On a later date, I had the camera with me, and thus we have a photo of an adult Praying Mantis on my glasses.

If I'd been carrying a camera, on a certain day some years back, I'd now be showing you a really cool photo of baby Praying Mantis' hatching out of their eggs. I saw them hatching on the side of a fence when I sidled up to see why a crowd of people had gathered there. I grabbed my phone out of my backpack, joined the crowd, and took as many shots as I could.

Alas, the photos were not a success. They lacked contrast and detail and simply didn't do justice to this little miracle of life. They turned out too poorly to share with anyone.

They say that the best camera is the one you have with you. My old flipphone wasn't up to the task. That was when I decided that I always needed to have some sort of camera with me.

When I'm planning to take pictures I bring my Canon 40D. It'd a nice dSLR that takes up a lot of space and weight in the backpack. It's just not practical to carry it with me at all times. So the next time I was out at Best Buy I picked up a little Canon SD1000. It's about the size of a pack of cards and takes pretty decent pictures for a small point and shoot. It also shoots passable video, though that can really eat up the battery.

Camera's aren't just for special moments

While having a camera is handy for special once in a lifetime moments, it is also useful for every day shots, and for building up an archive of images you might use in the future. If you have a website or blog on which you share information about your business or hobby there are probably times you wish you had a shot of your office, factory, craft project or something you've worked on that would help illustrate the story. If you carry a camera and take pictures on a regular basis you'll build up a collection that you can draw from in the future.

When I worked at Case Western Reserve University I took a lot of pictures on campus. As part of my job I took photos of special events, visiting VIP's and other things. I also took photos of buildings, students, robots, foliage, food, etc. just in case I could use them later. As time went on I built up quite an archive. This was handy because at a large university people need photos for Websites, posters, publications and all sorts of things. They would often contact our office to see if we had a picture of X they could use for project Y. We had a lot of images archived, and it could take time to figure out where the photo of what was. But as my collection grew I found that I could often direct people to my archive of pictures on Flickr so they could look for what they needed themselves. This saved time for all involved.

Over the years I've just made it a habit to take pictures of anything that might be useful later. I used a photo I took of my dinner later on a site about etiquette. Photos from my trip to the Galapagos came in handy for a site about Darwin. Having these photos on hand is simply handy.

So I tell people to carry a camera and shoot a lot of pictures now, you never know when you might be able to use them later. Not every photo will be usable, but the more you shoot, the better you get.

Nein, I'm not going to write about foreign languages today, I'll save that for a future post. What I'd like to discuss is using words that make sense to our readers. I might also suggest that we should string these words together in the most comprehendible manner possible—but I have a penchant for compound sentences—so I'm not sure how far that will get me.

When we write copy for our websites, brochures, advertisements, news releases, short stories and so on, we're trying to convey a specific message to our audience. If I'm selling website development (imagine that) then I want you to know that our team has the creative, marketing and technical skills you need to produce a site that will serve your goals and the expectations of your customers and prospects. I need to give you the information that will help you make an informed buying decision. And I need to deliver that information in a format you can clearly understand.

Whether we're promoting communications services, complex medical devices or toy robots, we need to speak in the same language as our ideal reader. To do so we need to pay attention to the types of words and phrases we use.

Jargon

"Here at the Behemoth Corporation we never phone it in. Instead we utilize proven class 12 practices to leverage your capabilities with our core competencies to maximize your growth potential in your phenomeniche."

Huh? What exactly does the Behemoth Corporation do? Are they business consultants? Do they focus on human resources? Marketing? Operations? Will they help you convert more sales leads, or better manage the inventory in your warehouse?

If you are a prospective customer, you have a specific agenda. You are looking for a company that will help you with a specific problem or project. If their home page uses ambiguous jargon instead of clearly stating that they provide inventory control solutions, customer service software or whatever it is you need, you'll leave the site before you ever find out what they really offer.

