Shopping for a good WordPress theme for your blog can be a huge challenge. How do you find one that has all of the elements you need, but still feels original? It seems like anything on the main WordPress Theme Viewer is either forgettable or inadequate, and many of us lack the technical skills to develop a fully-customized theme. Here are six quick tips to help you conquer the boring blog blues, and come out with something that original and dynamic.

Start with the WordPress Themes Directory. As you begin to identity things that work and things that don’t, you can borrow some of the searching tips below and migrate over to Google for some queries YOU think of that span the wider web.

1. Search by most recent: sometimes the newest WordPress themes are the most advanced and original, so limit your searching by including the current year, or just the past 3 months, etc.
2. Find one theme you ALMOST like, and visit the homepage of the designer of THAT theme. It’s likely that he/she has created other themes that will be up your alley. Some of my favourite WP theme designers include Allan Cole and Darren Hoyt
3. Look for themes that are compatible with the latest version of WP (at the time of writing, the current version 2.7, with 2.8 is currently in beta). Again, like tip 1, it ensures your theme will be new and pretty original — for the time being.
4. Check out people’s personal stashes of WordPress-related bookmarks on del.icio.us. (Here’s mine.)
5. Find out what specific style of WordPress theme you want, and narrow your search down to those types. For design professionals and illustrators, I’d recommend using queries like “portfolio style wordpress theme” or “photo blog.” Other possibilities might be things like “magazine style” or “2-column.”
6. Use search.twitter.com to look for themes that are making people talk. On Twitter, following entities I Heart WordPress will give you some pretty good re-tweeted tips.

Of course, any theme you choose will depend on you to take it to the next level with your customizations: modify it enough to make it truly your own.

History has rewarded the graphic designer for being aloof, elusive, and eccentric. Unpredictability in both pricing and productivity, slavery to sudden fits of mis-communcation, and being too creative to play well with others are all reasons why we don’t fit well into today’s corporate reality.

If success and freedom as a freelancer is your goal, it may be time to make yourself aware of the common stereotypes associated with the Graphic Design industry.

Creativity is Not King

It’s certainly not something you hear very often and as a graphic designer it’s probably a statement that makes you cringe. More importantly than the level of creativity and innovation you bring to the table, your biggest asset is your ability to meet and exceed the expectations of your client. Although a wise client with submit to your professional direction, it’s important that you are willing to swallow your pride and sacrifice creative elements if it makes your client happy with the work you produce on their behalf. As a designer, despite your desire to excel creativity, when it comes to providing great customer service, your client is king.

Pick up your Phone

It’s tempting to get in a groove and isolate yourself until you are happy with a final result. Resist this temptation. Be aware that the level of service you offer is influenced by the accessibility you provide for your clients to ask questions and receive status updates. Return e-mails and voice mail within 1 business day and establish a reputation of being reachable the majority of the time. Be proactive in your efforts to be a good communicator and call a client before they call you, in doing so you will ensure your client feels respected and in control of their marketing efforts.

Make Sure the Price is Right

In addition to the uncertainty faced by business people to easily access creative professionals in a timely manner, the worrisome subject of cost is also a difficult issue often encountered. Before you present pricing, ensure you have your information organized and accurate. On larger projects where subcontractors or outside suppliers are involved, be sure you outline the scope of the project clearly to your client and the establish the responsibilities of each supplier you choose to work with. Receive written quotes for printing, development or writing and issue your proposal in writing as well. Do not make vague estimates a part of your quotation process. Take billing seriously, even as seriously as eating the extra cost of a project if you go over budget. By absorbing a small amount of money here and there, issuing an invoice that matches a proposal is far better than losing the trust of a client. I think you would expect the same in any other purchasing situation and by adopting this perspective, it will encourage you to be more careful with your numbers.

Nice to Meet You

Virtual tools make working together easy. If you work with clients that are not local, take advantage of technology to communicate well. If you find yourself working with a client who does work close by, make time, when it’s appropriate to meet over coffee, get proof sign-off in person, or even deliver a final printed product once in a while. By making yourself a part of your clients’ reality, you are making a case for a continuing business relationship. As technology makes working with anyone, anywhere a viable option, your local presence may be the reason a client is comfortable working with you.

