My latest Squarespace website project was a site makeover for nu funk record label Boogie Boutique. Having already created and managed their website with the Squarespace platform, they wanted me to give the site a fresh new look with a bit more polish and design flair than their existing site had. My job was to bring to light the great content (photos, audio tracks) that they already had, and to create a framework which they could easily work with moving forward. They also wanted to integrate Facebook like buttons, embedded audio and video players, and generally smarten things up with a bit of subtle animation/movement. Before & after screenshots are below…

After: new homepage – the fruits of our labour
(click to check out the live version with subtle animation – hover over the boxes on their homepage)

Before: their old homepage

The only real struggle was getting Squarespace to play nicely with some of the more advanced additions such as the fancy Jquery sliders. We had to do some workarounds, but the overall result still looks good. I am really looking forward to the release of Squarespace Version 6 – which apparently is coming very soon – as I hope that the new version will have addressed some of the current system’s limitations and make it even easier to create professional-looking, easy-to-use websites in future.

If you’re like the Boogie Boutique guys – finding it hard to make Squarespace look pretty, or stuck with a boring cookie-cutter template – drop me a line and I’d be happy to work with you to help improve your site’s look and/or user-friendliness.

Recently I’ve noticed an influx into the market of web-based Facebook builder apps: services which allow non-techies to create custom Facebook pages or Facebook apps without needing to understand code or hire a developer. Having tried some first-hand, I thought I’d do a quick list of some of these tools to help you choose which might be right for you. As most of my clients are small biz and/or non-profit, I’m not including any of the big fancy ‘platform manager’ things which cost a lot: these are all available for free or a low fee (usually monthly pay-as-you-go).

Pagemodo

Best for: easy Welcome pages

Pagemodo is designed to be easy-peasy, and you really can create a nice looking custom landing page (Welcome tab) in just a few minutes. It’s free if you don’t mind Pagemodo branding, and if you pay as little as $6.25 per month, you can have up to 3 pages: either 3 different types of ‘tabs’ (eg. Twitter feed, Welcome tab & map page) – OR – if you manage 3 different brands on Facebook, you could have 1 custom ‘tab’ on each. You can also add a gateway which forces people to Like your page in order to have access to content (use sparingly!). Be warned though, the tool is a bit buggy and clunky, and the templates are a bit rigid design-wise.

Involver

Best for: integrating other social feeds & content

On Involver‘s free plan, you can use up to 2 of the Basic level apps, most of which are designed to pull content from other social sites into Facebook: Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitter feed, or RSS (eg your blog posts). There’s also a coupon app, as well as the ability to embed docs via Scribd (PDF, etc), and an iFrame maker which will allow you to embed any web page into a Facebook tab… but use this last one with caution as Facebook’s area is not as wide as most web pages, so you’ll ideally need a designer to make it look nice. If you need more than 2 apps or if you want their Pro apps (Polls, Signup forms, etc), then the price jumps up a lot to a whopping $99 per month (ouch!). I’d love to see them offering some middle ground in terms of pricing in future.

North Social

Best for: all-u-can-eat apps

North Social is the ‘buffet’ option: all the apps you want for 1 price. The price varies depending on how many Fans you have, starting at $20 per month for less than 1,000 Fans. The choice of apps is quite extensive, ranging from a few types of special offers and integrated shops useful for commercial businesses, to volunteering and donation useful for charities or garnering support for good causes, to the usual practical ones such as maps, photo galleries, embedded video, welcome pages and integrated Twitter or RSS feeds. North Social gives you many options to help build your fan base, but if you already have thousands of fans, it may not be the cheapest option: more than 5,000 fans and you’re looking at $50+ per month.

Wildfire

Best for: competitions & short-term campaigns

Wildfire‘s approach is a bit different from the others, as they price on a per-campaign basis. The fee starts from $5 + $0.99 per day for a basic campaign, but you’ll want to spend $25 + $2.99 per day if you want custom branding options. Wildfire has a range of different types of competitions, quizzes and contests, including contests where you can allow your fans to choose the winner. You could also use their ‘flash deal’ coupon option to create Groupon-style promotions. The downside to Wildfire is that they include other people’s campaigns in the confirmation email that gets sent to your fans who enter your own contest, which may not be the kind of thing you want to push on your fanbase.