They've lost your business. They may be very good at what they do, but they've lost the opportunity to serve you because they don't know how to talk to you.

I made up the sentence about Behemoth, but the example is not atypical. I found the following phrases on real sites.

• leveraging deep industry knowledge across 12 vertical industries
• channel the forces of work by leveraging our future of work business assessment model and let us help you create an actionable transformation program.
• specific application of the design elements for a generative or quantum organization and facilitate effective execution of breakthrough projects for unprecedented results

Jargon is rampant on the Web, but we don't have to perpetuate the problem. Let's set a new paradigm for communication by using words that actually explain what we're trying to say. Being specific helps our readers to understand us AND it helps them find us via search.

Industry or topic specific terminology

When we're working with our peers, be it in business or other activities, we often use words specific to those realms. Here at designRoom, Jennifer and Chad sometimes have to ensure that they've properly configured traps and bleeds. In my past I've inserted gudgeons into pintles and had need to ease a traveller.

Who knew the design business was so violent? Was Heidi manufacturing something? If so why were anxious tourists involved?

You have no need to ask these questions if you are familiar with these terms in their context. But most readers will require an explanation.

In the realm of print, a "trap" is where 2 colors overlap slightly so that there is no gap between them. If you were printing a yellow star against a blue background you would want the blue to just barely go over the edge of the yellow so there wouldn't be a white line. If you wanted the blue background to go all the way to the edge of the paper you would set it to "bleed." This means the ink is printed past the borders of the printed document (it bleeds off the edge) so that when the final piece is trimmed there is no white border showing.

Small sailboats often have detachable rudders. These rudders have 2 or more "pintles" (thick metal pins) that gan be inserted into hollow metal tubes ("gudgeons") on the back of the boat. This arrangement works rather like a door hinge so that the rudder can turn to steer the boat. A traveler is a track upon which a block and tackle (set of pulleys) is attached in such a way so that their positioning can be moved. This is like track lighting which allows you to adjust the position of the lights. On a boat the main sheet (the rope that adjusts the main sail) often runs through a traveller so that we can change the position depending on the wind conditions.

Sometimes, when writing to people in our industry, we need to use specific terms for clarity. But these terms won't be clear if we have to explain them as I just did. If I'm selling pintles to rudder manufacturers, I'll say pintle to be precise. I'll probably also discuss the specifications of the metal and other technical tidbits. If I want to sell small boats to novice sailors I'll speak in more generic terms about how easy it is to attach the rudder when rigging the boat. I might include a diagram with the pintle and gudgeon shown in the owners manual, but I won't use such terms in the sales brochure.

The trick with industry specific words is to use them appropriately. In the B2C (business to consumer) realm we need to use words that will make sense to our target reader. This also applies to B2B (business to business.) If we're marketing a particular service, we may use terms among our peers that are not as well known by our customers. Terms that offer precise meaning to one person may cause confusion to another.

Conclusion

Jargon and industry specific language are just a couple of ways to muddle our messages. But they are easy to avoid. After I write something I like to step away for an hour or more then read it with fresh eyes to see if anything jumps out that may not make sense to my readers. If I want to be extra careful I'll select the text and have my computer read it to me. I may catch things with my ears that my eyes have missed. Some bit of nonsense may still slip through, but if we work to write with our readers in mind then we have a much better chance of keeping their interest.

Back in the early 90's, when I started teaching myself HTML, Web design was still rather primitive. The first time I coded a Web page, I was only able to view it as text. Until the release of the graphic browser, Mosaic, most of us were viewing the Web in text-based browsers such as Lynx. After Mosaic was released, things changed rapidly. Graphically oriented browsers started evolving at the same time that Internet access was becoming more readily available to those outside the confines of universities and government offices. Now not only could we put links in our text, but we could format our text in color and add pictures.

Alas, the people who were writing HTML weren't usually well-versed in the art of graphic design. As I recall the Web (then) was a small sea of sites in which nerds listed their favorite Star Trek episodes and showed pictures of their cats.

