NAWBO (the National Association of Women Owned Business) and web.com conducted a survey on the State of Women-Owned Businesses. The area they cited as most important to their bottom line was web design and maintenance, followed by social media marketing and SEO, and email marketing.

Are you a women entrepreneur who would like to work with a woman-owned web design business? Contact Red Beret Design!

This article on optimizing your Facebook content in order to take advantage of Facebook’s new Graph Search makes a lot of sense, but I doubt that it is applicable for most companies that don’t cater to consumers. While I may be interested in what restaurants my friends like in Durham, or what books my friends are reading, I don’t get any social-network-mediated results for, say, printer affiliate programs, or SEO consultants. What I do get are results from Bing, the Microsoft search engine. A distant second to Google in terms of search traffic, optimizing for Bing could become more critical if people begin using Facebook for searching rather than hopping over to Google.

I read an eye-opening article today about the hazards of (some) free WordPress themes. The article, entitled “Why you should never search for free WordPress themes” analyzes the code in WordPress themes downloaded from the top 10 Google results for the search query “free WordPress themes”. MOST of the themes the author, Siobhan McKeown, examines are problematic: from the most benign (e.g., not being updated to the current version of WordPress) to the sneaky (links hidden way off screen using CSS) to dangerous…most of the free themes downloaded included base64, an encoding scheme often used to hide malicious code, which can mess up your site big time.

This is not to say that all free WordPress themes are bad. But be cautious about how you find them. The one link in her top 10 Google results that was worthwhile was the link to WordPress themes on WordPress.org. Even here (or anywhere—even with commercial themes), you need to check to see how up-to-date the theme is with the current version of WordPress. But at least you won’t have to worry about infecting your website with malware.

I’m a loyal user of Thesis, which is not a free theme, but I well-designed, well-supported theme framework. Although you could use the Thesis design right out of the box, as a framework it is intended as a launching pad for developing your own, unique, branded designs. Unlike many themes, you are not limited to a set layout, and absolutely not limited in terms of color or typography. In addition, there are tools for enhancing your on-page search engine optimization.

As of today, DIY Themes has release Thesis 2.0. I’ll be updating the design of this website in the near future, and am looking forward to the opportunity to test drive Thesis 2.0.

I added some new work to all three portfolios today. These are just a few of the projects I’ve been working on in the last few months:

A pro bono project for the Chapel Hill Breast Cancer Foundation

In the last year, breast cancer has become a personal issue for me. I wouldn’t be around to write this blog post if it weren’t for the research done by scientists in the years before my diagnosis. The Chapel Hill Breast Cancer Foundation helps fund research at Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest Universities in North Carolina. They are helping to raise funds for research through a golf tournament at Croasdaile Country Club in Durham, NC. Their main need was a poster, but as I worked on the poster I realized that the foundation did not have a logo. I designed a logo they can use for the golf tournament, that can also be adapted post-tournament by simply replacing the golf ball with a white circle. In addition to the requisite breast cancer pink, I added a band of Carolina blue to echo the foundation’s roots at UNC Chapel Hill.

Croasdaile Country Club was generous in providing some great photos of their golf course, so finding a good-looking image that would work at poster size was easy. In addition to the big poster, other advertising collateral included a smaller poster for posting in locker rooms, a save-the-date postcard, and a trifold brochure, all using a similar motif. I worked on this project alongside More Than Marketing, who developed the marketing plan and wrote the copy.

Blog masthead for a fun teacher

Ms. Computer Teacher is the pseudonym of a school teacher here in Durham NC, who teaches technology to middle school students. Her blog includes how-to posts such as how to build a digital portfolio, informs kids of technology news of interest to them, and generates lively discussions about how technology is affects their lives. She wanted a logo and masthead that would be fun, sassy, a little bit sexy, but also convey her knowledge and authority. We went through several iterations of silhouettes before refining the illustration to fit her vision. The colorful masthead behind the logo includes shapes that echo the layout of a circuit board, and also include a ghosted image of the html code from the blog itself. The project was finished just before the start of classes…I can’t wait to hear what her students think of the design!