Booshaka

Best for: Top Fans leaderboard

If you’d like to drive a little healthy competitive spirit among your Fans, you might want to look at Booshaka, as that’s their core offering: creating a hierarchical list of your fans based on their activity. Hitting right at the gamification sweet spot, the goal here is to increase interactions by employing game psychology, aiming at our basal human need to one-up each other in public On the paying plan, you can even add Foursquare-style badges to the mix, but sadly I can’t see their pricing and I must admit there’s a real shoestring start-up vibe on their site as some of their own site links don’t work or take you to ‘coming soon’ pages. Time to grow up guys.

This isn’t an extensive list, but these are just some of the tools I’ve tried and/or know about. If you have any similar tools that you have experience with, please do leave a comment as I am always interested to find other ways of helping people encourage engagement through social media.

My lovely and rather clever client Helen from Where There’s Smoke contracted me to help her showcase the work that they do in a fun, engaging way on their website. Rather than just telling in words what they do, how they do it, why and for whom, we worked up a tabbed slideshow which uses toys and other objects to not only illustrate these concepts, but also reflect what Where There’s Smoke is about: thinking creatively and coming at problems from a different angle.

My job was not only to design and build the website, but also to help figure out how to structure the site and to create all of the slides – as well as feeding back whenever certain bits of text content might be tweaked or improved in order to make things really simple for people to understand. This is my favourite kind of project: something I can get involved with at many different levels, calling upon my photography and artworking skills, as well as my web brains. It’s nice to get to flex all those muscles in one go

I used a handy jQuery slideshow rather than Flash, so it’s smartphone friendly and can be easily updated in future. jQuery is so cool, it’s my new favourite thing. I love how such a small, lightweight little bit of code can produce pretty animation. It makes both my tech geek and my design geek happy.

The site is built on Squarespace once again, and you can check it out here.

If you need to replace your Flash website with something more mobile-friendly and easier to update, or if you like the look of Squarespace, why not drop me a line.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and sharing recently – these are my links for July 12th through July 14th:

• Facebook Studio :: Gallery – Showcase of the best apps and campaigns on Facebook – useful resource for inspiration and ideas.
• How To Build A Facebook Landing Page With iFrames — SocialMouths – Useful design tips for Facebook landing pages with step-by-step instructions on how to make your own
• 30 Creative Facebook landing pages « INDEZINER – Great inspiration: see how companies are making good use of landing pages on Facebook to encourage 'likes', link to other content, showcase blog posts and more.

Hope you find them useful. Enjoy!

Here’s what I’ve been reading and sharing recently – these are my links for June 16th through July 8th:

• American Red Cross Facebook page – Another non-profit making good use of Facebook – really nice landing page with lots of content
• Global mobile statistics 2011 – Extensive list of the latest stats in mobile / smartphone use and trends
• YouTube – ‪Lacta – Facebook app – case study‬‏ – Nice little case study of a Facebook app campaign that went viral
• 4 Steps to Segment Social Media Traffic in Google Analytics « idaconcpts – How to use an Advanced Segment tool in Google Analytics to track referrals from multiple different social media sources in one single report.

Hope you find them useful. Enjoy!

Here’s what I’ve been reading and sharing today: these are my links for June 16th:

• Pipes: Social Media Firehose – How to use Yahoo Pipes to monitor your brand – includes a pre-built Yahoo Pipe that you can use for your own brand monitoring and reputation management.
• By The Numbers: How Facebook Says Likes & Social Plugins Help Websites – Some interesting stats on how the Facebook like button has yielded increased traffic, and pointers on where to put your Facebook like buttons on your site pages in order to get the best response.
• Online Brand Development – Old School Link Building in Social Media Age | Kaiserthesage – Tactics to attract links, both traditionally and through social media channels. It’s all about good content, people.

Hope you find them useful. Enjoy!

