Blogging

I am so thrilled to be able to share this beautiful new blog design for Lisa Cox.

Lisa is a fabulous Garden Designer based in Leatherhead, Surrey, but whose flair for creating gardens that suit their owners has meant that she works both throughout the UK and internationally. Lisa has been blogging now for several years, and you may remember our initial blog design? This latest iteration reflects where Lisa’s business is right now and works with her blogging style just perfectly!

Chloe has made sure that Lisa’s new blog fits within Lisa’s brand style and website design, whilst at the same time giving another dimension to her brand. I think it’s really boring when your blog looks the same as your website: it’s supposed to have another voice, another take on your business. So we’ve used the distinctive handwriting font and the same colour palette but introduced some new texture, pattern and illustrations.

Redesigning the Flourish blog is one of the next jobs on our list, and so I’m incredibly jealous of the small details on Lisa’s blog: the customisation of things like the Link Within box and the way the comments box has been styled. Just gorgeous!

Lisa takes beautiful photos of both her own garden designs and also gardens that inspire her, and I really think the new blog design shows them off in their full glory. I saw lots of lovely comments on Twitter yesterday about Lisa’s blog and I’m really looking forward to seeing the impact it has on her business.

Oh and isn’t the name fab? Lisa and I brainstormed a lot, as I know did many of her friends! I forget who came up with the name, but I think it perfectly encapsulates what Lisa creates for her clients: a room outside they want to spend time in. And I think the strapline “Grand Plans for Outdoor Spaces” just builds on that nicely.

You can see Lisa’s new blog, The Room Outside, at blog.lisacoxdesigns.co.uk I’d love to know what you think…

Tagged as , garden designer, garden designer blog, lisa cox, the room outside in Blogging, Case Studies, From The Studio

Have you discovered Blogstomp yet? If you’re a blogger and you blog photographs then you need this, like, yesterday. It’s AMAZING.

Before we go any further, I’m not an affiliate, I’m not trying to make any money out of you. I have been using the app for a couple of weeks now and it has completely revolutionised how I blog images. And I am evangelical about it. That’s it! So this is not about generating any affiliate revenue, I just want to save you time.

Time saving and pixel perfect

One of the things that stops many of us blogging is a lack of time. For some of us, it’s also that quest for perfection. All these things get in the way of you showcasing your lovely work with the world.

I have been told off on numerous occasions by Matt Pereira complaining that my photo montages aren’t pixel perfect. Now I don’t know about you but I have better things to do with my time than nudge things a mm to the left or right. Yes, I absolutely expect it of my designers when they’re creating client work. But my blog is my notebook and if everything was pixel perfect I honestly wouldn’t have time to get done half the stuff I get done (but that’s another story for another day…).

Matt Pereira and Eddie Judd both encouraged me to try Blogstomp, and I’m so glad they did. Even though it just looked like another pain in the backside tool in my workflow, it has saved me AGES when it comes to creating web ready images for the blog. And they come out pixel perfect! Result.

How I use it

I still do all my photo selection and organisation in Lightroom. And I edit my photos in Photoshop. But then I just import my full sized images into blogstomp and let it do it’s thing.

I don’t love that layout, and the difference in background tones looks appalling there doesn’t it? It’s really quick to chop and change images when you see that they’re not working.

I tend to select a few images I think will work together and see what kind of layout it comes up with.

If I don’t like the layout, I click Mix It Up until it comes up with something I do like. Then I click Stomp It and it’ll save the images at the right size and resolution for my blog. How clever?

You need to set up the detail for your blog- specify how wide you want your images to be and also define your styles – I have a 1px black border and a 10px (that’s pixels by the way) white border style. You can also add a watermark but so far I haven’t felt the need or found the time to work out how to do that.

The upsides

If you don’t already use Blogstomp, here are a few of the features I’ve found really helpful and I hope you find it saves you time too…

• Playing about with photos that you think might go together without using shed-loads of memory in Photoshop
• Resizing and reorganising at a flick of a button. I dread to think how many hours I’ve wasted doing this manually in Photoshop
• Pixel perfect borders with no effort
• Consistency of styling – every image that comes out is exactly the same style (if I choose it to be). That would be really hard to do manually
• Saving at the right size for my blog without even trying (to be fair, I used to use Photoshop Actions for this so it was pretty quick, but it was still a 2 step process – resize using the action and then Save For Web – blogstomp does this in one Stomp It click)
• As it Stomps them it removes them from your list so you don’t accidentally use the same image twice (tell me it’s not just me that’s done that?)
• If you realise that a couple of the images don’t work together you just de and reselect different ones

Does this sound more and more like an advert? Sorry Told you I was evangelical.

The downsides?