Spell Check

Good grammar and spelling are often overlooked in favour of correcting pre-flighting issues or troubleshooting interactive elements. Especially in print design, one word spelled correctly can be the difference between success and epic failure. By using spell check often and paying attention to the little things, your client will never know just how close they were to being unsatisfied.

Every graphic designer is creative. Being creative and knowing what your clients expect in terms of customers service will give you the edge you need to compete and succeed as a Graphic Designer.

Tips for putting the finishing touches on a business proposal. Advice for dealing with a perilous relationship. Walkthroughs on how to build a fence on your particularly sloped backyard. Questions like this can sometimes be solved with a quick Google, by asking your friends, or by taking an old-fashioned trip to the library. Sometimes, though, your question is a little too precise, a little too obscure, or a little too convoluted for those sources to solve.

Thanks to the web, there are now countless services that let you put willing experts and helpful strangers to work answering your unsolved riddles. Below is a brief tour of some of 2009’s best sources for crowdsourced answers.

For non-profits: try Urbantastic

Founded by Vancouverites Heath Johns and Ben Johnson, Urbantastic is breaking new ground for micro-volunteering. If you want to help your city become “a more friendly, more lively, more benevolent place,” you can volunteer from home by completing tasks posted by local charities. As of mid-April 2009, there is now an “Ask a Question” feature, where you can help non-profits find answers to questions ranging from marketing advice to event planning.

Sample question: Where should we get our 2009 t-shirts printed?

On the go, from your phone: try Cha Cha

ChaCha describes itself as “mobile answers.” Call 1-800-2ChaCha from your mobile phone, tweet to @chacha, or text your question to 242242, and “you’ll receive the answer as a text message in a few minutes.” It’s not as new or crazy as you think: just last week, ChaCha officially answered their 100,000,000th question (that’s one hundred million). Questions submitted by you are routed to a subject-matter-expert (a “guide”), and within minutes, you’ll have your answer.

Sample question: Who is responsible for preparation of the president’s budget?

For a business angle: try LinkedIn Answers

Since LinkedIn is the go-to social networking site for business professionals, it means you’ve got thousands of pros gathered in one place eager to establish reputations for themselves. It also means you’ve got a ripe crop of potential question-answerers ready to help you out. LinkedIn’s Answers section lets you tap into the crowd to ask any question you like, receiving multiple answers from multiple perspectives.

Sample question: Which personal finance / budgeting / money tracking / money management software do you prefer and why?

For everything from relationship advice to technology tips: try AskMetafilter

AskMetafilter is one of the web’s mainstays for crowdsourced queries. Since 2003, AskMetafilter has been providing the “hive mind” perspective on countless issues, from personal dilemmas to business propositions. You can post anonymously or with your own username, and the result is a selection of opinions, ideas and opinions that will help you make a well-informed decision. Or, just find some really, really obscure info.

Sample question: I need advice or a good book to read on how to (i)not let my career and continuing education take over my life and (ii) keep myself from being negatively transformed through stressful experiences.

For live help from a real person: try Skype Prime

Receiving advice from somebody on the phone can be a much more reassuring experience than just blasting a question out into cyberspace and twiddling your thumbs while you wait. Skype Prime connects you in real-time to somebody whose background relates to the help you need, and lets you talk via Skype to walk through your issue. It is a paid service, though, which might be a deal-breaker for people looking for easy online answers.

Sample question: Can somebody show me how to use the clone stamp tool in Photoshop?

For in-depth research and oddball inquiries: try Wikipedia’s Reference Desk

If you can’t make it to your local library, the next best option is Wikipedia’s Reference Desk. Think of it as your opportunity to ask a helpful, diligent expert the weirdest questions you can think of. Although Wikipedia often gets a bad rap in academic circles for being a little too lax on its fact-checking, the fact is that anybody who is dedicated enough to pour hours of effort into editing a public encyclopedia is likely a smart, diligent person.

Sample question: What’s a word meaning misplaced nationalism?

