Tobias Buckell did it. Daring Fireball does it. There’s a growing trend of turning off commenting on internet websites, and at the moment, I have comments turned off here while I tinker with the site. Matt Gemmell makes the case for why this is a good idea.
Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category
New Design Live (sorta)
This is the first design I did not mock up in Photoshop first–I designed it in the browser. I’ve yet to get around to looking at it in older IE browsers, sorry. I reserve the right to change things in the future, but this should pretty much be the basic stuff. There’s a lot of responsive design and CSS3 work into this one, so it should look good on a mobile device and iPad.
Comments are currently removed. I’m still trying decide if I want to have them at all on the new site. You can point feedback at me on Twitter or Facebook though!
A “humanistic” approach to social media marketing
This past weekend, I attended MileHiCon 43. I had a really good time–I hadn’t attended in several years due to attending World Fantasy instead. It’s a very small science fiction convention by comparison to World Fantasy, but full of fun, dedicated fans.
I was on two panels, both of which I think went relatively well. The first was on New Marketing for Writers–specifically regarding social networking. I’ll talk more about that in a minute. The second panel was on “Urban, Suburban, and Rural Fantasy.” I had no idea what the hell we were talking about (as typically used, the term ‘urban fantasy’ has little to do with urban settings) and mostly just cracked wise about vampires and werewolves “doin’ it.” Also, I mocked Kansas a bunch, because that’s pretty much what I do when I’m at a loss for anything else to say. I’m told it went over fairly well, though. Mario Acevedo is one funny guy.
During the marketing panel, I realized that for a while now, I’ve been striving to develop my own notions of “ethical” internet marketing for writers, although I’m not certain I’ve ever tried to say as such. This hit men when one of the other panelists talked about using a Twitter bot to identify and automatically follow potential fans, which then de-followed anyone who didn’t follow back in three days. I was repulsed by this idea, although I don’t think I articulated clearly why I think that it’s wrong.
I think my entire approach to social media marketing can be summed up in two bullet points. They are:
- be a real human being, not a marketbot spewing out demands to buy your stuff
- don’t be a jerk (unless you’re a funny jerk).
Social networking in particular, and the whole internet to a lesser extent, is about connecting with other human beings. It is not your low cost broadcast medium for advertising your book. I do advocate that authors and creatives share their passion for their work via the medium, but not to the exclusion of everything else. Engage with other human beings. Social networking is not a broadcast medium. Twitter actually has a surprising number of examples of marketing people who get this, and engage with their clients/customers/readers as human beings, rather than as walking bags of money to be hit with the twitstick.
The reason I can’t support the idea of using a bot to do your following and unfollowing is it’s taking a cold, methodical approach to the very human work of initiating social interactions. It’s like trying to make friends with a junk mailer sent around town. It’s treating those you follow as potential money bags, not as people with thoughts and feelings and interesting opinions. They are targets. Potential “subscribers,” not conversational partners.
I don’t think there is strong evidence that this tactic of being a carnival barker on social media even works. Anecdotally, I think people spot these broadcasters early on and drop them unless they _really_ like their products in the first place.
The fundamental marketing strategies are: be loud, or be clever. And online, I find that clever wins out–especially with readers. Novelty accounts like ShitMyDadSays and DrunkHulk demonstrate this with their huge followings. The local carpet company posting nothing but sales notices doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot of followers and probably won’t.
My approach may not squeeze every last potential dime out of the marketplace, but I think there are some things more important than making money– being a decent person, for one. And I don’t care if it means I never get rich, because I’d rather be seen as decent than a wealthy jerk willing to do anything to make a buck. Hopefully there are authors who are more inclined to hire a web designer who advocates this moderate approach to online shilling. If you’re looking for someone who thinks there is no marketing technique too low, no method too inhumane in the pursuit of gaining readers, then I’m probably not your guy. I can live with that.
On Depth vs Diversification and Commitmentphobia
At any given moment, your business/career is at a crossroads. There’s one really big decision that everyone must consider at some point.
Is it better to specialize further,deepening your market or niche commitments, or is it better to diversify your interests, keeping your eggs in multiple baskets. On the one hand, you develop your skills further and you can achieve a mastery of sorts. On the other hand, you protect yourself against crashes. Say, for instance, that you have made it a specialty in developing real estate websites. Then, in 2008, the real estate market crashes. There’s widespread agreement that you’re one of the best at what you do—but the need has dramatically dropped off. You can be very good at something that nobody needs done.
It’s that fear that leads to a certain kind of commitmentphobia, where one is unwilling or unable to specialize in one area only. Why only write copy when you could also work on a novel? Why only build websites for real estate agents when you could learn to develop iOS and mobile applications? If one fails, then perhaps the other will succeed.
