Those of you who are regular readers may remember that I’ve been working on a free WordPress theme for a while. Today, you finally get to see some of the work. I call it Vitruvian Theme.

Inspired by Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the idea of balance and proportion is built into the structure itself. The columns and typography are related by approximations of the golden ratio to give the theme a sense of visual harmony.

I plan to release Vitruvian Theme within the next week. Thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

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If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email. Thanks for visiting!

David Culpepper of PureBlogging recently asked whether passion is really as important in choosing a blog topic as everyone seems to think.

Passion is almost always trumpeted as being the most important factor in choosing a topic. I disagree with this assumption. I don’t know about you, but I can be passionate about something one week and be burned out before you know it.

While David agrees that passion is important, he points out that you probably need to have a fair bit of knowledge in your subject, too.

Personally, I think that bloggers would be much better served by thinking of their blogs and subject in terms of a marriage rather than raw passion. Yes, passion is an important part of a good marriage, but it is quite possible to be passionate about something in the short term but find that ultimately you don’t want to be stuck with it.

The question you need to ask is this: Are you willing to commit to this subject? Not necessarily for life, but at least a significant amount of time? It doesn’t matter how passionate you are about your subject if you can’t commit to it.

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I’m pretty happy with the progress I made on my goals this month. Though my subscriber count didn’t grow as quickly as I would have liked, I’ve got some interesting developments going on. Read the rest of this entry »

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Hello to everyone who found this blog via my guest post on Anywired: How to Write Your Way to Online Success (Even if You’re Not a Writer).

If you’re looking for a few good articles to start with, I suggest:

• 18 Productivity Haikus - Get Things Done and Achieve Inner Peace through the Power of Poetry
• 5 Questions to Ask When Evaluating a Web Site Design
• Saying More by Saying Less
• The Business of Fiction - 5 Ways to Help Your Business by Reading a Novel
• The World’s Most Powerful Form of Networking

Thanks for stopping by!

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Photo by rblock (license)

I’ve been writing this blog for a few months now, and it’s doing pretty well. But the other day I realized that I’ve never asked for any feedback other than for individual posts. Today I am fixing that and opening up the suggestion box.

Leave a suggestion

Want to see a post on a particular topic? Something about the current design bugging you? Do I post too frequently or not frequently enough? If you have any suggestions at all, please post them below, and I’ll do what I can to make this blog a better place for you to hang out.

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Photo by Coneee (license)

If you’ve been following along with me so far, you know that content is more important than design and that the way you judge a website’s content is by its purpose. So now it’s time to start translating that purpose into great content. Here are a few questions to get you started.

Warning: Mediocre to painful Star Trek analogies ahead.

1. Is the content full of mistakes?

By mistakes I mean things like spelling, typos, grammar errors, etc. While online writing is much less formal than offline writing, that doesn’t mean that you can be sloppy. An occasional spelling mistake can be overlooked, but consistent errors of language will eventually affect your reputation.

There are exceptions to this rule, and engaging content can overcome weakness in this area, but by and large it holds true. So it may be useful to have Mr. Data *cough* spellcheck *cough* proofread your work.

2. Does the current content support the purpose?

If you are trying to sell Star Trek uniforms, but the content on your site doesn’t offer anyone a reason to want them* you probably aren’t going to be selling many uniforms. Or consider the much more common case of a blog that says you should subscribe but doesn’t tell you why. Yes, I’m guilty of this one, but not for much longer.

* “Look absolutely dashing in this alternate future uniform worn by Picard in All Good Things…”

3. Is the content engaging?

Engaging content is absolutely critical. It isn’t enough to just say “You want to buy my product. You want to buy my product,” like the Borg endlessly repeating that resistance is futile. To get people thinking your way, you probably need to be a bit more seductive.

4. Who should be writing this?

Most of the content on the web isn’t created by professionals. Instead it is created by the website owner, or perhaps a web designer or some other member of the organization who doesn’t necessarily have a particular talent for it. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this, but really think over the effect that this will have on different sections of your site.