For well-researched answers you have to pay for: try Uclue

Uclue calls itself “a professional, fast, and inexpensive research service.” Name your price (how much you’re willing to pay for an answer), and you’ll have yourself a crew of researchers out looking to earn that bounty. Staffed by former Google Answers Researchers, Uclue specializes in digging up the details on any topic imaginable.

Sample question: How to change your identity (UK)?

The new brand is cursive wordmark that aspires to embody a concept described by the tagline, “freedom to create, spirit to achieve.” According to the brand’s official website, AlbertaBrand.com, the identity development process was a 5 month long procedure with a budget of $4 million dollars. This budget was allocated towards the establishment of an advisory panel and focus groups consisting of normal citizens like you and me, oh and graphic design was in there somewhere too.

Let’s take a quick tour of the options that became runner’s up:

The Albertan may have proved unpopular due to it’s mixed messages. It’s certainly not clear what it’s trying to say. It’s very formal and corporate in it’s approach as well.

This version of the logo is very current in the way it uses gradients, just add a little shine and it would pass as a fancy new web 2.0 start-up.

The lowercase square treatment could make this version of the logo the corporate image of any North American technology company. The use of the period in the “t” is such an uninspiring concept and copied from an abundance of non inspirational sources. This could possibly be the weakest of choice in the set.

Meet the rainbow option. Symbolic of Alberta’s Leprechaun pioneers. That may or may not be true, but it would be very difficult to stand by a decision to appoint this logo for the cost of printing alone. It’s difficult to know what the designers were getting at here.

The Conclusion

Overall, the new brand for Alberta seems adequate. It doesn’t amaze and it certainly does not show off in any way. It’s disappointing that more inspiration wasn’t not shown in very many of the choices, there is no attempt at double meaning or any specific geographic mirroring. Ironically, the creation process of this identity, judging from the results, seemed linear and static, with very little motivation to come up with something new. Even orange was recycled and repackaged from the license plates. Perhaps at best, we’ve put a new suit on our old logo, which had much of the same reserved and bland personality the new one has. The lack of inspiration seems ironic considering we are looking to represent “freedom to create, spirit to achieve” to the world.

The Justification?

Sometimes, being a graphic designer and a normal citizen, I can’t help wondering what an invoice for this project would look like and how it would be itemized. If one graphic designer was hired for this project, the government would be paying him or her $50,000 per hour based on a 40 hour work week. If a team of 10 people worked on this project, for forty hours per week, for 5 months straight, tax-payers would be looking at an hourly rate of $5,000 per hour.

If you ask me, this final product does not deserve that kind of financing. The value of graphic design is not based on who the customer is, or what the final outcome is being used for. It’s based primarily on the time it takes to produce a result and the demand for this service. The concept of getting what you pay for in the design industry has very low ceiling and yet the cost of branding and identity development seems to be driven by the insecurity of clients to feel as though their logo must be very expensive to be good. Fueled by the greed of marketing professionals who are happy to propagate these sentiments through excessive fees, makes affording a graphic designer very difficult and trusting one even less plausible.

Do you have any thoughts on the industry or the logo? We’d like to hear them.

Millions of Screenshots

The first stop on our tour is at 456 Berea Street. This is the home of Roger Johansson, a Swedish web specialist and accessibility expert. His blog is always well stocked with cross browser compliance tips and CSS techniques. I found this topic on styling form controls particularly amazing and quite helpful. In this post, he’s coded and taken screen shots of over 200 different form elements in different browsers! Unbelievable!!

Digital Inspiration

If you are in the mood to be blown away, make sure you drop by Think Four’s blog. This post is is loaded with mouth-watering, juicy photo manipulation design, created by experts. Inspiration is just a click away.

Read Once, Print Twice

Next stop is Fuel Your Creativity, a source for ideas, inspiration, and helpful tips from your good friends and mine at Fuel Brand Group. This post, called 3 deadly sins of print design, although a bit more on the elementary side, is a great post for beginners in the print medium, or web developers who may be looking for some helpful advice.

Before you leave, make sure you check out this interesting post from Fuel on dual element logos. One of the most interesting and challenging aspects of identity design is the layers of meaning embedded into the design elements. When more than one idea plays across the logo, you know you’ve succeeded.

