Business Blogging Pros

Candy Fun News Episode II

It's a little long (over three minutes) but the footage of our Official Taste-Tester is worth it:

Joanna O'Neal

Business Blogging pros welcomes one of our newest clients, Joanna O'Neal. This is Joanna's personal blog, chronicling her experiences as she settles in to a new community and a new life. This is the first blog I've built using Typepad's new Journal theme. Journal has some oddities and inconsistencies but he managed to overcome them.

Memorial Day, 2009

No, nothing has happened to my son. 

This is Spc Colin Barnhart, a fire team leader in the 1-158th Infantry, Arizona Army National Guard. 

In 2006 his unit deployed to Afghanistan. Colin was not yet deployable at the time. While Mom and Dad were grateful, it was hard on my son to see his buddies leave without him. 

In March, 2008 the 1-158th returned home,  All but two of them:

Staff Sgt Charles Browning
Pfc Mykel Miller

Today is a day of mixed emotions. While I am proudly wearing my "My son defends freedom in the Army Infantry" t-shirt, my thoughts and prayers are also with Browning, MIller, and their families.

Thank you for indulging me on this Memorial Day 2009.

Change Catalyst Group

Business Blogging Pros welcomes Jean Lasee and Change Catalyst Group as one of our newest clients. 

The Change Catalyst Group accelerates the process of moving organizations through the change they face, with better results and more positive outcomes. In other words, organizations accomplish significantly more with their help than on their own

Ray Meurer, the Drive Time Millionaire

Business Blogging Pros welcomes Ray Meurer as one of our newest clients. If I were going to get into MLM it would be with this guy. He understands it. He understands why most people fail and why some succeed. Working with Ray has been a lot of fun. By that I mean that I like to 'teach people to fish' rather than 'fish for them'. I taught Ray to fish, teaching him how to modify and arrange his sidebar content, modify the colors of his design, etc. Before I knew it, Ray was using what he had learned to make hi own changes and updates. What go go, Ray!

Arizona Mortgage Experts

Business Blogging Pros welcomes Gary Lau and Western American Mortgage Company as one of our newest clients. With the changing real estate and mortgage market here in Arizona, Gary decided use a blog to help keep people informed and up-to-date on the latest news and conditions.

Why I DIslike Wordpress.com, Reason #46

The Navigation Bar

OK, first some background: I build blogs for small business owners.  What happens when your blog is also your website? (a good example is here)  You need some extra pages: Perhaps one to describe your services, one for your public speaking schedule, another for your press releases, etc. Maybe even one for your online store.

The logical way to provide visibility and access to these pages is via a horizontal nav bar, typically positioned just below your banner or header. Many (but not all) Wordpress.com themes support a nav bar.

The Wordpress.com nav bar has two serious deficiencies:

1. If it's not a page, I can't put it on the nav bar. I may want to have a link to something on another site (such as my website, an online ordering page, another blog for my podcasts) up there on my nav bar.  Can't do it with a Wordpress.com blog.
2. I'm stuck with my page titles as navigation items.  My page may be titled "Explore our exceptional, personalized services" but I probably want something shorter like "Services" on the nav bar so it doesn't take up so much space.  Again, I can't do it with a Wordpress.com blog.

Typepad Gets It Right

Typepad, on the other hand, lets you do what you want.  

Want a nav bar item pointing to something offsite?  No Problem.  

Want to use something other than the page's actual title?  No Problem.  

Want to use a special post category as a navigation item?  No Problem.

Want to point to another blog containing your podcasts or videos? No Problem.

This is the way it should be: empower the user. Yes, there is a little more copy-and-paste involved, but since Typepad introduced this functionality I've taught dozens of business owners how to add pages to their site.  And They Love It.  They love the fact that they can do it themselves without relying upon a webmaster who may later hold them hostage. (I'm working with a client for whom their ex-webmaster disappeared with the only copy of their website passwords.)

Understand that I use both Typepad and Wordpress.  When I have a new client, I spend time with them understanding what they want to do now, as well as what they may want to do in 2-3 years.  Then I pick the best platform for the circumstances.  Typepad's implementation of the navigation bar is one of the reasons the client usually ends up on Typepad.