Or to put it in writer terms, why spend months and months polishing a single short story when you could write a dozen and see which one sticks to the wall?
Specialists have an opportunity to rise to the top of a field or craft. Spending six months on that short story may make it more likely that it will win awards. But you’re less insulated against failing. If your field becomes obsolete, or the story fails to sell, you’re in more trouble than if you diversified your efforts. You may not climb to the top when you diversify, but you’ll be insulated against failure from any one individual project or market. So which is it to be? I think nearly everyone makes this crucial decision in some aspect of their life.
There’s no one true answer to this question. Both options are valid. That’s part of what makes the decision so hard to make. The worst choice you can make is not to choose—to waffle back and forth.
Our time is sadly finite. Every minute we spend is a minute we never get back. I wonder how differently we would treat ourselves and each other if we were constantly aware of it? I think we would be forced to realize the selfishness and the generosity of our actions more. I don’t think of it this way, but the hour or so I’ve been drafting this blog post is time I have gifted to you, in the hopes that my conundrum and my perspective on it provides some measure of insight to yours. Our time is a gift that can be given freely, or horded for ourselves.
There’s another conundrum with which we all have to struggle.
Thinking Ahead to the Future of Clockpunk Studios
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what my options are for growing my business. I quite enjoy running a web design and development company with a staff of one, but it behooves me to think about what the future will hold, and if I want to achieve certain goals in life, I will have to grow as a business. The way I figure it, I can grow via the following methods:
- hire regular subcontractors to assist with projects, and take on more projects.
- raise my rates
- increase the number of billable hours I do in a day
- hire full time staff
- find passive income streams
Hiring regular subcontractors is tricky. You want reliable and dependable freelancers who are skilled, but don’t cost so much that you might as well do the work yourself. It’s difficult to find those people, but if you are one of those people, please contact me. I’m very interested in hearing from you.
Raising your rates is a risky game of chicken, and you never know when you might price yourself out of your niche. I’m definitely pushing the upper boundary of my main author website niche. Publishers are happy with the costs, but new, individual authors find my services on the pricy side. I don’t want to leave them behind entirely if I can help it. They’ve been the core of my business since I started part-time a few years before I founded Clockpunk Studios.
Increasing the number of billable hours is also a tricky game to play. The more hours I’m focusing on income, the less time I’m spending working on maintaining my skill set and looking for new work. Like everything in small business, it’s a balancing act. How much time does one spend on each part? I’m fairly happy with the number of hours I work right now, so I’d like to avoid this growth method if I can.
Hiring full time staff is something I’d love to do in the long run, but right now, that’s not going to happen. I’m thinking of it as a five year goal. I need to conquer a lot more territory to make this possible, and doing so will involve restructuring the basis of my business (incorporating, for one).
Passive income streams are the holy grail of the infotech-based small business. The idea here being you do some upfront work and develop a product which pays dividends over time without much effort. I’ve played around with stock photography, and the best that’s managed to do is help defray my costs of buying stock art for my projects. I’m also toying with developing and selling WordPress themes on popular theme marketplaces, but it’s starting to look a little over-saturated out there.
Then there’s the whole online-game project, but it’s a huge gamble and difficult to justify the large number of hours of development time before it stands a chance of returning on the investment.
The truth is, the future is probably a combination of the above. I’ve recently started outsourcing some small tasks here and there where appropriate, and I’ve recently bumped up my weekly hours quota. And I’m still investigating the idea of developing WordPress themes for sale.
Do you have any thoughts or suggestions? Please feel free to share them in the comments!
Delaying a Project and a Good Review
My “pays the rent” freelance project load is such that I’m going to have to hold off on my “pipe dreams of the video game industry” project right now. I’m going to shoot to start it up in November now (although I’ll be squeezing reading in anywhere I can). It’s embarrassing to have made that post on Monday and by Wednesday have to change my schedule and plans, but as always, my first priority is paying the rent. I always seem to think there’s more time in the day than there really is. I should probably be working more on my time management skills (which really aren’t bad) before I should be working on my game writing skills. Anyway, more to the point, I’m not seeing a lot of work coming down the pipe right now, so I need to hustle some up. If you’ve been thinking about hiring me to build a website, now’s a good time.
In writing-related news, my story in Interzone issue 224 (on newsstands and in bookstores now!), “Godfalls’s Chemsong,” received a very nice review from John DeNardo over at SF Signal. I’ll take 4 out of 5 stars any day. The story is an experiment of mine to create bizzare alien biology and society using mostly real Earth biology traits that exist in real creatures. I only improvised a little bit, and I’m pleased with the results. I really should write more stories like that, but they’re a bear to come up with. But I guess if it were easy, everybody would be doing it.
