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Archives for June 2008

Design Trends For 2008

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The folks over at WebDesignerWall have published their design trends for 2008. Thankfully, the Web 2.0 design craze appears to be over, with glossy backgrounds and flashy gradients missing from these designs. However, here are the elements that were most pronounced this year:

  • Vintage/Retro Styles
  • Handwritten Notes and Paper Clips
  • Grungy
  • Splatter Ink
  • Watercolor
  • Big Fonts
  • Script Fonts
  • Wood Patterns
  • Zig Zag Patterns

So for those of you in need of inspiration, give this list a good look through as I’m sure there will be at least a few new ideas that will pop into your head.

Other than the designs showcased in that post, have you come across some really cool website designs lately? Perhaps a WordPress theme or two which you found to be impressive? Be sure to link to it and let us know in the comments.

Interview With Patrick O’ Keefe Part 1

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Here at Performancing, we’ve highlighted various forum software to use in conjunction with your blog. Ahmed Bilal also published an article back in 2007 which explained how to launch a forum on your blog. Once you have the blog up and running, it’s time to manage it. Thats where the expertise of Patrick O’ Keefe comes into play, author of the book Managing Online Forums. The book covers all aspects of managing an online forum but it doesn’t stop at forums. Many of the topics discussed within this book could be used in managing online communities in general.

In Part 1 of this interview, I tap into Patrick’s knowledge regarding what to do before the first forum post is published and developing your community. Part 2 will be published tomorrow.

Jeff – What are some things that should be done prior to the first forum post being published?

Patrick – It’s important to be ready to accept people, in all facets. If you ran a brick and mortar restaurant, would you open with the store clean, but with you in your underwear? The same goes for your community. From your look to your functionality. Don’t launch with things coming soon. Launch with things that are ready to go that people can use now. You should have your infrastructure set up, both publicly and privately. So, that means your public forums, but also your private forums for discussion amongst staff and the proper documentation of guideline violations.

Speaking of guideline violations, it’s important that you have your user guidelines written and online. It’s always best to start with guidelines to ensure that everyone is on the same page from the start. It’s always harder to add guidelines later than it is to start with them because, even if you are still managing the community the same, it will be treated as a new thing and a change when people may feel that they are already used to a certain way. So, have guidelines and enforce them from the start.

Guidelines are also a sort of vision statement for your community. They really show people who you are and who you want to be. Have a set idea in mind for your forums. It doesn’t have to be too specific or difficult. At KarateForums.com, we want to have a community where the martial arts can be discussed in a respectful manner that is both family and work friendly as much as possible. Everything that we do works to accomplish that. I’m a big believer in having goals, having an aim and sticking to it.

Suffice to say, before launch, all details should be taken care of. Don’t launch until you are ready.

Jeff – Once the forum has launched, what are some steps one can take to grow and nurture their community?

Patrick – So, from a promotional standpoint, with forums, a lot can be tied to activity. If you’re hyper about marketing and hyper into aggressive growth, you want to have some activity going because activity itself directly affects the success of any marketing campaign that you undertake.

As an example, let’s say you use Google AdWords to promote your forums. If you send people to a community that hasn’t had any posts in a few days, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice and not realizing the full potential of your money because people are less likely to join a community that doesn’t already have something happening. Even if it’s just you, your brother and a few friends (or something like that), activity is activity. Try to keep some going.

Most people don’t have an ad budget. I’m the same. For those people, it’s important to have that activity and then to make sure that people can find you through search engines. So, using a search engine optimization hack for your software can help, to ensure that search engines are able to spider your content. Forums can be big time content generators, from the general to the very, very specific, and making sure that search engines can find that content can make your life a lot easier.

As far as nurturing goes, I believe that nurturing comes from you, and your staff (if you have anyone), spending time on your site and ensuring that it’s taken care of. This can take shape in the form of fairly, but firmly enforcing your guidelines, welcoming people to your forums and contributing yourself. Being a part of the community allows your users to regard you as a real person, rather than a machine or just an authority figure. This can lead to the community being a more encouraging and comfortable place for people to be.

Keeping Track Of Stats With My µStats

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A new service launched today called My µStats promises to deliver user’s stats for all sorts of different ranking platforms such as Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Alexa, Feedburner and Delicious. There is no user registration required to be part of the service. Simply type in the URL into the text field and then click on the Get Widget Code button which will generate a block of code you can place into your blog as a widget.

Here is what the widget looks like using performancing.com as an example:





The values are updated weekly but upon the initial use of the widget, some amount of time is needed before the values are displayed. Overall, the widget design doesn’t look half bad, although I wouldn’t mind seeing a version which contained a larger font size to display the values. Also, it’s nice to see such a compact widget display so much information that usually you would need to figure out by hand or use a number of different browser extensions such as SearchStatus.

Would this type of widget be of any use to you?

Override Extension Compatibility

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Yesterday, I described how the new version of FireFox didn’t exactly excite me as I discovered a number of the extensions I use on a daily basis were not compatible. Although the technique is not new, Justin Ryan who left a comment within the previous article highlighted a cool extension called Nightly Tester Tools.

