I’m probably not the first to tell you there’s been a giant shift in the public relations industry and what qualifies as effective PR strategy over the years. You most likely already know or have read that the days of endless pitching, sending the same templated email to a blanket list of reporters, then cold calling to follow up are behind us.

But now, more than ever, a PR strategy remains important. You can’t buy credibility, today’s consumers are too smart for that, you have to earn it. An effective and well-executed PR strategy can be one of the best ways to “earn your stripes”.

So what does an effective PR strategy look like today?

Public Relations Is Not Media Relations

Media relations is an important component of most public relations strategies, but they are by no means one in the same. Today, in some ways, a content strategy has almost replaced a traditional PR campaign. Think about it, all pieces of your content strategy: blogs, videos, social media, SEO, etc. are tools for engaging with the public…with your target audience. Use your content tools to reach relevant journalists. Think carefully about this as you craft your messages. Remember that you are using your content strategy to build a reputation and develop a rapport with consumers and reporters alike.

Become Your Own Reporter (…initially)

My favorite thing about the Internet today is that with enough dedication, hard work, thick skin, and decent writing skills, anyone can create sustainable “buzz” about their brand or product. Create a blog and contribute to it regularly. In addition to supplying industry trends, helpful tips and tactics, you can also use this as your platform for your own company announcements. If you’ve been successful in building industry credibility, the word will spread and the media will pick up on it.

And if you’ve been successful in building a blog with a strong or dedicated following, you’ve most likely been pitched to. This is potentially the best way to learn what to and (more likely) what not to do. You’ll start thinking like a journalist and be able to sharpen your communication skills.

But Media Relations Is Still Important (…just different)

Whether implementing a traditional PR campaign or a hybrid content strategy, your goals are likely to remain the same: increase awareness among new relevant audiences, convert leads to customers, drive traffic to your site, etc. In many instances, of these, driving traffic to your site is easiest to measure of any campaign. What some may not realize is that media coverage, if secured correctly with strategic content, does impact SEO.

6 Tips For “Pitching” To Today’s Journalists

I’ve scoured my favorite success stories and articles with tips and tactics from journalists on how to “pitch” them, and compiled the tips I have found to be most useful.

1. Build relationships with up and coming reporters
Buffer Co-Founder Leo Widrich suggests to look for newcomers among tech reporters (or whatever industry it is you’re targeting), rather than the veterans who get 1,000 emails a day — at least.

2. Focus on the media outlets that matter
Your story made it to the front page of the Indianapolis Star…fantastic! But is that where your potential customers, investors, or partners are going to learn about you? Keep your topic in mind when building or filtering your media list for a specific story. Ask yourself if your target audience is going to find you. Maybe they don’t read that publication, but will it appear in page one of search engine result pages for your target keywords?

Assuming you’re trying to reach an intelligent audience, you want your company mentioned in intelligent media outlets.  Dharmesh Shah of OnStartups.com said “Any media outlet that will do a story based on a crappy pitch is a media outlet that will get you crappy exposure.” Makes sense.

3. Do your research (seriously!)
I feel that this is one of those situations where everyone says they do something but no one really does it. Gini Dietrich notes on spinsucks.com that media list services such as Cision and Vocus are great starting places, but they do not do the necessary research for you. The Internet is at your disposal – use it. Almost every blog or author page has an about section where you can at least check out the author’s bio and recent work.

Know what the journalist has written and don’t pitch them on a topic they just covered. Looking at their past work is more of way to gain insight into the types of stories or topics they’re interested in covering: innovation, education, startups, enterprises, finance for small business, consumer electronics, etc. Take note of their passions. Even if it’s not in their “beat,” they may cover your story if it’s something they’re interested in.

Examine the tone they use to address their audience and consider picking up a similar one in your pitch to them. Your message will likely resonate with them if they can relate to you. Do this without patronizing them, of course.

4. Keep it relevant and interesting, consider making it exclusive
Whether you’re communicating to a reporter, editor, or blogger, journalists want targeted, customized messages with a piece of news or story that is relevant to them and their readers. They want it short and easily digestible; accurate and backed by facts. Most importantly, they want it to be compelling and unique. Even better if it’s exclusive to them.

Note to startups: Keep in mind that your story just isn’t that special. Today’s reporters have heard every shoestring story out there. Some helpful questions to ask yourself: How is your startup solving a problem in a new and innovative way? What new business solution did you create in order to reach success? Or give the next tip a try.

