I recently noticed that I’ve passed 725 posts here and the organization of those posts is far from ideal.

When I started blogging I didn’t know what direction this blog would take and so didn’t plan the best categories. Tags didn’t exist and I was admittedly too lazy to go back and add them once they became available.

How should this or any blog be organized to hold both its existing content and the content it will need to hold in the future?

The 50 minute video by Lorelle Van Fossen above is a great introduction to setting up categories and tags for your blog.

How To Use Categories, and Tags

WordPress has allowed us to create custom taxonomies for a couple of years, but for typical blogs the two default taxonomies (categories and tags) will be enough.

What’s nice about categories and tags is that they work independently of each other making them more powerful in combination.

Think of categories like the chapters or table of content of a book and tags like the index of that same book.

Each chapter in a book is about one general subject and no page or section exists in more than one chapter. In a book each chapter sticks to one general topic and so should a category.

Someone should be able to look at chapter titles alone and understand what the book is about. Similarly someone should be able to look at your category list and understand what your blog is about.

When you look through the index of a book there’s a different kind of classification going on. Topics in an index could be found across chapters. The same page could be located several times under different sections of the index.

Where chapters are good at giving a general overview of the structure of a book, the index is good at helping you find specific information inside.

Combining these two taxonomies operating at different levels offers a lot of flexibility for navigation.

General Guidelines for Categories and Tags

Categories are your higher level organization and when choosing categories think about the following:

• Categories should be broader in subject matter
• Categories should be fewer in number
• Each category should pertain to one and only one subject
• All categories should be at the same level of granularity
• A post belongs in one and only one category
• Your system of categories should generally be planned ahead

Tags exist at a lower level than categories and the following should be considered when setting up a tagging system:

• Tags will be narrower in focus
• Tags can be created after posts are written and the system can grow organically
• Post can have multiple tags, though the number should remain reasonable
• Tags can be seen as subtopics of the general category
• Tags can be seen as a completely different system of classification as categories
• Tags can cross categories

How To Classify Your Content

If you’re tasked with organizing content for a new blog or reorganizing it for an existing blog, start by making a list of all the possible topics you’ve written about or think you will in the future.

Don’t worry too much if the topic should be a category or a tag until you have the list. Once you have the list, group the topics into different themes.

Say your blog is about about different styles of music. Your list might have included ragtime, swing, freeform, smooth, hard bop, acid, and afro-cuban. These are all different styles of jazz and so naturally fall under the broader topic of jazz.

Jazz then becomes the category and the different styles can become tags.

You might argue that something like hard bop is better as a subcategory instead of a category and you may be right, however tags make it easier to classify a post that compares hard bop to bebop.

If both were subcategories you’d have to chose one or the other. As tags you can include both.

In brainstorming your topics you may have also listed topics like guitar, bass, drums, saxophone, and piano. Later you might have grouped them all under the more general instruments. Should instruments then be a category like Jazz?

It really depends on where you want the focus of the blog to be. Do you plan on writing posts about specific instruments and if so will you talk about jazz, classical, rock, and blues piano all in one post?

Under what category would you then place a post about Rock guitars? Would it be better under Rock Music or Musical Instruments?

If you want to write about both musical genres and musical instruments, perhaps you need to rethink the categories a bit. In fact you might settle on just those two main categories.

• Genres (or Styles)
• Instruments

Under this system both jazz and guitar would become tags.

How I Might Reorganize this Blog

Again when I look at the categories currently in use here, I don’t think things are classified well.

Some categories have a couple of posts while others have hundreds. There are too many categories and too many levels of granularity. It’s a mess.

Here’s how I might reorganize things.

Categories

• Web Design
• Web Development
• Marketing
• Freelancing
• Content Creation
• Some kind of Catchall Category

These are the main topics I write about and they’re broad enough to hold a variety of different subtopics and a quick look at the list should help you understand the general content you’ll find within.

The Catchall category would be for things like general news about me, or the business or those few posts that don’t fit into any other category.

Under this system I could write a post about grids from the perspective of design, perhaps discussing how to decide what type of grid to use based on your content. That post gets categorized under Web Design and tagged with grid or grids.

Another post could be about how to use the 960 gird system. That post would also be tagged with grid or grids, though would now fall under the Web Development category.

The system of tags could grow organically, though off the top of my head they might include:

• grids
• typography
• layout
• html
• css
• seo
• links
• keywords
• clients
• inspiration
• creativity
• etc.

Hopefully you can see the flexibility in a system like this that uses very general subjects as categories and much more narrow topics as tags.

Both systems could be used as navigation or even better they could be combined to provide a system of faceted navigation. That would make it easy to zero in on posts taking about grids in the context of design, but not development.

Summary

While the focus of this post has been on blog post classification I hope it sheds some light on how you might classify and organize other types of content.

When structuring non-blog content we tend to go with category and subcategory, which works well when the content isn’t too much or too deep. However once your content grows past a certain point you either need to have multi-level navigation or a very wide top-level navigation.

Using systems of classification that can cross each other like categories and tags can ultimately be much more flexible and more usable.

The key is using taxonomies that can work independently of each other as well as working together.

• Why PR Will Own Content — Todd Defren
• The Content Convergence Dilemma: Where’s the Content Department? — Adam Cohen
• Storytellers Will Own Content — David Bailey

In a freelance business like mine where I’m the only employee it’s an easy question to answer. I’m responsible for creating content. I do everything for this business so if content needs to be created it’s on me.

However, at a larger company with departments for marketing and public relations, seo and product development, customer service, human resources, and on and on, who should be leading the way when it comes to content creation?

As a PR guy Adam thinks public relations should lead the way and I’d agree many in PR will have the right skills.

However, no matter who is leading I understand completely: it’s not easy for any communications specialization to own content production and while I may think one is best poised to lead, certainly we’ll see this vary across organizations.

I think the answer is simply whoever is best at creating content.

That seems like a non-answer I know, but I think it’s less important which department owns content than the content be the best it can be and works to enhance the overall strategy and brand of the company.

If your best content creator is in marketing then that’s who should lead. If that person works in engineering then the engineers should be in charge.

Even though here it’s me and me alone who owns the content, I wear many hats as a freelancer and you might ask which of those hats am I wearing when working on new content? I’m glad you asked.

Which Hat Do I Wear When Writing?

I’ll try to answer Adam’s question by considering where I’m focused when creating content here. There are different types of content, of course. A typical blog post isn’t the same as a sales page, which isn’t the same as the bio I write about myself. Each has it’s own focus.

Who might be in charge? Who’s voice should lead the way.

Production — Long ago I realized I enjoy learning new things and then teaching what I’ve learned to others. Many of the product ideas I would like to explore relate in some way to creating content that helps others learn.

In many ways when I create content, especially on this blog, I’m a product guy experimenting with what would work best. I’m practicing a craft and wearing a hat solely concerned with the content for the content’s sake.

Marketing — When I first started blogging no one knew who I was and part of my reason for starting the blog was to change that.

Writing on the topics for which I offer services helps show prospective clients that I know what I’m talking about and can perform the work I claim I can on sales pages. It also gives people a voice to get to know prior to contacting me.

Even beyond clients, having content here opens up connections with others in the industry and related industries. It helps grow a network of people who can help me and be helped by me.