Website design for BECOMING Durham

BECOMING is a program in Durham County which addresses the clinical, developmental and social needs of youth ages 16-21 who need support negotiating a successful transition to adulthood. The masthead was designed with a youthful edge, and highlights the familiar skyline of downtown Durham. The biggest challenge I faced was in developing a site that seamlessly transitioned between the English and Spanish versions of the site. Thanks to the ease of use of WordPress, the website is updated regularly by BECOMING staff, who make blog posts, upload videos and presentations, change the home page promos, and add events to the calendar.

Website design for a General Contractor

CWB Holdings, LLC, is a new business founded by Curtis Brookshire, a general contractor based in Creedmoor, NC. He needed a website for his new business that would inform potential clients of his services. Working with Trisecta, who wrote the copy for the website, we developed a threefold approach to his services. He offers similar services to real estate agents and property managers, yet the reasons they would call him are very different, so we broke those audiences out into two separate pages. In a third section, we broke out a third, unique market of quality management consulting. What sets Mr. Brookshire apart from other general contractors is that he has a degree in engineering, Six Sigma certification, and years of experience working as a military contractor. That also led to the home page headline of “Engineering Expertise, Business Acumen, Military Efficiency”. The red, white and blue color scheme was used as a subtle nod to his goverment experience.

Reformatting a previous brochure design

I’m not sure why I had not added my design for the Phillips Ambassadors brochure to my portfolio in the past. My guess is that I had waited on it with the intention of taking a photograph rather than just uploading an image of the digital file. The front of  the original brochure has the Phillips logo embossed, an a line of gold foil along the open edge. It looks quite elegant; not sure that my photo does it justice.

Phillips Ambassadors is a study abroad program at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, focused on sending U.S. students to study in Asia.

The original brochure is a five panel gatefold. For this fall, however, the Phillips Ambassadors program wanted to make some changes and update the content. The new brochure is taller, but is redesigned as a trifold. As you can see below, the new brochure is much more streamlined, owing in large part to the deletion of a long list of programs that was on the two beige panels in the original. A greater variety of usable photos also enabled me to use three photos for a more symmetrical layout (although I will miss the young woman with her elephant!). I am guessing that improved digital camera (and mobile phone camera) technology has enabled the young ambassadors to take snapshots that are high enough resolution to print at a reasonable size.

Another part of the redesign involved a photograph that appears on the inside of the cover. The client was concerned that the photograph, of the Shanghai skyline, looked uninviting due to it having been taken on a very overcast day. A bit of color manipulation in Adobe Photoshop was able to brighten the sky, water, and skyline so that the city looks a bit more cheerful. Now the students will be treated to a photo of Shanghai with a Carolina blue sky.

I took advantage of a discount offer for GoMobi to create a mobile-optimized version of redberetdesign.com. According to Google Analytics, the amount of traffic I get via mobile is still pretty small, but it is growing, and I wanted to be sure that anyone coming to the website via a mobile phone was treated to a good user experience. I’m usually a bit obsessive about researching every possible technological option, but today I threw caution to the wind and signed up for a plan via Hostgator for under $3 per month for the optimized site. I suppose I could have set up a subdomain and a special CSS stylesheet for mobile and a browser sniffer to redirect mobile users to the mobile site, oh, and either designed my own icons or purchased some from iStock, but instead I signed up for GoMobi and had my mobile site up and running in a couple of hours. I still need to install the WordPress plugin that will redirect mobile users, but that will only take me a few minutes more.

Like most WYSIWYG systems, there are elements that will drive a designer to distraction. For instance, the site’s description, as you can see is center-justified. I avoid center-justified text for anything longer than a headline, because studies show that center justification decreases readability. Alas, however, I did not see an option to change it.

GoMobi includes an option for adding a gallery, or linking to a FlickR gallery. I don’t know that  a lot of people will want to wade through a portfolio on a mobile device, but I suppose my next step will be to add at least a few portfolio samples to the mobile-optimized website.