5. Provide anecdotes, useful tips
If you’re trying to pitch a company profile piece rather than a piece of news, consider taking the approach of explaining how you reached success in a certain areas. Perhaps wait for a milestone announcement such as,  “The secrets behind how we attracted $2 million in round-one funding.” Or “Why our product saw 100,000 downloads within 48 hours of launch.”

For example, Buffer Co-Founders, Joel and Leo recently shared the deck they used to secure $500,000 from 18 angel investors including HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah, Mightytext Co-Founder Maneesh Arora, and AngelList’s Graham Jenkin — posting it to Onstartups.com. It was was then picked up (along with a write up) on Business Insider.

Content that’s going to be valuable to readers is going to be more attractive to reporters. As digital marketers, we want our content and content we develop for clients to spread wide and far, right? So obviously that’s exponentially more important for journalists. Pitch them a story that’s likely to have high share count.

6. Monitor engagement on earned coverage
Treat the coverage you’ve earned how you would treat your own blog post. Monitor comments and answer questions. This is an effective (and easy) way to build relationships with new potential customers. Clearly they were interested in your story, keep it that way! Same with social media. Keep an eye on the story, thank people for sharing, and answer any questions or comments that arise as quickly as possible — before someone else does!

The 3 Rs of Media Relations

Overall, when pitching to journalists, I suggest keeping the three Rs in mind:

• Relevant: The story being pitched should have meaning to the journalist and their audience.
• Reliable: Use updated and accurate facts; don’t go making any false claims for dramatic effect.
• Reluctant: Just because you’re excited about your company’s new logo redesign, doesn’t mean the world will be. Think long and hard about whether or not what you have to share is “media worthy.” Hold off till you have something truly valuable to share. After that, audiences will be on the lookout for your next big announcement.

There are plenty of other helpful PR tips out there, these are just my favorite. What are yours?

Shannon Byrne is a freelance content and social media strategist based in St. Petersburg, FL and a full-time comedian in her mind. She’s an enthusiast of coffee, sunshine, live music, and digital marketing. Follow her on Twitter at @ShannnonB.

Don’t get me wrong. Blogs are great, and arguably the most important place to start when launching a content marketing strategy. After all, it’s about attracting and engaging a target audience. And the proper use of keywords within relevant content can be an effective way to do so. Where’s a better place to include keywords than a blog post? But it goes much farther than that…

Your audience will engage with high quality content.  Great content will also earn you authority and social capital in the form of links, likes, shares, and mentions. In order to be successful in today’s search and digital marketing landscape (i.e. rank high on search engine result pages or SERPs), you have to attract visitors with relevant and “sharable” content. Google’s algorithms are mirroring human engagement factors now more than ever. When determining page rank Google is looking at:

1. Quality of content: Useful information with relevant links. (By far, the most important factor.
2. Social signals: Likes, shares, blog comments.
3. Authorship: How much influence the author has.
4. Referral traffic: Are other sites linking to you? Better yet, are high-trafficked sites linking to your site?
5. Page traffic: This includes bounce rate and time on site.
6. Link structure: Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

So you know why having a well thought out content strategy is important, now what?

7 Key factors For Building a Successful Content Strategy

Start with your audience: Already know who your target audience is? Perfect. Now ask yourself why they care what you have to say? Get to know them. Really work to identify their needs, goals, interests, and behaviors. Then think of how you can fulfill those needs while relating to their behaviors. Try using tools like Google Trends to discover what people are searching and related keywords to topical searches. Most importantly, remember you are writing for people. Make your content conversational and easy to understand, without seeming like you’re “dumbing it down” or talking down to them.

Produce high-quality content: Ask yourself – would I share this? Better yet, ask someone in your target audience what they’re interested in learning more about, then do your research. If your content is deemed useful, moving, or entertaining, it’s going to get shared — and if it’s really good, it will spread like wildfire. Define a clear purpose for each piece of content and stay focused. Check against that purpose as you develop the content. If you’re all over the place, you’re going to lose your audience.

Think before you link: Pay attention to anchor text and only link to relevant content. Try to find industry experts to link to – then let them know. I am sure they’d be more than happy to share your story! And don’t be afraid to link to your own content. This will keep visitors on your site, and extend the shelf life of previous material.