One of the better forms of growing an audience is to create content for other sites with an audience similar to the one you hope to cultivate.

The marketer in me is aware of all of the above when creating content.

Search — Search engines rank pages filled with content and if you want to be visible in search results you better have some content that search engines can find.

While search engines ultimately follow the people, they aren’t people themselves and have some of their own requirements about what words to use and where you might use those words.

The choice of which content to create can be directed by what content does and doesn’t do well for you in search engines. Decisions about how to structure your site to hold content is something the seo department will want a say in.

The seo in me helps choose keywords which appear in the content, helps names files and images, helps decide how to write page titles and headlines.

Social — Especially true once you’ve started building an audience is the notion that any content you create will likely get shared on one or more social networks.

An understanding of those networks can help you improve how often your ideas are shared and ultimately how much traffic they bring back to the site.

• Time of day/week content is published
• How the title is written
• Subject matter chosen

Things like the above directly affect how much content will be shared. The social media person in me keeps these things and other things in mind in order to help the ideas in the content here spread.

Who’s In Charge?

Ultimately I’m wearing all of these hats when creating content and probably a few others as well. That’s why in the end I think it’s less about which department owns content and more about getting those people who are most capable of creating content to own it.

Those people are the creatives and they exist in every department.

More than anything if I’ve had success as a blogger it’s because of all the hard work I’ve put into to becoming a better writer. In time that might expand into any work I put into creating videos or podcasts or anything else that might pass as content.

It’s not because the marketer in me owns the content or because the product guy owns it. It’s because there’s a creative in me who’s hopefully capable of creating content others want to consume.

All those other hat wearers are in there, though.

The creative in me is in constant contact with the marketer who shares the direction marketing has planned for the business. The creative is in touch with the seo who’s taught him how to write in a way that might be more appealing to search engines. The social guys come by with advice on what will have more sharing potential. And the product guy is always pushing toward refining the product itself.

None of them ultimately own the content. It’s the creator in me that drives the content.

The creative does so with the advice of all those others in mind and he does his best to please each and every one, however none of them have final say in what gets published or what the content looks like.

The creator understands the purpose of each piece of content generator and understands who’s advice is best to listen to.

The creator does and his sole goal is to create the best content he’s capable of creating, because if he does you’ll be back for whatever he creates next.

He also knows to listen to the marketing team more when writing sales copy or that the public relations department might have the best advice when it comes to writing about the company.

Summary

Your business will work best when all departments or hats are working toward the same goals with a cohesive content strategy in mind. Don’t worry about which department owns content or which hat you’re wearing when it’s being created.

Everyone in your organization needs to be working for the overall good of the organization. If they aren’t your company has more issues than who owns the content.

There are people throughout your company with the talent and desire to lead the way with content.

Choose those best capable to create content to create it and help those people understand the goals for all the other departments. Feel free to create a new department devoted to media around these people. Of just buy them a new hat to wear.

• Livefyre
• IntenseDebate
• Disqus
• Facebook Comments

Each of these systems has a variety of features, advantages, and problems. Before even looking into the features of each commenting system, it’s important to consider the value of comments to your blog, what you want out of a commenting system, and which functions would be most useful.

Do you want to have a high volume of comments, even if they aren’t of the highest quality, relevance, or decency? Do you want fewer comments that are more civil, on topic, and less offensive? How much time would you devote to moderating comments?

With these questions in mind, you will come across the following types of features and decisions to be made about the comment systems for your site.

Public, Reputation-Driven Comments

Most of the comment systems listed above offer some sort of public, reputation-driven system.

If your site receives plenty of flame comments, trolling, pointless bickering, or all of the above, integrating your comments into a public infrastructure will definitely help discourage those pointless types of comments.

However, do be aware that these types of comment systems can discourage commentators for a number of reasons:

• You have to log into or create some form of social media account
• These comments don’t allow people to post anonymously
• Comments link back to some sort of profile or comment history

For Facebook Comments especially (where your comments are linked to your profile with your actual name), this can really scare away comments. While comments will be much more civil, they can also be overly polite with people tiptoeing around each other and being less inclined to gridlock into an intense, passionate discourse.

Anonymous Comments

Even though most new comment systems have some type of reputation/social integration, many comment systems will also allow visitors to post comments anonymously (with the obvious exception being Facebook).

Allowing anonymous comments will result in a higher volume of comments, but with this higher volume usually comes an extreme dip in comment quality. If your site covers particularly controversial topics, the level of comments can drop as low as death threats.

Moderating Comments

One decent solution to keeping the quality of comments high, particularly if you are allowing anonymous comments, is to moderate the comments yourself.

Just about all of these commenting systems give you the ability to delete any comments that are obscene, spam, or just completely thoughtless or irrelevant.

Of course, you don’t want to spend more time moderating than you do actually writing content for your site. Luckily, some systems give you more automated moderation controls such as blacklists and whitelists which can really ease the moderation process.

Tweets As Comments

One of the most annoying features I’ve ever seen on a third party commenting system is the one that integrates tweets into the comments section.

While it can be interesting for the blogger or writer to see what people are saying about their article in tweets, this feature really offers nothing to the readers except for a bunch of useless comments that they have to wade through.

This is because most tweets about a post just say “This is a summary of an article (and here’s the link) #somethingrelevantorfunny.” Not the best contribution to a comments section.

Quick Rundown

Each commenting system has a lot of similarities, and many features are subject to change and add by the month.

This makes weighing pros and cons can be difficult, especially since bugs change just about as quickly as features, but I will provide a couple features that define each comment system:

LiveFyre

• Pros — Has a great interface, reputation points/like system, and reply system making comments very social and conversational.
• Cons — Can’t post comments as a “guest” or “anonymous” which might be too big of a barrier of entry for some commenters.

IntenseDebate

• Pros — Highly customizable, supports valuable add-ons such as Comment-Luv, and is made by the same company that owns WordPress.
• Cons — Doesn’t work across all universal browsers (IE9 and Opera have glitches), and replies are hidden until you click to expand.

Disqus

• Pros — Users can post anonymously as “guests” and supports many other login credentials, allows you to customize the look with CSS, and the system is very popular and well-recognized.
• Cons — You can’t add your own content to the comment layout (such as a Rules section), and people have reported lost comments after switching from WordPress native comments.

Facebook Comments

• Pros — The most popular social network in the world makes logging in to comment easy, and adds some accountability to commenting since Facebook profiles are attached to comments.
• Cons — Discussions might be a little too polite, and many people will not be inclined to post due to the ties to your public profile.

Conclusion

Getting the right commenting system for your blog is often a push and pull situation.

It’s nice to have a democratic setting in which anyone can contribute their thoughts and viewpoints to your content, but you don’t want your comments to be flooded with thoughtless or rude garbage.

And of course you can clean up your comments area with some hefty moderation, but wouldn’t this energy be better spent creating content for your site?

Ultimately, you just have to decide how important comments are to your posts and how much you’d like them to change.

This guest post is contributed by Lauren Bailey, who regularly writes for best online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: blauren99 @gmail.com. 

How Often do You Need to Post?

Your main focus with a blog should be to produce the best content you’re capable of producing or hire someone to create the best content they can produce. Quality will trump quantity. Unless your blog is a news blog you don’t need to publish every day or several times a day.