Squarespace is a great CMS that is really easy to use, but sometimes it takes the hand of a design pro to make it look just right. Recently I was contacted through my Squarespace microsite by a client who had been using Squarespace for a while, but needed some help in making the site look more professional.

The client is a professional golfer from Canada, so he needed something that reflected a more polished image, but didn’t cost the earth – every sponsor/fundraising dollar counts when you’re a young pro. Squarespace is perfect for this, as I can turn out a polished design very quickly and easily, keeping the costs down. He also needed to be able to update his blog while on tour, without having to log in and think too much about the technology. Once again, Squarespace already has an ‘email-to-blog’ function built in, so all we needed to do was turn it on, and he was able to create blog posts just by sending an email to a special email address. Squarespace automatically turns those emails into posts. Easy as pie, and it means he can keep his focus on the golf rather than having to fiddle with logins and whatnot.

The cool thing about the project was that the content was mostly already there, it just needed to be restructured, finessed and brought into a more user-friendly navigation. I also helped create more search-engine-friendly page titles and descriptions, so things look a lot better on Google now. And because the client was already familiar with the Squarespace system, it didn’t take much training, and we were able to handle the entire project by email smoothly, across 3000 miles.

Here’s the end result, after my work:

and here’s what the site looked like before:

We’re both really pleased with the transformation.Why not pop over to Will Mitchell Golf yourself and have a look?

If you’re in a similar situation – finding it hard to make Squarespace look pretty, or stuck with a boring cookie-cutter template – drop me a line and I’d be happy to help improve your site’s look and/or user-friendliness.

P.S. We also took the opportunity of working together to professionalise the way his email newsletters were being sent. He had been using PDFs attached to an Outlook email, but now he has a stylish email newsletter template which matches his site branding. He can now track email opens, clicks, and easily add new subscribers. Sweet.

Recently I was contacted by Sarah Louise Dix, a rather chic couture upholsterer and designer of stunning bespoke furniture. Like many small businesses/sole traders, Sarah had a website which had been created by a friend, and she got in touch because her friend was no longer able to update the site. Although she initially wanted me to take over the updating, after a chat over hot chocolate, it became clear that the best approach in the long run was for Sarah to move to a system where she could control the site herself, without having to pay someone to do the updates for her. With the increasing popularity of iPhones and iPads, it also made sense to move away from Flash, which her site used for its image galleries, as Apple still seems dead-against supporting Flash on these platforms. It’s no good creating amazing furniture if people can’t see it.

While there are many low-cost tools out there that could have done the job, Sarah wanted to keep most of her existing site’s design, and these tools would not have been able to replicate certain features such as the style of the image galleries she had for her products. And as she makes bespoke high-end products, she needed the site to keep its polished and professional feel, which is not easy to achieve with something like Google Sites or ClickPic. And I like to ensure that even the little things are covered when it comes to design, such as the little favicon which appears in the browser next to the web address… to me, details like this are what set apart professional sites from ‘off the shelf’ sites. And it’s all about detail when it comes to Sarah’s target market.

Luckily, the style she had on the site closely matched what Squarespace could do, with a little tweaking. So I created a custom Squarespace template, migrated her existing site content into the new system, and took the opportunity to also freshen up a few things and add some functionality like a News section. We also added a private area for Press, which meant she could direct media contacts to her own site rather than sending them emails and large files via DropSend.

A couple of hours of training, and Sarah was all set to take control of her site in future. I’m sure I’ll still pop over to the site from time to time, if only to drool over her amazing creations.

With more and more companies using social media for business, it’s increasingly important for businesses to have a set of guidelines or rules of engagement which can ensure that employees know what to do when interacting online. It’s equally important for managers and superiors to have these guidelines in place, as they may not be accustomed to the style of communication that social media requires. Too often companies jump on board with Twitter or Facebook, using these channels purely to send out marketing messages and press releases. And then they are surprised when the results aren’t there. I ask: “Would you tune into a TV channel that was 100% commercials?” I think not. So it’s no surprise that people are tuning out these constant sales messages.