Here are some trends that began in the 90's. While most have dissipated, you'll still find sites that use them today.

Black Backgrounds, too many colors and minimal knowledge of Photoshop.

You remember pages like this. The light text was hard to read (and impossible to print) and the plethora of colors made it impossible to tell which things were meant to stand out more than other things. It was tricky to find a link in the mix, and one had to wonder why the designer chose colors that so clearly clashed. The whole mess was taken to even more extreme levels in the early days of MySpace. I once looked at a MySpace page that had such low color contrast that I was forced to view the source code to actually read the text.

What made the dark background trend even more desparate was the timing. In the nineties many people were still using monitors with low resolution and limited colors. If you looked at one of these pages on a device with 256 colors, your text would be choppy and photographs would look like bad experiments in posterization.

Custom bullets

Why use a plain round or square bullet in lists when you can add some fancy eye candy? Here are just a few reasons:

• Custom bullets create a visual distraction, taking the focus off the content's message.
• Detailed images require more pixels, thus creating larger bullets that may not align well with the text.
• Overdesigned bullets may look clunky on textured backgrounds.

People have used custom bullets for a variety of reasons, but unless they blend seamlessly into the design they are likely to disrupt rather than enhance a site.

Flash

Flash was originally developed to create animations. If you needed to illustrate something with movement, but couldn't use video, Flash was the answer. Alas Flash then became the answer to all sorts of other things that weren't really necessary.

• Developers used Flash to create navigation for entire sites. This was often bad for SEO (search engine optimization), particularly if the pages weren't coded properly.
• Organizations created Flash intro's to sites to show users that they were on the cutting edge. Alas this just frustrated users who wanted to get to the content rather than wait for a lame animation of a logo (or whatever) to load.
• Flash was used to add "interactivity" whether it was needed or not. I can't count the number of times I was asked to create something in Flash, so the site would appear high-tech, even though the Flash animation didn't help to tell the story that was core to that particular page.
• Embedding video was easier with Flash and for awhile it became the standard method for embedding video from YouTube and other sources. This became an issue when Apple didn't support Flash on iPads, though HTML 5 and other tools quickly filled in the gap.

Flash could be used for good or for evil. When I worked at Case Western Reserve University, I took classes in Flash animation at the Cleveland Institute of Art so that I could create animations for the Web. As it turned out I also used them for presentations. One example was a map I created showing where the graduates from different schools would march during commencement. In the past they had used a plain map filled with so many colored lines it was hard to tell who went where. The interactive map made everything clear to both students and staff volunteers.

Flash support is dwindling, but in the coming years we'll see more alternatives for creating similar animated effects. As with Flash, the key will be to use them only when they help to tell the story.

We're not sheep—we can decide which trends to follow and which to avoid.

The trends we've looked at today provide us with some classic examples of things to avoid—though not entirely.

• Dark backgrounds can be used successfully in small doses, such as sidebars, if the type offers sufficient contrast, and a print stylesheet is available for those who want to print the page.
• Custom bullets may make sense if they augment the design rather than causing distractions.
• Flash is effective for animation if you know your viewers will be able to see it.

As with anything moderation is the key. Trends should be examined to see if they make sense in the context of our goals. Does the latest popular dropshadow technique help advance our cause or does it hinder readability? Do the hip colors of 2013 work with our corporate branding or do they set a tone that doesn't really make sense for our business?

When we follow trends that help us tell our story we're on track. When we adopt trends that disrupt the user experience, accessibility or our brand's perception, we're doing ourselves a disservice.

What do you think?

Which Web trends (past or present) do you find most annoying? Which ones do you like? Please share your thoughts below.