In my case, I’m a decent informational writer, but not all that great with a sales pitch, so my self-written sales pages tend to sound like a logic-obsessed Vulcan trying to persuade ordinary human beings that I can provide an emotionally gratifying product. To help fix this I’ve been working with Naomi of IttyBiz to update the sales-related portions of my website, and have been extremely happy with her work.

Do you have a horrible Star Trek analogy of your own? Post it below!

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Photo by a VeCeS Veo… (license)

Last week I talked about how a website’s content is more important than its design. The point of a design is to support the website’s content. But how can you tell if the content itself is doing it’s job? You have to know what your website’s purpose is.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Duh! Of course you need to know your website’s purpose!” But even if you have some idea of your website’s purpose, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a very clear idea.

This all leads me to my main point. If you don’t have a clear idea of what your website’s purpose is, you have know way to tell whether it’s working or not.

How to figure out your website’s purpose

1. List the things you want your website to do for you

For most websites, there will be more than one goal that your website helps you accomplish. ( Such as providing product information to potential buyers, as well as providing post-sales support information.) Some are more important than others, but right now, your job is just to list them all.

2. Distinguish between goals and means

After you’ve created your list, look over it carefully. You’ll probably find that it’s actually a combination of goals and methods. So, for instance, “convince people to give me money” might be a goal, and “positioning myself as a well-known expert on the plight of unemployed Fortran coders” a means. (The line between them, of course, can be a bit fuzzy.)

Go through the list, keeping this distinction in mind, and mark each item as either a goal or a means.

3. Rank the goals

Now, looking at your collection of goals for your website, you’ll need to rank them from most important to least important. If you have a hard time ranking them, just compare two at a time and ask yourself, “If someone held a gun to my head and forced me to choose just one of these, which one would it be?”

By the end of this process, you should have a pretty clear idea of which goal is your website’s primary purpose, and which are just secondary.

Often, just going through this exercise and figuring out will help to clarify your thinking about your website. But save your list (of both goals and means) because it will be useful in going through my next blog entry on using your list of goals to evaluate your website’s content.

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Hey guys! I hope you’ve been having a great week. Here are some of the best posts that I’ve read recently.

• AnyWired–Middlebrook Make Money Online Challenge: The Beginning
  Mark at My Tropical Escape has started an online money-making challenge. And Jarkko Laine has accepted the challenge as well. Looks like this will be interesting to watch.
• Coffee Break: Your Best Piece of Advice - FreelanceSwitch - The Freelance Blog
  The commenters at FreelanceSwitch offer their best advice on freelancing. Some great ideas here!
• Attentional Feng Shui of a Room | The Growing Life
  Is the arrangement of your room distracting you from what you need (or want) to do? Read this article.
• Moleskine Notebooks: The Ultimate Guide (and how to rank your addiction) | Put Things Off
  Nick Cernis offers a complete guide to the Moleskine notebook and a very funny ranking of addiction-level. (I’m a groupie.)
• ? theAdmin.org - Your Marketing Game ?
  If you’re like me, you probably don’t find marketing the most exciting aspect of business. But this marketing game from Eric Davis might change that.

Have a great weekend!

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One thing that I’ve noticed about web designers who care about good design is that we often tend to focus on a design as if it were the most important aspect of a web site. The problem is that it’s not. To adapt a phrase, “It’s the content, stupid!”

Exceptional content can overcome bad design

Steve Pavlina’s site is a striking example. It is a bit of an eyesore — Whoever thought that the green and blue on his site worked well together? — yet because of the consistently interesting content, still ranks in the Technorati 100. The main thing that the design has going for it is that it makes the content pretty easy to read. Read the rest of this entry »

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I made more progress toward my goals this month than last month, but still not quite as much as I would have liked. Here’s how it breaks down. Read the rest of this entry »

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