It happens that moving from a detailed working view of crafting beautiful, meticulous code carries an obsessive and addictive quality which makes moving focus to see the big picture quite difficult to do smoothly. It would seem therefore that the ability to have ‘varifocal attention’ would be beneficial to all developers. Being able to zoom out from close up to wide angle, from detail to strategy would be great. Good ones do this naturally. The rest of us could probably use some help.

There are no-doubt other terms in many fields which describe this ability and countless methods and techniques for increasing this ability . I’m adding this to my to-lean list. I welcome discussion on this point and any links to resources would be great.

Meanwhile the new term we came up with ‘Varifocal Attention’ seemed to be a good one in this context. So here is how I’m describing it:

Varifocal Attention: The ability to change focus of attention when working. To move from highly-detailed to overall strategy with ease.

At Root Interactive we like to help you to get a site that is uniquely YOU. Sometimes however, you want to let your work show itself off in the most simple website environment possible. This minimalist request is very common among artists as it reflects the blank state of the gallery, white cube, canvas. You can create a site at WordPress.com

Georgie Henry – Painter

Talented illustrator and painter Georgie Henry had precisely this requirement for her painting website. Her illustration work already had a very bespoke and querky website which we created a few months back: www.georgiebirkett.com but the painting site was going to be different. Clean, simple and uncluttered. Here is the simple site she created.

Transferable skills – creating a new WordPress site

Georgie had already worked with us to create her main illustration site in WordPress. This was a highly crafted, bespoke site self hosted on Georgie’s own shared hosting account. We were able to add and create as much custom functionality as we wanted by using plugins and a custom theme. Georgie had worked alongside us and was now confident adding pages, posts, uploading images, cropping thumbnails and including galleries. She knew WordPress.

WordPress.com

Feeling confident about her skills – Georgie embarked on her own mission to create her painting site in WordPress.com. This is a very clever thing to do. WordPress.com is a website that allows you to create as many blog sites as you want and they will host them for you for free. There are limitations to what you can do – namely that you can’t install plugins, edit themes (directly) and have limited access to other administrative features normally present in a self hosted site. But that’s ok because the good thing is that you may not need them! In fact I’d say that as a starting site, WordPress.com gives you all the basic building blocks to get you started and you can easily export your site into your own self hosted site later on. There are two key upgrades that allow you to create a truly unique site even within these restraints. These are the Custom CSS upgrade and the custom Domain name. All this for as little as £20

Customising a WordPress theme with CSS

Georgie had found a wonderful minimalist theme called Wu Wei by Jeff Ngan. It was clean, simple and did the job nicely. She had kept the white colour option and needed a bit of customisation to get it to be just how she wanted it. At this point we worked together side by side to add some custom CSS styles. The main job was to style the gallery page and hide some unwanted features.

If you are interested in creating a similar site then I will be creating a ‘how to’ blog post shortly with simple instructions and the basic CSS to add to your custom CSS editor.

Simon and I have decided to cooperate in an endevour to prolong the life of our office beans by transplanting them to the support column in the centre of the room. This comes after the realisation that they are better off there than drifting akimbo in their little pots on our desks. Central support is called for.

It’s catching on!

I’ve not been well of late and this has led me to many delirious outpourings of well intentioned but badly worded social media exercises and artistic sproutings. I forgive myself for lack of grammatical and political correctness and thank Simon Sadler (yes funny that – another Simon) for his kind words of encouragement and am pleased to know that planting my business cards has taken off. His bean plant is doing very well as you will see.

I also planted a Root Interactive bean. I have never seen anything grow as fast as that magical bean; it is truly alive. It reminded me of how everything around and within us is ready and waiting to flourish; we just have to plant the seeds.

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Yes – it’s true, Simon’s beanstalk is bigger than mine (his is the beanstalk on the other desk next to the picture frame). Am I envious? YES. Why? childish competition. Of course mine should be the healthiest, biggest, greenest beanstalk on an October day in the office.