Be Good To Your Clients

The good folks at Vandelay Design seem to know what they are talking about when it comes to getting along with clients. In addressing the common problem designers seem to have with communicating well, this post outlines the right way to go about customer service. The emphasis on learning to respect your clients ideas and working collaboratively is a lesson many Graphic Designers could use to learn.

Be Good To Your Ideas

Eric Karjaluoto has difficult last name to pronounce. Don’t let that deter you from visiting this post at ideas on ideas. This is another post about being a better designer, but it’s more from a creative perspective. This is a great read on challenging yourself to take your work to the next level.

What to Read Before You Die

The Die Line claims to be the world’s #1 packaging design website and who’s going to argue with that? My favourite part of the site to visit is the redesign category of their blog for fresh new takes on product packaging.

Enforce Your Design Rights

In closing, here are some helpful templates from the Design Police you can use to vandalize critique other people’s work when you just can’t stand bad design.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve got any other sweet links you’d like to share, please leave a comment!

Being self-employed in a city like Vancouver makes you fortunate: with good transit, good people and good cafes, the only real challenge in this city is actually doing a good job. But since we know you’ve already got that covered…what you really need is a place to have client meetings.

1. Try the library

With 22 branches strategically placed in the most convenient locations all across Vancouver, the library is the most obvious (and yet the most surprising) choice for a business meeting. Vancouver has committed to providing free wireless internet in every location, and if you don’t mind embracing the “community” feel, nothing beats a library as a quiet space for smart people.

2. Do coffee

Your favourite local coffee shop is moonlighting as a prime location for your next meeting. Here in Vancouver, it’s almost harder to find a coffee shop that doesn’t have wireless: every Waves location will hook you up for free, and most Blenz, Wired Monk and Bread Garden Urban Cafe locations will, too. Even at Starbucks, all it takes for free wi-fi is a registered Starbucks card – I carry an empty one around in my wallet for just that purpose.

3. Join the club

Your meeting could be happening in a Gastown loft with view of the Burrard Inlet and the North Shore mountains, in a comfortable-yet-stylish space with exposed brick, floor-to-ceiling windows and ready access to the city’s best coffee. Yeah, it’ll set you back a monthly membership fee, but you’ll also be part of Workspace, one of North America’s pioneers in shared spaces. The meetings might just be worth it. (You can also try The Network Hub on Richards Street, available at $20/hour for our kind of meetings)

4. Chow down

The breakfast meeting is a classic, and if you’ve got a client you’re comfortable enough with to eat pancakes and talk business at the same time, then Vancouver has a couple options. Every De Dutch location has free wireless. All Cactus Club shops (for a lunch or dinner option) can feed you broadband and beefsteak, and The End Café on Commercial can give you coffee, food and internet (and big tables).

5. Centre yourself

In January of 2009 Vancouver City Council passed a motion to start rolling out wireless for all Community Centres in Vancouver. It’s not ready yet, but most of the Centres have a good amount of tables and chairs ready to be inhabited by entrepreneurs like you.

Tools & Resources

• Find a wifi-enabled coffee shop in your neighbourhood
• Read some tips on coffee shop working from Vancouver’s most notable mobile meeter

From a professional perspective, there are several factors that should influence your decision making process and help you, as a creative, to valuate your services.

Rate Formulation Equation

Your first step to take in establishing an hourly rate is to calculate your overhead costs by creating a budget. If the idea of budgeting bothers you, this is an unfortunate problem to have. Many designers experience these same sentiments which is one of the main contributing factors in unreasonable and wildly fluctuating pricing models. If you can’t create a budget or do not want to create one, you run the risk of running an unsuccessful venture.