According to the explanation by Justin, the majority of extension incompatibilities have nothing to do with the new code. I’ve gone ahead and installed the NTT extension. Once installed, you’ll see a new option on the Add Ons window called “Override Compatibility”. This will remove the bits and pieces of code from being checked for compatibility issues. Also, once you click on the override button, you’ll be greeted with a dialogue box warning you that using incompatible plugins may cause hangs, freezes, memory leaks and crashes which makes me question whether this is a safe procedure to perform or not.

I will admit though, all of the plugins which were labeled incompatible are now working just fine. I haven’t used FireFox 3 for an extended period of time so I can’t say whether or not this is a bad technique, but I’ll be sure to let you know if things go down hill.

If you have used this plugin or the aforementioned hack, please let us know how the performance of FireFox 3 has been since the change.

Update An Existing Post or Create A New Post?

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Let’s say you spent all this time writing an excellent post a few weeks ago, but now some new information has come out that makes this post seem old. It was a lot of work, and the post is still quality. Still, you don’t know what to do about it. Should you create a new post with the new content or update an old post with the new content?

Update the Old

First off let me explain why anyone would bother updating a post. You would update an older post that brings in a lot of traffic so that it can still be thought of as useful by the users. You certainly can’t argue an old post receiving more stumbles, can you? This is one of the primary reasons to keep older quality content up-to-date. However, frequent changes can change SEO rankings.

Make Anew

A new post with the updated content (which, preferably, links to the old) could be a great way to handle this situation. A new page is better for SEO purposes, and it also gives readers something new to look at. Both of these results are reasons enough to hit the “new post” button on your content management system.

Why Not Do Both?

The solution, in my opinion, would be to write a new post now and update the old post later. Obviously, you want to create the new post to give readers something to read, and people could simply go back to the old article via links if they wished. Afterwards, you update your old post with some of the new information, and then link to your newer post. This gives people that come from search engines and social sites a reason to go to another page on your site, and if that happens, they are much more likely to subscribe.

I make a habit to update older posts on my blogs, and while many of my readers will never notice these changes, I have seen the impacts it can have with driving new visitors to updated content.

Essentially, you get the best of both worlds using this method, and I think you should give it a try. I think the potential for more stumbles, diggs, reddits, and traffic far outweighs any SEO penalties an article might receive. I also really appreciate an author who takes the time to keep older content up-to-date—it shows that he or she cares about what was written.

This Extension Is Not Compatible

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Today is the big day where Mozilla will try to break a record for a piece of software downloaded the most number of times within a 24 hour period. It’s the launch of FireFox 3 which promises over 15,000 improvements including bug fixes, performance increases and an increase in reliability. However, there is one aspect of the new release which will hold me back for at least a month or so and that is the extensions.

After installing FireFox 3 onto my notebook just as a test, I discovered that a number of extensions I use on a daily basis as a means of getting my work done were incompatible. The extensions were as follows:

  • MeasureIt 0.3.6
  • SnagIt 1.0.1
  • TinyURL Creator 1.0.4
  • tweetbar 1.0
  • whos.amung.us Users Online Counter 1.6

The only plugins which really matter to me within this list is the Tinyurl creator, Tweetbar and SnagIt. Without these, my productivity goes down the tubes. Considering FireFox 3 has gone through so many release candidates, I don’t understand why these plugins are not compatible. I did a check to see if there were any updates and the only one which updated was the FireFTP extension.

This reminds me of the situation with Windows Vista. There were so many release candidates for the operating system on top of the amount of time between beta releases and the final release yet, there were plenty of incompatibilities.

My advice, hold off on upgrading if some of the extensions you use are vital to your workflow. If you have already upgraded and noticed an extension was not compatible, let us know in the comments. Also, I’m interested in knowing what your experience has been like with the new version.

The Weekly Buzz: Watering Holes, Share This, Which Stats Programs

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The Hive, a Performancing project, was created to provide a community for those looking to increase the performance of their blog and network with the pros. The Hive still continues to grow, and there are many great things being discussed within.

Here is a small sampling of the buzz:

Watering Holes:

Many bloggers act like magnets, trying to draw as many people as possible to their blog with hopes that they will stick around. Instead of this approach, it was suggested that bloggers should figure out where their audience hangs out and to visit the watering holes which pertain to your niche. Help them help you.

Which Stats Programs:

There is a post within the hive where user’s have opted to share which analytical stat programs they are using. While most people seem to be using Google’s analytical stats, others are using WordPress.com powered stats, Feedburner, AWStats and of course, pMetrics.

pMetrics is an awesome statistical analysis tool which blasts away the competition and allows you to quickly get an idea as what is happening on your site. My favorite feature is aptly named SPY, which allows you to check out who, what and where a particular user is browsing your site. You can register for your own pMetrics account here.

Share This:

A blog post which was written by a HIVE forum member was recently copied word for word by another blogger. After contacting the ripper in question, it was determined that because the original blog had SHARE THIS displayed on their site, the ripper thought it was ok to copy the entire post and publish it on their own site. This is not how the SHARE THIS moniker works. This reminded me of the (press the any key) joke except this really happened and according to the responses, has happened to more than one person.

Join the Hive

For $10 a month, you can become a member with over a hundred others which have already joined. What you have seen thus far is just a small taste of the discussions that take place on the forum. With some of the blogosphere’s most successful answering questions and participating in the discussion, you’ll surely get your moneys worth in no time at all.