Two New SF/F Client Projects Live
Two projects have gone live to the public this week. Let’s break them down shall we?
Rocket Kapre
Rocket Kapre is a website dedicated to fantastic Filipino fiction. I was approached by the client Paolo Chikiamco a couple of months ago with a tight timeline. We started with a pre-built theme and worked our way from there, customizing as necessary (and customize we did). I modified the slider and many other layout aspects significantly. I also rolled out quite a bit of custom template work using the Flutter CMS tool. Any place where I wanted to add new content areas to be filled out, custom images, etc, I used Flutter to do that. We have custom write panels for the Books and the Authors entries for example. I learned a lot about building a theme setting page by working with this theme as well. Also, I really became a fan of the AZIndex plugin based on the work on this site, and have used it twice since on other sites. I owe those guys a donation.
Fantasy Magazine
Recently, I was brought on board as the regular web guy to implement a bunch of changes over at Fantasy. I look forward to working with editor Cat Rambo on improving things throughout the year. Our immediate goal was to redesign the existing theme in a way that uncluttered the home page considerably and added room for some advertising. I developed the featured content slider and I built on the tabbed interface from the last site design by adding some accordion work as well. Anywhere I could open up content to the editors, I did so using custom page calls and the like. For instance, the masthead information on the About tab is a page that can be edited and modified on the back end now. In general, I did a lot of code base cleaning up for my own understanding. There are a couple of custom plugins at work on the site thanks to Matt Kressel that proved very useful. Coming up will be a much more complex user system allowing user profiles with all kinds of fun custom fields. I just need to get the box upgraded to PHP 5 for that work. Some cool features coming down the pipe there.
So those are just a couple of the projects I’ve been putting the finishing touches on lately. I’ve mostly finished up at least one other site that won’t launch for quite a while. And I’ve got a couple new ones to get to work on, and some subcontracting work lining up as well.
Clockpunk Studios is doing pretty good these days! Turns out that mastering the WordPress template system has been a good career move.
Case Study: The Five Worlds Website
…the Academy was founded to detail the story of how Fremont’s Children directed the outcome of the Making War. This is the incredible and unlikely story of how a brother and a sister, and other young heroes, created the balanced forces that drive us today. Although this is a tale of our past, it is still a story in the making. We uncover new bits of information regularly. We invite you to drop in from time to time to see it.
Brenda Cooper, co-author of Harlequin’s Moon with Larry Niven, contacted me a couple of months back, interested in how I might help publicize the release of the third book in her series, The Wings of Creation. I jumped at the chance to get involved.
The first thing I did was tackle the books. In this series, Brenda has built a strong cast of young characters and an interesting setting that is both recognizable and alien at the same time. They’re good “all ages” science fiction, and I really enjoyed them.
From reading the books, I suggested developing a website for the series as if the site was the digital presence of an actual institution in the world. The website would provide samples of the books for reading, and an encyclopedia of information–a kind of reader’s guide, if you will.
The Academy of New World Historians is the organization responsible for assembling the historical texts that make up Brenda’s series. Each book opens with excerpts of interviews conducted by these historians. The goal of the website is to share their publications with the rest of the Five Worlds.
The site is built on a WordPress framework, using a custom theme. It’s fairly straightforward in design and construction to reflect a culture that values simplicity and usability in interfaces. The design uses some jQuery effects here and there for some pizazz–I was really interested in trying out the “expanded navigation” method that I’ve implemented on the home page. You can hover over the section titles and see additional information for the section, such as links to specific topics.
Overall, Brenda has been a joy to work with. I hope you will all check out the site and her books. They’re good stuff, and I would recommend them even if Brenda were not a client.
Why WordPress is the Perfect Platform For Author Sites
I get a lot of requests for help with WordPress lately (which I am happy to answer), and I’m making a good chunk of my money through my knowledge of the content management system. I thought today I’d give you some background on why I’ve made WordPress my go-to platform when designing author websites.
Broad Support and User Base
WordPress has one of the largest user bases of any content management system. Why is this a good thing? Well, it means that there’s a lot of community support. It means that if there’s a feature you want, there’s a good chance someone has already developed it as a plug-in (there are tens of thousands of plug-ins for WordPress). If you run into a bug or other problem, there’s a good chance that you can find someone else who has already experienced this problem with a Google Search. This all translates into fewer hours and more features for your author website. You get more for less.
What this also means is that rather than having to go out and buy expensive books to learn how to design WordPress sites, I have been able to learn everything I know from reading online. So I have less up-front investment (although still quite a bit of investment in mastering parts of it). Those savings get passed on to clients, ultimately.
