So, you finally have your own blog. Now what? You’ve been anxiously awaiting the moment, and now that you have the ability to share your thoughts with the entire world, you can’t think of anything to say. Maybe you feel intimidated by the whole concept of a world-wide publishing system at your fingertips. Maybe the user interface of your blogging software or CMS (Content Management System) is confusing and difficult to use. Maybe you’re second guessing your own ideas.

Whatever the reason, it must be overcome. Whether your blog is for your business or just an outlet for your personal ideas, to be successful, you must produce interesting content. Here are some guidelines and tips to help get your blog up and running.

1. Familiarize yourself with WordPress.

One of the main reasons why you wanted a blog was so that you could make updates yourself. To do this, you must be familiar with and able to use your blogging software or Content Management System. If possible, have somebody show you how to log in and make posts, etc. First hand experience is always best. If nobody is available to assist you, you can find lots of useful information online. If that’s not working for you, you can hire someone to teach you how to use WordPress.

(Did I mention that I’m available for WP instruction and consultation?)

2. Write your post before logging in.

Don’t try to write your post from the Add New Post page in the WordPress Admin panel. Even if you’ve become familiar with WordPress, you’ll be more productive if you write your ideas down on paper or in a word processor first. This is a more comfortable writing environment for the majority of people. It will allow you to focus on the content of your blog post instead of being distracted by other elements of the WordPress interface. Most of us have too many distractions already. So, why add more?

3. Don’t copy or scrape content.

Create your own content and be original. It’s not only unethical and possibly illegal to copy or scrape content from other blogs, it can actually be detrimental to your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). When the same content is found on multiple pages by a search engine, it could result in a lower search ranking for both of them. Also, if the site you copied from is more popular than yours (which is likely if you’re using their content), your site will be pushed down in the search rankings. If you find it absolutely necessary to inform your audience of some other content, write up a brief summary and why you think it’s important to your readers. Don’t forget to include a link to the original article and give credit to the original author.

If you can’t think of any ideas or topics for your own posts, stay tuned for How to Blog (Part 2) coming soon.

4. Don’t worry about perfection.

Of course you want your blog post to be perfect, but don’t let that stop you from generating content. Remember, you can always edit your posts after they are published. That being said, please spell-check, proof-read, and double check everything before posting. In most many cases, the bulk of the traffic that a page generates comes shortly after it is posted.

So please, take the time to nurture your blog. Consider your audience, create quality content consistently and you will see an increase in traffic. As usual, your comments and questions are always welcome.

I’m very pleased to announce the roll out of an e-commerce website for Dead River Coffee. They are located downtown Marquette, Michigan and are the area’s premiere coffee roasters. Go ahead, ask anybody. For years, the only way to get your hands on their fresh roasted coffee beans was to drive down to their shop and pick it up. Now this great coffee is available to the world at the click of a button.

The site was designed with stark minimalist intention and a purposeful simplicity to invoke a simpler time. The color scheme consists of only black, gray, and cream. The background is a textured cream color. The logo at the top is the same logo they use to stamp on a plain brown bag before filling it with the coffee beans of your choice. The logo, tag lines, page titles, and all other text are either black or gray.

Embellishments include the prominent use of tag lines in the header and footer, a large ring-shaped coffee stain in the upper left of the header, a custom coffee cup with coffee stain under it that separates the footer from the content of each page, and the one pound and half pound bags full of beans that overlap the photos on the product pages.

Also featured is a horizontal drop down navigation menu located under the header, a three-column layout for the main page, and beautiful black and white photos scattered throughout the site.

WordPress was used as the CMS. Several things were made possible by this including movable modules and dynamic content on the main page. The movable modules are actually text widgets that can be easily rearranged or exchanged in the administration panel of WordPress. Some of the content on the main page is added dynamically by pulling content from the “About” page and the “Order” page. Also, there is blogging functionality. The posts gets displayed in the “latest news” section.

I used some CSS styling techniques to make adding new photos easier. New photos added to the main page are automatically re-sized to match the width of the columns while still retaining their original ratio. Also, a thin dark border is added to all photos for consistency.

Last but not least, this is a fully functioning, fully integrated e-commerce site. The ordering process works precisely as one would expect. From each individual product page, or from the main order page that lists all products, a visitor can select one-pound or half-pound as the size and hit the “add to cart” button to begin the ordering process.