Links related to good and bad trends and practices in Web development

• 20 experiential web design trends for 2012
• 30 Bad Practices of Web Designers
• Are Current Web Design Trends Pushing Us Back to 1999?
• Symptoms Of An Epidemic: Web Design Trends
• The Web Aesthetic

My rendition of Buddha at the 2012 Chalk Festival

Each year, in September, the Cleveland Museum of Art holds its annual Chalk Festival. During this 2-day event, members of the public are invited to buy squares of sidewalk (chalk included) on which they can draw anything that inspires them. This year saw topics ranging from dinosaurs and comic book heroes to landscapes and zombies.

I've been going to chalkfest for well over 10 years now. I typically reserve a bunch of squares in advance so that I can draw with friends, even though we pick our own subjects. I tend to pick things that I think will be relatively easy to draw, then discover they were more complicated than I thought. In past years I've drawn the Taj Mahal, Venice, the Peter B. Lewis Building, an old BMW, a sailboat, and a tortoise (among other things.) Some have looked recognizable, some not. One year I tried to do an egyptian statue that ended up looking like an alien holding a frog.

This year, I looked through old photographs (I usually draw from my own photos) and chose to draw a statue of Buddha. The tricky thing about drawing on sidewalks is that they aren't smooth and it is difficult to draw precise details with the chalk. This Buddha (with the exception of his headpiece) had clean lines that seemed as though they might be easy to draw.

Preparing to draw

I have friends that can grab a box of chalk, draw freehand upon the sidewalk and produce a brilliant looking bird in less than an hour. I'm not one of those people. I'm better drawing on the computer than by hand. To make up for that, I plan ahead. I start by sizing a photograph to proportions that I think will work on the ground. Then I add a grid that I can use to keep my proportions in order.

After adding the grid, I create a posterized copy of the image. Techically Buddha is solid gold, but he doesn't look monochromatic. The sunlight illuminating the statue creates highlights of whites and yellows, while the shadowed areas include orange, red and brown tones. The posterized image helps me see where the gradations occur.

48 colors of chalk

When you buy a large square of sidewalk, you are also given a 24 color box of chalk. I knew that wouldn't give me enough shades to make gold, so I went to Utrecht and bought extra colors. I'd hoped to find gold chalk, to add a metallic sheen, but alas there was none to be had that day. Thus I had to make do with the shades I had and hope that I could blend them in such a way that the whole would seem more gold than yellow. Shading is always tricky, but I think in the end Buddha looked suitably shiny.

If you attended this year's festival, you saw that Cleveland brings a lot of talent to the walkways. My Buddha doesn't compare, but I enjoy the process. The act of stepping away from the keyboard and drawing by hand is refreshing. I should do it more often. But for now I'll just have to keep my eyes open to come up with ideas for next year.

Photos of the work in progress. (Click on any image to see them enlarged.)

More CMA Chalkfest Words and Photos

• Cleveland Museum of Art, Chalk Festival Pool on Flickr (lots of pictures way cooler than my Buddha)
• Cleveland's chalk festival (Flickr user: AAS Designs)
• Chalk Festival, Cleveland Museum of Art 2012 (Flickr user: zenbikescience)
• Chalk Art Festival 2012 (Flickr user: Dabbler)
• Arts & Events Photos (Flickr user: hacool - me, and apparently I'm a bit behind on uploads from recent years)
• Chalk Fest colors University Circle (Cleveland Magazine)
• CMA Chalk Festival (By featured artist, Van Taylor Monroe )

2012 Cleveland GiveCamp Participants at Burke Lake Front Airport - Photographer: Al Bell

Cleveland's 3rd Annual GiveCamp began on Friday July 20, 2012 and ran through Sunday July 22. During this time almost 200 volunteers donated more than 5,000 hours of time developing technology applications valued at nearly $625,000, while sponsors donated $14,000 in goods and services to make the event possible. The numbers are impressive, but the most important thing is the result. 25 non-profit groups, who contribute throughout the year to making Cleveland a better place, walked away with technology solutions that they could not have afforded on their own. These solutions will make it easier for them to continue to fulfill their missions in support of the Cleveland community and beyond. With results like that it seems to me that the sponsors got a pretty good return on their investment.