Great Back-end Usability
The back-end of a site is the part that only the site author sees. It’s where you go to manage your content, write new blog posts, and so on. Because your readers never see this part of your software, you might be tempted to be satisfied with any old thing–that is, if you’re already a computer expert, and don’t have any trouble learning new interfaces. Not all interfaces are created equal. Now, WordPress hasn’t always had a nice, user-friendly back-end, but these days, it’s quite simple and beautiful. I enjoy spending time inside of the WordPress software, configuring things, and a good portion of my enjoyment is due to that.
And chances are, you’ve already used WordPress. A lot of authors have already used sites like WordPress.com to set up blogs in the past. So this means you spend less time learning an interface, and more time working on your writing.
Power Theme System
WordPress allows you to configure and lay out your site any way you want, and it does it through a straightforward theme engine with well documented template tags. Through a combination of plugins, theme writing, HTML, CSS, and judicious JavaScript, there hasn’t been a design concept I have come across that can’t be implemented in some fashion with the system. And using a good blank theme as a starting base, you can have a theme up and running from an HTML prototype very quickly. You dream it up, and I build it. It’s as easy as that.
A CMS, Not Just a Blog
Some people make the mistake of thinking that WordPress is just for blogs. That’s only a small part of what WordPress can do these days. With a few basic plugins, you can build just about any kind of Content Management System feature you might want. And most importantly to authors, it gives you a user-friendly way of managing and editing that content. Rather than having to spend money down the road paying your webmaster to update your site, you can do it yourself through the back-end. It’s a win-win for you and your webmaster.
Conclusion
So those are just a few of the reasons I use WordPress. I was very hesitant to adopt it early on because I had read a lot of negatives, but each one of those negatives has been addressed by the development team. Eventually, it made less sense to stick with an old warhorse like Movable Type and to move on and work with the younger, more dynamic WordPress. Since I made the move, I haven’t looked back.
If you are an author, publisher, or small business looking for a site built on WordPress, don’t hesitate to contact me via Clockpunk Studios, my design company. I am available to take new work on starting in early September. I have a wide range of prices I can offer you, to fit many budgets. We can build your dream site, or we can get you started with something basic at your own domain very quickly, and add to that later. So don’t assume you can’t afford it. You might be surprised how cheaply you can get up and running with your own WordPress-backed site.
Don’t Damage Your Brand as a Marketing Twhore
Twitter is fast becoming a pimple on the backside of my social networking life. It’s always been an odd thing, under attack by spammers of the traditional sort as well as nontraditional. I block social media experts, SEO experts, and porn stars on a daily basis. They don’t care what I have to say, they just want to sell me stuff. Twitter’s a great way to share things, but straight-up product pitching has been really getting on my nerves.
But in the past month, I’ve noticed an even more unsettling trend on Twitter. I am not going to be polite about how I describe this. I’m calling this twhoring. A lot of other activity on twitter has been assigned this term, but this is a better subject for that descriptor.
What is Twhoring and Twimping?
Twhoring is happily advertising/spamming product names as hash tags to your entire followers list for the off-chance that you might win some piece of tech. Twhoring ranks lower than actually advertising or prostitution because advertisers and prostitutes actually get paid for what they do. Twhores tweet away with a slim chance of getting anything for their publicity efforts.
The same sort of people who will complain about ads on a website or on a TV show seem to lose their senses when presented with an easy opportunity to “win” a Apple product. You might think you’re clever and start tagging the hashtag to every one of your tweets. This is what the twimps like Boxyspace and Moonballz want you to do. Strut their stuff, spread their branding far and wide. Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll give you a snack cake. A Twinkie perhaps?
It doesn’t help that I loathe both companies involved in twimping out their products with twhores. “Build your own website” companies generally offer shoddy products and compete with professional designer/developers such as myself. No drag and drop system is going to build you a better website than someone who has done it for years. And if it does, then you’re probably a designer yourself and you didn’t need their software anyway. But that’s beside the point.
You may think that tagging your posts once and a while doesn’t do any harm, but when everyone on Twitter is doing it, it becomes old real quick. There for a while this week, I’d say 30% of the tweets I saw had MoonBallz attached to it. It’s like a twitterly-transmitted disease. It spreads rapidly, and it makes you ooze marketing pus.
Disinfect yourself, my friends. Stop being a twhore and start holding out for something of real value, at the very least. This isn’t a contest you’re participating in, it’s a unnatural viral marketing campaign that makes the participants look gullible.
Too many people I respect have fallen prey to this. You are giving it away, folks. Value your brand. It’s worth more than a laptop.