Logo design can be one of the toughest challenges for a new company. What do you need to convey about your company, and how do you boil that down into a simple symbol?

Bill Haig, Ph.D., worked for years with famed graphic designer Saul Bass. He describes his approach, which he calls credibility-based logo design, in an article entitled “Would you buy a logo from this man?” He asserts that the key factor a logo needs to convey is credibility.

One of the obstacles I’ve encountered in logo design is that sometimes a client will want the logo to carry too much weight. A logo cannot convey your entire mission statement, or your business philosophy. Think of your logo not as a paragraph, but as a word. Smart. Fun. Classy. Precise. Inspiring.

Haig would say that there is one word that trumps all the others: Trust. The article is a worth reading if you are looking for insights in how to brand your company as a trusted source.

Last year I set out to blog regularly in order to lend insight into topics of interest to companies that are trying to figure the best way to build a website or market their business. I set myself a long list of topics and set about writing daily, and posting whenever I’d finished a brief essay on my self-assigned topic. I have never intended this to be a personal blog, other than to share personal experiences that pertain to the topic at hand. I debated just picking up where I left off, but decided that my personal perspective on this topic may be of value to other solopreneurs, and worth sharing.

This is my first blog post as a cancer survivor.

A little over a year ago, I was diagnosed with stage 1 invasive breast cancer. I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say that what followed that diagnosis was two surgeries, six weeks of radiation, three months of chemotherapy, and a bout of pneumonia. Then the recovery began.

Being a solopreneur made the entire ordeal much less stressful than it might have been. I didn’t need to ask anyone’s permission to attend the many, many medical appointments that dominated the past year (radiation treatments alone are five days per week).  When the worst of the fatigue from chemotherapy hit, I didn’t need to ask anyone’s permission to take the time I needed for my body to heal. When I felt a little better, I’d work on the sofa with my laptop; a little better yet and I would work a few hours at my desk.

I made the decision early on to stop taking on new clients for the duration. It was fortunate that my illness coincided with a deep recession, so there wasn’t a huge amount of work to turn away. I continued to work with current clients, but made sure they were informed of what was going on. I had one stipulation for any projects I’d take on: no tight deadlines. All business development projects—including this blog—fell by the wayside. After decades of putting my work first, my health became my #1 priority.

I am fortunate that the drop in income was a struggle, but not a disaster. I have good health insurance, and cannot stress enough how important that is for anyone of any age, no matter how healthy you think you are. I am also fortunate to have a husband who was able to help support me not only financially and emotionally but logistically: driving me to appointments, cooking meals, and picking up the slack as efforts towards household chores fell by the wayside, too.

Years before, I had purchased long-term disability insurance, yet I ended up never filing a claim. It was difficult to gauge how much I “should” have been able to work; there are many who continue to work full-time straight through chemotherapy. I didn’t want to stop working 100%, nor did I want to continue working 100%. My medical schedule and energy level varied from week to week and day to day, so it was difficult to say how much I was working or intending to work. My situation didn’t conform to what was expected on the insurance company’s claim forms, and needless to say, they were of no assistance in figuring it out. When it was all over, I ended up canceling the insurance and wishing I’d saved my money all these years.

I had my first meeting with a potential new client during my last week of chemotherapy. My biggest anxiety about the meeting was what to wear on my bald head. Since I work at home, I had not bothered to fill my prescription for a wig. Although I have a fine collection of scarves, I didn’t want to show up to a business meeting looking like a gypsy. And nothing says “cancer patient” like a turban. My husband suggested the obvious: Why don’t you wear your red beret? Which is what I did, although I had to tug it down over my ears to disguise the lack of hair.

As my energy level has increased post-chemo, so have the hours I spend on my business. I’m working on several client projects and have a few more in the queue. I’m studying Google Analytics with the intention of obtaining my certification, and also taking a 26-week course to become a Certified Marketing Advisor. I’ve started some non-work-related creative projects that may or may not converge with my design work at some point down the road. I’ve updated my business plan with tasks that take me all the way through to the end of this year.