It’s hard to deny that posting more will bring more traffic. It generally will. However traffic alone does not a successful blog make. Presumably you’d like visitors that actually do something like read your post and subscribe.

Where quantity is concerned it’s more important to be consistent. Pick a schedule you can reasonably maintain and stick with it whether it’s once a week, twice a week or once every other week.

You can’t let too much time pass between posts or you risk losing your audience, but you really don’t have to publish every day.

More posts will be better only if your quality doesn’t suffer. Aim for publishing the best post you can and over time you can increase how often you publish. If your posts are good people will read them even if they don’t come every day. If your posts are bad it’s irrelevant how often you post.

Questions You Should Answer Yes To

I’m sure there are examples of successful bloggers that would answer “no” to any of the questions below. Truthfully there are no absolute rules you need to follow to be a successful blogger.

However most of us would do well to answer “yes” to each of these questions.

There are plenty of other things you should be doing, but I think you should start with the questions below and honestly be able to answer “yes” to all of them.

Are you passionate about your subject?

Maintaining a blog is not easy. It takes lot of work to come up with new ideas, turn those ideas into something others want to read, and promote your posts so others know they exist.

Blogging will be much easier if you feel passionate about your subject. All bloggers go through periods where writing a post is the last thing in the world they want to do or where the ideas aren’t flowing. Your passion can help sustain you during these times.

If you don’t feel passionate about your topic it will show in your writing. If you’re not interested in your posts why would you expect your readers to be interested in them?

Are others passionate about your subject?

It’s all well and good to be passionate about your subject, but are there others who are also passionate about it? Is there an audience for your subject?

Odds are unless your topic is so narrowly focused there will be people other than yourself interested in it, but you might want to ask around to make sure.

If there are a large number of other blogs on the topic then it’s probably safe to say others are interested in it. If there are no other blogs on the topic it could be an indication no one really cares about the subject.

You might have hit upon something no one else has considered before, but do make sure the audience for your topic is greater than one.

Are you following what goes on in your industry/topic?

Assuming there are people interested in your subject, there are likely others blogging about it. You should be following as many of these other blogs as you can.

They’ll help you know more about what’s going on and what sub-topics people are most interested in. They’ll help you generate ideas and provide a source for you to network and get the word out about your blog.

You don’t have to read every post on every blog about your topic, but you should at least glance at the post titles and get a feel for what others are talking about and also what they aren’t talking about.

Can you commit to a consistent schedule?

As I mentioned above you don’t have to post every day, but you do need to post consistently. Ideally you’ll post with a strategy in mind. If you only post once every few months there’s little reason for anyone to subscribe.

People subscribe to blogs less for what you’ve written and more for what they think you’ll write in the future. They subscribe because they don’t want to miss out on your next post.

When you show your blog is consistently active it gives people a reason to subscribe so they won’t miss what you write in the future. They know you’ll be around tomorrow.

Do you have something to say and can you say it in an interesting way?

While it’s important to know what others are saying about your topic, you can’t just repeat what everyone else is doing. You need to give people a reason to specifically read your blog.

Can you approach the topic in an original way or offer a unique perspective? Can you create content significantly better than others on the topic are creating? What is it that you bring to the topic? Can you develop a blogging voice?

You can’t bore your readers. You don’t need to be (insert your favorite author here), but you do need to find a way to make your blog interesting enough for your audience to stick around. You need to deliver content that’s entertaining, useful, informative, engaging, or generally interesting.

Do you have a thick skin?

No matter how wonderful your blog is there will be people telling you how awful it is. While criticism is important to listen to, you do need to be able to separate genuine criticism from those trying to get a reaction out of you.

Most blogs attract trolls at some point. It’s better to laugh them off than get mad and respond.

Genuine and honest critiques can also hurt sometimes so you need to be able to take in the advice offered and let your feelings about it go. Listen to critiques objectively and use them to make your blog better.

Remember though, that it’s your blog and ultimately you should decide how to make it better. You don’t have to change something just because one commenter suggests you do.

Would you read your blog if you didn’t write it?

This is one of the most important questions you need to ask yourself. I first heard the advice at either SEOmoz or CopyBlogger, though I can’t remember which. This questions pulls in most everything above.

If you weren’t the author of your blog would you read it? Would you subscribe to it? This isn’t an easy question to answer and you need to be brutally honest with yourself. You’ll need a thick skin to deal with your own critique.

A few years ago I asked myself this very question and had to honestly answer that I wouldn’t have read my own blog at the time.

I took a few months away and came back with a new direction and a greater focus. I spent the time away thinking about what I wanted to read in a blog and thought about why I read the ones I read.

It takes more work to create a blog I want to read, but today I can honestly say I would read this blog even if it wasn’t mine. If you don’t want to read your blog, it’s unlikely anyone else will want to read it either.

Is there a way to generate revenue from your topic?

This question naturally depends on the goals you have for your blog. You can certainly blog without any desire for making money. Your blog can be an outlet for your creativity or it can be a cathartic release or it can be any number of things that never involve money.

I’m assuming though, that part of the reason you’re blogging is a desire to help the bottom line of your business.

Assuming you do want your blog to contribute to your business, you have to think about how it will contribute to your business. There are a variety of ways you can do this.

• Promote the services you offer
• Sell your own products
• Sell other people’s products through affiliate links
• Sell advertising space

Ultimately you’ll sell your own products and/or services or the products and/or services of others or some combination of all of them. Each of the above has different strategies for success and each can be subdivided into more specific categories.

I’ll save those strategies and subcategories for another post. For now simply think about whether or not your subject will lend itself to helping you make money in some way.

That money doesn’t have to be direct revenue. Your blog can sell absolutely nothing and exist solely to provide credibility to potential clients. Your blog might exist mainly as a marketing tool to attract traffic that then is directed to other parts of your site where you do sell something.

The question you need to answer is does your blog somehow help your business in some way.

Summary

Creating and maintaining a successful blog can be one of the best ways to market your business or bring direct revenue to your business. However it isn’t easy.

You won’t have success just by installing WordPress and assuming everything will run on autopilot. It takes a lot of work and effort to stand out from everything else that already exists.

Before starting you should ask yourself the questions above and you should be able to answer yes to each and every one. Even more you should be able to prove to yourself that you can deliver on your “yes” answers. It’s not enough to just say yes.

Don’t be discouraged though if you find you can’t do some of these things as well as you thought at first. It might take you some time to truly figure out how your blog best fits strategically with your business or how to create posts that entertain your readers.

As long as you’re willing to keep at it and strive to to make your blog better, you can reach a level of success.

Perhaps the one question you most need to answer yes to is are you willing to keep working at it until you succeed?

There’s a free sample chapter (PDF) available, though it’s not my chapter.

How I Came to Write a Chapter

About a year and a half ago I started submitting my posts to a number of sites in the design community that accept submissions for community news. Apparently my content stood out a little from the usual submissions as several people contacted me to write guest posts for them leading to more people seeing my posts.

Early last year, Vitaly Friedman, the owner of Smashing Magazine approached me to write a guest post for the site. I guess the post went over well enough since I was asked to write another. A month or two later Vitaly asked if I’d be interested in working on a study of ecommerce sites for a project he was thinking of getting started.

That project was put off, but we thought the study would work for Smashing Book 2. There are 2 lessons here.