• It can only montage up to 4 images at a time. So if you want to put together uber-montages like Matt did in his recent post on my charity fundraiser then you’ll need to use something else.
• There’s no free (useful) trial – they get watermarked, so you kind of have to just go for it
• It doesn’t seem to like .png files (the files I get when I take a screenshot like the images above) which means I still need to resize those in Photoshop

Are you a Blogstomp convert too? I’d love to know how you use it and if I’m missing any tricks.

Tagged as , Blogstomp Review in Blogging

Earlier this week Fiona wrote a post about who you are writing for and I thought I would follow up with a post about what you’re writing.

The point she was making was whether you should be writing blog posts for search engines or to engage with your active readers.

And there’s a relatively straight forward alternative question to this: Are you writing blog posts or news articles?

To begin with I’ll state my interpretations of each

Blog posts

Based on ideas around your business (or life for personal users) and your thoughts and comments on what’s happening in the news.

News articles

Based on factual information designed to engage and inform the reader about current or ongoing information (whether about the business directly or articles in the news that relate to your business).

Audience connections – blog posts

On a blog you will generally be posting to an active reader list – people who read what you have to say time and time again. You might get referrals by word or mouth (in this decade: social media) and them sometimes a post you write will perform really well on a particular topic in search engines (See how just one blog post by Flowerona about the UK Royal wedding bouquet received tens of thousands of hits, and resulted in the offer of a column for a floral magazine)

Though search engines are important to gain new subscribers (though the age old ‘word of mouth’ tactic is pretty good – i.e. ‘Share’ buttons) you are making connections with human beings and writing copy that is riveting and compelling. If your blog post is good people should want to share it and it’ll spread across social media platforms such as Twitter.

Audience connections - news articles

You may read or are linked to news articles by the BBC, the Telegraph and other news sites. Look at their tone and how they write. They’re connecting with the reader to inform them of what has/is happening.

It’s a good idea to keep factual information relating to your business where you are informing rather giving opinion in a separate news feed (generally integrated with your website). And this is where you can start putting your Search Engine hat on.

The tone of voice used for writing news articles that inform a reader is exactly the tone that is suitable to writing good search engine copy. They make use of repeating key note information and quotes to reiterate their point (see the correlation?).  By still making a readable piece of copy you can entice searchers on to the news article that you have written and then link them off to a) more information, b) your contact details and c) (if you have one) your own comments on a separate blog. Please feel free to rearrange this order as you see fit.

Expanding the example – the Telegraph

As an illustrative example The Telegraph has news articles for informing their readers of current news and blogs for their editors so that they can give their own comments. There are separated to keep fact from opinion.

The cost of upkeep

Whether you are writing a blog post or a news article the same problem arises: you need to write frequently. To engage with your active readers of a blog then they’ll be wanting new content to come back to. To engage with search engines exactly the same applies. If there’s nothing new they’ll got bored and stop coming back.

Tagged as in Blogging, Search Engine Optimisation, Uncategorized, Websites

There are generally two approaches to blogging. The voice of search engine optimists: use your blog to drive traffic to your website and haul your business higher up the search engines. And then there is the voice of reason: build your blog organically to create meaningful relationships with your visitors, position yourself as an expert [...]

Tagged as in Blogging

Liezl Croft is an utterly lovely wedding and family portrait photographer. A force of South African fabulousness, creative, warm, friendly and with an eye for fun she asked us to create a brand refresh and blogsite that would reflect where her business is today as well as (of course) attracting and retaining lots of new clients. [...]

Tagged as in Blogging, Case Studies, From The Studio, Web Design, Websites

These posts are a bit like busses aren’t they? You wait for one In The Studio This Week and then two come along at once! Harriet Tipping is a very lovely nutritional therapist who has just about to launch her business, Nutribeing. She already had a logo but no brand identity to speak of, so [...]

Tagged as , blog design in Blogging, Case Studies, From The Studio

Rarely does a week go by when someone doesn’t ask me the question “How on earth do you find the time to blog?”. I too, have been the victim of the “I don’t know how she does it” type comments. Small children, business, baking etc – where does blogging fit into my time? I know [...]

Tagged as in Blogging

Angela Marshall is an author and one of the country’s leading image consultants. I’ve known her for years since I met her networking when I first started my business, and I was delighted when Angela invited to give her blog an image makeover. Angela works with large corporates: often financial institutions and professional services, and [...]

Tagged as , angela marshall, appearance management, blog design in Blogging, Case Studies, From The Studio

 So you want to take better photographs of food for your website or blog but don’t know where to start? Rush out and get yourselves a copy of the gorgeous Plate to Pixel: Digital Food Photography & Styling, go on, right now! Rarely do I leap about quite so much over a book as this [...]

Tagged as in Blogging, Recommended Reading

Ahead of tomorrow’s sell out blogging workshop I thought it might be fun to combine a little list of my own “must have” tools for bloggers. Looking down my list again it’s probably fair to say that most of these apply mostly to creative bloggers – those of you that write cutting edge, hard-nosed business [...]

Tagged as in Blogging, Inspirations