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…

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.

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.

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 and create powerful leads for your business.

I’d like to say that the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but the fact is that you need to decide which of those stances you’re going to take, because I would argue it’s nigh on impossible to do both of those equally well.

Building relationships is more sustainable

You probably won’t be surprised from my introduction to know that at Flourish, we advocate the latter approach. Why? Because we believe that building brands, engaging with your current and prospective customers and gaining traction is the most sustainable approach to business. Because we believe that quality over quantity is more effective, and because we know that writing a blog for real people is more fun and inspirational (and we all need a bit of fun in our lives) than writing for a spider (of the search engine variety).

I realise that using your blog to drive traffic sounds a lot more attractive than the slow burn approach I advocate. After all, who wants to wait 6 months for a relationship to build? Anyone in a service industry actually! Anyone with a product or service that they want to make irresistible to their ideal clients. Building relationships with your reader over a longer period of time (and in my experience it takes around 6 months) means that when that reader is ready to buy, you are the only choice. And as long as you don’t have three heads, you’ve generally got the work.

Quality over quantity

Do you really think you’re going to get that same level of commitment from your blog readers if you’re writing for the search engines? I’d suggest not. Ultimately it’s about quality over quantity. Writing your blog for the search engines may, if you do it well, bring you in legions of visitors, but if you’ve pumped every post full of key phrases like Image Consultant, Image Consultancy, Image Consultant Surrey and entitled your post Image Consultant Surrey: A Makeover for Sue (don’t laugh – I see it all the time!) do you really think that those visitors are going to want to do business with you?

As I say, you have to decide which approach takes priority. And for me, building a brand wins every time.

A real example: Lisa Cox

Let’s explore an example. Lisa Cox, Garden Designer extraordinare is a cracking example of how to use your blog to position yourself as an expert, build relationships and generate business from her blog. Lisa does this by sharing what’s going on in her world, making her blog look beautiful and writing from the heart. In return she has a healthy readership, enjoys the couple of hours a week she invests in blogging and has generated some exciting business: including clients in Leeds and France. She didn’t set out to gain business outside of Surrey, but isn’t it exciting that it’s happened?

Do you honestly think that if she’d prefaced every post with Garden Designer Leatherhead or Garden Designer Surrey that these readers would have been as interested. If she kept linking back to her own website sales page every time she mentioned the word Garden Designer do you think people would have responded? How about if she’d added a paragraph like this at the bottom of every post?

Lisa Cox creates beautiful spaces that inspire you to get outside and enjoy your garden, if you’d like to talk to me about a consultation then please get in touch.

The point is that if you’re building relationships, you don’t need to add all these trappings. People know, love and respect you, and when they’re ready to buy they’ll move heaven and earth to do business with you because they like you. I’m not sure you can say that of the SEO approach to blogging, but maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?

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.

And whilst we’ve been working with her on her printed literature now for several years, I was delighted when she asked us to give her blog a brandover. Having set up her business less than two years ago, Liezl had previously created her websites herself and felt that her business was at a level where she was ready to step things up a gear.

As well as being a cracking lifestyle photographer, Liezl is also very crafty and I think you’ll see that come through in the look and feel of the site.

We’ve worked on creating direct mail for Liezl in the past (which we won a design award last year for) but this project gave us the chance to really flex our creative muscles! We designed to create Liezl a WordPress based blogsite – a website and blog rolled into one which would give her the chance to showcase her photography without being too onerous to manage.

We put together a colour palette that created an aspirational feel, whilst plenty of texture and elements like the bunting creates a sensory quality and follows on from the work we did previously on the mailers. We all love the icons that Chloe created for each category, and the beautiful pattern that sets off the blog. I’d always known that Liezl’s work was beautiful, but what I hadn’t appreciated was the enormous difference the right surroundings make to her images.

If you take a look at the difference between the old blog and the new, I think you’ll agree they’re night and day apart.