If you have been doing business for a few years, and have managed to keep these records, look back on your invoices and receipts, itemize both into several streams of revenue on the income side, and categorize your expenses in the same manner. If you are starting from scratch, there are several types of expenses that you can typically account for on a month to month basis. Here is a sample of what this may look like:

- Utilities: $300
- Rent: $1,500
- Phone/Internet: $75
- Recordable Media: $25
- Travel expenses: $150
- Online subscriptions: $100
- Payroll (your salary): $3,000
- Tax Remittance: $250

Total Monthly Expenses: $5,400
Total Yearly Expenses: $64,800

Once you have an idea of your annual expenses, it’s time to turn your attention to your income. Keep in mind that it’s very doubtful that you will have the opportunity to bill your clients for 40 hours per week as you would as normal employee. Managing your own business is wrought with numerous interruptions and many small tasks that require your attention and are simply not costs you can bill to anyone. Realistically, your opportunity for billing time directly to a client may be limited to 25-30 hours per week or 1400 hours per year. Your time may also be affected by your network of clients and their requirements. Estimate your billable hours carefully and responsibly.

Once you come up with a practical weekly estimate, extrapolate these numbers out to create an annual figure. When you have this number calculated, divide your expenses ($64,800) by your billable hours (1400 hrs.) to come up with an hourly figure ($45.71/ hr). Once this figure is arrived at, you must consider the cost of growing your business and retaining income for savings. Perhaps, 10% is a good rate of savings (for an annual total of $6,300), and 20% would be a suitable mark-up for investment back into your business ($12,600 annually).

When taking these figures into account, your hourly rate of $59.21 seems like a figure that will ensure you cover your costs, pay yourself, save for the future, and encourage spending on growth initiatives like advertising or hardware upgrades.

Streamlining Your Business

Once you have created a financial blueprint for your business, you are well on your way to making yourself a successful entrepreneur. Your task now is to discover ways to lower your expenses in an effort to gain a competitive edge over your competition. If you can create opportunities to save on overhead costs such as utilities, rent or phone costs, you can choose to pass these savings onto your clients.

In the process of looking for creative ways to cut costs you may discover that these are also ways to reduce your carbon footprint. If this is something that saves you money every month, apart from the obvious benefits to the environment, it may be also be an opportunity to market your organization from a green perspective.

The more you can reduce your overhead expenses, all things being equal, the bigger the advantage you hold over your competitors.

Supply and Demand

Supply and demand is popular term in economics and may be the most practical way of deciding how to price yourself hourly. If demand is high, meaning your phone is ringing off the hook, your inbox is full, and you have more work than you can handle, your hourly rate is ready for a increase.

It’s also worth mentioning that if you have very little work, this is not justification to increase your hourly rate, rather it’s time to find a part time job to help make ends meet. Increasing your rates in this situation, although a short term solution, will not sustain you over the long term as you may end up pricing yourself out of work before you even begin.

Supply and demand should be the only factor that influences your hourly rate. By establishing yourself and succeeding on the premise of excellent design, fiscal responsibility, and great customer service, you are creating a fair economic environment that will grow proportionally with your success and the satisfaction of your clients. These are easily measurable metrics.

Ethics

Although ethical decision making seems to be an out-dated principle in our capitalistic society, it’s an important factor to consider in pricing your services appropriately. Here are some potential situations where you may need to rely on ethics to make a decision:

Use your best judgment, or ask a trusted source, when you are faced with the temptation to charge more than your typical hourly rate or more than what was originally quoted. Remember that supply and demand is the main driver of your services.

Consistent Value vs. Potential Value

There is a school of thought in the design industry that believes you should bill on a sliding scale where cost is determined by the size or earnings of a client. For example, larger more established organizations should pay more for creative services than a smaller, lesser known client due to the fact that they have the potential to make more money from your work. As an responsible and respected designer, it should be noted that this ideal is ethically irresponsible and fundamentally flawed.

Unless a larger organization approaches you with work while demand for your product is high, or negotiations are dictated by a set budget that is higher than you would normally expect to charge, you should not be inclined to charge larger companies any differently than you do your regular clients.

Be aware of this slippery slope as it can cause serious creative difficulties if you do take liberties with your cost structure. The product you provide should always be of a consistent caliber, not one that fluctuates with the quality of your clientele.

Smart Partnerships

Your suppliers are a key element in your cost structure. Choose the people you work with carefully and ensure you can trust them to deliver a quality product in a timely fashion. Whether you outsource printing, web development, or hosting, your clients will be affected by your supply chain decisions. Be sure that you establish a specific percentage mark-up on all outsourced services and do not deviate from this pattern as it is important to create pricing that your clients can count on and budget for.