Don’t stress over frequency: Quality ALWAYS comes before quantity. Don’t stress if you’re only posting once a week or two, as long as its quality content. As with most things in life, it will get easier with time and experience. Before you know it, you’ll be hammering out two posts a week. Until then, get your team involved. They’re all experts about something, and passionate about one area or another in your industry. Ask them to draft up a post. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you or your editor can help polish it off.  Editorial calendars, which warrant their own post entirely (spoiler alert), can also be extremely helpful in remaining organized and focused in your content strategy.

Another solution is to bring on guest bloggers. This can be incredibly valuable in generating new, high-value traffic to their site. Choose a respected expert in your field with authority and influence. As a bonus, they’ll help share the content they wrote for your blog with their own networks!

Share, share, share: First off, make your content shareable. Install a plug in for social sharing, making it convenient for visitors to spread your content. Then share your posts across all your social channels, business and personal. You don’t necessarily have to tailor the accompanying text for each individual audience, but I suggest doing it.  This is also a great way to test what type of language works on different channels, for different groups.

REALITY CHECK: Once is not enough. Share the post in different ways. Maybe once with the title, another with a key point, then a quote or teaser. But be careful, it’s much more appropriate to share one piece of content on Twitter multiple times than it is Facebook or LinkedIn. Use your discretion, and try not to be obnoxious about it. Also, if you’ve featured other people, companies, or tools in your post, don’t shy away from letting them know on social — as long as it’s a positive (and well written) reference, they’ll love it.

Repurpose: Think you may have missed some of your audience with a blog post because they don’t have the time to read lengthy tutorials or anecdotes? Then turn it into a podcast and video. In addition to posting it to your YouTube and/or Vimeo channels, repost the video version to your blog. You could add it to the same post, or even create its own announcing that the post is now available in video or audio!

Take a few key points from the post and turn it into an edition of your e-newsletter and link to the original content. Or expand it into an eBook. If you have the resources, turn one of your most popular posts into an infographic and then share it with publishers. There’s no way every one of your audience members saw the original blog post, don’t be afraid to reuse the content in as many ways as possible. And if a few people do see it more than once, it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to chastise you over it.

Measure, improve, and repeat: Pay attention to analytics. Look at number of visitors for each post, time on site, click-throughs, social shares, etc. See what type of content is most popular and repeat it.  Check out the metrics on your social sites, see how well posts promoting your content did, and think of different ways to package it. This is the best way to determine what your audience wants, short of asking them directly.

These are just the basics of getting a content strategy started. I’d be happy to dive deeper or answer any questions you may have. Feel free to leave them in the comments below!

Featuring dozens of original works by Lauren Rasch, Adam Graham and Danial Ryan. FEAST will offer a buffet of Form, Environment, Art, Sustainability & Technology.

May 11, 2013 from 7-11 pm | RSVP on Facebook →

Hemingway once claimed that if “you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Hemingway spoke of the Paris of the 1920’s, a city immersed in the confluence of the Arts, a seemingly endless buffet of styles, movements and ideas.  This “feast” was an unlimited, bountiful abundance of the sensual delights of art and innovation.

That spirit of exuberance can be found at FEAST, the inaugural art show and grand opening showcase the new creative studio shared by two of central Florida’s technology and creative up-and-comers, Big Sea Design & Development and Roundhouse Creative Studios.  FEAST will feature original works by three incredible artists, Lauren Rasch, Adam Graham, and Danial Ryan, set inside St. Pete’s very first net zero energy building - the coolest new addition to the Grand Central District.

FEAST – Grand Opening + Art Show from Roundhouse Creative on Vimeo.

About the Artists

Lauren Rasch’s works are emotionally complex in a way that is hard to verbalize.   Simultaneously demented, quirky, chilling, humorous, her work is immediate and visceral.  Language-based, her art reveals, critiques, mocks, and embraces every truth –from scathing sarcasm to the sublime– we’ve ever wanted to speak to all those who comprise our social worlds: ex-boy friends, future lovers, mothers, the person who just cut in front in rush-hour traffic.  Her ability to twist language into haiku-like observations on contemporary life is matched only by the joy of her illustrations, which sometimes reinforce the truth of her observations, and other times act as whimsical counter-points to her language.  Lauren’s work is gorgeous in its visual style as well in its emotional honesty. In the Tampa Bay area, Lauren has exhibited works at such places as the Bricks, SPoT, Blue Lucy Gallery, and the Tampa Museum of Art: Art After Dark.  Her work can currently be found at Even N Odd in St Pete, Salty Not Sweet in Cleveland, Cinda Lou Shop in Westerville, Ohio, with a future solo show at Eclipse in Asheville, North Carolina in August.

