Ross Kendall

A blog might be all about you, but you can’t afford to ignore your [potential] audience. Here are 5 quick tips to help you write great web content.

• Be user centric: think from the perspective of the website visitor and what they might be most interested in.
• Keep it short, clear and concise.
• Use catchy (but meaningful) titles.
• Upside-down writing: start with a 1 line summary and then expand out from there, including the most important bits first. (Unfortunately, there is no time to develop a narrative.)
• Make it scannable: break up content with headings and keep paragraphs short.

There is a lot more that could be said, but I don’t have the time and you probably don’t either. If you would like to learn more, try this article on Writing for the web.

Following on from my previous post about the groovy lightbox 2 script - which you can use to display enlarged images in a snazzy way - I now offer you a tip on integrating it with your Flickr images.

For those who may not have heard of it, Flickr is a popular ’social’ photo sharing website, that offers some great tools for managing and sharing your photos and other images online.

The Creative Coast blogs run on a blogging system called Wordpress, which is possibly the most popular piece of blogging software. What this means is that it is possible to take advantage of extra features that are offered by WordPress ‘plugins’ (useful add-on programs).

The WordPress plug-in, WordPress Flickr Manager (WFM), has just been updated to a new version (just yesterday) which now has Lightbox 2 support.

So all that remain is to install the  WFM and test it out.  Hopefully, you will soon see it in action on this blog.

If you are looking for ways to spruce up your website (or even your blog), adding great images is a good place to start. But why have just a small image when it could be clickable to view an enlarged full screen view.

So called “lightbox” scripts are handy little programs that you can add on to your website or blog that offer a neat way to show off images. The work by overlaying an enlarged image over the web page.

To see what I am talking about, have a look at Amy’s design portfolio, and click on one of the thumbnail images.

Apart from having zoomable images, it is also possible to arrange them into mini photo gallerys.

OK, so where do you go from here? Why not check out some of the scripts available to see what they can do. While a bit of HTML knowledge may be helpful, most people will find that the instructions provided are easy enough to follow.

• Lightbox v2 - a revised version of the original script
• Shadowbox.js - a new script with extra features (including video support)
• Slimbox - a lightweight Lightbox clone

Note: If you have a creative coast blog and would like to try it out for yourself, it will require a couple of simple changes to the template or ‘theme’ that your blog uses. This is something that requires admin access to the server, but if you ask nicely someone (Adrian, Gordon or me) will be able to help you out.

I thought I would start a short series of posts with blogging tips.

To start with I thought I would highlight the importance of getting your blog listed…

It’s important for people to be able to find your blog, otherwise you are wasting your time writing it in the first place. Getting your blog listed in search engines and blog directories is probably the place to start.

Google Blog Search is the place to begin. While it is possible to automate the process of getting each new blog post listed (and we may set this up for the creative coast blogs), it can easily be done manually each time you update your blog using the Google blog pinging service

Technorati is probably the largest blog community and directory. Getting listed here is probably a valuable thing to do. Sign up and get your blog listed. like Google there is a ‘pinging’ service available.

Some other sites worth checking out that will help increase the visibility of your blog:

Search Engines

• Yahoo! Submit your site
• MSN Live Search
• Google

Blog Directories

• Blogarama
• BlogCatalog
• Blogdigger
• BritBlog

I get most people coming from Google, but if anyone has other good suggestions please add them to the comments.

Well a jolly good question, especially since we are dedicating a whole Creative Coast night to the topic!

This is just my take on the topic of ‘blogs, as I’m sure that every blogger would give a different answer.

The term ‘blog’

For the uninitiated, the term blog comes from web-log, which is just a name that someone thought up to describe their online journal. So basically, a blog is personal online journal that someone ‘logs’ their thoughts, comments, ramblings and ideas on.

What do you put on it?

Blogs are as varied as the people who write them, and it’s not really for me or anyone else to say what they should be used for. Basically a blog is your space on the web and you can do whatever you like with it (within the law of course).

While there is no guarantee that you will garner a large audience, if you do want people to actually take an interest in your blog it helps if you put something interesting up. Some people just put links to interesting things that other people have written, collecting their ‘finds’ on the web, but generally it’s good to stick to topics that you actually know something about so that you can say something useful.

But Why?

Shameless self promotion of course. Well, that could be part of it anyway.

…more to come.

Update: Adrian had just put up a post in his headspace titled why blog? where he gives some of his thoughts on the topic, and shares what attracted him to blogging.

Adrian asked me to tell everyone what blogging is all about at tonight’s event. That would be a fine thing to do if I actually:

• liked standing up in front of everyone
• had something useful to say
• was good at blogging
• had more time

Oh well, I’ve said yes now, so I better get my butt into gear and work out something to say.

The thing that I’m really worried about is that there are these folk that will be turning up (bryan and laura from the www.wonderfulnorth.com - an art/video/blogging project) who look like they know stuff!  While I’ll be glad to meet them and hear what they are doing, I’ll feel a bit nervous with pros in the audience.

Anyway, it’s sure to be a great night and who knows, I might actually say something useful

See you there!