A shopping cart opens up as a modal window and displays all items in the cart, quantity, price and subtotal. It allows the visitor to modify the quantity, and displays an updated price and subtotal. By pressing the “check out” button, the visitor is taken to the “check out” page which is fully integrated with the same look as the rest of the site.

From here, the visitor can securely enter their private information. After filling in the “City”, “State”, and “Postal Code” fields, shipping is automatically calculated and a new total is displayed. By clicking “confirm your order” the transaction is sent to be processed and the visitor is shown a receipt page they can print for their records. An email receipt is also sent to the visitor.

The layout was designed to be flexible and allow for growth of content in the future. The site is being maintained by Theo at Dead River Coffee so bookmark it and check back often for updates. Seriously, if you like fresh roasted coffee beans, this is the place for you!

Check out deadrivercoffee.com to see the web site for yourself.

There are many reasons to have dynamic content on your website, but the two most important are to increase traffic and to increase sales. Dynamic content will drive traffic to your site by helping give you a better ranking in search engine results. It can drive sales (assuming you’re selling something) or conversions by giving your visitors a better user experience.

What is dynamic content?

Back in the day, a hypertext document on the world wide web was a static file that looked the same to everybody who viewed it. If the page was lucky, it would be updated periodically, but for the most part, it just remained the same and collected virtual dust. If you’ve ever stumbled across a website that looks like it hasn’t been updated in 10–15 years, it probably hasn’t.

In contrast, a dynamic document on the world wide web can be customized for each user based on individual conditions or parameters. So it could show different content depending on the time of day, a user’s profile, operating system, browser or just about anything else.

Sometimes referred to as “conditional content”, it allows a more unique experience for the user with personalized messages and such. With dynamic content, the content is separated from the design and stored in a database. The content seen by the user is generated at the time of request at the server level using CGI, ASP, PHP, or a content management system.

How does it drive traffic?

Search engines, or more accurately, their search bots (also known as spiders) crawl the web and index the sites they find. They prefer dynamic content over static content because they figure something that changes often is more relevant than something that doesn’t. Therefore a dynamic page is more likely to ranked higher on a search engine’s results page and that means more traffic to the site.

How does it drive sales?

Even more important than its SEO benefits is the fact that human visitors like to see something different each time they visit a site. It keeps them interested. If it looks the same every time they visit, they are much less likely to return again. We humans also tend to enjoy an experience more if it’s personalized. For example, when a user logs in, they might see a custom welcome message that includes their name. No matter how it’s done, if a user has an enjoyable experience while using your site, they are much more likely to return again. They are also more likely to tell all their friends how great your site is, buy your widgets, visit your physical location or sign up for your service.

Using a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc., allows you to control your dynamic content very easily, hence the massive number of “blog” type sites that have popped up over the last several years. The key to this is quality not quantity. You must give your audience something that is interesting or important to them.

So, keep it fresh, keep it flexible, keep it dynamic.

In case you haven’t heard, WordPress is a personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL. In other words, it allows your site to be a dynamic, database-driven organism. So rather than having a couple static HTML pages sitting there getting dusty, your site can be built with PHP modules which can be combined in many different ways to dynamically generate the HTML page seen in your browser. I’ll get into why that is so important in future posts.

WordPress is licensed under the GPL and is an Open Source project. As an Open Source project, WordPress has managed to generate a huge community of users and developers. This has helped it grow from a small project in 2003 to a massively popular blogging platform in 2005 and now to a full blown Content Management System.

I’ve only been designing for WordPress for about one year, but in that time, I’ve seen drastic improvements as new versions were released. As I write this, version 2.8.4 is the latest and greatest. As a custom WordPress Theme developer, I have come to be intimately familiar with most of it’s features. I’ll be talking about WordPress a lot so check back soon or better yet, grab the RSS feed or subscribe by Email.

Wow, it’s been almost two years since the last major site redesign here at Middle Ear Media. A lot has happened since then. It might take a couple days to get everything in order, but I just couldn’t wait any longer.

I went with a whole new look for the site, but I plan on bringing the old look back with an Optional-Theme button where the user can select which Theme is used to display the site.

For the new site, I’m using WordPress as the CMS. I designed a custom WordPress Theme for Middle EAR Media that makes use of many built-in features of WordPress. You can now conduct a search of the entire site, subscribe via RSS or email, leave comments, and much more.

As you can see, the new site has a blog section where I’ll be posting all kinds of stuff related to the projects I’m working on as well as web design in general. So hang tight while I work out the kinks and check back soon.