. That’s okay for some and it can work but to shorten your quest to the first page of Google search you’ll probably want to choose a domain name based on your niche’s keywords. Not only is it a benefit for SEO(Search Engine Optimization) but having a domain name that represents your niche will be immediately recognizable by someone searching for your product. There is more to this but to give you an example, let’s go back to the classical cd’s. If someone was to search for “Classical Music” what would tell the searcher more, theblacknote.com or classicalmusiccds.com? This isn’t a trick question, obviously the classicalmusiccds.com domain would be the one to get clicked if theblacknote.com was the other choice. Of course there’s an exception to every rule and you might be attracted to black notes but the majority of people will click on the most obvious result rather than the catchy one. Once you make a list of keywords group them by importance and relevance. You’ll use this later, trust me.

Keyword research is not just for choosing a domain. Since you are in the research part of your project what you want to do is make a list of keywords relevant to your business or niche. The longer the better. Your going to use these keywords later to optimize your blog to get as much love from Google as possible, so try to think outside the box too. Start with the most closely related keywords and start working outwards from there. There are many sources for how to do keyword research so I’m not going to get into details here since I could write an entire series of articles on keyword research. There’s a great article and list of more keyword research tools at Nine By Blue.

Blog Outline and Configuration

I cannot tell you how many people fail to do this and later have a mish mash of a site with no clear concept of what it’s supposed to be. Once you find a domain name and make a list of keywords, don’t do anything else until you’ve done this. I love my computer, iPad, netbook, notebook and smartphone but when I outline a site I revert to my favorite way of doing it, pencil and paper, and I suggest you do the same. Sit down at a clean uncluttered desk and start outlining your blog:

Pages
Categories
Tags
Keywords
Content
Home Page

For each one of these make create a separate sheet of paper just as you think you may want it on your site. You may struggle with this at first, it’s not as easy as you may think. There are many things to think about and consider. First and foremost you want your site to make sense to the visitor. Any information should be easy to find, pages and categories clearly named, images (if used) to further tell your story, there should be a natural flow to your information. If you really want to delve into this all important part of creating your WordPress blog (Or any site for that matter), I recommend “Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web” by Christina Wondtke and Austin Govella.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when doing this step is creating pages when they should be categories and categories that should be pages. When you make mistakes like these they are very difficult to later fix, I shouldn’t really say difficult, more time consuming that anything else. To give you an example I had a client who had created 4 pages for interviews he did of some prominent people. The correct way would be to create a category named Interviews and publish all interviews to this category. This way if a visitor clicks on the category link he or she will see all the interviews in that category but if they read a page with a single interview unless you post links to the other pages they would never know. It’s also easy to add more interviews as he gets more, but to keep creating pages just doesn’t make sense in this example. As I said earlier this is one mistake that I see over and over so please consider all this very carefully and take your time structuring your blog on paper before you ever install WordPress.

One last thing you should do when doing this step is to refer to your keyword list. Use your most important keywords, the one’s that you want to really optimize for, and base your pages and categories on that list. Also keep the list in mind when working on the concept of your home page. Try to visualize the flow of information from top to bottom and left to right and see how you can use your keywords to highlight or accent a particular part of the page (or blog).

If you take all these suggestions seriously and take the time to do all these tasks, I promise you that your blog will have a much greater chance of success. Today a ten year old can start a blog but only a smart and savvy business person can make it a financial success.

In the next part of this series of articles I’ll discuss design concepts and get you thinking about traffic principals and methods.