Having meetings and milestones on my calendar again is a great tonic.  For several months I was focused only on getting through the day, or even the hour. To be able to focus on goals that are months or years down the road, and being healthy enough to do the work to meet them, is something I don’t take for granted.

One of my milestones has been to resume blogging. Check!

I’ll be resuming my editorial calendar from last year, picking up with my discussions of web development options, especially my personal favorite, WordPress. Following that I’ll be talking about branding and logos, print design and marketing collateral. In addition I’m developing a library of quick tips that I hope to pepper throughout the blog. As I go through my studies on marketing for entrepreneurs and Google Analytics, I hope to share some of what I learn here as well. If you are interested in these topics, come on back, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog.

The Content Marketing Institute recently published an article entitled “12 Content Marketing Predictions for 2012“. Some interesting ideas, a couple of which were food for thought, several of which observations of current trends more than predictions of anything brand new. Here’s my take on the predictions of the content marketers:

Baggott: Agree, but loyal customers may spend more, cost less, and evangelize your brand more than new customers.

Blanchard: Certainly a possibility, but I’m skeptical. If it happens, it will be a company that relies more on information than image. I could stand to see fewer insurance company commercials on TV.

Bolen:  Companies are already shifting more money into inbound marketing, much of which is dominated by content marketing.

Chapman: I’d be encouraged if companies would interact less on social media, and do more to improve their interactions via their customer service departments. Why build up a loyal customer base only to lose customers because a customer service rep is incompetent, indifferent, or not empowered to actually service customers?

Davis: I’d better get on board before my CEO asks about this. My ignorance of Lady Gaga’s splashiness is clearly holding me back.

Gago: Excellent point, but both creation and curation have their place in an overall content strategy.

Leibtag: Makes sense, both for the business and the customers.

Miles: I had a couple of jobs in the 90s that fit that description.

Pasquinucci: In a small business, there is no distinction between the marketing and editorial on my blog/website. As a media consumer, however, I consider this a creepy and dangerous trend when it leaps from the business-owned platform to “independent” media outlets.

Riggs: I’m still a toddler when it comes to Google Plus, but I’m using more and more Google Apps so incorporating Google Plus into the mix seems inevitable.

Roetzer: Quality. What a concept. Hopefully readers/customers will vote with their eyeballs and gravitate to quality content. But then they might miss out on Lady Gaga’s splashiness.

Stelzner: Seems this is already happening, simply by virtue of having blog posts and articles that anyone can read. There’s a place both for free and premium content.

What trends do you see in content marketing?

In a previous post on open source web development platforms, I gave some background about exactly what Open Source means in terms of web design and development. In this post I’ll delve a little deeper into the pros and cons of using and open source web design and content management systems (CMS).

The main attraction to open source systems, for most people, is cost. As in zero. Zip. Nada.

OK, you still have to pay for your web hosting. But budget web hosting starts at under $100 per year.

Once you get your website up and running on your budget web host, you install your theme and plugins (I’m using WordPress terminology here, but the same applies to other open sources CMSs). There are thousands of free themes and plugins, but there are some with more advanced functionality that have licensing fees. These are not going to break the bank, but they can add to the “free” price tag.

Why would you pay for a plugin or theme, when there are usually dozens of free alternatives?