Adam Graham’s works are informed by Literature and the means by which contemporary technologies manipulate our cultural understanding of Literature.  His paintings and illustrations include numerous allusions to classic works of Literature and Philosophy, as the themes, and words themselves, are juxtaposed adjacent to one another, to create a visual collage of text and image.  Each work is, in a sense, a thesis-of-found-thought, offering new perspectives of thought via a mashup of the visual and the textual.  Adam has exhibited extensively in the Tampa Bay area including Blue Lucy Gallery, Baisden Gallery, and the Tampa Convention Center.

FEAST’s third artist is Danial Ryan.  To view a work by Danial Ryan is to step into a bizarre, hallucinogenic realm of diabolic Pizza Gods, crazed squid-cat hybrid creatures, occultist bears, a gigantic Randy “Macho Man” Savage towering over new York City, and a well-armed, Paula Deen-cyborg riding a fire breathing great white shark through the Vermont countryside. Danial’s works unify the debris of pop culture into an apocalyptic, yet strangely beautiful, vision.  From Subway Sandwiches to Internet Cats, from Super Mario to the sitcom Arrested Development, from Nicholas Cage to Star Wars, Danial plunges into the mythology of the American consumer experience and resurfaces with works that are enticing, controversial, creepy, funny, mythological and, above all, just plain strange.  Danial has exhibited at the Studio620, Collage Ybor, and the Roosevelt.

FEAST celebrates Form, the Environment, Arts, Sustainability, and Technology.

Clear those calendars, and circle Saturday, May 11, for FEAST promises to be an intriguing exhibition.

Details: 

Saturday, May 11 from 7-11pm

Big Sea + Roundhouse Creative Studio
1980 Central Avenue, St. Petersburg, FL 33712
Part of the Warehouse Arts District Trolley Tours and Downtown St. Pete Second Saturday Art Walk

___________

Big Sea Design & Development is a boutique digital agency in based in St. Petersburg, Florida.  Since 1995, Big Sea has been building brands and websites for every device, using their evolutionary and collaborative design process for clients from around the world.

Roundhouse Creative Studios cultivates brands with powerful stories to tell. Award-winning videographers, graphic designers and motion animation specialists deliver the creative vision that transform our clients’ marketplace goals into an enduring brand experience.

The below is an abbreviated transcript from Andi’s presentation at Wordcamp Miami 2013.  Here’s the presentation itself.

I chose to introduce WordPress multisite for a couple reasons. First, although I’ve been working with WordPress for a very long time, until recently I was afraid of multisite – mostly because of now debunked myths about what it can and cannot do.  Sadly, multisite is still trying to shake off the bad reputation of WP-MU – the multisite “plugin” it used to be.

Second, once we started working with multisite, got familiar with the administrative interface, with managing themes and clients and plugins – we were amazed.  The power and structure of multisite allows us to do things we couldn’t in that past.  It’s a way to offer complex solutions to clients and amaze them as well.  And it’s all very, very simple.  So don’t be scared.  Let’s jump in.

What is WordPress multisite?

Multisite is a capability built into WordPress that allows it to run a network of websites through one installation of WordPress.  Multisite allows you to manage several sites that would normally be separate WP installs under the “umbrella” of one WordPress installation.

Each site is installed as a subdomain of the parent site (i.e. subsite.yourdomain.com) or as a sub-directory (www.yourdomain.com/subsite).  You can use domain mapping to give each site its own unique domain name (i.e. www.sub-site.com).

But wait! I haven’t seen any “multisite” in my WordPress, and I’ve been everywhere!  Well, it’s just not enabled out-of-the-box.  We’ll get to that.

Some great examples of multisite installations include bbcamerica.com. This giant WordPress Multisite install is the home for all the BBC America shows. Each site has its own child theme which is powered by the main framework.

Other examples include WordPress.com, Edublogs.com, the various blogs hosted by NYTimes,  and so many more.

Why would you use multisite?