• When creating content, create the best content you can
• No matter how great your content you need to give it a little push to get the attention of others

The Ecommerce Study

The basic idea was to analyze about 50 ecommerce sites in order to understand how they make use of different design patterns. For example how long is the typical checkout process and how many top level categories are used to organize products.

We looked at a number of different aspects of designing and developing an ecommerce site, recorded the data in a spreadsheet, and grouped the analysis under the following categories

• Layout
• Information Architecture
• Navigation
• Color
• Check-Out Process
• Contact and Support
• On-Site Marketing

The chapter was something of a departure from what I usually write and I thought it would be an interesting challenge and an opportunity to learn something new.

Some of the data collected was exactly as expected, such as nearly all sites allowing you to search products. Other things like the number of top level categories went against common wisdom.

What I Learned

Naturally I learned something about how ecommerce sites are designed and developed, though that’s not what I want to talk about here. If you’re interested in what the study revealed you should pick up a copy of the book.

What I want to talk about here is what I learned in general about writing a chapter for a book.

Writing A Chapter is Harder than Writing a Blog Post

Not that maintaining a blog is easy, but writing something much longer than a blog post requires more planning, more research, more writing, more of everything really.

The chapter took quite a bit longer to write than I expected and much of my time last summer was spent working on it. Some days it was the last thing I wanted to do. Fortunately a few deadlines kept me pushing through to the end.

I’m Capable of Writing a Book

Writing a book sounds like a daunting challenge and like I just said even a chapter is hard work. A book is a lot of words to come up with. Writing a chapter was a bridge between a blog post and a book.

I think the final chapter is about 10.000 words, but that’s only because an additional 10,000 were cut. Many of those cut words were a natural part of the editing process, but a few sections were eventually removed for space considerations.

Having written 20,000 words I feel more confident I can write 50,000 or 100,000 or whatever it takes to write a full book.

Planning is Important

You can’t wing 10,000 or 20,000 words. Well maybe you could, but it’s better to have an idea what you’re going to write before you start.

There were so many different ways the chapter could have been organized. Vitally and I went back and forth a few times deciding what aspects of the sites we should look at for analysis.

Some things that sounded interesting (what platform was the site developed on) were harder to determine than we originally thought, while others though easy to discover (choice of typeface) didn’t really fit with the general idea.

Flexibility is Important

While planning was important, much of what was eventually analyzed only came about after a first pass at analyzing the sites. Each round of data collection led to a few things that we thought would be an interesting part of the study.

About half of what we eventually looked at wasn’t on our initial list and only came about through an iterative process of looking through the sites several times.

We let the research and data collection shape the chapter and allowed it to grow organically.

The Writing Process Makes for Great Learning

Some things I would have guessed before the study and other things surprised me. Among the later was how many conservative brands are using social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Even more I learned how to do a study like this and it’s given me ideas for other studies I might put together. I assume I’ll be able to do these studies quicker and easier the second time around.

I haven’t looked at any ecommerce site since quite the same way. The study usually stays with me while shopping online and especially when I’m developing an ecommerce site. Some of the lessons from the study have found their way into my work making me a better developer of ecommerce sites.

Writing for Different Audiences and Formats Expands Your Writing Chops

I’ve written for audiences other than all of you before, but this is the first time I’ve written something this large for print.

There were different considerations for both audience and medium, from something as simple as needing higher quality images to modifying my writing style.

The more you can step out of your comfort zone as a writer (or a designer), the more your skills improve. We all fall into routines and rely on things that have worked in the past. In many ways that’s a good thing, but it also means you don’t grow as a writer or designer.

Working with an Editor Brings a New Perspective

For most of my writing my only editor is me. That’s a lot different than having someone else edit your writing. I’ve worked with an editor before on some shorter articles, but not to this extent.

It’s interesting to see how your words aren’t quite as clear as you think at times and it’s something to see large chunks of you writing removed. Parts of the process were invaluable for improving my writing and parts of the process were hard to accept. Overall it was a great learning experience.

An editor will provide much more feedback than you normally receive on your writing and offer a different perspective.

Vitally and the Staff at Smashing Magazine are Truly Great People

I knew this before, but wanted to specifically mention it here. I can tell you that Smashing Magazine is dedicated to creating the best content they can.

You may or may not like everything they publish, but I can assure you their goal is always to produce the best content they can and the people there are a joy to work with.

Summary

Like I said the book is now available. Most of you probably read Smashing Magazine so I may not be telling you something you don’t already know. You may not have realized I was one of the contributors to the book though.

Writing my chapter was a lot of work. Some days it was the last thing I wanted to do, but I knew I had to push ahead. Overall it was a great experience and one that I’ll be able to draw from while working on a full book, which I hope to get started this summer. Wish me luck.

Hopefully the chapter turned out well. I did my best, though it’s sometimes hard for me to know how my writing will be received. As I mentioned the chapter was also something of a departure for me, which makes it a little harder to know what others will think.

If you did buy and read the book or are planning to, I’d certainly appreciate some feedback. Send me an email and let me know the good and bad so I can do better next time.

Justin’s own posts shows why it’s irrelevant. Somewhat ironically his post arguing for the use of proper grammar is grammatically incorrect. I’ll let you check the post on your own to find the grammatical error. The reason the post shows the irrelevancy of its argument is that even while grammatically incorrect, it’s still easily understood.

Edit: It looks like Justin has correct the grammatical flaw in the post. Originally it boiled down to “I have more friends on Twitter, while Facebook is” or something similar. Again the post was easily understood and the original still read fine.

Aside: Since I’m picking on Justin’s grammatical error I should also point out he’s one of the foremost authorities on WordPress. His blog is one of my first stops when it comes to learning most anything WordPress and if you use also WordPress, but aren’t yet subscribed to Justin’s blog you should correct that right now. Here’s a direct link to the feed.

Grammar as Guide and not Absolute Rule

Rules of grammar, whether literary or visual, should be seen as guides and not absolutes. It’s not what your teachers told you in high school, but it’s true.

Language evolves. Grammar changes over time. What’s incorrect today will become correct tomorrow. What we know today as a comma descended from a slash. Before that it was a dot placed at a certain height.

If you doubt language evolves have a look at Beowulf, written sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries. It’s written in English, albeit Old English or Anglo-Saxon. That we call it Old English should be enough to see that language evolves, but take a glance at the epic poem to see how much. The image above is a small part of the manuscript.

It’s been estimated that Shakespeare invented over 1700 words as well as many phrases now in common use. The first time he used them they were grammatically incorrect by definition and yet people both understood and enjoyed his plays.

Lewis Carroll wrote Jabberwocky, partially seen below, using several nonsensical words and yet the message of the poem seems clear.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird and shun
  The fruminous Bandersnatch!

Whether you want to accept it or not, txt speak will likely become more grammatically correct in the future as more and more people grow up using it. It’s simply the evolutionary nature of language.

Language exists to help us communicate. What’s important is that we’re understood, not that we do so according to a specific set of rules. You have a message to convey and as long as you get that message across you’ve communicated successfully. Whether or not the form of communication is grammatically correct is irrelevant.

The best writers and designers break the rules of the language they use and in so doing advance the language. See Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll above or consider the Bauhaus who went against many of the “rules” of design that came before.