Veggie Teens Cookbook

Business Blogging Pros welcomes Elyse May as one of our newest clients. Imagine you are a teenager and have decided to become vegetarian. How to you explain it to your meat-loving parents? Veggie Teens is not just a cookbook. Elyse wrote it to help teens convince their parents to let them try becoming a vegetarian. Elyse wrote this book while in Junior High as a school project. Her dad is a chef and her mom is a doctor so a vegetarian cookbook seemed like the perfect idea to her. From the moment she started, she knew this would be more than a school project because there had to be thousands of teenagers out there just like her.

Chappie

Business Blogging Pros welcomes Ann Eiland as one of our newest clients.

Anne's father was an Army Combat Chaplain in World War II, serving throughout the European theatre.  

In Anne's words,

I was an adult when my father handed me a well-worn, black notebook that had been tucked in among his numerous books and asked me if I wanted to read it.

I was amazed. It was a diary that he had apparently kept during his years in combat - a document that I had not know existed. As I began to skim through the entries, I discovered that he had been in almost every major battle with the Germans in North Africa and Europe. However, it was not just dates and places. Instead, he had noted details, included descriptions, and inserted his own opinions about the various events, places, and people. 

It read more like a story than a diary, and it was unique because it had been written as these events were occurring around him, not written from memories of the past. Once I was able to convince him to let me turn his diary into a manuscript, he and I began my work, and we had three wonderful years before his death to complete the task. Chappie World War II Diary of a Combat Chaplain is the result of that effort. It is the account of an ordinary man’s response to extraordinary events going on around him.

Anne worked with her father prodding his memory in order to flesh out the cryptic notes in the diary and the result is one of the most compelling stories I have ever read. This wa a blog that I wanted to build. The banner is comprised of some of her father's actual photos (just to the left of the third photo from the left, you can just see her father delivering a Sunday sermon). The background is one of her father's actual WWII combat maps which she graciously loaned to me for scanning.

Dry Cleaning Zen

We've built several blogs for Steven Phillips and Z Cleaners over the past couple of years. This time we decided to re-purpose his Dry Cleaning Zen blog. 

We designed the banner a couple of years ago for a narrower single-column template and as a result we modified it to fit the new wider Typepad templates. We also added a horizontal navigation menu and links to badges specific to various levels of service he offers.

One of the things that makes Type such a pleasure to work with is that everything you see here was done without modifying templates.  Upload some graphics, add some stylesheet overrides and presto - a professional-looking blog.

Why I Avoid Typepad's Advanced Templates

I just got off the phone with a woman who has a Typepad blog and needs a couple of things added to her sidebar.  What's the big deal, you ask?

The big deal is that whoever originally created her blog used Typepad's Advanced Templates.  There is nothing wrong with Typepad's advanced templates per se.  They work wonderfully.  They provide the designer with complete freedom to do anything.

The problem is that when you go to Advanced Templates you give up all control over your sidebar content. In this case, she wanted to add a 'Follow Me On Twitter' badge to the sidebar.  If you've switched your blog to advanced templates then you must modify the HTML in the actual sidebar template module - not something your average non-geeky business owner can do.

My business philosophy is to empower my clients, not hold them hostage.  I want my clients to be able to maintain as much of their own blog as possible.  While I offer to maintain clients' blog for a nominal monthly charge and make these kinds of changes for them, I don't want them to be forced into that.  

When my client wants something done that requires advanced templates I always tell them what the cost will be in terms of the flexibility they will be giving up.  Invariably they make the right choice.

Frankly, setting up a client's Typepad blog in Advanced Templates without a compelling reason is IMHO professional malpractice.  It is not operating with the best interest of your client in mind.

Perspective Leadership Development

Business Blogging Pros welcomes our newsest client, Pam Krulitz and Perspective Leadership Development.

Her blog is intended for all of those people who started out life and careers as scientists, engineers and technologists and who now find themselves in positions of managing or leading people—perhaps a small team, or perhaps a company. 

Her blog is a place of learning, sharing and exploring together what leadership is, why it is important, and what it takes to develop as a leader, particularly for those who started out in a technical discipline.