Aaron Kippola shares his musical endeavors

Aaron Kippola is a multi-talented musician who is known for his saxophone, guitar, drums, and more. He is currently working on several self-produced albums on which he sings and plays most of the instruments. Several years ago, I designed a logo for him and began work on his Album Covers. I also created a simple splash page in lieu of a proper website. After a long wait, I’m glad to announce the launch of his new site aaronkippola.com.

Design

Color Scheme & Layout

The site uses the same gray, white, and green color scheme as his logo. In fact, the logo is a key element in the minimalist site design. It stands out from the gray background in the upper left corner of the site. The layout is familiar with a horizontal navigation menu below the logo. Main content is on the left and a narrow sidebar is located on the right.

Boxes, Borders, & Backgrounds

Boxes with thin, white borders act as a unifying element throughout the design. The boxes surround regions such as the navigation menu, sidebar widgets, as well as individual page and post content. The separating effect of the boxes is increased by the creative use of subtle background images. An image of a stage floor with sprawling cables serves as the background for most pages. However, the contact page is bit more personal with a large image of Aaron faded into the background.

Webfonts

Embedded Webfonts are utilized for the navigation menu and widget titles. This allows for easy updating of widgets and menu items without having to create new graphics each time. Page titles use an image replacement technique to include graphical embellishments.

Content

News Updates & Blog Posts

Using WordPress as the Content Management System, Aaron Kippola can keep his site fresh by easily publishing his own dynamic content at will. The News page, which is also the home page, is where Aaron will keep us up to date on his musical endeavors including the progress of his recording projects and other important milestones. If you’re interested in learning more about Aaron on a personal level, his blog is the place for you. Here, he’ll share his thoughts on the music industry, review some gear, and maybe even rant about a thing or two.

Photo Gallery

The Photos page shows five thumbnail images from each of Aaron’s galleries. It also provides a link to each gallery. On the individual gallery pages, thumbnails are shown. When clicked, full-size images open in an overlay window. They open as a slideshow by default, but can be manually navigated as well.

Music

There’s no music on the site yet, but Aaron’s first album is in the mixing stage so it shouldn’t be long now. He plans on having free samples to listen to, and songs & albums available for purchase. Along with the music, he will also provide lyrics for all the songs. Eventually, he’ll add a calendar to promote upcoming gigs so you can see him perform and hear his music live.

Check out aaronkippola.com

Web Design Marquette, MI | Middle Ear Media - Creative design studio & web agency

Free WordPress Plugin “Super Custom Login” released

I’ve released another free WordPress plugin. This one is called Super Custom Login, and as the name suggests, it allows you to easily customize the WordPress login page. It also enhances security by removing error messages upon failed login attempts.

The default login page for WordPress sites shows a WordPress logo above the login form. This logo is hyperlinked to wordpress.org. Super Custom Login replaces the default logo with your own customized logo. The hyperlink is modified to point to your homepage instead.

Having a customized login page helps maintain your brand when users log into your site. It’s a professional touch that I use on all of the WordPress-based sites I create. My login page, for example, shows a compact version of my logo. Not sure if you’re logo will fit? No problem. Super Custom Login comes with a template file to ensure your custom logo fits properly.

As an added bonus, Super Custom Login also removes error messages upon failed login attempts. These error messages let you know if the username or the password was incorrect. This is a security vulnerability that could be exploited by potential attackers.

Follow the link below for more details, and of course to download the plugin for your own use.

Super Custom Login: Free WordPress Plugin

Web Design Marquette, MI | Middle Ear Media - Creative design studio & web agency

How To Blog: Topic Tips

It can seem daunting at times, but it’s very important to learn how to blog effectively by choosing better topics to write about. Do you suffer from writer’s block and have difficulty generating ideas? Or have you experienced information overload and just couldn’t seem to narrow down your ideas? It happens to all of us at times, but if you keep in mind the following tips, you should be able to generate engagement and interest in your blog.

1. Choose a Topic You’re Passionate About

When choosing a topic for your next blog post, you should choose a topic you’re passionate about. Your passion will show through in your writing and help you deliver quality content. Also, the entire process will be more rewarding. However, it’s important to keep in mind the goals and motivations of your potential audience. Make sure to generate engagement and interest by giving them something unique.

2. Brainstorm for Ideas

Would you like to generate more ideas for topics? While brainstorming, open the gate and let your ideas flow. Reserve all judgement till later. Only after generating a large number of alternative options should any ideas be decided upon. Give yourself a time limit of 10 to 15 minutes or whatever you’re comfortable with. Review the purpose of your blog. This is the context that your blog posts will fit into. Write down just enough of each idea to clearly identify it and then move on to the next. When the time’s up or when you’ve exhausted your brain, rewrite your ideas into a more legible and complete list.

3. Focus on One Main Idea

Identify the main idea you wish to communicate and focus on it. Having a topic that’s too broad or including too many other topics will cause the average reader to lose attention faster. If you have more than one, try writing a series of blog posts about a related topic. This is a great way to express all of your ideas while maintaining focus with your posts.

4. Write a Review

If you read, write a book review about an interesting book you’ve recently read. Briefly discuss the book and how it affected you. Give the author whatever critiques or accolades come to mind and you’re done. Apply the same principle to a movie, product, app, or whatever! This is a great way to express your opinion or showcase your expertise in a particular field, but be aware that others may not agree with you.

5. Write About a Polarizing Issue

Certain issues tend to elicit opposite and extreme responses. By weighing in on such an issue, you can attract more attention and more traffic to your blog post. You should be extremely careful when writing about a polarizing issue because you run the risk of alienating a large percentage of your potential audience.

6. Interview Someone

Interview someone who is accomplished, visionary, or inspirational. Someone in your industry is best, but not necessary. Make sure to do your homework and ask them relevant questions. It’s very important to leave the impression of a professional. This is a great opportunity to add value to your post via shared experiences and insights.

7. Choose a Topic Related to a Previous Post

If you’ve already posted to your blog, look through your previous posts for topics you could expound upon. You could approach the topic from a different angle, dive into the details of some aspect of the topic, or look at alternatives to it. Regardless of how it’s done, it should help give your blog posts continuity.

Learn How to Blog Better

I hope that these tips will help you choose better topics for your blog posts. With better topics to choose from, it should be easier to generate quality content that your readers will enjoy. Blogging shouldn’t feel like work. Learn how to blog better and don’t forget to stay creative!

Be sure to check out the previous post in this series How to Blog: For Beginners.

Web Design Marquette, MI | Middle Ear Media - Creative design studio & web agency

How to Blog: For Beginners

This post will help you learn how to blog. 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 you plan to blog for business or just use it as an outlet for your personal ideas, to be successful, you must produce interesting content. Here are some tips and tricks 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 listing on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). 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, have a look at How To Blog: Topic Tips.

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.

Learn How to Blog Better

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. Blogging shouldn’t feel like work. Learn how to blog better and don’t forget to stay creative!

Web Design Marquette, MI | Middle Ear Media - Creative design studio & web agency

Dead River has a pretty good cup of coffee

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

Web Design Marquette, MI | Middle Ear Media - Creative design studio & web agency

Dynamic Content: Why it’s Essential

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.

Web Design Marquette, MI | Middle Ear Media - Creative design studio & web agency

Knee Deep in WordPress

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.

Web Design Marquette, MI | Middle Ear Media - Creative design studio & web agency

Major site redesign

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.

Web Design Marquette, MI | Middle Ear Media - Creative design studio & web agency