And what about my virtual beanstalk?

Just like the beanstalk – my new website has also been drawing little pockets of energy every morning as I have gotten into the habit of checking Google Analytics. As I’ve been busy giving out promotional beans and sending out mailshots, I am always fascinated by what the day’s statistics will reveal.

Hoorah! oops…. I scored a home goal

At first the site had loads of visitors – the graph was high and I marveled at the wonder of modern science. The only bad thing was that most of these visitors where in fact just …me. With so much tweaking and modifying I was a regular visitor.

The truth of the matter is that now that I’ve stopped updating the installation and started to feed the site itself with new updates, activity and links I see a better reflection of how the site is growing and by unique visitor numbers and how this unique visitor graph is changing.

A good balance

Another good indicator for me is the source of traffic. At first the main source of traffic was direct traffic – people who knew the site (again mainly me) and a portion of referred traffic from other sites (mainly ones I’d made) so I could tell pretty much that it wasn’t generating much new traffic. After the Mailchimp email newsletter campaign, getting stuck in with twitter and having Feedburner doing various magical things with my blog feed, I have now started to see a more balanced distribution of visitors from different sources.

But are there any beans yet?

No. can’t say that there has been a lot of actual conversion yet but I’m sure as with all new ventures, these things take time. But it is shiny!!! just like the small leaves on my beanstalk. Now I just have to keep feeding and watering it and singing to it as I believe both websites and beanstalks like the attention.

So a weekend goes past and my little bean plant has grown to nearly a foot tall with two impressive heart shaped leaves. I got the feeling that the plant needed an upgrade to a pot of its own. So I carefully extracted the plant with all its roots and transplanted it. Being so tall now it was starting to need some support. I put a rod in with it to help it along. Thoughts turn to my clients and their websites.

Sometimes websites need bigger pots too.

Just like the plant that feels crowded and out of control surrounded by other plants and no room to spread its roots, I understand that for small businesses and organisations, the time also comes when the static website of a few pages that has sat there in cyberspace for a few years collecting few hits and a lot of web dust, decides the time has come to take some control and give the little website the time and attention it needs to nurture it into a flourishing and productive web entity

We have a couple of clients who are in exactly this position. They want to edit the site themselves now, they want to be interconnected with Twitter, events, blogging and anything else that will give them the necessary exposure and chance to rise towards the Google web sun, whilst delivering good web content to their users. They need to assess their Web Vitality before deciding what needs doing, but what’s fairly evident, is that in both cases they need to be in control and this may mean setting up a CMS (content management system) that will allow them to manage the site themselves.

WordPress as a powerful CMS

Here at Root Interactive we are very happy with WordPress as a good starting choice of CMS. There are many reasons why we like it but primarily we find that YOU like it. Out of all the freely available content management systems out there, this seems to be both powerful and simple at the same time. It’s easy to create a basic site with WordPress and you can start completely for free with a hosted solution from WordPress.com. Although there are many limitations to your ability to modify your theme to make it do what you want, its certainly a good introduction to a powerful website without a big expense.

A bit of web landscaping

Is a website like a plant? or is it like a garden? I’m not sure about that yet but in either case it helps to get some expert help sometimes and the web is full of help and advice in the form of blogs, guides, articles and videos.

At Root Interactive we can  help out too of course. Clients often come to us with a half made website that they have started themselves. We Love the fact that they have tried themselves. I think its great because now they really know what they want, and what doesn’t work for them. They also know the good and bad bits of creating websites and they find their own technical and creative limits.

If this sounds like you and you need some help getting in control of your website then get in touch. More about WordPress to come.

After having handed out a handful of my business cards… ahem! beans I was left with the distinct desire to plant some and see what would happen. No Jack and no cow,  so I just popped one of my beans into this here plant pot on my desk last week and Pop! today we have a sprout. Can’t tell you how exciting this is. Certainly it makes the idea of guerilla bean planting appealing. Back to the grind…