Until recently, I really didn’t know the answer to this question.  We work for a lot of clients in a lot of different industries.  No projects seemed to need to be a “network” of sites.  Until we started working for one particular client who was starting a franchise network within his company.  Aha!

Some other great opportunities to use multisite include:

• To enable your customers or clients to set up their own blogs or websites (ala WordPress.com.
• Organization with many branches, locations – these could be businesses, franchises, teams, school districts, non-profits, associations, programs on a station, etc.
• To run a blogging network for SEO or shared content publishing that need oversight in one place.
• To herd your cats – or keep your clients in line by maintaining all of their updates, plugins and themes through your ONE super-admin.

You have access to and control of every single site in the network from one WordPress dashboard. Sub-users are granted control of their specific sites. To them, the rest of the network is effectively invisible.

If it’s so great, why wouldn’t you use multisite?

Multisite is not always the answer.

• If your sites need separate databases, as in the case of secure data (personal, financial, COPPA-compliance, etc).
• If you ever need to ever extract sites or change hosts, it can be a big undertaking.
• If your clients need control and the ability to upload or add their own plugins, make theme changes or access to the files on the server.
• If you don’t know what to do when your site gets attacked by Russian porn hackers, don’t try to run a WP network.  If you’re great at keeping everything up to date and know who to call when things go wrong, go for it.  There are some great security plugins out there that will force you and your users to act safely, even if you’re not great at it yourself.  Just use them.

Multisite is a maintenance life-saver, but it does require more setup and more technical background. Definitely not for someone just getting WordPress.

So what are the benefits of multisite?

There are some great reasons to look into using multisite versus installing dozens of separate WordPress sites.

• One WordPress install, one hosting account to manage, one place to upgrade the platform and all plugins, one uniquely branded environment (if you’re the sort that likes to brand the admin, login screens, stuff like that).
• You, as the super-admin, can see and virtually control everything that happens on your network – or you can pass of that fun to your client who wants that level of control (i.e. brand manager, franchise owner, blog dominatrix, whatever)
• Reduce plugin fatigue and save yourself from plugin mayhem.  How many times have you handed over a site to a client, only to be called back to fix something a few months later to find they’ve installed 30, 40 even 60 plugins?  90% of them are disabled but they’re there, sitting ducks for security breaches.
• Updates!  Always know that your clients are using the most secure, up-to-date versions of WordPress and their plugins available because you update them  - multisite is a maintenance life-saver!

Let’s get started then, shall we?

First and foremost, I want you to think long and hard about your hosting situation.  You don’t want to be setting up a multisite installation that you think might at some point hold hundreds of sites on a shared host.  You need to consider scalability and growth implications before you set up your sites.  Because each site will (most likely) have it’s own domain mapped to it, moving the entire installation at a later date is going to be incredibly difficult.  So choose wisely.

Now let’s get multisite enabled.

1. Edit your wp-config.php file to include the following:
   
2. Set up your network under Tools > Network Settings
   
3. Most of the questions here are self-explanatory if you’re familiar with WordPress, but pay special attention to:  Directories vs Subdomains.  
   1. Subdomains:  Make sure your hosting company allows “wildcard domains” on your account for this to work.  I like to use subdomains when I’m setting up sites that will eventually have their own domain mapped to them anyway.  Sub-domains look like “subsite.yourdomain.com.”
   2. Directories mean that the sub-sites on your domain will live in the a place like “yourdomain.com/subsite.”  Also fine, and works really well for multisite being used for locations or branches of a single business, when they only want to use one top-level domain.

No matter which you choose, you can configure each site to use it’s own domain using a Domain Mapping plugin later, but it’s near impossible to have to change this approach later.  So choose wisely.

You now have not just one, but TWO admins!

The regular /wp-admin is where you’ll go to do all of the things you’re used to doing in a WordPress admin.  You’ll manage the content of the main (root) website, you’ll enable plugins and themes, you’ll add Pages and Posts.

You now also have access to a Super-Admin, where you can manage your entire network. You can create sites, upload plugins and activate them across the entire network, upload themes and assign them to your sites – anything and everything.  This is where the magic happens.