1. Quality. Free plugins and themes are created by developers for a variety of reasons: as a labor of love, to give back to the community, to learn new skills, to boost a resumé. And although most developers of free plugins are competent, some are not so competent, and their work can be riddled with bugs. Someone who is selling their work as a business has a vested interest in happy customers.
2. Dependability. For many developers, writing a free plugin is a side project—something they do in their spare time. A new job, a new baby, or simply getting bored and moving on may mean that a plugin is no longer supported. As newer versions of the core software are developed, the free plugin you love may no longer work as the developer does not make the necessary changes for it to keep up with core upgrades. Unless a business goes out of business or discontinues a product, they are likely to do their best to keep it current.
3. Ease of use. Many plugins are easy to use as a tricycle, which is one of the aspects of open source web development that is so exciting to a web designer. But some plugins still require a greater knowledge of HTML or PHP than your average user is likely to have. Businesses—the successful ones, at least—know that their customers are not likely to be fellow engineers, and will go out of their way to make the software user-friendly.
4. Documentation. Plugin developers are focused on the code and functionality of the plugin. There is usually some minimal amount of documentation, but for more complex plugins, it may not be all the information you need to get the most out of the plugin. Often, it is written in engineering-speak rather than user-friendly language. Businesses are more likely to hire an experienced technical writer to write documentation—or at least to give documentation more than a glance and a nod.
5. Support. This can be iffy whether the plugin is free or purchased. It’s rare that there’s an 800# you can call and talk to someone about your issue—but that’s par for the course with most software these days. Hopefully, whether pay or free, there will be a forum where you can post a question, and be helped not only by fellow befuddled users, but by the developer or a knowledgeable person on the developer’s team. The more complex and critical the software—e.g., an ecommerce system—the more important it is that you know you can get answers when you need them.

Yes, these are generalizations. There are developers of free software that is easy and solid and well-documented and well-supported. You can pay good money for difficult to use, buggy software with poor documentation and no support, that is abandoned by the developer after version 1.1.

So how do you figure out what free software to take advantage of, and which is worth paying for? More on that question in a subsequent post.

Several of the most popular web development platforms, including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, are “open source” software. What does that mean? Why should you care?

Open source software is developed in a very different way than proprietary software. Proprietary software is developed along the same lines any commercial product is developed, under the control and direction of the decision makers in a corporation. Open source software is developed by volunteers who work on everything from the source code to bug testing to documentation.

The open source software movement dates back to the 1980s. The Linux operating system, which is now one of the main operating systems used for web hosting servers, was one of the first major open source software efforts. Open source software is available for free to anyone who wants to use it; the source code is available to engineers who wish to change, improve or adapt it.

The philosophy behind open source software is well stated in this mission statement from the Open Source Initiative:

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.

So how does this work in the real world, without descending into chaos? These pages can give you a glimpse into the process:

• Call for contributors to WordPress, showing the range of skills needed
• Map showing recent contributions to Drupal, showing that this is truly a global effort (map is at the bottom of the page)
• A list of bug reports and feature requests for Drupal. This shows the excruciating detail of how software is developed.

Although open source projects generally begin as the brainchild of a small group of people, the larger open source web development platforms have spawned nonprofit associations dedicated to advancing the development of the software. The WordPress Foundation, Drupal Association and OpenSourceMatters (for Joomla) are nonprofits backing these three popular web development platforms.

Although WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are the most popular, they are far from the only options. As of this writing, there are 141 different content management systems listed at opensourcecms.com. And that is just content management systems. Virtually every type of software can be found in an open source version.

In addition to contributing to the core software, programmers can expand the capabilities of a web development platform by writing add-ons for specific purposes. These are called modules in Drupal, extensions in Joomla, and plugins in WordPress, but they all serve the same purpose of expanding the functionality of the platform for specific applications.

As of this writing, there are 15,614 plugins available for WordPress. Plugins (and their Drupal and Joomla counterparts) add specific functionality to a website: a photo gallery, social media integration, ratings systems, events management—you name it, there is probably a plugin available. The advantage of plugins is that a non-programmer can easily add advanced functionality to a website. On this website, WordPress plugins are the basis for the portfolio, the home page animation, and the contact form; they protect comments, forms and email addresses from spammers and display my twitter feed on the blog pages.

Open source web development platforms are free, and make it easy for a non-programmer to build a sophisticated website. There’s a lot to like about them. But they do have their pitfalls. In a subsequent post, I’ll dig a little deeper into the pros and cons of open source web development platforms.