Responsibility in Graphic Design is an important aspect of our industry that is often disregarded in the passionate pursuit of creative solutions. As a designer, remember that your choices affect everyone and if you run your business with professionalism - everyone wins!

Where were you when you started taking Twitter seriously? For me, it was on the bright red couches by the fireplace at the food court in Metrotown, when my friend Zach Bulick took 20 minutes to spell it out for me. It was in September 2008, and I had a cold at the time.

“It just seems so frivolous,” I insisted between sniffles. “It’s like reading the Facebook status updates of strangers.”

“It seems like that at first,” Zach countered. “But start thinking outside the box and you’ll come up with some amazing ways to use it.”

Because Twitter is basically people blogging in under 140 characters, you can tap into a lot of information very quickly. Zach pointed out that CNN was using using it to gather instant feedback from viewers, and that Comcast (at least I think it was them) was using it to offer a new kind of customer service. They’d use search.twitter.com to find messages where users are complaining about their company or services, then get in touch with them instantly to see how they could help.

I realized then how Twitter could work for the organization I work for, a non-profit in Vancouver called Union Gospel Mission. We could educate people about homelessness. Give people an unprecedented glimpse into the street-level work we do. Network with other agencies like us to share resources. Build relationships with influential bloggers. Share progress towards fundraising goals. Offer admin support to donors who need it. And since that conversation with Zach, that’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do as @ugm on Twitter.

I have a feeling that Twitter could work for your business, too, and it’s just a matter of thinking it through and coming up with a good strategy.

1. Gather the tools and learn the terms

Compared with the familiar territory of blogging, Twitter is a whole new world. You’ll learn the lingo and lay-of-the-land quickly, but it’s always nice to have help. Once you set up your account, you should:

• Find out what you don’t know.Twitter’s Getting Started page will help you decipher the meaning behind the initials, symbols and abbreviations littering the landscape of Twitter. If you’ve got time for a quick video, Vancouver’s Miss604 walks you through a thorough tutorial of what you need to know.
• Download TweetDeck. Twitter isn’t really a website, so don’t treat it like one: it’s a non-stop stream of interrelated communications, and you need the right tools to manage it all. TweetDeck is to Twitter as Outlook is to email. This application will let you manage your Twitter experience with greater ease and better returns.
• Augment your arsenal of Twitter tools by exploring the tools and tricks available to you as Twitter user. .

2. Find the key influencers in your area

In every industry and every geographic area, certain Twitter users have more influence than others. It might be because of their expertise, their personality, or just the number of people following them. As a businessperson, it’s a good idea to follow these key influencers — it’s good, old-fashioned networking. It keeps you in the know, and helps establish your presence as a fellow like-minded expert. (You can use a service called Twellow to identify who these individuals are.)

3. Listen to what people are saying

Leave the monologuing for the theatrical types — it’s your foremost priority to hear what other people are saying before adding to the noise. The better you understand the culture, the more effective you can be as a participant — that goes for life and for Twitter. If you can get a handle on the nuances of this communication style — the type of Tweets that plummet and the type that soar — you’ll be better equipped to contribute content that is valuable, unique and compelling (more on that in step 5).

4. Metrics and Monitoring

• Monitor terms that pertain to your business or industry. It’s incredibly useful to see what Twitter users are saying about your business, your industry, your products or your work — consider it a free, unfiltered focus group. You can automatically monitor Twitter for specific updates in a few ways: TweetDeck can bet set up to constantly monitor up to 10 terms that you select. Or, if you use RSS, you can do a search on Twitter Search, then subscribe to the feed for that query. (Leave us a note in the comments if you need help with that step.)
• Define what you will consider “success” as you venture into Twitter. Is it how many people are following you? How many replies you receive weekly? How many visitors Twitter sends to your website? By developing clear standards early, it will keep you focused. It will also act as an early warning system to let you know when you need to start adjusting your strategy.