1. Manage sites
   You can now add new sites using a form in the Super Admin that looks very similar to creating any other new thing in WordPress.  Simply visit Sites > Add New and you can create a new website in seconds.   To edit sites, simply hover their information in the list to view the ‘Edit’ link (or click their name) and you can manage the site’s settings – like which users have access to the site, which themes are enabled for it, and whether or not it’s available to the public or listed as private.
2. Manage themes
   The big questions I had as a noob were in managing plugins and themes – both of which I thought would be unnecessarily restrictive or impossible. Themes are *really* easy, by default, but a bit counterintuitive if you’re used to WordPress.You’re not going to do much from the Themes tab in your Super-Admin except to perhaps upload a theme and to decide whether or not the themes you’ve uploaded should be available to the entire network.  In our case, we do custom design so we don’t usually make themes available to everyone.  In that case, we upload themes, but then go to Sites > Edit Site to enable a specific theme for just this site.
3. Manage Plugins
   Plugins are managed much like themes, but off-the-shelf you aren’t able to specify which sites can access which plugins.  It’s either Enable for Network or not.  We use a plugin called Multisite Plugin Manager that allows us granular, site-specific plugin management capabilities.  There are others out there too, and Google can help you there, but start with WPMU.org.  Great multisite plugins.

And what about Updates?

Updates are the best part of multisite, by far.  Just click “Network Update” under your Tools and you can update plugins, themes and even the WordPress platform for every user in your list.  One click.  Done.

So what’s left?

Just get out there and build something!

Set up a preview site and enable multisite. Start exploring the plugins available that can help you extend multisite to do so, so much more than you’d ever imagined.  Play with it – the same way you learned WordPress!

Things were fairly simple.

Then Apple introduced the iPhone, and a lot of people bought them and started using the internet with them. Suddenly, there was a new character in our story – a user with a small screen, less time and a slow connection.

We need to be mobile!

The kneejerk response to this new character was to build a separate, “mobile” website, designed specifically for the iPhone’s screen and feature set.

Mobile websites typically present users with a subset of the content and features present in their desktop counterparts. Based on the assumption that mobile users are always on-the-go and connected to a slow wireless network, this was a fairly reasonable strategy.

The iPhone was really the only blip on the radar at the time, and as Android and other smartphones began to appear, mobile websites mostly worked. Blog posts were written, books were published, and the concept of the mobile web was born.

The iPhone was just the beginning.

Today, though, the web is everywhere, all the time.

From phones to tablets to televisions, even “Smart Refrigerators”, people are using the web with an enormous multitude of devices. A growing percentage of the population is eschewing the desktop altogether in favor of a phone or tablet.

In fact, in the last quarter of 2012, a full 23.1% of users are browsing the internet on a mobile device (be it a tablet or phone).  That’s 1 of every 4 visitors on the web coming from a handheld device, a smaller screen, in an unknown browsing scenario.  On some of the sites we manage, we see numbers in the 30s and 40s.

We need to respond.

Do we start making tablet websites and television websites? What about the fridge? It’s clear that the separate “mobile” site approach isn’t a tenable one. So what can we do?

Responsive Web Design, a term coined by Ethan Marcotte presents an elegantly simple, albeit challenging, answer to this question: make one website that works everywhere.

No more separate URLs, no more handicapped features and abbreviated content. Responsive websites aim to be device-agnostic in terms of both content and presentation.

It all starts with fluid layouts and CSS media queries, which allow designers to adapt their design to a wide range of screen sizes. Rather than creating separate, fixed-width layouts for each screen size, the layout stretches and compresses to fill the space available on any given screen.

On the smaller end of the spectrum, which is usually a phone or handheld device, site navigation is often presented as an expandable menu and page content is rendered in a single, fluid-width column.

As we go up in screen size to larger devices like tablets, multiple columns can be introduced and more of the navigation can be revealed.

Even further up the scale, we can increase the number of columns and the complexity of the layout, and present the full navigation up front.

People want a website that works, whenever they access it, on whatever device they happen to be using, and the list of internet-connected devices is growing a brisk pace.

Always and in everything, remember your reader.

But there are times when we’re not writing the copy, and you’ve got access to change most of it, anyway.  We want you to take over the friendly and useful charge as if it were your own.  On the Web, users are engaged and want to go places and get things done. The Web is an active medium, so let’s get them moving.

