BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

Working at a computer can be hard on your eyes, especially for blog designers. Many of us wear glasses to see the screen better, even if only at work.

To avoid headaches and fatigue, always make sure your glasses (if you need them) are up to date. You should have an eye exam ever year to make sure your glasses are still doing their job.

But there is no reason glasses cannot be stylish, fun, and affordable, too. You can order them on line, starting at about $7 and have as many pairs of glasses as you need, plus the stylish frames that you want.

My favorite, ZenniOptical.com, offers glasses (lenses and stylish frames) for cheap. How about $6.95 prescription eyeglasses? They design and manufacture the frames and lenses themselves and sell them directly, with no retail stores or middlemen to add costs.

So you can choose from a huge selection and have different glasses for different purposes—such as sunglasses, formal glasses, and fun glasses in different colors. You can get scratch-resistant, finger-print resistant, no-glare coatings, too, so you look better in photos.

Now here is the really fun part for Valentine’s day: Why not get a special pair for your Valentine? Maybe a color he or she would love but never think of buying for themselves, like red or bright blue, or orange? Or cool sunglasses with non-glare coating?

Think of what fun it would be to go out to dinner in matching red glasses frames or sunglasses?

Valentine’s gift quandary: Solved!

Blog designers now need to keep up with smartphone technology. Clients now need for us to incorporate QR codes, automated texting, and a host of other technology with their sites. So we need to know and use the latest technology ourselves.

That means we can no longer wait for our cell phone providers to give us new “free” phones every two years when we sign a new contract. As a blog designer you need to move up to iPhone and Android and keep moving up as technology advances.

So what do you do with those older mobile phones? Do you toss them out? Donate them for emergency use? Or sell them to get back some cash to defray the cost of constantly updating?

Here is the best way to sell your older mobile phone: Trade it in on SellMyMobile.com. They compare and show you the current prices for 400+ models of mobile phones, so you know what is the best price you can get for your phone.

I had no idea what the going rates were for mobile phones like mine, and I find eBay more confusing than helpful for that kind of info. Who knows which prices are realistic there?

From now on, SellMyMobile is where I plan to go to sell my phone.

Take a look. I think you will want to do the same.

As blog designers we need to keep up with not only the latest designs, technology, software and SEO, but also with the latest business trends as they affect the sites we design. It is not all about the pretty colors—or even the content.

As users become accustomed to more and more interactivity—with smart phones, tablets, advanced web designs, and more—we need to provide more and more interactivity on websites and blogs. Especially for business, and even if our clients have not thought of it yet.

Business communication used to be a one-way street. Companies made announcements, ran ads, released news. Customers waited to be persuaded. Or sold. Not anymore.

Interactivity is now essential for business websites. It has been especially important for consumer confidence in new technology such as home banking.

Consequently live chat features have become a standard for ecommerce sites to make connections with site visitors. And LivePerson, which has been around since 1995, provides the most comprehensive live chat software for business.

As the first company to make chat an active sales tool, LivePerson is a chat technology innovator. In fact, they lead customer relationship technology with chat software that includes a behavioral targeting engine to give the customer a convincing, effective, and pleasant experience.

LivePerson has live chat solutions for all kinds of sites. They offer good-looking graphics and specialized products for all kinds of businesses and customers. This is top of the line chat that increases sales, because customers like it.

That means that as blog designers, we need to recommend it to our clients and incorporate it in the sites we build.

WordPress themes today are so colorful and full-featured that small businesses may forget that, though they have an exciting-looking website, they still need a business logo. Once they do, they may not know where to start.

Here are 7 tips from a former advertising account exec and PR pro:

1. Hire a Graphic Designer Who Specializes in What You Need

Do not cheap out by letting your child, your draftsman, or your brother the “artist” try to design a logo for you. Logo design is important, and it requires professional skills and knowledge.

Find a real graphic designer who specializes in logos and has a good, varied portfolio. Make sure you like the artist’s work. That may seem obvious, but clients forget it sometimes.

The only other alternative to that is to use a logo design competition. If you do that, remember, all the rest of these tips still apply, especially tip number 2.

A logo will be with you for a long time. So make sure it is a good one that fits your business and represents it well.

2. Prepare Yourself. Then Brief the Artist Well

Think, think, think. Look at the logos of your competitors and of big corporations in your field. What do they have in common? What makes them appeal to customers in your market?

