Unsigned

They’ve just released a new theme that is specifically for bands, singers or musicians that want to roll their own website. There are lots of websites and services out there to help bands get going¹ but Unsigned by WooThemes is for the artist that wants to have full control over their site and doesn’t mind doing a bit of HTML/CSS coding or wants to hire someone to help with that part of it.

Features

They’ve bundled in a bunch of great stuff, including:

Events Module

Caters for the management and listing of events (gigs, festivals, etc). Events can be grouped into categories (club, concert, gig, festival, etc) and tours. An event’s status (upcoming, right now, past) is determined by it’s start and end date/time.

Discography Module

Discography is where the artist manages their album releases. Albums can be sorted into categories and make up a cover image, unique catalog ID and a release date. Each album has an audio player facility, which uses tracks that are uploaded directly when adding or editing an album.

Videos Module

Videos is where the artist manages their embedded videos from YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Videos can be sorted into categories and make up an optional posterframe and an embed code field.

Soundcloud Integration

Woo — SoundCloud is a bridge between Unsigned and SoundCloud. When a username is specified, the system connects to SoundCloud and retrieves the user’s tracks and playlists. These two content types are outputted via a Woo — SoundCloud — Playlist widget for specific playlists and a Woo — SoundCloud Tracks widget to display individual players for specific tracks.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free plugin that enables e-commerce on any theme — but on Unsigned it allows bands.musicians to sell their albums and other merchandise right on their site.

Buy Unsigned

You can pickup Unsigned for $70 from WooThemes or get in touch with me and I’d be happy to help you get your band’s website up and running.

They’ve recently put together their annual report for 2011 and rather than distribute it² using traditional print and PDF methods, they’ve built a beautiful HTML/CSS/JavaScript based side scrolling report that shows all the important stats on sales, marketing and company culture that anyone might want — all accessible from your browser.

A great way to show off your brand to an audience that might not otherwise read your stuffy PDF.

On the subject of less boring annual reports, worth checking out is Apple’s new iBooks Author application. If your potential audience or investors are iPad users, this is a great new way to distribute an annual report with images, text, charts and other audio/video.

The Problem

When you first setup a WordPress website/blog/etc., the pages and posts you create all get a unique URL ² which is great. Helps computers and people to be able to tell the different pieces of content apart. The problem is that the default setting is for the URL to look something like www.websitename.com/?p=123 and www.websitename.com/?p=124. Not very easy to tell what kind of page you’re getting when you visit that URL, nor is it easy to tell someone later on to just go to www.websitename.com/?p=123 to find the information you need.

The Solution

Video Version

Direct link to Vimeo or YouTube version.

Text Version

Luckily, as with most thing WordPress related, the solution is pretty simple. Here’s the xx step process to make your URLs look nice for everyone.

• Login to the WordPress admin
• Go to “Settings” and then “Permalinks” (should be something like http://www.website.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php)

• Choose “Month and Name” (My personal preference but “Day and Name” works too)
• Click “Save Changes”

Once you do that, WordPress will automagically change page links from things like www.website.com/?page_id=2 to the more human readable and easier to remember www.website.com/about/ for Pages and www.website.com/2012/01/title-of-post for Posts.

It makes Google happier for search results³ and makes your users happy because they can navigate and find things on your website much quicker and easier.

Watch the talk — Do Things the Long, Hard, Stupid Way

Right now the different groups they talk about are celebrities, media organizations, nonprofit organizations, political groups, sports teams & Universities — but the ideas are similar for all organizations or businesses.

One of the more interesting uses for Google+ that I could see is through the use of what Google is calling Hangouts. Basically it’s video chatting with up to 10 other people. It’s been done before — but with Google+ it’s free and easy to have a conversation with 10 customers or clients about your product or service. Some ideas for how you might use Google+ Hangouts:

• Hold a quick video chat on a new feature of your product that you just launched.
• A live Q&A with one of your support staff and some of your customers
• Get feedback from your clients on how business is going.
• Or just shoot the breeze with whoever happens to be online for awhile and see how things are going.