Here’s how:

• Use familiar, natural language. Speak to your clients and customers as you’d expect to be spoken to, without rhetorical, buzzword-laden jargon or vague references to abstract principles.
• Be respectful of their time and intelligence.  Don’t say more than you need, or over-explain simple concepts. If in doubt, leave it out.
• Don’t make me work. Provide links to reference material in your blog posts or to related content on your site. Don’t make people work too hard to find what they need.
• Follow conventions for naming common features. Want folks to get in touch?  Contact Us would be appropriate.  Stick with what people already know and love to get them where they want to go.

Your visitors want to construct their own experience – and they’ll actively reject whatever your website is trying to push.  Users cherry-pick the information and concentrate narrowly on what they want or need to achieve their goal.

If you’re smart, you’ll write accordingly: make your content actionable and focused on user needs.   Keep it friendly and useful out there, folks.

The building we’re in, that is.

We moved in on November 15th, but have spent the past two weeks getting settled.  Putting furniture together, finishing painting, getting signage designed and installed, finding that lost HDMI cable and why won’t the printer work?!?

It’s been a roller coaster, all culminating in our official “press event” yesterday – the grand opening.

We said a few words.  The Mayor said a few words.  A few other important people said a few words.  We gave tours of our new space.  We ate snacks and talked to clients and friends.

This building is unique because it’s a “Net Zero” building.  It’s covered with 90kw solar (photovoltaic) panels (both the roof and the carport).  It’s crazy insulated to help maintain interior temps, including reflective window tinting.  The geothermal HVAC units are the first of their kind.  We’re harvesting rainwater for irrigation of our native landscape.  The building is fully self-sustaining – and it’s pretty impressive.  The first of its kind in Florida, it was built by the great guys at All Florida Management Group.

We’re incredibly lucky to be tenants here.  We share our space with a video production agency, Roundhouse Creative.  It’s a really charged creative environment.  We commissioned a huge mural by local artist, Bask and a really fantastic wood panel installation by Brian Vanek at Renovate & Build.

It’s our dream workplace, really.

The event yesterday was crazy.  We had a few hundred folks here, all buzzing about the building, about our creative energy, about how we’re the future of the creative economy in St. Petersburg.

(No really – listen to the Mayor’s words!)

We’re honored to be a part of this project – and we’re excited to get settled in to our new space, our new neighborhood, and our new zero-energy existence – and to begin to provide our services with almost no carbon footprint.

Think about that:  we’ll be designing and developing websites with almost no environmental impact.   No carbon emissions.  No fossil fuels consumed.

If you want to learn more about our building, visit the website we designed to illustrate its impressive features.

Some of the press about our event yesterday:

• On WMNF.org (text, audio and video)
• On Fox 13 News (text and video)
• On 83degrees (text)
• On eNews Park Forest (text)

We hope you can swing by if you’re ever in the neighborhood – we’d love to show you around.

These are five tools I use on a daily basis as a web designer at Big Sea – tools that help me with inspiration, the design process, user-interface decisions or my mood.

1. Subtle Patterns

I can’t imagine a world without this site. As designers, we love textures and patterns–some like ‘em loud and some like ‘em subtle. The patterns run the gamut which also means you’ll spend a little more time than necessary… oops. You can download this precious collection and then upload to your Photoshop pattern library. BOOM!

2. Colorzilla

I use this all day long. This is the ultimate color extension for Firefox and Chrome. Pick a color, find a darker hue, find a relative gradient – even generate the CSS for that gradient.

This is an awesome way to build a palette based on inspiration you find in your browser – whether that’s a photo, a site, anything.

3. Pattern Tap

Need ideas on how to treat a blockquote or button?  Looking for creative ways to build a form?  Sometimes I get stuck on the most simple, common section or element of a site design. Sometimes I just need to look at something other than my own design. You’ll find plenty of inspiration and influence on PatternTap – all usefully organized into user interface type or element.

4. Bacon Ipsum

Content can be hard to come by when you first start a design, so bacon ipsum dolor sit amet capicola ribeye brisket ham hock kielbasa, strip steak short loin chicken sirloin bresaola pancetta. I love bacon and this is my favorite lorem ipsum generator.

There are alternative generators for the vegetarian clients (veggieipsum.com). But seriously, drumstick pork belly chuck, jerky meatloaf sausage!

5. Songza

Doing anything without music gets weird. Working without music gets real weird.  I’m all about mood music. I’m terrible at making my own playlists. And I generally don’t like listening to whole albums or a bunch of songs by the same artist. Also, I like free and hate streaming ads… Songza is my daily go-to, online music stream – and has playlists to fit just about any occassion.