Here’s my take on the rules of engagement for staff whose job it is to interact with people through social media and online communities. It may be their sole job, or part of their job. My version below is made up in large part from a great O’Reilly article in Forbes and AMP3 PR, who have done a great job in creating a working policy for their own employees – a big shout out to them!

Guidelines for Social Media in the Workplace

We expect everyone who participates in online commentary / social media to understand and to follow these simple but important guidelines. These guidelines cover all social media and online community platforms including but not limited to:

• Social networking (such as Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn)
• Micro-blogging sites (such as Twitter)
• Blogs (including company and external blogs, as well as comments)
• Video/photo sharing sites (such as Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo)
• Online communities (forums, discussion boards)
• Collaborative documents / wikis (such as Wikipedia)
• Review sites (such as Qype, WeLoveLocal)

Social Web Guidelines for Employees

Pick & mix.
Spend some time researching and reading up on various sites before deciding where it makes sense for you to spend the majority of your time online. You can’t be everywhere, so pick sites which rank well and are well-visited by the company’s target audience and/or connected to our core business. Then, feel free to mix in a smaller portion of less-popular sites or blogs when comments or topics warrant it.

Look before you leap.
Read, read and read some more. Learn the landscape and individual style of conversations on that particular site – every site has its own (usually unwritten) rules and quirks. The quickest way to make a fool of yourself or get banned from a site is to dive in without first understanding the lay of the land.

Listen before you talk.
Before entering any conversation, understand the context. Whom are you speaking to? Is this a forum for “trolls and griefers?” Is there a good reason for you to join the conversation? If your answer is yes, then follow these practices when engaging online:

Say who you are.
Always be transparent about who you are and who you represent. Use your real name, identify who you work for and what your role is. You can disclose this on your About page or bio, and please also indicate that your opinions do not represent official positions of the company. If possible, include a link to the company website in this page and/or your signature – but only if this is allowed on that particular site. Use your best judgment to determine when this might be appropriate.

Show your personality.
You weren’t hired to be an automaton. Be conversational while remaining professional. Bring your own personal flavour and experiences to your postings: be YOU first and foremost, and an employee of the company secondly. Part of the whole point in having you communicate online in a work capacity is to provide a real, human face to the business.

Add value, not noise.
Social media is about conversations, personal advice, recommendations and building relationships. It is not a sales channel or means for distributing press releases. Remember the 80/20 rule of thumb: 80% of your conversations should be about general topics relevant to the business and/or your own experiences, only 20% should be about the company’s products or services.

Build a following.
Promote yourself by finding and sharing information that will be interesting to your friends and followers and useful for them to share. Become a trusted part of the online community – not only by creating your own content, but sharing others’. Establish relationships online with other people you respect and trust.

Be responsive.
If someone responds to something you’ve said, be responsive and follow-up quickly. If you say something in error, don’t delete it, simply go back and update it with the correct information.

Know you’re always “On”.
You represent the company at all times and you must assume that your social media usage is visible to customers, managers and prospects. Be careful what and with whom you are sharing. Keep in mind that while we all have the occasional work frustration, Facebook and Twitter are not the best venues in which to air them as those comments are available to your customers and coworkers.

Be respectful.
Respond to ideas, not personalities. Don’t question motives, use profanity or demeaning language, or make remarks that are off topic or offensive. Always demonstrate respect for others’ points of view, even when they’re not offering the same in return. Take the high road: never pick fights and don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face and in the presence of others. If you are sharing a negative experience or commenting on a brand or individual, please try to do so in a constructive way.

Don’t expect perfection.
Do expect to make newbie mistakes, and don’t expect everyone to love you. No matter how nice, calm or inoffensive you are, and no matter how much research you do, there will be times when you will trip up and say something unpopular. It’s OK – shake it off and just remember that how you handle this is more important than the misstep itself.

Have full disclosure.
If you are writing an advertorial or other sponsored content – or if you are contracting others to post on the company’s social properties in exchange for money – make sure there’s a clear distinction between the normal / free content and any paid content. Today’s web users are savvy people, and hiding paid activities are a quick way to a bad online reputation.