My role at GiveCamp

Most GiveCamp volunteers are assigned to non-profit teams, focusing their efforts on developing specific projects. Others work with teams that help support the event overall, such as food service and social media. For the past three years I've been part of the social media team, but my specific role is to act as a roving WordPress advisor and part-time graphic designer.

Teams track me down in person or via Twitter with questions and I try to answer them. If I don't have an immediate answer, I try to hunt one down, and in either case I share the resulting suggestions via Twitter, Facebook and Delicious bookmarks. Answers take many forms. Sometimes it may be as simple as sending a link for a particular WordPress plug-in (tools that add features and specific functionality to WordPress sites.) Othertimes I might share a bit of code I've used for another project and show the team where to add it to their theme templates in order to achieve a particular result. Over the years I've gotten to do a bit of everything from creating graphics and logos to editing HTML, CSS and PHP files. Then on Sunday afternoon, while the teams are putting the final touches on their projects, I adjourn to the airport to give a WordPress training session to the representatives from the non-profit organizations.

Common WordPress issues in 2012.

Developers post wireframes and sitemaps
on windows overlooking the water.

Over the past few years, the developers have gained experience, and turned to more sophisticated solutions to site needs. Last year we saw teams looking for new and better ways to add secondary and other menu functionality. This year the following three topics stood out.

Custom Post Types & Taxonomies

Custom post-types, custom fields and custom taxonomies provide better ways to organize certain types of content. In a typical WordPress installation we use standard post types, in which posts are used on the blog (and can be organized by categories, tags and chronology) while pages are used for static content (and organized hierarchically through parent and child pages).

Custom post-types allow us to create additional options. For example we use the custom post-type "work" here on the designRoom site to organize our work portfolio. In conjunction with "work" we use the custom taxonomies, Work-Type, Industries, Client and Topic Tags so visitors like you can browse our work in various ways. For example, you could browse all projects related to Web sites, or all projects done for the manufacturing industry. For a non-profit project such as those produced at GiveCamp, custom post-types can be used to create a directory of Green buildings, or to organize a list of volunteering needs.

Bending WordPress themes to your will

Reverse-engineering themes was another big topic this year. WordPress themes have evolved over the years and developers have created some very complex themes that offer a lot of built-in functionality. If you match the right theme to the right project you can have great results. But if you want to alter such themes it can be very complicated. These themes use so many different template files that it can take a lot of time to figure out which bit of code is doing that one thing you are trying to replace. We had one team that was struggling with this for hours, so we recommended switching to a different theme and just adding the functionality they needed. It took some long night-time hours, but in the end they produced a site that did exactly what they wanted and it all worked out.

Here at designRoom we build our own custom themes from scratch. Usually the only time I have to do any reverse-engineering is when I need to add or modify a site that was originally created by someone else. It can be frustrating, but in the end I often walk away with new ideas that I can then apply to another project. I expect that the themes I explored at GiveCamp will provide inspiration throughout the year.

Responsive Design

GiveCampers in Action

Ever since the Web began, designers have struggled with how to present information so that it looks right on different computers and browsers. In our current world of iPads, smartphones, netbooks and other devices, the challenge has only become more complex. Should we build multiple versions of sites for different devices? Can we get away with multiple stylesheets? What technology do we use to detect the device a visitor is using?

"Responsive Design" is one of the latest responses to such challenges. A responsively designed site will use special stylesheets such as mobile.css and @media queries to control how a site is presented under certain conditions. In this way you might design a site to use a three-column layout on a large screen and a one-column layout on a small screen. There are a variety of challenges to this. On the one-hand the technique that works for device A may not work for device B. On the other hand the designer has to put some deep thought into the way a site should look in different conditions and how we can achieve those looks through styles alone, without altering the underlying HTML.

This year at GiveCamp several teams used themes that incorporated Responsive Design techniques. They faced a few challenges along the way in regards to image-sizing and positioning of floated elements, but for the most part they worked as desired. I expect we'll see new best practices for Responsive Design evolving quite a bit over the course of the next year. In the meantime here are some sites that explain the topic in greater detail.