Particularly as more and more of our commerce moves online, using tools like Google+ Hangout to maintain a human connection with your customers is one great way to set yourself apart from all the other websites vying for people’s attention and money.

So if you’re trying to market a new version of a notebook you sell, what sort of video would you create to convey the quality that goes into each notebook? I’m pretty sure your first thought wouldn’t be the video they created — but I know it goes a long way to convincing me that Coudal puts the utmost care and effort into the creation of their notebooks if they’re willing to put this much effort into the promotional video.

Maybe the most obvious way to market your product isn’t the best way. How could you present a different aspect of your product to highlight the strength, quality or design of your product?

Orabrush used a YouTube video and some innovative marketing to get their tongue cleaner that they were making in their garage out to all the Walmarts across the United States.

I mention this here only because a common keyword search that brings people to this website is ‘squarespace vs virb’ where they land on this post comparing two popular website builder companies.

As part of the sponsorship of SSKTN, Squarespace has set me up with a complimentary version of their system and so I’ve moved the SSKTN blog over to Squarespace.

Screenshot of SSKTN Blog on Squarespace

It’s a really powerful and easy to use content management system. It’s not for everyone but I’ve been very impressed with how much you can do with a site without having to touch any HTML/CSS code.

I’d invite you to check it out and then let me know if you have any questions about Squarespace in the comments below.

Depending on your website, it can be a contact button where you’d like people to submit their name and email address for a special offer. Maybe your website is a service that you want people to sign up for. It could be that you have an e-commerce website where you want people to place an order. Or maybe you have a coupon or some sort of digital download that you’d like someone to get.

It’s a technique that’s still popular because it does work really well to draw your eye to the thing the business/web designer wants you to do or take action on.

It’s a good idea to:

1. Figure out what you want people to do when they visit your website. Maybe top two things?
2. Does your website make it clear how to complete those one or two things you defined in step 1?

Webdesignerdepot.com has a list of do’s and don’ts of call to action pages. Take a look at some of their suggestions and compare to your website to see how you’re doing.

When you search Google Maps, in this case for the term “coffee shop”, Google shows you a list of all the coffee shops in the area.

Clicking on Broadway Roastery, a great coffee shop here in Saskatoon, brings you to a detailed page on that business — not to the business’ web page.

Here you can see links to Directions, Reviews, Photos, and Related Places.

(As an aside, as a business owner I don’t want people to see the Related Places section — why send your customers to your competition? The solution is to add more content to this page so that Related Places is pushed further down the page. See further down for details.)

If you’d like to be able to add content and update this page, you just need to click on the Business Owner? link on the top right corner of the page.

From that link you’ll be given the option to a Add, Edit or Suspend a Listing. Typically you’ll want to Edit your listing.

After you choose to Edit a Listing you’ll see a page that allows you to edit all the information about your business (address, phone number, email, website, description, hours of operation, etc.)

Obviously filling in as much detail as you can will help Google know everything it needs to present the correct information to people searching for your business.

Towards the end of the business listing there’s a section for photos and videos.

This is where you can add more content to your listing so that Related Places gets pushed further down. Add links to videos about your business or upload photos of your business and people will see that. Much more interesting than those other pesky related businesses Google might want to show potential customers, right?

Verify

Once you’ve filled in all your details, Google will require you to verify that you’re the actual owner of the business. They do this by sending out a postcard with a special PIN code to the business address that you filled out in the business listing. In 2–3 weeks you’ll get a nice little Google postcard with a PIN code to come back and input to verify that you are the owner of the business. From then on, you’ll be able to update and make changes to your Places information on Google Maps.

Google Places

So that’s a quick look at how you can control what Google lists for your business. You can go directly to the Google Places page to start editing/add your business listing. Obviously get in touch with me if you’d like a hand setting this up.