Know your facts and always give proper credit.
It’s OK to quote others, but never attempt to pass off someone else’s language, photography, or other information as your own. Always give proper attribution (by linkbacks, public mentions, re-tweets and so on). All copyright, privacy, and other laws that apply offline apply online as well. Be sure to credit your sources when posting a link or information gathered from another source.

Think ahead.
Everything you say can (and likely will) be used in the court of public opinion–forever.  Be smart about protecting yourself, your privacy, and the company’s confidential information. What you publish is widely accessible and will be around for a long time so consider the content carefully. Google has a long memory.

Be in it for the long haul.
Don’t expect instant fame, audiences or popularity: building a trusted online presence takes time.

If you respond to a problem, you own it.
If you become the point of contact for a customer or employee complaint, stay with it until it is resolved.

Play nice.
We encourage you to connect with other employees and affiliates online. In doing so, we ask you to remember that sharing personal information about co-workers may affect them inside as well as outside of the office. All standard HR policies apply to interactions between colleagues across the social web.

__________________________

If the above policy is not quite what your own company needs, have a look at this list of social media policies from a huge range of types of organisation, from non-profits through to large corporates. Or indeed check the online database of social media policies.

Now that the internet as we know it has been around a while, you’d think that people would have stopped making truly horrible, un-usable, unreadable and downright ridiculous websites. You’d THINK that, but you’d be wrong. The aptly named Webpages That Suck has pulled together their top 25 worst websites of 2010, which is a great place to look for some holiday season laughs. My favourite has to be number one on the list: Yale School of Art (pictured above).

Having been to art school myself, I totally understand that they are doing a post-modern interpretation of a website, parodying those early 90s websites with the same tongue in cheek that Duchamp, Warhol or Koons had when making their art. I get it, OK? But the difference between a website and a piece of art is that a website such as this has to perform a functional duty: to disseminate information to the viewer in an accessible way. Art doesn’t have to perform this task. Art can therefore be as sublime or ridiculous as the artist wants it to be, without necessarily infringing on its raison d’etre in any way. Sure, art can disseminate information, but usually this is not essential factual information that the viewer has come to the art piece looking for; generally, the message of art is that of conveying the artist’s viewpoint or evoking emotions on something.

Websites are different. Now, I am not saying that all websites have to conform to the norms of usability and accessiblity. But websites that act as the one and only online interface for any business, organisation or individual should. There are laws about this stuff for a reason; defying these on informational websites doesn’t make you clever or creative in the eyes of your audience: it simply makes you annoying and stupid. Can you read – or even FIND – the school’s address on the page shown in this image on the right? Click it to view a larger image…

Don’t get me wrong: I *love* online art. I have contributed to sites such as SITO’s HyGrid (one of the earliest online art collaboarations) and I think The Johnny Cash project is a brilliant combo of art and wiki culture. And there are plenty of great sites which push the boundary between art and design. But the boundary between these two areas is really quite important when it comes to websites such as the Yale one. I would have no problem whatsoever if the Yale folks decided to make an online art piece. And I’d be fine with them creating a website as unreadable as the one they have, so long as they made it easy for people to opt out of that design and view the site in an alternate version.

My problem with the Yale site is that this illegible beast is the only place you can find the information, and they have made getting it pretty damn difficult and frustrating. I don’t care how cool or PoMo it looks, to me, this is bad design. The goal of design should be to enhance the use of an object, not get in the way of it. If you bought a can opener designed by a product designer, no matter how beautiful it was, if it didn’t open cans you’d be chucking it in the bin. If not, you could hang it on your wall and call it art. Art isn’t meant to be useful; design is. Anyone who has ever clicked ‘skip intro‘ or ‘view HTML version‘ buttons on a Flash website knows this.

The funny thing is that the Yale site used to be even worse: it used to have a flashing animated background (check it out here – warning: may cause seizures!). I am guessing some poor unsuspecting epileptic made the mistake of visiting their site, and the resulting lawsuit* forced them to change it

* I don’t really think this, but it sounded more intriguing than what probably actually did happen.