Why Learning Grammar is Still Important

You might think after reading the above that I don’t think it important to learn to use grammar properly. Quite the contrary. In order to break a rule you should understand the rule you’re breaking. You should have a reason for breaking it.

The more we understand, the more informed the choices we make, even when the choice is to go against our own understanding.

Rules of grammar are like standards. If we can all agree that a period marks the end of a sentence or that a space between lines of text marks a new paragraph we can better communicate with each other. It’s ok though to break from standards in some situations, especially where breaking from the standard makes things clearer.

Think about coding a web page. We all know and groan about how Internet Explorer sometimes doesn’t honor standards. We’ve all had to write a hack or two to make something work in IE. Did it make us poor developers to write grammatically incorrect code? Not at all. That incorrect code simply helped us communicate with a specific audience.

Still it was important for us to understand coding standards first in order to understand why something specific wasn’t working in IE and then to understand how to fix it without breaking the code in other browsers.

Understanding as much as you can about grammar is important because it opens you up to communicating with a wider audience. In some places using proper grammar is a must. A resume comes to mind as does most formal business communication. Any form of professional communication calls for proper grammar. Anything less will be viewed as unprofessional.

My Friends: Twitter vs. Facebook

For fun I scanned my own followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook to see if either clearly wrote better than the other. While my scan was far from scientific there was little to suggest that what was written on one was better or more correct than the other.

However I would agree with Justin that the character limit Twitter imposes will get some to put more thought into what they write by necessity. I don’t think it will have any great impact on the majority, but for those people interested in improving their writing, Twitter can help them get there.

In many ways it’s the same as how constraints aid us in design. Our solution has to work within the limits set by the client.

Two of my Facebook friends often wrote grammatically incorrect sentences. Those two people are cousins of mine who happen to be two of the most literate people I know. They’re probably two of the most literate people on the planet and both have been writers and editors their entire lives. One is even co-owner of a publishing company she helped found.

I guarantee they write better than both you and I and yet here they are ignoring some rules of grammar in Facebook posts. Those posts were also among the clearest communication on either Facebook or Twitter, despite not being bound by every rule of grammar.

Both Facebook and Twitter lend themselves to informal use of language. Neither is a place you should expect to see grammatically perfect posts or tweets. And from my informal scans neither tries to meet those misguided expectations.

Summary

Grammar is important, but what’s more important is communication. If you can get your message across to your intended audience there’s nothing wrong with breaking grammatical rules.

There are places and audiences where your grammar and general use of the language will be judged, so failing to learn the rules of grammar is a no no. Just because you don’t have to use those rules all the time is no excuse not to learn them. You will be able to communicate more effectively the more you understand the language, even if at times you ignore its rules.

Keep in mind that while this post focused on written language, everything here applies to visual language as well. Learn the rules for communicating visually, but remember that those rules can be broken whenever it aids communication.

I’ll close this post with the same recommendation Justin made in his post and suggest buying and reading a copy of The Elements of Style, by William, Strunk and E.B. White. It’s one of the best books you could ever read where learning to write better is concerned.

And accept my apologies for any grammatical errors in this post. However, as long as the message gets through I don’t plan on fixing them.

Both designing and blogging are attempts to communicate using language. In one case the language uses visual grammar and in the other the language uses the grammar of the written word. Learning to write better will help you design better and learning to design better will help you write better, because both teach you to communicate better.

graphic (adj.)

1. Of or relating to written representation
2. Of or relating to pictorial representation

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at writing as it connects to design. I hope to show you that becoming better at one helps you become better at the other. First I want to begin with a few thoughts about multi-tasking.

Multi-Tasking is Not What You Think it is

I’ve always thought that multi-tasking as most people think of it is an illusion. There are very few tasks you can really do at the same time. Waking and chewing gum come to mind as things you can do at the same time without either suffering.

On the other hand you really can’t text and walk down the street at the same time. Lot’s of people do, but they aren’t doing either skill as well as they could. You need to use your eyes for both and what you’re really doing is moving your attention back and forth between activities.

Here’s what happens when some people try to do both at the same time.

Multi-tasking as we think of it is really moving back and forth between multiple tasks. With tasks that don’t require concentration and focus that’s perfectly fine. For tasks that do need concentration and focus it’s another story.

I have a different view of multi-tasking which is to do one thing that serves multiple purposes. Blogging is a good example as it:

• makes you a better writer
• helps generate new ideas
• is a great way to market yourself and your business
• enhances critical thinking
• provides informational content for search engines and social media sites
• teaches you to communicate more effectively

The last one above is the most important where this post is concerned. If our goal as visual designers is to communicate doesn’t it make sense to do things that generally helps us become better at communicating?

The Connection Between Blogging and Design

I’ve mentioned it a couple of times already. The connection is that both are forms of communication. They simply communicate using a different language with a different syntax and grammar.

Visually we speak with objects, visual elements that we place in space on the page or screen. We structure these objects to form patterns and textures. We create sequences of objects to give the illusion of activity and develop relationships between elements to communicate additional meaning about them.

Design principles become our visual grammar for communication with design elements.

When writing we speak with pictorial representations of sounds that become letters and combinations of letters. We structure these letters into words and create sequences of words to form sentences and sequences of sentences to form paragraphs.

Writing has its own rules of grammar for communicating with the words we use.

We might even try to map the different elements to each other, though it’s far from a perfect comparison.

• letters – points
• words – lines
• sentences – shapes
• paragraphs – volumes

Ask anyone who speaks more than one language and they’ll tell you that the more languages they learn the better they are at communication in any one of them. Ask any programmer and they’ll likely tell you the same. They’ll tell you how learning javascript helped them program better in php or similar.

Writing will help you think more logically as you attempt to present an argument and then prove it. Logic will help you make better design choices to support the message your design wants to convey.

When writing we speak of voice. We develop rhythms to our writing that communicate something more than the words themselves. And we choose certain words among several that mean mostly the same thing to communicate different nuances. When these rhythms and word choices are consistent we’ve developed a voice that communicates additional information about the speaker.

In design we have a style. We choose shapes and textures that evoke certain feelings. We create rhythm and flow visually to communicate something more than the elements themselves convey. When these visual rhythms and choices in color and shapes are consistent we’ve developed a style that communicates additional meaning about the design.

The best writers practice writing in different voices. The best designers practice designing in different styles. Both choose the appropriate voice or style for the particular project.

Writing Practice

Many. perhaps most of you already run a blog. This post isn’t trying to convince you to start one, but rather to see what you do when writing a little differently. See how what you write connects to how you design. Try to be more conscious how each makes you better at the other.

Instead of posting a quick tweet, take an extra second or two to craft it. Pick that right word or two that really gets your message across. See email as an art form and use them to practice the craft of writing. Maybe, not all email as you’d never get anything done, but some.

For years I’ve been emailing back and forth each night with a friend or two. In part it’s to say connected with a friend and in part it’s to practice and develop my skills as a writer. Again that multi-tasking thing.

Experiment with your writing. Try writing for another site and use a different voice than the one you naturally use. Write in different places, some where you need to be more formal and some where you can be less formal. Look for places ways to expand your skills as a writer with the understanding that it will expand your skills as a designer as well.

Summary

There’s a very strong connection between writing and visual designing. Both are about communication. They simply use different languages to do convey information.

