Blog Roll

I need to update my blogroll so I can easily check out what you guys are up to. Feel free to update yours too with my new web media blog http://gracebakerwebdesign.wordpress.com/ and if you’re interested in following my typography blog chuck this one in there too http://gracebakertypography.blogspot.com/

New Blog

Hey guys!

I’ve started a whole new blog for the website here is the URL

http://gracebakerwebdesign.wordpress.com/

I’ve also started a blog for typography

http://gracebakertypography.blogspot.com/

SEO search engine optimisation

A lesson in search engine optimisation is extremely valuable if you want to get found on the internet. It is really important that your web page come up in the 1st few (if not the 1st) page in a search engine search such as google, bing or yahoo.  Internet users will often not go past the 1st page of results (SERPS are search engine result pages). There are entire careers based on SEO just to stress how important it is especially for businesses. Heres a quick clip on how the google search engine works.

When doing some quick research to figure out how I can get found on the internet it turns out there are a lot of useful websites. Here is a useful one that is specific to my wordpress blog

http://seotechnique.net/seo-plugins-for-wordpress.html

The easiest and most common techniques include

• Having good quality content on your page
• Using keywords in the title and within the content
• Similar words to the keywords within the content (people use many different words for the same search result.)
• Captions and sidebars should also include key words (there is a big emphasis on using keywords for SEO)
• Having other sites link to you makes your page seem more popular
• link out to a few sites that have a good reputation
• Leave comments, pretty much just spread yourself around and generate buzz so that people want to click onto your site!

Once people are on your site its important to keep them there with interesting content and quality content. Ways to do this could be to

• Make helpful tutorials, a lot of people use the internet to find out how to do things.
• Be rich with media, interesting media like images and videos
• Make the presentation of your page friendly and welcoming
• Update posts regularly and again just keep commenting and have discussions and in my case critiques.

There are even online tools that can help like google analytics, wordpress also have tools to help you get found.

To find out the best keywords to use on my site I did a quick brainstorm on what my site was all about and then went onto the google adwords keywords site and typed them in. A list of related keywords come up with helpful information about how many people are searching those words and how much competition there is for them. I then selected the keywords that are closely related to my site that are very popular and have only a small amount of competition.  These words are recorded in my book and I can refer back to them whenever I start a new post or I can sneakily insert them into older posts as long as they still make sense.

 

Tutorial: How to start a wordpress blog to promote yourself online

Why should you start a wordpress blog?

Starting a blog is one of the easiest ways to get your information onto the internet and to start forming an online profile. You won’t need the skills to design an entire website or the money to hire someone to do it. It’s free and it’s just a few easy steps away. All you need is an email address and a few minutes.  You can have people learning about you, checking out your skills and contacting you in no time.

There are many places to start a blog online. This tutorial will teach how to start a blog through wordpress, as this is the online blogging system that I am familiar with.

Before we begin

Start thinking of keywords you want to use to describe yourself or that you want others to
associate with you and your skill sets.

For example:

Robert Baker wants to start a blog to promote himself as a musician…

His keywords might include

•    solo artist
•    acoustic guitar
•    mallow sound
•    smooth voice
•    cover songs
•    song writer
•    special occasions/events
•    easy to dance to
•    brings social environment to life
•    sound enthusiast
•    great sound system
•    bars/restaurants/wineries
•    experience

From these keywords you can start to form a quick and catchy username (or URL). This is what people will type in to view your blog. Your chosen name may not be available so keep your options open or just think of slight variations

For example:
(must be in lowercase with no spaces or symbols)

•    robbaker
•    robertbaker
•    robertbakeraccoustics
•    robbakermusic

Lets get started
This will only take a few easy steps. To start up a blog you will need

•    a username
•    a password
•    an email address

This is the case with most social media sites like facebook, twitter youtube and many others. Once you have a blog up and running you will be able to

•    display information on your page
•    change the look of your page
•    add more pages
•    categorise your posts
•    upload images
•    upload videos
•    add links

This online profile will help your viewers learn more about you and what you do.

Step 1
Go to http://wordpress.com, and click the ‘get started here’ button

Step 2
Fill in the blank fields.
1st make sure you’re user name is available
(wordpress will give you a tick if it is.)

Now move onto the next fields

Step 3

Click the sign up button and thats it you’re done!
You will receive an email to confirm your account.
Just open the email and follow the instructions.

When you sign into your blog you will find yourself in the behind the scenes page which is called the dashboard. To have your blog open while you’re working on it right click on your user name and choose
‘open link in new tab’

This is what the dashboard looks like

The sidebar is what you will use to find all your options. The options you will probably use the most are ‘Posts’, ‘Pages’, ‘Comments’ and ‘Appearance’.

