Solution: Build it yourself, for less than $100!

Let’s face it. Not everyone can afford to hire a professional web designer for $1,000 or more. In reality, not every website warrants such an investment. But there are hundreds of folks who would love to build a blog, family website, photography showcase, or a site for their small business.

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Despite having built a strong reputation for themselves in the industry, upper management realized that their website and marketing approach had grown stale, and felt it was time for a change. Due to my previous work and ongoing partnership with Senior Service Match, I was invited to participate in the redesign of Hearthstone’s website.

Initial Discovery Meeting

For our first meeting, company executives were flown in from around the country to share their input and valuable perspective on the goals for the redesign. It was clear that the staff and leadership of Hearthstone do not fit into the negative stereotypes of “nursing home” workers, but rather exude an upbeat confidence, high energy, and a genuine passion for fostering a high degree of independence for their residents, as well as a holistic approach to their health and general well-being. The tone of this first meeting was fun and upbeat.

Across the board, the leaders of Hearthstone made it clear that they were ready to shed the antiquated image of their current website (shown at right), in favor of a more modern, clean, and decidedly “not senior” look and feel.

Throughout the meeting, I took copious notes, carefully jotting down keywords, adjectives, and key phrases that would later inform the design phase. I asked specific questions about the unique abilities and strengths of Hearthstone versus her competitors, and was blown away by the level of passion with which these folks began to respond.

They told stories of individuals who had left the company, only to return a few months later, as they realized that this work was truly their life’s ambition. The depth of experience represented by the Hearthstone staff is a clear indication of their unique love for their work.

As a result of this line of conversation, we arrived at a new tagline for the company which was eagerly adopted on the spot. The new tagline, “Our Heart is in It.” has already made its way into other elements of the marketing plan, and will soon make its way into corporate training and new employee orientation materials.

Mood Board Development

Because the new design objectives represented such a dramatic departure from the current website, I proposed that we develop a series of “mood boards” to explore new colors, textures, and typography before diving into the actual site mockups. This step turned out to be critical to the success of the project, and I plan to incorporate it into all future design projects of this scale.

(Thanks to Amy Lamp at the venerable Forty Agency in Phoenix, AZ, for this inspiration!)

Mood Board v1.0

The first mood board suggested a very fresh and modern color palette, contemporary textures, and vibrant imagery that would clearly differentiate Hearthstone from her competition.

Since the individuals responsible for reviewing the mood boards were scattered all around the country, the mood boards were posted online, using a fabulous tool called GetSignOff.com. The initial feedback to the first mood board was positive, but a completely new set of adjectives now entered the equation. Turns out what they really wanted was not modern, contemporary, clean, or fresh. Rather, they now communicated that they wanted a look and feel that was “warm, home-like, classic, and transitional.”

A completely new mood board was created and posted for review, exploring this new design direction, along with specific colors and imagery that were now being requested. Deeper, warmer, colors, more traditional typography, and more classic photos and imagery were brought into this design.

Mood Board v2.0

At this stage, the client was still not happy. They really liked the “swoop” from the first mood board, and requested a third mood board consisting of a “blend” of warm, classic, and contemporary elements. Because we would be shooting custom photography for the site, we agreed to simplify the final mood board by dropping the photos and imagery from the mood board, moving forward with a simple color palette, on which the client happily signed off.

Color Palette v4.0

With the color palette finally approved, and new parameters for the design direction, I was eager to get started on the actual mockups for the site. Thankfully, we were crystal-clear on the content for the home page, as well as the action points we should feature. Three mockups were requested: the home page, an inside page, and then a sample landing page for each of the 37 “micro-sites” to be developed for the individual communities themselves, featuring content specific to each location.

Home Page Mockup

Inside Page Mockup

Microsite Page Mockup

These mockups represent a nice blend of warm colors, modern typography and layout, subtle gradients which add a “home-like” texture to the site, and simple, easy-to-understand calls to action. The layout is instantly intuitive, and the client feels it is perfectly suited to their target demographic, which is made up primarily of “baby boomer” women.

The client approved the mockups with only the most minor of revisions, thanks in large part to the ground covered during the mood board phase. Without that critical step, we would have no doubt made countless revisions to the site mockups, which is considerably more time-consuming.

Custom Photo and Video Shoot

In addition to the website redesign, we were also asked to shoot custom photography in the studio and on-location. To further leverage this time, we also shot video testimonials, which will be edited and used throughout the site. Paul and Marcus Cook, of Bellus Images in Houston, TX, shot both the still photography and the video testimonials, over just two days. The resulting images are stellar, and will definitely help to further distinguish Hearthstone.