Liezl’s old blog

I don’t want to embarrass anyone by going into this too heavily, let’s just say that the design of the blog had a long way to catch up with the quality of Liezl’s work…

And the new blogsite

Liezl has been so much fun to work with on this project and we wish her lots of luck with the new site and branding. It’s too early to measure the financial success of the blog – it’s been live for less than a month, but visits have doubled and the feedback to Liezl’s Facebook and Twitter page was overwhelming! Do hope on over and take a look (and do leave her a comment too, it’s so lovely to receive feedback when you’re writing your heart out and you know how lonely it can be when you’re first blogging)… You’ll find Liezl’s website and blog at www.liezlcroft.com

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 we really had a very free rein (within the confines of the brief of course!).

The brief for this blog design was to create something that felt fresh, uplifting and healthy. I think it’s a great example of a very clean and professional Spring design. You can just feel the energy bursting out of that green can’t you? And yet the purple keeps it restrained and the attention to detail in the layout and typography keeps the whole feel professional and smart.

I really can’t wait to get this live for Harriet as I know it’ll be a great platform for her to start to launch her business. Keep your eyes peeled too because over the next week or so we’ll be sharing the new website design for Nutribeing with you too…

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 that many of you find it hard to find the time to blog, and so I thought it might be helpful to talk about how to find the time, and what you might do to carve out a little time for your blog.

Don’t waste energy on what you should have done

First up, I’m the first to admit that I should sometimes blog more regularly. Sometimes I blog every day, sometimes a week or two slips by without me finding time to post. I’m not going to berate myself over that, and I recommend you don’t either.

Right now we are having major renovations done on our house. I’m pretty laid back about a bit of mess, even chaos, at times, but this has really floored me. We moved back in to our house on Sunday (about two weeks sooner than we should have done I think) – no heating, no electrics, no hot water and the back of the house ply-boarded up. It hasn’t been fun, and it’s affected the time and energy I’ve had to blog. I hope you don’t have the major upheaval that I’ve got, but there will be times when it isn’t humanly possible to blog. That’s ok.

Make it part of your routine

As MD of the business, I know that the buck stops with me when it comes to attracting and keeping customers. Sure, I have two fabulous Account Executives, but it’s my job to drive the business forward, and experience has shown me time and time again that this blog helps me attract and retain clients. Therefore I need to make time for it.

I was at Vanessa Langham Day’s Entrepreneur’s Circle yesterday and she reminded us that as business owners we should be spending 20% of our time every day on driving the business forwards. That means an hour and a half a day (or an hour and a half of each of the three days that I work) on marketing. Updating your website, making strategic plans, implementing your website and writing your blog. Do you invest that much time in your marketing? If you work full time that means a whole day a week! Imagine what that could do for your business if you did that week in week out.

So there’s no getting around the fact that you just need to make the time.

Write a “job lot” of posts for efficiency

I’ve taken most of Friday to work on marketing and have already written three posts and will probably write a couple more that I’ll schedule over the course of next week (or this week, as you’re reading this next week!). That means that every week I can go into the week knowing that I have some blog activity going on.

Write posts around a specific theme

I always find that writing a series of blog posts gets a better response from my readers and is easier to write – the challenge is, it takes brain space (which is often quite hard to find when you’re living on a building site )

What else do you do to make time to blog? And what’s getting in your way? I’d love your thoughts!

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 sixty percent of her clients are men so it was really important that we didn’t make the website too girly. I love her new strapline which we developed for Angela based on my knowledge of the elements of style and image that are important to Angela and her business.

Angela has had a WordPress blog for some time now, and had been writing a fair bit. She has a really fun, no nonsense style and doesn’t mince her words. We felt that it was really important to inject some of that elegance and style that Angela has into the blog, as well as giving it an authorative no-nonsense look that matches her writing style.

Chloe has done a fab job neatening everything up, making the whole look and feel smarter, easier to navigate and more elegant. And I love how the theme just offsets what Angela is writing now.