‘Posts’ are kind of like diary entries. Once you publish the information you put in the post will appear on your blog.

To make your 1st post click ‘Posts’, more options will appear down the sidebar. Click ‘Add New’ and start typing. Once done there is a Publish button to the far right. Don’t worry if you make mistakes, you can edit or delete anything you put up on your blog. (You will probably like to delete the post that wordpress has kindly put in for you.)

You are most likely questioning the appearance of your blog. To change this click ‘Appearance’ down the sidebar and then go to ‘Theme’. There are many themes available for you to choose from. Have a play around with previewing them.
Remember everything you do can be edited so don’t worry if you choose a theme that you’re not happy with. just go back and follow the same steps again.

For more information on setting up a blog, I will follow up on each of these steps in future tutorials with more detail and images. My blog also has updates as I have been going along.

Feel free to contact me.

For a copy of this tutorial you can download this from http://graceelizabethbaker.deviantart.com/

Rob Ryan

Whilst flicking through an Urbis magazine in some waiting room I stumbled across some great plate designs. Im really getting into this plate art. Also great inspiration for typography. More quirky household design http://until.com.au/

Tutorial progress

My tutorial is beginning to take shape

You can see that I have arranged the information in small amounts to make the information look less intimidating and hopefully keep my viewers attention for longer.

Planning and making a tutorial

So its week 5 into the semester and this week we are finding ways to get more traffic onto our blogs. Today I learnt about the phrase “Content is King” and did a quick bit of research on google.

“Content is King”

This is a current meme (idea, behaviour, style that spreads from person to person within a culture) when organising or building a website. Text content is particularly important.

Media venture is likely to fail through lack of appealing content regardless of other design factors. Content can mean any creative work such as text, graphics, images or video.

Content is king because the internet is the information ‘superhighway’ and that is what most people will use it for – to find information.

Useful and interesting content will create more traffic especially if it is updated frequently (I often move away from a blog if the last post date is old). Content usually refers to articles, tutorials, news and opinions.The image above helps support the idea that content is king. It has been proven that people who go onto the internet scan for information rather than reading full articles. The most important information for my tutorial should attract the attention of my audience fast and keep them interested.

Tutorial

A great way of adding some crucial content to our blogs is to create a tutorial that invites in a specific audience and is useful and interesting.

A helpful page on target audience

http://dianev.com/web-design-help/web_design_basics/target_audience.html

Find ways to convey the information in an appealing manner using a variety of text, images, video and audio.

Planning my Tutorial

My idea came to me when I thought back to showing my blog to my dad. He is a musician and really liked the idea of having a blog to promote himself as at the moment he only has a facebook page and this does not give him a professional or particularly unique look.

My dad just turned 50 and like many other 50 year olds he has a limited understanding of the internet. My target audience will be 50+ year olds who want to promote their skill set in a professional manner.

What do they like?

music, art, socialising, family, the outdoors, nature

How do they learn best?

This is a mystery to me. I’ve always had trouble teaching my dad anything!

I find myself always skipping ahead too fast and he always makes me back track and makes me explain repeatedly which is entirely understandable. He has had an upbringing with no technology whereas I have been bought up with computers as an important part of the curriculum.

So how will I teach my 50+ year olds to start up a blog? Very carefully! Explain each step fully . No extra useless information, dad can often get hung up on details that aren’t important.. “But its says I should download this?”, “Don’t worry dad its nothing!”. Also the information will look intimidating if there is too much. I will go through each step one at a time, commend them on completion of a step and assure them that they’re doing well, it won’t take long, its a simple process.

Special requirements?

Same as above, easy step by step instructions. Make it visually appealing, think of the things my audience enjoy like nature and music. How can I involve this kind of imagery in my tutorial?

Best ways to teach these skills online

Hmmmm… videos are usually very good as there are visual instructions as well as audio. It just means that they will have to keep pausing and rewinding if they miss anything.

Screen shots are very helpful as they will be able to see exactly how the page should look in front of them. I would really like to do a video/podcast where I could tell my audience the instruction then to press pause while they go off and do it. Unfortunately I don’t have the skills or tools to do this. I have enough understanding of illustrator to make something cohesive.

Here is another helpful article about designing for a target audience

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/dialogbox/targetaudience/

Watch this space anyway… tutorial coming soon.

Widgets and Social media

Today I have learnt a whole lot about social media and linking other accounts to my blog. I have now spread myself a little bit further into cyber space in the hopes that I can attain followers.

I already have accounts with facebook, twitter, youtube, wikispaces and obviously wordpress so I opted to create a few extra accounts that would be more relevant to my creative identity.

We had the option to create a Flickr account but as I am not much of a photographer I decided to be a Deviantart-ist (graceelizabethbaker.deviantart.com) instead. This works well for me as I love browsing the site for art. Now I can follow my favourite artists more closely and also create a following for myself.