While each naturally requires different skills in the particulars of the languages, syntax, and grammar used, the skills you learn in communicating with one directly translate to the other.

Learning to write more logically and learning to write with different voices will make you a better designer as it will teach you to communicate better and in a number of different ways.

Last week Chris Brogan posted one big traffic secret, in which he said,

I’ll tell you one thing I know: the more you post, the more traffic you get

Chris is righ,t of course. It’s pretty easy to realize if you publish one more post that attracts only one more visitor over the course of a year, it’s still more traffic than had you not published that post. And more realistically each post is going to bring in more than one visitor per year. More posting is generally going to lead to more traffic.

• It’s one more link for subscribers to click on in their feed reader
• It’s one more page for search engines to index rank
• It’s one more page that can generate incoming links and referral traffic

However does that mean you should post more often than you currently post now? Chris himself isn’t saying you should automatically post more. His article is mainly an observation, and a true one at that. More posts will lead to more traffic. As Chris points out many top blogs post more than 5 times daily. This more posts leading to more traffic really isn’t in question. The question is, is more traffic necessarily better?

My answer is the ever so definitive “it depends.”

Sometimes Posting Less Will Bring You More

It depends on your business model and goals for your site. It also depends on whether or not you can maintain the same level of quality with additional posting. If there’s nothing remarkable about the additional posts how much of a difference to they realistically make?

Quality trumps quantity.

If your business model is to sell advertising then yes more is better. The more people you can get to your site and the more pages you can get them to visit once there, the more advertising you can sell and the more money you can charge for each ad spot.

For everyone else traffic in and of itself is mostly meaningless. It’s only when that traffic takes some action that it becomes meaningful.

If you sell a product do you care that 1,000,000 visited your sales page or do you care that 10 people actually bought your product? If you could get those same 10 sales with 10 visitors would you complain about the 999,990 people that didn’t visit and leave? Was all that extra traffic worth anything?

Sure, many top blogs do post a lot. Many also sell advertising as their primary source of income. Is that how your business works? It might and if so you probably are better increasing your publishing rate, even if publishing more reduces the overall quality of your content. Not everyone makes a living selling advertising, though.

One way a blog can help a site is to convince potential clients to get in touch or convince potential customers to buy. If posting more means lowering the quality of your posting, will your blog convince more people to buy from you? Probably not. Will it convince more people to call or email you? Again probably not. Not if posting more means a general drop in quality

Ever read through the comments on some top blogs? Some do get good comments. Many get useless “first to comment” and other “me too” types of comments. How many of those people do you think will buy?

Isn’t this whole idea of more for the sake of more what led Leo Laporte to question his use of social media a couple weeks back?

Search Engines and More Content

One of the reasons I suggested above for more content leading to more traffic was that each new page could potentially rank and bring search traffic. Seems plausible, but is it true?

In general yes. It’s really hard to argue that having a larger site with more content is going to lead to less traffic, but consider the following

Removing Posts Helped V7N

A few years ago John Scott, the owner of the v7n forum removed a large number of old and inactive posts from his forum. He didn’t delete them, but moved them to a private section of the forum inaccessible to search engines

John removed posts that were a certain number of days old, had less than a certain amount of page views, and were for the most part inactive in the number of responses. Within a few weeks he noticed an increase in search traffic, a 7,000 visits a day increase in search traffic, to the V7N forums.

John pruned the lower quality posts and the result was an increase in traffic. Less content did equal more for V7N.

Keyword Cannibalization and Duplicate Content

Over the years Rand Fishkin has talked about the concept of keyword cannibalization. The idea is that by targeting the same keywords on multiple pages of your site those pages compete with each other. Links into the pages are divided and search engines have to determine which page to rank. Overall the multiple pages might receive less search traffic than if there were only one page targeted for the keywords in question.

When you post more you naturally write about the same subjects and naturally use the same or similar words in post on the same topic. It’s possible those additional posts might be hurting your overall search traffic as opposed to helping it.

A few years ago many of my own posts had found their way into what then was Google’s supplemental index. Google was indexing both the xml feed and the html posts and as a result most of my search traffic disappeared. After fixing the issue by removing the feeds from being indexed (less content) traffic not only returned, but increased.

Having less content indexed seemed to work very well for me.

Signal to Noise in Links

I’ve always suspected that the search engines use all the data they collect to look at a signal-to-noise ratio of links flowing into your site. Something like a comparison of how many pages your site has that are being linked to divided by the total number of pages on the site.

Speculation on my part, but my thinking is a site with 10 pages, each with 10 links pointing to each page is better than a site with a 100 pages and 100 links all pointing to one page on the site. The latter would get search traffic to the one page, but not the others. The former would get search traffic to all pages totaling more than the latter site got to it’s one page.

That second site is telling search engines that there’s some value to every page on the site. The first site is telling search engines that the one page is valuable, but the rest, not so much. It would seem to go toward the overall authority the site has in the eyes of search engines. Again speculation on my part, but it seems logical enough.

Whether my theory is right of wrong, the idea of this section is to point out some cases where more content may not always lead to more traffic from search engines. Of course more pages are more content for search engines to index and rank so consider everything in this section with a grain of salt. In general more posts will likely lead to more traffic.

However do realize that more isn’t automatically better. There may be times where more posts results in less traffic or not enough new traffic to make creating the additional content worth the effort.

Quality trumps quantity.

My story

When I first started blogging I tried to post as frequently as I could. I regularly published 3 times a week and tried pushing myself to post 4 and 5 times a week.

The problem was I didn’t have enough to say to fill a post a day or the time to say it well. Many of those old posts aren’t very good. Some were, but most were rather ordinary and not especially worth reading.

In time I didn’t even like writing them and eventually stopped blogging for a few months. Part of the reason was I simply couldn’t find the time to write as often as I thought I should. The quality of the posts suffered and my interest in writing them suffered.

About a year and a half ago I resolved to revive this blog. One of the crucial decisions I made was to only post once a week. I felt I could write one good post a week and that it would better than writing three mediocre posts a week.

A funny thing happened. This blog has been consistently growing since that decision to post less. Traffic is up and subscribers are up. Both have increased at a much greater rate then they had been when I was trying to write more often.

Less posting is certainly not the only reason, but less posting has meant more quality to each post, which has been a big part of the growth I’ve seen over the last 18 months. As I’ve set up a process to increase blogging productivity I’m now also able to post twice a week, while still maintaining a quality I’m happy with.

Others have had similar experiences. Just this week Larry Brooks, who has an excellent blog for writers (mainly fiction writers) at storyfix.com, posted a similar story to mine above called Just Maybe…He Who Blogs Less Blogs Best.

Less blogging led to increased quality and ultimately more traffic for Larry as it did for me.

The next time I redesign this site, I’ll likely go through old posts and remove many. I’ll remove those posts that aren’t really worth reading and don’t pull any traffic to them. I’ll prune the posts that aren’t contributing, much as you would prune dead or dying leaves from a plant to help it grow.

It’ll be interesting to see what effect that has on traffic to the site.

Summary

You’ve likely heard the advice to fire the bottom 5% of our clients/customers each year. Those 5% probably aren’t contributing much to your business so you get rid of them and either replace them with new clients/customers or better serve existing clients/customers. The end result being a net gain for your business.