We debated long and hard with Angela about which seasonal personality she should be (the joys of bringing colour theorists together from two different schools!) and agreed that Winter was the right season for Angela. Winter is authorative, elegant, expert, loves upmarket things and luxury. We’ve injected a bit of warmth into the colour to ensure that it felt approachable and comfortable to Angela

I know that Angela has had a great response to her new makeover and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for her blog! You’ll find it at http://www.angelamarshall.co.uk/ go on, take a look!

I’ve long been a fan of food photographer Helene Dujardin’s blog Tartelette. Her photography is just stunning and always, without fail, picks me up after a stressful day. I find her styling inspirational and her photography just beautiful.

And so when I discovered that she had written a book on how to take food photography I didn’t need any encouragement to get myself a copy in the interests of research.

I think that most of you will find the styling, information on props and creating a mood with your food photography the most valuable. Helene is so generous with what she shares and the whole book is truly inspiring. I just couldn’t wait to rush out and play about with my lunch, much to the delight of my family.

Styling, props and how to create a mood

I really “got” some of the things she was saying around thinking about the mood you want to create when styling a dish – give a homely dish homely props, an elegant dish elegant props. I think it’s something that’s very obvious once you think about it, but the point is that I’d never thought about it like that before. Haleluja Helene!

There are chapters on styling specific styles of food and Helene helps you tackle some of the challenges, like wilting lettuce or melting ice cream. And best of all, Helene cooks real food, the sort of food you want to pick up and eat, so you won’t find anything dodgy going on with mashed potato in place of ice cream, varnish or any of those other odd food styling tricks of old.

The technical stuff is certainly a little overwhelming for a complete novice like me. I found myself reading and re-reading the chapters on exposure as I’m not much of a technical girl but Helene is reassuring in her knowledge and I value the fact that I can play around with styling and then go back and re read those chapters when I’m ready.

And here’s something I made earlier

I just couldn’t help playing about with our lunch in prep for this post. There’s a lot to work on technically, and these were very much 5 minute snaps while the toddler and my husband chivvied me along to finish so that they could eat their lunch (because we’re staaaaaarving).

It’s also probably fair to say that these are “inspired by” Helene’s work rather than even remotely being on the same planet as hers but it’s not often I get to publish my food photography on the Full Bloom blog so I’m just going to stop apologising now and let you make your own minds up…

Enjoy. Oh, and I happened upon this video from Helene sharing the inspiration behind the book via Creature Comforts blog and I couldn’t not show it to you.

If you do buy the book, or do have a copy, do let me know what you think!

Plate to Pixel Promo Video HD from Taylor Mathis on Vimeo.

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 blogs may wish to curtail some of the girlier elements of my list – but here are some of the things that work for me.

1. A gorgeous notebook to jot down your blog ideas and keep you motivated. A lovely client gave me this beautiful Liberty notebook and it makes me smile every time I see it.

2. A camera. I love my Canon 350D, I love my new 5D even more. Photos bring your blog to life and help you connect creatively, plus it’s a LOT of fun.

3. And if you have a camera then you’ll need something to edit your photos in. I can’t do without Adobe Photoshop CS5 and my recently discovered copy of Adobe Lightroom but if you’re starting out Photoshop Elements is great at £80 a copy.

4. A lovely fountain pen to write in your notebook – just because you’re blogging online doesn’t mean it’s not important to connect with actual writing.

5. WordPress. There are many blogging platforms but WordPress remains my firm favourite: intuitive to use, flexible, and very customisable for your brand.

6 & 7. Blogging Your Way ecourse from Decor8: a fun, creative and inspirational way to help you connect with your blog and take it to the next level. Highly recommended.

7. Vicki Knights Photography Workshop for Creative Business Owners - a cracking way to improve your photography skills.

8. And if you’re going to do all this writing, then you need a nice cup of tea.

So those are my top eight, what would you add to the list?