• Beginner’s Guide to Responsive Web Design
• Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It
• Responsive Web Design

Why I keep going back to GiveCamp

The feeling one gets from GiveCamp is hard to explain. Naturally it feels good to help others, and as you've surmised, I also learn in the process. Each year I meet great people with a variety of skills. We make new friends and reconnect with old ones. We immerse ourselves in a world of code, but we do so on the sunny shores of Lake Erie. Being a part of the process is rejuvenating. Somehow it just makes one happy to be a nerd, so as you may have guessed, I'll be going back next year.

Read more about GiveCamp from other participants and visitors

• Adventures at Cleveland GiveCamp 2012 - Sarah Dutkiewicz
• Changes to the registration process - Ohio City Writers (non-profit participant)
• Cleveland GiveCamp: Coding for Charity - Stuart O. Smith, Jr.
• Cleveland Give Camp 2012 - David Mead
• Cleveland Give Camp 2012 - Elaine Stephenson
• Cleveland Give Camp 2012 - Erin Krieger
• Cleveland Give Camp 2012 - Etsuko Dunham (In Japanese)
• Cleveland Give Camp 2012 - Toby Mackenzie
• Cleveland GiveCamp 2012 LeanDog Inc and Burke Lakefront Airport - GreatLakesGeek.com
• Finding Your Passion As A Volunteer - Amy Wong
• Five Questions With GiveCamp - COSE Blog - Brad Nellis
• GiveCamp: The Most Fulfilling Weekend. - Mike Kusold

I love a parade. Well, not usually—I've never been that interested in harvest queens waving from Cadillacs, or floats covered in flowers.

Parade the Circle, held each Spring in Cleveland's University Circle is another story. It's not so much a parade as it is art in motion.

Parade the Circle showcases the creativity of Clevelanders, people from all walks of life (plus international guest artists) who put together floats and costumes inspired by one common—and often ambiguous theme. Last year's theme was 2011 Voices among Voices. This year's is "Branches Become Roots - Cycles: Coming Back/Going Forward." Themes such as these are open to interpretation. I look at this year's and imagine dense rain forests in which shoots come down from the canopy to replant themselves in the soil below. In that I see the cycle of renewal and sustainability. I see someone riding back and forth on a unicycle. These are my initial most literal interpretations of the theme. As my mind wanders I may see a Phoenix, dark moments of history repeating itself, the Mayan calendar, etc. Were I to participate in the parade, the ideas for costumes or floats would be endless.

Inspiration comes in many forms, but I prefer to watch.

Despite daydreams in which I design parade floats in my head, for the parade I remain a spectator. As I watch the parade—through the lens of my camera—I'm inspired to find the right way to capture the moments. I snap quickly because the performers are on the move. If I blink they'll be facing the other way or will have walked into the shadow of a nearby tree. Participants spend weeks preparing for the parade and each year I'm more impressed with their imagination and creativity. I use my camera to try to capture their achievements so that I can save them for later, when the images may serve as a source of inspiration for other projects, be they related to photography, Web development, or this blog. The photos aren't as good as being there, but its the best method I have for grabbing a slice of time and storing it away.

Get inspired - East Side and West

Whether you're looking for creative inspiration or just a day of great entertainment, you'll want to catch this year's parade. It starts at noon this Saturday, June 9, 2012, in University Circle. The art doesn't stop on the East side. Saturday is also the day of the Gordon Square Arts Festival so you'll find something fun on both sides of town. Buses will be running between Gordon Square and University Circle all day, thus making it easier to attend both events. Visit the Parade the Circle and Discover Gordon Square pages to learn more.

2010 Parade Highlights

Our client is not alone. Blogging has become so popular over the years, that people have come to associate the format with the content.