Sit down and write down attributes the logo must convey about your business. For example, a maid service should look clean and friendly. A food logo should be appetizing. And so on.

3. Focus on What Your Logo Needs to Convey

Do not try to convey too many things in one logo. You may be the biggest patriot, a veteran, born on the Fourth of July, but that does not need to go into your logo, and the red-white-and-blue color scheme could be counterproductive. Let the artist  come up with colors.

4. Keep in Mind All the Ways a Logo Is Used.

Remember that your log should be used everywhere—on stationery, invoices, business cards—not just on your blog or website. So it needs to be designed by a pro to scale well (large or small) and to print well—not just show up well on line.

This is where your teenage cousin is likely to let you down. They won’t know how to do that.

5. Be Original.

Do not copy or even sort of imitate any other logo. Aside from legal issues, patterning your logo after another company’s logo can cause problems. If they are well known, you lose recognition for your business, because people will automatically think of theirs instead. Plus, it looks amateurish. That reflects badly on your business.

6. Stay Away from Fads.

Orange or purple or blue-and-yellow may be hot stuff this year, but in a couple of years, a faddish color scheme will make your business look dated, out of touch, even tacky.

7. Decide Carefully, but Do Not Dither.

If you have hired a good artist, thought through exactly what you are trying to convey about your business, and then sat down and explained that to your artist, the first few designs will likely be the best. Do not think that if you keep asking for more and more variations, the designs will get better and better.

If the first group of designs does not include at least a couple of winners, you have either hired the wrong artist or not briefed him/her properly—or both. If you cannot make a decision, it may be because you have not prepared yourself and the artist properly.

In that case, discuss your needs and hopes for the logo again, to make sure you and the artist are on the same page. If you are, then make a decision and stick to it.

Blog promotion is a never-ending job. We list our blogs on various sites. We tweet our posts. But ultimately getting the word out about a blog depends on ranking well in Google and other search engines.

How do you make sure your blog ranks well enough in search results to be found by plenty of people? Search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. It is hard to keep up, but most of us have to make the effort. It simply is too expensive for many of us to hire a really good SEO expert—and the bad ones are worse than useless.

Besides, knowing how to judge an SEO expert often requires knowing so much about SEO that you might as well do it yourself. If you know what you are doing, you can hire others to some of the work for you. But how do you know where to find them?

SEOClerks is a site where SEO workers of various kinds offer their services. The prices range from just $3 on up to about $1000, depending on the complexity or difficulty of the task and the skill of the service provider. Some of the SEO workers on the site offer subscriptions or give discounts for multiple orders.

This is a great site for buying SEO services. You can try out workers by purchasing small, cheap tasks and see how they do at those before signing up for more expensive packages of services. There is no need to risk much time or money finding out how well the services work for you.

If you use social media sites to get visitors to your blogs, you can, for example, Buy Tweets. You pay a small fee to get someone to tweet your sponsored messages to their Twitter list. Then you can easily see if the tweets resulted in traffic to your blog. If you sell goods or services on your blog, you can quickly see if the traffic resulted in actual purchases.

If you have a FaceBook fan page, you can, for example, have someone get 200 people to Like your page for only $5. From there you can send them to your blog. Pretty much any SEO work you could imagine is available for a reasonable price—or downright cheap.

For a few dollars, you can have an SEO-enhanced article written, get your blog listed on dozens of directory sites, or have comments posted on high-ranking blogs that link back to your blog. You can even buy links on specific blogs to permanently link back to yours.

Follow along as you work to build a variety of sites-all using WordPress. Each chapter is devoted to the construction of a different type of site that can be created with WordPress and the right combination of either free or premium themes and/or plugins.While this book isn’t designed for beginners, those with even an intermediate knowledge of WordPress will be able to get these sites up and running in no time. Also, since each chapter is devoted to the design of a different site, there’s no

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A convenient how-to guide for maximizing your WordPress experienceWordPress is a state-of-the-art blog publishing platform with nearly ten million active installations. Eight minibooks provide you with expanded coverage of the most important topics to the WordPress community, such as WordPress basics, theme designs, plug-in development, social media integration, SEO, customization, and running multiple sites. Veteran author Lisa Sabin-Wilson leads an authoritative team of authors who offer

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