The site designs are now being converted to a WordPress template, after which the new site content will be built. Stay tuned for the site launch and more details!

Hope you enjoyed this inside peek into my design process. If you’ve got any questions or feedback, feel free to post it in the comments below. I look forward to hearing what you think!

At TEDGlobal in London, Tim Brown talks about how design got small — and why it’s becoming big again. Design is moving beyond the sculptural object displayed in lifestyle magazines or on pedestals in museums of modern art. It’s returning to its roots, when design thinkers like Isambard Brunel created innovative breakthroughs.

It’s time to begin thinking of design as a process for problem-solving, rather than merely for the creation of products.

About gary vay•ner•chuk

Nobody has succeeded at utilizing social media to create a personal brand like Gary Vaynerchuk. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to promote his family’s local wine business, Gary rapidly adopted and leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine.

As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, doors opened to a book deal, several national TV appearances, and a flurry of speaking engagements around the world. Gary’s dual identity as both a business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.”

About the book…

This book is a 90-minute read, and weighs in at just 140 pages. The tone and pace of the book is not unlike listening to Gary speak, and it’s simply loaded with practical advice, step-by-step instructions, and real-world examples. In addition to a complete, 21-step outline for building your personal brand online, Gary even “threw in” about half a dozen phenomenal business ideas for anyone with the ambition to go for it!

Because this book primarily addresses folks who are relatively new to internet-based business and social media, there wasn’t a lot of new information in this book for me. But keep in mind, I’ve been creating web sites and utilizing social media for more than a decade. Gary’s book is simply a gold mine for newbies, and is the first book I can honestly say that I will recommend to anyone everyone who is considering moving their business into the online arena.

While I didn’t take away many new strategies from this book, there was still plenty of material that challenged me on a personal level. Gary’s “three simple rules” to which he attributes his success challenged my to take a fresh look at my own priorities:

Three rules:

1. Love your family.
2. Work superhard.
3. Live your passion.

“I measure success by how happy I am, not how big the business is or how much money I’ve made. And thanks to following those three rules, I’m 100% percent happy.”

Don’t believe him? Listen to him talk for 5 minutes and you’ll become convinced. Very few people share Gary’s level of passion for what they’re doing.

What does it mean to live your passion?

According to Gary, “it means that when you get up for work in the morning — every single morning — you are pumped because you get to talk about or work with or do the thing that most interests you in the world. You no longer live for vacations because you don’t need a break from what you’re doing — working, playing, and relaxing are one and the same. You don’t even pay attention to how many hours you’re working because to you, it’s not really work. You’re making money, but you’d do whatever it is you’re doing for free.”

When you start thinking about how to live your passion and create a livelihood from it, have the following conversation with yourself…

“Is     this     my ultimate passion?

“Yes.

“Okay. Am I good enough to be the best blogger about     this     in the world?

“Uh…”

If you can’t answer both of those questions with an emphatic, “Yes!” you are not going to win.

Summary of the book from Amazon.com…

Do you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love. In Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses.

Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed here, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand. By the end of this book, readers will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, Crush It! is the ultimate driver’s manual for modern business.

This was probably the best 11 bucks I’ve invested in my business, as I’m sure I’ll be recommending this book to all of my clients and friends. Click here to check out the book on Amazon.com [affiliate link].

When you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. What stood out to you? Post your thoughts in the comments field below. Looking forward to the dialog!

Over the past several years, I’ve tried just about every contact form plugin out there, including cforms and Contact Form 7. I was frustrated with the apparent trade-off between functionality and usability. It seemed that the more flexible the plugin, the more confusing the UI. This is where Gravity Forms simply blows away the competition! They’ve managed to create an incredibly flexible plugin, adding innovative features while still maintaining a drop-dead-simple AJAX interface that feels more like a desktop app than a web plugin.

In fact, this plugin is so good, you’ll wonder why it doesn’t just come standard in WordPress! (hint, hint)

Just a few of the innovative features…

1. Seamless Integration with WordPress 2.8+ – If you know how to use WordPress 2.8, you know how to use Gravity Forms. From the colors to the way it functions, Gravity Forms looks and feels like a part of WordPress.
2. Visually Create Forms with Our Sleek Editor – The visual form editor enables people with no HTML skills to create complex forms in minutes. Just add fields, choose field options, and drag them into the desired position.
3. Prevent Spam with Built-In reCAPTCHA Protection – The reCAPTCHA field will shield you from spam by preventing from submissions from automated scripts. You will also be helping in digitizing books for online use.
4. Allow Users to Automatically Create a Post – Let your users help with data entry. When added to a form, our Post Fields create a post when the form is submitted. Great for user submitted stories, job postings, directories, etc.
5. Manage Entries from the WordPress Admin Panel – Search, edit, delete and keep track of all entries from the Entries page in your WordPress administration panel.
6. Easily Export Form Entry Data to CSV Format – Need your entry data for other applications? Easily export all or part of your entries to CSV. Our export tool makes it a breeze to export only the fields that are needed.