The idea is to fix the weakest link in your chain and then move on to fix the next weakest link. Posting more usually comes with a loss of quality. Instead of fixing the weakest link, we’re creating more of them.

If your business model is advertising. If your money comes simply from having more eyeballs on your posts, then posting more absolutely makes sense. And realistically even if your business model isn’t advertising, more posts likely means more traffic and by consequence more clicks and more leads and more sales.

The question for most the rest of us is, is it really worth it?

If you can maintain the same quality while posting more, then by all means posting more will help your blog. If quality is going to drop you need to carefully consider whether that drop in quality is worth the extra traffic.

More traffic is not automatically better. You can probably generate just as many leads and sales by putting more into improving the quality of the few posts you write now. The added benefit is there are less weak link posts to turn people away.

You aren’t just improving each post by putting more effort into writing less of them. You’re improving your blog as a whole. You’re no longer the person who sometimes has interesting things to say. You’re the person who always has something interesting to say.

Quality does trump quantity and quite often less is more.

I’ve written about this process in the past for Search Engine People and it comes from some ideas I had a couple of years ago about assembly line blogging. The main ideas behind it haven’t changed much, though some of the details have.

Years ago I would sit down at night and try to take a post from nothing to finished all in one night. Some nights the writing flowed and other nights I struggled for ideas. I think the overall result was to have an uneven blog. Quality would vary from post to post. Some of the writing felt more like an obligation than a passion.

In general I don’t think the blog was very good. There are what some very good posts from those days, but for the most part the blog wasn’t anything special. If I had to answer the question at the time would I read my blog if it weren’t mine, the honest answer would have been no.

Then I hit on one of those creative blocks where I felt I had absolutely nothing to say and stopped saying it. Since writing had become an obligation it felt great to be relieved of that obligation. This blog sat empty for a few months.

I came back with a new direction, a passion for the new direction, and a process to help me be creative and productive. I’m certainly somewhat biased, but I think this blog has become something worth talking about over the last year or so. If I have to answer the question today, I can honestly say, yes I would read here even if this place wasn’t mine. A large part of why I think this has become a better blog is the process that follows.

• Brainstorming
• Outlining and Note taking
• Writing a First Draft
• Editing, Proofing, and Linking
• Adding Images and Media

Working on each of the above on different days or times helps me be more productive and as a result I think helps me create better content.

Brainstorming

I generally don’t brainstorm on a regular schedule. I tried, but it didn’t work for me. What I typically do is collect links and scraps of information while I’m reading and surfing the web that I think might make for an interesting post. I do have a list of post topics and every so often, maybe once every 3 weeks or so, I’ll sit for an hour and think up any new ideas that I can.

This is one area of my blogging where I’d like to do a better job.

Many of my posts for the last year have come from the design books I read and reread. When it’s time to begin a new post I’ll flip through the books and see what topics are interesting and that I think I could cover reasonably well. At times I’m focused on one aspect of web design and I’ll be reading books and sites about that topic and I’ll pull a few related ideas on that topic.

If possible I try to look for ideas I can write several posts around as either a series or a related set of posts on a single topic.

Thursday posts are mainly coming from something I read online that makes me want to write a long comment.

Outlining and Note Taking

Once I’ve chosen a topic to write about I create a new entry in my blog editor (I’ll review the editors and other tools I use in another post) and start by making a quick outline. The outline is mostly to get me to start thinking about the topic and an angle to write about, though I often expect the outline to change as I put together the post.

As I build the outline I’ll jot down any thoughts I have as the start of notes for the post. If the idea came from a book or two, I’ll read through the pages in the books, taking notes as I go. The next step is to start searching online for any article or post with additional information that I can link to and as I go I’ll usually skim/read and take more notes.

My initial outline changes as I take notes. Ideas that hadn’t occurred to me arise. The information I find might suggest a different angle for the post. Maybe I couldn’t find much information on something I thought would be a main section or find more information about something I thought would be a minor part of the post.

Writing the First Draft

I write the first draft in one sitting. Ideally I’ll have done a good job taking notes and organizing them and when that’s the case I can often fly through the first draft. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of working through each section and turning my notes into complete sentences and paragraphs. I’ll usually spend a few minutes organizing the notes for a particular section and then turn those notes into a few paragraphs before moving onto the next.

More often it takes longer to write the first draft and even though it takes more time there’s only so much to say about how I write a draft. At this stage I just write, not worrying much about the writing. The idea is to write enough words that can be shaped later. This helps separate the creative writer from the critical editor.

A few thoughts about writing in general. The only way to become a better writer is to write and write as often as you can. One reason I spend time posting at forums and commenting on blogs is simply to practice writing.

Reading is the other component. Read the best writers you can. Go through the literature section at a bookstore and take down the collected works of Hemingway or Faulkner or any other writer you’re supposed to read. Read fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and any other form of writing you can, always looking for the best authors. As you read great writers you’ll develop an ear for their rhythms, which will find its way into your own writing naturally.

Develop a writing voice. Write naturally. Don’t force words onto the page for style or because you think they make you sound more literary. The don’t. Start by writing in your own voice, the one you speak with and develop out from there. Your writing and speaking voice will grow differently, but they should start in the same place, that being you.

Proofing and Linking

A day or two after I’ve written the first draft, I’ll go back into the post and read through it. I’ll fix any typos I notice, rewrite awkward sentences, remove some paragraphs and add some new ones. Here I’m in full editor mode and looking to shape the first draft and do my best to ensure it reads well and stays on topic.

After a quick break I’ll organize the links I’ve collected and begin working them into the post. Most of the time I’ve already done a little of this as I took notes and worked through the first draft, but the majority of links I’ll save to the end. I check each post I’ve collected a link to and decide which section of the post to include it. Some links get dropped. Maybe they don’t offer much more than what I have in the post or my post moved in a somewhat different direction than the post I was going of linking to.

Other links I feel are important to include, though they may not have a natural place in my text to add them. I might write a new sentence or paragraph mostly for the link or sometimes I’ll add in a resources section within a section of the post if there are a few articles I want to link to, but haven’t found a place for within the content.

One other thing I do when adding links is look at a preview of the post to see how balanced the links look visually. I prefer not having all the links in one section while another section gets none. Ideally I’d like a roughly even amount of links in each section since I think it creates a better visual flow.

It’s not always possible to do that and ultimately I place the links where I think they make the most sense in relation to the content. Often you’ll see the same word or phrase linked through a post. Usually this is because the articles I’m linking to are all general coverage of the topic. If I can, I put the ones I liked the most closer to the top or in a place where I think they’re more likely tot get noticed and clicked.

Adding Images and Other Media

I used to add images at the same time I proofed and added the links, but lately I’ve been doing this on a separate day since it can take significant time to either create or find the right images. Ideally as I’ve done everything above I’ve made notes about where images should go and what the images should be.

Images and other media are a great way to dress up a post. People are attracted to images and they tend to stick around a little longer when images and video are present.

Sometimes I’ll have to create images to illustrate a point. Other times the images are mainly there to dress up the post a bit, though I always try to create or find an image relative to the content near where the image will be.

With the images I don’t create I mainly search the creative commons images at Flickr since I want to make sure I’m not using an image with a copyright that prevents me from using it. Certain images I feel comfortable assuming are public domain and will grab those from anywhere. Images of famous paintings for example.