Next I searched for Delicious (www.delicious.com/graceelizabethbaker). I had not heard of this site today. Basicly this is a place to store bookmarks (or favourite websites). This is very handy for me as I am currently storing names of websites all over the place or forgetting what that awesome website was that had all the information about such ‘n such. So here they will be from now on. I think it would be a good life plan to visit my bookmarks often to keep up with the world of art and design. Note to self: add the wecancreate site to delicious.

Another helpful social media site I learnt of today is Quora (www.quora.com/Grace-Baker). My initial understanding was that it would be a site where I can ask questions and find answers but once I signed up I found a much better use for it. Once the account is formed Quora asks for a description and a large list of topics come out. I searched anything I could think of that is art and design related. Then up on my screen like magic I have a feed of questions and answers all related to the topics I’ve just selected! so Not only can I ask questions, I can also view questions that others have asked that I never even thought to ask. Really relevant stuff (I have already added a link to my delicious account to a question about design blogs). I can also choose to answer questions if there is anything I specialise in. Got mail as soon as I signed up from one of the Quora reviewers and not one of those silly automated messages.. nice touch!

There are other places that the widgets section of wordpress admin has introduced to me. Gravatar is one. Signing up to this makes it possible to share a photo from one social media account across all of them without having to upload the same photo over and over again.

Meebo is similar to msn hotmail but it makes it easy to share websites with friend right then as you are chatting to them. Simply click on the page and drag it onto the meebo box where you were chatting.

Akismet is another widget. Akismet is used to protect users from spam.

Facebook is a less professional social network and more for friends and family. It allows you to put up photos, videos, link,s status updates, create events, find friends and so much more. Awesome for getting in contact with people you’ve lost touch with or are aliving a long way from (viewing photos and leaving messages can help bridge that gap).

Twitter I think is used to follow other people. I personally started up an account to follow WITT art. But now I can use it to get people to follow me.

Now my cyber arms are outstretched and its up to me to keep them active and hopefully start getting some traffic to my blog and a bit more of an online identity.

tata for now

Traditional tattoo style theme

Today in web media we looked into theme. I changed my theme a good few times to see if any would go with my proposed idea. We went through how to use photoshop to customise our own header and background. Useful info on dimensions was available  http://en.support.wordpress.com/themes/custom-header-image/.

So I’ve had a play and I finally have something up that is my design. I’ve gone the traditional tattoo style. It is a bit of a challenge to find an existing theme that will work with my ideas and then fitting the design to what is already up and can’t be changed. I plan to keep playing around because I’m not happy with what is up, its more of just a rough of what it could look like. Its fun to experiment with the possibilities though. For the background I used the no repeat option, centred it and and set to no scroll as I didn’t want the background to disappear as the page is scrolled down. Background colour was retrieved by using the ink dropper in photoshop, double clicking the colour and finding the code that indicates the exact colour.

The sketches that I scanned in need to be tidied also. Was thinking of having a bit of practice in illustrator and trace each image and see how they turn out.

We also added some links today. The blogroll down the side lists the entire classes blog links (very handy as I plan to annoy them and rack their brains). These links were added by going into admin mode, clicking add new and then add your heart out. To make sure the list of links came up we then went to the appearance drop down menu, click widgets and dragged the links button over to the sidebar (my theme did not have a ‘primary widget area’ for some reason but the sidebar worked just as well).

I had a quick peek at everyone’s blog and made a comment or two but now that I have documented today’s work I’m on my way to having a proper peek. Prepare to be stalked people!!! Mua haha ha

Reserch into the theme or “look” of my blog

This week we have to think about how we would like our blog to look.

I am going to use this as an opportunity to explore a part of design that I am interested in and that is Tattoo Art. I’m going to start by making a brainstorm of images and maybe even work on making a logo using a traditional tattoo font. The challenge I think will be to avoid looking tacky as tattoos are often seen as tacky. The trick will be to look simple and clean. Decide on a definate style of tattoo that I like and go with that. Incorperating too many styles will look messy and lose impact.

http://www.thecuteinstitute.ca/blog/tag/kawaii-tattoo

These are all quite cute.. could go for cupcakes rainbows and teddy bears but I do prefer a bit of edge.

http://media.photobucket.com/image/traditional%20tattoo/rachelkristin/traditionaltattoflash2.jpg

Taking a closer look at this I realised it embroidered! I very much like this style though. Keep it traditional I reckon.

http://m-weaver1013-dp.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html

Perfect font. And it just so happened to come from a design blog that is exploring the same traditional tattoo design. Is my idea too common? Id like to explore further anyway and try make it my own by adding my own design concept.