Many people still expect blogs to be journals in which individuals and groups document their activities, eating habits, reading habits, etc. Blogs also provide functionality that can make them useful for things that aren't bloggy at all.

For instance, when I worked at Case Western Reserve University I used our blogging system to create the Community Outreach site which is basically a directory of community outreach programs that can be browsed in different ways. I used a blog to build this because it gave us an easy way to assign categories to the entries so that people could browse by topic, school and program name.

Here at dRC we also build blogs for clients to distribute job postings, news releases and other non-bloggy content.

In the case of the client who brought up this topic, we decided to keep the name blog because she will be offering a mix of news, announcements, videos and educational tips, and we didn't want the title to focus too much on just one aspect of the content she would provide. That said, our conversation reminded me that many readers still wonder what makes a blog a blog.

It's not what you say, it's how you say it.

When I think about what differentiates a blog from other types of Web sites, I think about functionality. Blogs include certain features that allow us to organize our content more efficiently so that visitors can browse by time or topic, interact by making comments, and subscribe to keep abreast of timely updates. Back in 2006, a former colleague of mine, Aaron Shaffer, produced a podcast, Blogs, Wikis, & Podcasts for Beginners that explains this rather nicely. The audio file is about an hour long, and much of it is still relevant now—although the technology has evolved significantly in the past six years. It is worth listening to when you have the time, but for now here are some of the features that differentiate blogs from other types of Web sites.

Categories

Categories allow us to assign our blog posts to broad subject areas. Imagine these as areas in a grocery store. Items in the store may be found in Meat, Produce, Baked Goods, etc. Here on the dRC blog, I've placed this post in the "Web Development" category. Months from now, when we have more posts you'll be able to visit that category to find any posts related to the rather broad topic of Web Development. You might also think of categories as being the types of subjects listed in the table of contents of a book.

Tags

Tags are tinier topics. Going back to the grocery store analogy, these are the specific items you might find in the grocery aisles, such as bacon, cupcakes or ostrich eggs. This post includes the tag "blogging." Tags are also similar to the items you might find in the index of a book.

Chronological Archives

Blogging platforms such as WordPress, Movable Type and Blogger allow us to assign dates and times to our posts so that they can be read in chronological order, usually with the most recent post appearing first. This was the key differentiator in the early days of blogging. Authors needed a way to clearly show their latest news, announcements, links and other thoughts so that readers could quickly discern what information was most current. This also allows us to develop historical archives and for readers to tell if a post includes the latest information or is likely to be out-of-date.

Commenting

Blogs enable our readers to interact with us by responding to our posts with questions or comments that can lead to further discussion. Some sites disable commenting in fear of spam (a sadly relevant concern), but I find that comments add incredible value. Comments can add additional information to the initial posts, bring up questions that we've not considered and let us know if we're writing the kind of things our audience wants to read. They also allow us to meet people. I have several friends/peers I've met just by commenting on their blogs or responding to comments they've made on mine.

Social Media Sharing

Blogs let us add links and buttons that make it easy for readers to share our posts with their followers in social media spaces such as Facebook and Twitter, or as links in their own blog posts.

Podcasts

If you prefer to communicate via video or audio, blogs allow you to include media enclosures that let you distribute this content via blog.

RSS and E-Mail Subscriptions

If you read a lot of blogs it can be hard to remember to visit each site to see if there is a new post. But if you subscribe to a blog, the latest post will be downloaded to your News Reader automatically, just as the latest issue of a magazine might be delivered to your mailbox.

Ping and Pingback

When you publish a blogpost on most blogging platforms, your program will "ping" other servers to alert them to new content. This spreads the word quickly so that your content can be found almost immediately by search engines and other services. If you link to someone else's blogpost in your post, your program will send a "pingback" that lets the other blogger know about your link. These "pingbacks" are often found in your comments and are a nice way to learn when people reference your posts.

Content Management

Blog platforms are Content Management Systems (CMS). These offer a variety of functions, but for most bloggers the key benefit is ease-of-use. You can make a blog post, assign it categories and tags, embed photos or other media and publish it without having to know HTML.