Gravity Forms also sends automatic emails to users in response to a submission, enabling you to create professional and personalized messages.

If you’ve been searching for a simple way to create custom forms for your WordPress pages and posts, look no further than this plugin! Honestly, Gravity Forms is unrivaled when it comes to creating custom forms for WordPress.

Ready to learn more? Why not jump over to their site and take a look at the video tour?

But wait! There’s more…

Thanks to the good folks over at WooThemes, you can use the coupon code: WOOFORM20 when you purchase Gravity Forms, and they’ll give you a nice 20% discount. So what you waiting for? Go check it out already…

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT GRAVITY FORMS FOR YOURSELF!

During a recent conversation with one of my clients, he raised these concerns and asked me if I thought Twitter was just an “overhyped trend” that would soon disappear. “Why is it,” he asked, “that so many businesses have had poor results using Twitter to promote their products or services?”

In my opinion, the majority of these negative articles reveal either poor practices, a gross misunderstanding of the purpose of social media, or both. One may as well write an article about the fundamental flaws of a hammer when used to brush one’s hair. You’re either using the tool incorrectly, or for the wrong purpose!

Twitter Facilitates Meaningful Relationships

In short, Twitter was developed with the simple purpose of building relationships. It is NOT a platform from which to repeatedly broadcast your products or services, announce your latest sale, or drive traffic to your website.

[Please re-read the paragraph above.]

It IS, however, a simple and effective tool to facilitate legitimate, meaningful, two-way communication.

The businesses and individuals who understand this basic premise are experiencing tremendous success in building their brand, reputation, and interaction with their readers. Those who are truly using social media to build relationships with their audience are discovering its incredible—and relatively untapped—power to supercharge their businesses.

Oh, and those same folks rarely—if ever—mention their own products or services outside the context of a conversation. Instead, they ask questions, solicit input from their readers, respond to customer problems in real-time, and share only relevant information—often from other sources outside of their own offerings.

Thankfully, the good folks at Twitter have just released a brand new tool for businesses seeking to make the most of Twitter (and other social media) to connect with their audience. In addition to a “Twitter 101″ primer on the basics, this microsite also includes pages of case studies and best practices for businesses. A brief excerpt follows:

How to measure the value of Twitter

Before you set up measurement tools, focus on the quality of your engagement, and use your gut to check how things are going. How’s the feedback and interaction with your followers? Are you responding to most or your @messages? Are most tweets about you positive? Or if they started out largely negative, are they coming around? Are more people beginning to engage with you and mention your company?

Next, think about quantifying your experience. Although it can be tricky to add up the value of relationships, Twitter does lend itself to measurement in a few ways—especially if you’ve already defined what you hope will be different for your company in three months, six months or a year if you succeed on Twitter. Tactics like these can then help you assess your progress in meeting that goal:

• Keep a tally of questions answered, customer problems resolved and positive exchanges held on Twitter. Do the percentages change over time?
• When you offer deals via Twitter, use a unique coupon code so that you can tell how many people take you up on that Twitter-based promotion. If you have an online presence, you can also set up a landing page for a promotion, to track not only click-throughs but further behavior and conversions.
• Use third-party tools to figure out how much traffic your websites are receiving from Twitter.
• Track click-throughs on any link you post in a tweet. Some URL shortening services let you track click-throughs.

Check out the Twitter 101 for Business microsite for more information, helpful tips and resources, and inspiring case studies…

Visit the Twitter 101 for Business Site

Those now-famous words were first spoken by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, in the following context:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Or, as Chris Anderson puts it in his latest book, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business…

“Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive.”

Such is the premise of the compelling new book by Wired Magazine’s Editor In Chief, Chris Anderson. But tell that to the poor CIO who just shelled out six figures to buy another rack of servers. And what of the notion that “anybody can make money on the web?”

Today, the underlying technologies that power the Web are fast becoming too cheap to meter. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

Every year, like some sort of magic clockwork, massive banks of servers churn out more and more data for less and less, bringing the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume closer to zero.

Just last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage. (Just in case that wasn’t totally clear, that’s “unlimited” as in “infinite.”) So the market price of online storage, at least for email, has now fallen to zero. And the stunning thing is that nobody was surprised; many had assumed infinite free storage was already the case.