Anytime I use an image created by someone else, I’ll do my best to link the image back to the source to give credit where credit is due.

With the images collected I’ll bring them all into Photoshop to resize them, combine them, or work on them in any way necessary.

Once all the images are added the post is done. It’s all still in my blog editor at this point. I’ll give it another quick once over before sending it to WordPress. I always send the post as a draft to WordPress and give it one last look before finally hitting the publish button and hoping I’m not making a fool of myself. Even with all the proofing, I’ll still leave typos in posts and even worse the post titles.

Then it’s time to begin working on the next post.

Summary

That’s pretty much my process for writing the longer tutorial style posts that I publish on Mondays. I spend anywhere from 1-3 hours each day over 3 or 4 days to put them together. Call it 6-10 hours per post. One tutorial post a week is about all I can realistically publish, though lately I’ve been adding posts like this one on Thursdays.

These Thursday posts have a slightly different process. The topics are something that came up durning the week or previous week and tend to be posts that don’t require research and where I can share a little more about my thoughts and personality. For example this post came out of David’s comment last week and I’m writing the first draft Sunday afternoon during a rain delay in the Yankees/Mets game. Sometime later in the week I’ll proof and edit and add a few links and probably some images if necessary.

I continue to explore the process I described above and try to improve it as I can. I’d like to be able to put together the same quality in less time and I’m always looking to improve the quality any way I can. I’m looking for ways to mix in different kinds of posts like this one that take much less time to create in order to be able to offer more than one post per week.

One thing the process does is allows me to slowly build up a store of posts. I spend time every day working on this blog, but since it doesn’t take me 5 full days to finish a post, I can slowly get ahead. A month or so ago my brother came into town and I took most of the week off, but you never noticed, because I had a post at the ready.

A store of posts also makes it easier to have something when another site requests a guest post or to give me more time to work on book if I choose. Some thoughts for the future include working more with media like video.

I hope this look into my own process has given you some ideas for improving your own blogging. The key is to understand yourself and what parts of the writing process flow and what parts are harder for you. I found that by working on different tasks on different days it made things easier overall and allows me to improve each distinct part more than when I tried working on them all at the same time.

If there are any particular aspects of the above you’d like to know more about let me know with a comment. Also if you’re interested I’ll write something up about the various tools I use to help with most or all of the above.

Do you follow any kind of writing process or do you write everything in one sitting?

photo credit: Yandle

As much as I’d like to tell you otherwise, I don’t think I can give satisfactory answers to any of the questions above. I’ve felt for a long time this blog has lacked the kind of focus I’d like to see it have. Hopefully that will change in the not too distant future.

I’m sure most, if not all, of you have noticed the polls I added to the sidebar when I redesigned the site. You know the ones just to your right and down a little. I added them for the simple reason of wanting to get to know you better.

Some of you I know personally, some of you I’ve gotten to know through comments, but the majority of you I can only really guess about. Hopefully the polls make for a nice way for you to share a little something about yourself without being too taxing.

For everyone who has responded to any of the polls that have run, thank you. I do appreciate it and they’re already helping me learn more about how to make this blog better. I would like to call your attention to the currently running poll.

The goal of this poll is rather direct. I’d like to know what you’re interested in seeing me write about here. If you’ve been with me for awhile you know I write about a variety of topics that all fall under the large umbrella of online business, but with the idea of adding more focus I want make the umbrella a little smaller. I have my own ideas, which I’ll share in a moment, but I also wanted your input.

My Three Goals For The Year

I’ve think I’ve mentioned a few times over the last few months that I’ve had 3 main goals for the year 2008. They changed a little since I first mentioned goals at the start of the year.

The first was to redesign the old site and move it from the yellowhousehosting domain to the vanseodesign domain in order to build a better brand. I hope it’s obvious that this first goal was met. If you’re unsure just look up at the address bar in your browser to confirm.

Goal 2 is to enter the WordPress theme market. I’ve hinted at it here and there that I’m currently working on a theme framework and ideally it’ll be ready by the end of the month. More likely it’ll be late October or heading into the holiday season, but I like to be optimistic. I’ll keep everyone updated and fill you in with more details as we get closer to launch.

The third goal at the point of this post is to focus or refocus this blog.

Why A Focused Blog Is A Better Blog

Just about every time I’ve suggested someone choose a focused topic for their blog the response is along the lines of not wanting to limit the topics written about. I think there’s a misconception about what it means to focus a blog.

How about an example using sports.

Sports would be a wide focus for a blog. Think about all the different sports out there. It’s unlikely one person is an expert on all of them. Football, the American kind, would be more narrow, but still somewhat wide in focus when you consider there’s more than one professional league, college and high school football, flag football, etc. A blog about the National Football League further narrows the focus, and a blog specifically about the New York Giants would be even more narrowly focused.

Can you tell I’m looking forward to (and now watching) the first game of the regular season? Go Giants!

A common objection to a New York Giants focused blog might be that you’d want to write about all the other teams too. You still can. A blog about the Giants isn’t limited to only posts about the Giants, but the majority of posts should be written with the context of the Giants in mind.

If you wrote about the Dallas Cowboys you’d want to write about them in relation to an upcoming game against the Giants or how A Cowboys win or loss affects the Giants chances of making the playoffs. The point is you’re not limited in what you write about, but rather should be writing in the context of the focus of your blog.

photo credit: [puamelia]

Where I Want To Focus This Blog

That brings me back to this blog and where the focus is and where it should be going.

Again, I think most posts here have always fallen under the umbrella of online business. I write about marketing and SEO, social media, and blogging, but I think overall it’s been too wide of a focus.

When first starting this blog my aim was to write more design and development posts. Posts like:

• 2 Column CSS Layout
• Column CSS Layout
• Simple Menus With (x)HTML Lists And CSS
• Simple Navigation Bar With CSS And (x)HTML

While I wear many hats as a business owner I primarily consider myself a web designer/developer. Somehow I got away from that early on and have hesitated to move back towards it.

In part the reason is that it’s not always easy to change habits. I’ve developed a rhythm for writing and switching to writing more about code and design would require a change in that rhythm.

The other part is not knowing how you’d respond. If you’re here because you like a certain kind of post and I write less of those posts you might leave and I’d rather see you stay.

The poll currently running has been showing the most votes for design and development topics since the beginning. There hasn’t been a huge response and there’s not a large disparity between the top and the bottom, but it’s making me think many of you wouldn’t mind seeing more design and development posts.

I’m taking a cue from those of you who have voted that it’s ok for me to start tweaking things around here. If you haven’t voted in the poll, but want to help shape the direction of this blog, please vote and/or comment below. It’s really the only way I know what you’re thinking.

Now please know even with a refocus I’m still planning on writing about most of the topics I usually write about. But how often I write about certain topics may change and the perspective of those posts may change a little as well.

Any changes I make will probably take some time for me to work through and you won’t see a major break with the status quo. More likely it’ll be a gradually change as I find a new rhythm without trying to drastically alter what’s been going on here the last few years.

Again thank you to everyone who’s voted in the poll and to all those who haven’t yet, please do vote to let me know a little about what you’re thinking. And to everyone, don’t be shy. Share your thoughts in the comments below. Now’s your chance to let me know where you want to see me go with TheVanBlog.