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There are plenty more sites and tools that I use for developing (*cough*CodeKit*cough*), but we’ll save those for another post.  What are your favorite design or inspiration tools?

Here are my top five geeky pumpkins, and yes, in order.

1. WordPress pumpkin. Great use of a symbol that we love.

2.  Octocat (github) pumpkin.  When you stare at the cat all day anyway, might as well make it festive.

3.  Twitter FailWhale.  Love this pumpkin, because I love this image.  Intricate and delicate and difficult.  No way I’d be this patient.

4.  JQuery ghost pumpkin. This rad pumpkin also looks a lot more intricate than I’d be able to handle, but love the idea of the ghost fading in …

5. Pantone color pumpkin.  Orange is one of my favorite colors, and I love that a designer found this pumpkin’s perfect shade.

I don’t usually get too creative with my pumpkins (my kids and neighbors really wouldn’t appreciate the humor anyway), but I love seeing these photos when you all do!  Send me more pics of your nerdy pumpkins!

Kickoff Meeting

We generally schedule a kickoff meeting to get everyone involved in the project around the same table.   We use a modified version of Paul Boag’s Kickoff Agenda that we keep in a Google doc and then link to from our project management system for all to access at any time throughout the project.

Here’s a link to our generic kickoff agenda – feel free to use and edit as you need.  We modify it for just about every project, but it’s a great base.

This meeting can take place in-person or via conference call.  We try to round up ideas of information architecture, design aesthetic, and even the technical nitty-gritty.  We make sure we’ve got everything thoroughly accounted for before we start the planning and design process.

Information Architecture

This phase varies from project to project, but I’ve recently adapted a simple approach that involved nothing more than a bulleted list of content we’ll be including on a wireframe.  With the advent of responsive design, using a bulleted list for the information architecture saves us the headache of manipulating more content than we’re ready for, and gets everyone on the same page with the hierarchy of the layout.

For instance, a project we’re working on now includes these elements, and will be designed in an “infinite scroll” layout:

1. Branding statement: The primary emotionally communicative element of the design. It does not convey detailed information so much as give users an impression about what your company represents and help them identify with the organization. Vital to impart trust and reliability.
2. Variable featured content: Selected by site administrators, this area will include highlighted items from across the website such as events, images, etc.
3. Site navigation: This allows users to find the content they’re looking for; this will follow an anchor-text format for the infinite scroll type of layout.
4. Services: Three separate sections (each with a photo gallery) that convey the breadth/depth of service capabilities in an engaging, informative way.  Need to be able to add more service areas so will need this to be flexible in layout/style.
5. About Us: Team and corporate information, written to highlight the strengths of each and establish the important of relationships and trust.
6. Communications: Feeds of recent items from sources such as the blog, Twitter, or newsletters, with links to the source articles where applicable.
7. Inquiry form: Get in touch! Basic inquiry form and contact information.
8. Footer content: Includes links for some site navigation, legal pages, and social networking pages, as well as location and copyright information.

All this in a simple Google document, shared with the client.  He/she makes comments, asks questions and very quickly we’ve all got a solid understanding of what the order of information will be on the website.

Wireframes

Next, we move on to wireframes, wherein we create a black-and-white content-free simulation of the website layout.  We’ve been using Moqups.com to do this lately, but also use Balsamiq and Axure when the need arises for either collaboritive framing or more complex web app framing.

We generally build lo-fi wireframes – meaning they’re very basic.  We don’t really account for true scale or hierarchy, instead referencing the elements of the IA outline in a very simple fashion.  If we’re working on a responsive design – which now accounts for about 75% of the sites we build – then we start by wireframing the mobile version of the site.

This type of framing allows us to negotiate the content strategy to determine if the layout will work for the client’s capabilities and meet their needs.  We explore analytics, established goals and try to organize content accordingly.

We usually wireframe the homepage and a number of key interior pages that will require individual design and styling so that we’re all on the same page before we start designing and developing.  This also helps us to refine the development strategy, research plugins that we might need to employ or decide on what platform best suits the project (i.e. custom development, WordPress, etc.).

This process can be augmented with a number of additional steps depending on the scope of the project – things like stakeholder interviews, SEO analysis, content strategy and user experience planning – but this is the basic process we use to start any project, big or small.