I'll discuss these features in more detail in future posts, but what are your thoughts? What do you think makes a blog a blog? Are there other features or elements you would add? Let us know and we can discuss those too.

Blogging Resources

• 7 Reasons to Rethink Your Blogging Strategy: New Research
• Blogs, Wikis, & Podcasts for Beginners (audio file)
• State of the Blogosphere 2011 (Technorati Study)
• Study Shows Business Blogging Leads to 55% More Website Visitors
• The State of the Blogosphere 2011 (Brian Solis article)

This is a chalk drawing I made of Adelbert Hall—where I worked when I was Webmaster at Case Western Reserve University. The drawing was made at the Cleveland Museum of Art's annual Chalk Festival.

Once upon a time I was a client.

Sometime back in the last century I was a product marketer for what is now Thomson Reuters West. My job was to develop marketing campaigns to sell legal research products. I worked with editors and authors to understand the products, researched the competition, defined my target audience, developed my marketing plans, then communicated my needs to our in-house agency (and sometimes outside agencies). They would then write and design my catalog, postcard, brochure or whatever vehicle I had chosen for the project.

While the strategy was in my hands, design and copy were in theirs. But our mutual success depended on my guidance. I had the best results when I gave them the information they needed to fully understand the product and the key messages I wanted to convey. I might also suggest imagery, such as a photo of a book cover, or perhaps a shot of an interior page feature that helped illustrate a selling point. After that I left it up to their imagination to develop something compelling. The trick was to give them the information they needed to create without dictating how they should do their job. When we struck the right balance, everyone developed a feeling of ownership for their part of the project and we had successful results.

Sometimes I was the in-house agency.

During my years at West, I wore a variety of hats. One day our art director left. I'd worked closely with her, apprenticing in a way, so I stepped in to fill the gap until we hired a new one. Even after that I spent half of my time in the studio, designing book covers, ads, brochures, t-shirts, trade show displays, etc. Sometime during this period we were missing a copywriter. So I took to writing my own copy as well. It seemed to work. I even placed in the finals of an advertising competition for my headline "Bill is Braising Shrimp."

On to Academia and wearing more hats.

After I left West I landed at Case Western Reserve University. They needed someone who could build web sites, write and edit a newletter, and edit and design printed materials such as brochures and invitations. In that respect I was the in-house agency for our department. Armed with a Mac, a PC, digital camera and color printer, I could write articles for the alumni magazine, create posters promoting an event, update the Alumni web site, etc. As time went on I was spending more and more time building web sites, and less on printed matter. At this point I was transferred to University Marketing and Communications where I could focus entirely on the Web. Here our department functioned as the in-house agency to the whole university. We produced publications, handled media relations, conducted marketing campaigns and managed the Web. In addition to maintaining the main site and building sites for central departments, we also guided Web maintainers across campus. We also often hired outside agencies to build sites for special projects. So sometimes I was the vendor, other times I was the client. Playing both roles helped me to better understand how to serve my clients and to communicate with my vendors.

Now I'm at an agency.

Before I landed at designRoom Creative, I'd always worked in-house. When you do that you develop in-depth knowledge of your products, services and industry. Working at Case gave me the opportunity to learn about a variety of topics. While we were an in-house team, we worked with departments ranging from Music to Macromolecular Engineering. It was a good stepping stone to the variety of clients one meets on the agency side. In a given week at dRC, I may learn about everything from skull implants to greeting cards. I work with clients who are in a role similar to one I once played. They teach us about their products, their competitors, their customers, etc.; then we develop strategies and marketing materials to serve their goals.

What I've learned.

Now that I've been both client and vendor I've learned that it doesn't really matter which role one plays, as long as we all work together towards a common goal. Ideally, my experience helps me to understand the client perspective, though I learn more and more each day.

What about you?

What roles have you played? How has your role impacted your perspective?