5. Contribute content that counts

Don’t spam your Twitter followers with sales pitches and ad copy. Instead, try to mine your business for engaging stories, interesting angles and thoughtful approaches that you can share. This is easier than you think: nobody knows your business like you do. What are the “front lines” in your business? If it’s the guys in the shop, sit down with them weekly to find out more about a project they’re working on. If it’s a team of programmers, plumbers, pro soccer players or professors, tune into the day-to-day and discover the unique aspects of your organization that nobody else knows about. As you learned in step 3, this is a conversation, not a speech. When you enter Twitter as a business, you are being invited into someone’s living room. Do your best to add commentary and ideas that will add value, and you will be rewarded.

Got questions? Want to chime in with your own tips, tricks or tools for using Twitter? Comments are open 24/7, and we’re here to help.

Charlie Bit me

Uploaded in May of 2007, this video of Harry and Charlie, one biting the other, was filmed by their dad and uploaded amongst a multitude of other typical childhood memory style video clips. This 56 second video became a smash hit on YouTube and now has over 84 million views.

Miss Teen America

The complete meltdown of Miss South Carolina in attempting to answer a simple question regarding the American educational system was posted on Youtube and laughed at mercilessly by the world. It currently has 33 million views. The viral power of this clip was made popular with its ability to make almost anyone blush with embarrassment.

“101 Simple Meals” Article

This article gives out 101 recipes which will be ready in under 10 minutes. It was passed around the web frequently, and as a result has become widely known as a great example of viral content. As you can see, viral content does not have to be quirky.

It’s important to be very careful when handling viral content, as anything you upload to the internet could become viral, with potentially disastrous results.

As an example, a couple of years ago a video was uploaded to the internet of a student using a golf ball retriever to perform Star Wars moves. The video was titled “Star Wars Kid”, and it received attention from news networks, as well as millions of views on YouTube. The upload of the video resulted in a lawsuit, as the uploader did not have permission to do so. The student in question suffered years of name calling, and still does.

Viral Content as a marketing technique can be an easy way for companies to get their message out via word of mouth, without spending millions on traditional media. Many times, pure luck and good timing plays a big part in determining how far reaching a viral marketing campaign will spread.

In the event that an organization fails in producing something valuable enough to prove viral, they may consider purchasing the rights to an existing viral phenomenon and brand it as their own. This technique was used by Stride gum, when it capitalized on the now infamous travels of dancing Matt, who started traveling and dancing for his own entertainment but now does so as a testament to the long lasting nature of gum.

See that little icon at the left side of your URL bar? What you’re looking at is a favicon.

The word ‘favicon’ is short for ‘favorites icon’. Favicons were originally introduced with Internet Explorer 5. To install a favicon, developers could place an image file in the root of their web server with a specific name. This image file would then be used as the favicon for the website, and would be displayed in the user’s ‘favorites’ toolbar alongside the domain of the website.

But why?, I hear you ask.

There are many reasons why you may want to upload a favicon for your website. Firstly, if your site will be aggregated by content providers, or if your sites main feature is RSS, the favicon you upload will be displayed by your RSS feed, making it easy for users to identify your website quickly. It’s also the same case in a user’s favorites list, where there are many sites. You to stand out in that list and provide a quick graphical reminder of your sites.

Also, people DO notice favicons. For example, when Google recently changed there favicon, the blogosphere picked up and all of a sudden there were hundreds upon thousands of posts about the switch.

Your next question will most likely be: How do I create a favicon?

One of the best ways to create a favicon is to visit a website such as Favicon.cc. Favicon.cc provides you with a large square, comprising of 256 smaller squares. On the right hand side of the page there is a Color Picker box, which allows you to choose a color for the box you are about to fill in.
Then, once a color is selected, hover over a box and click it to fill it with that color. You can fill all the boxes with colors of your choice, and when you are finished, click the ‘Download Favicon’ button at the bottom of the page. This will download a file named “favicon.ico” to your computer.

Now, all you have to do is upload this file in to the root of your site’s web server. Once you have done this, the favicon will be available in the URL bar, beside the web address of the site.

Favicon.cc also has a gallery of the top rated user created favicons. The gallery can be viewed here.