Virtually every product Google provides is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411. And yet, somehow they have created a $220 BILLION dollar global empire around their “free” products.

A new kind of free…

The idea that you can make money by giving something away is nothing new. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you’d buy another, or you’d get a product free only if you’d paid for another service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. “It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)”

A taxonomy of free

This new kind of free is forcing companies to adopt new business models, leveraging opportunities around the falling cost of doing business in a digital age. Chris identifies six broad categories:

1. “Freemium” – Web software, content, and services, free to users of the basic version, made possible by the more expensive, premium “pro” version of the site or software, usually with more features than the free version (think Flickr and the $25-a-year Flickr Pro).
2. Advertising – Content, services, software, and more, free to everyone, due to pay-per-pageview banners, pay-per-click text ads, pay-per-transaction “affiliate ads,” and even site sponsorships.
3. Cross-subsidies – Free products that entice you to pay for something else, one way or another. “It’s a free second-gen Wiii! But only if you buy the deluxe version of Rock Band.”
4. Zero marginal cost – Free items that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone, such as online music. Between digital reproduction and peer-to-peer distribution, the real cost of distributing music has truly hit bottom. Some artists give away their music online as a way of marketing concerts, merchandise, licensing, and other paid fare.
5. Labor exchange – Free web sites and services, if you rate stories on Digg, vote on Yahoo Answers, or solve a few CAPTCHA codes. Users knowingly (or not) create something of value, either improving the service itself or creating information that can be useful somewhere else.
6. Gift economy – Free, or “open source” software or user-generated content to everyone. From Freecycle to Wikipedia, we are discovering that money isn’t the only motivator.

The economics of abundance…

Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it’s obesity. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Enabled by the miracle of abundance, digital economics has turned traditional economics upside down.

But money and physical resources are no longer the only currency in the online world. “Attention” and “reputation” are now very real metrics for determining potential value. How many eyeballs are on your site? How many followers do you have on Twitter? What’s your PageRank? If you can consistently convert those metrics into cash, they become a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.

A new generational reality…

During the course of researching the material for his book, Chris shares that there were broadly two different camps of skeptics: those over the age of thirty and those below. The older critics, who had grown up with the 20th-century version of free, were suspicious: Surely “free” is nothing of the sort—we all pay sooner or later. Not only is it nothing new, but it’s the oldest marketing gimmick in the book. When you hear “free,” reach for your wallet!

But younger critics had a completely different response: “Duh!” This is the Google Generation, and they’ve grown up online, simply assuming that everything digital is free. As this generation comes of age, they will discover entirely new ways to convert zero-cost technologies into meaningful ventures, transforming the world in the process.

So what does it all mean?

There is both good news and bad to be found in these new realities. First of all, the cost of doing business online is dropping by the day. Last month, I provided streaming video tutorials to more than 3,000 visitors to my WordPress tutorial video site. All that bandwidth cost me just $2.58, thanks to Amazon’s S3 distributed storage network. The cost of delivering HD-quality streaming video to my clients has effectively become a no-brainer.

However, the expectations of readers are changing just as quickly as the falling costs. Because the average internet user comprehends the zero-cost margins involved in the delivery of this content, they expect to read content and even receive online services for free. The challenge now is to provide relevant, quality content and services online, while exploring — and possibly creating — new models for making money online.

What do you think?

If Chris Anderson (and many others) are correct, and $0.00 is really the future of online business, what does that say to you? How will your own business model need to adapt to leverage this new reality?

Do you offer any goods or services for free? If so, are they merely “bait and switch” techniques of yesterday, or are you genuinely providing value to your clients and customers? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic! Weigh in below…

Visually, 2.8 looks and feels a lot like 2.7, with just minor tweaks here and there. But once you dig in, you’ll begin to notice more changes.

Major changes and rewrites under the hood to the styles and scripting have made 2.8 noticeably faster. You should notice significantly better response times while navigating the admin area.

The built-in plugin updater has been such a success, they’ve now added the same functionality to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. There is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with sidebar widgets before, this release should offer great relief. The widgets interface has been completely redesigned, enabling you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. (Yeah!)

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. If you have a wide monitor, you can choose to display one, two, three, or four columns of widgets in your dashboard, instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

Check out the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the WordPress Codex. The list is exhausting!

Overall, you should be able to upgrade to version 2.8 without major disruptions to your current theme, but you’ll enjoy a much faster, and even more flexible interface than ever before. Keep up the great work, WordPress!

http://tinyurl.com/5u75pe

So when Gary offers his take on “how to monetize your blog”, he knows what he’s talking about. Check out this video, complete with a live, unscripted call to a would-be sponsor for his site. Take notes.