The Blog Studio

Here at The Blog Studio, we’re always looking for ways to help our clients get up and running quickly. Be it, Wordpress, Expression Engine, or even a custom built CMS. We thought that to help our clients out, and to also help anyone else looking to get started with blogging, we’d offer this handy WordPress guide on what to do with the Control Panel.

TBS-Wordpress_Walkthrough.pdf <-- Link to the guide

This guide was created by Mike Caputo our fabulous developer. The guide barely touches the surface of what this CMS is capable of doing, however, we think that we've covered the bare essentials for someone who is getting started with blogging. These things include basic tasks like:

1. Adding Categories to posts
2. Adding Tags to posts
3. Adding Pages
4. Adding links
5. Entering basic content
6. Entering custom field data

We will update the guide as feedback pours in - so please feel free to leave you questions or comments.

As if we didn’t have enough trouble getting sites to render across browsers! Once upon a time I knew that Safari rendered colours slightly differently than other browsers. That’s one of those arcane bits of knowledge that is rarely useful outside a bull session with copious amounts of beer and my fellow web designers. But it was driven home just now when I happened to have the same page up in both Safari and Firefox.

The root of the cause and it’s simple solution is best explained in this article.  To summarize: it’s the colour profiles stored with the images. Safari honours them. Others don’t. Frankly, I prefer the way Safari handles it, and wish other browsers would follow suit. By specifying a colour profile, the designer can more accurately predict the way the image will look on a variety of monitors.

I believe I am over-simplifying things somewhat. No doubt someone will tell me that we’re always going to be dependent on how the user has his or her monitor configured. Still, I’ll take some control over none, thank you very much.

This was the first weekend up at the family cottage since my dad died last month. It was hard, as you’d imagine. But wow, the weather was amazing, and the leaves were showing off their best fall colours. Here are a few of the hundred or so shots I took.

Just how much traffic of a spike will a redesign cause? Obviously it’s different in every case. Since we relaunched our site last week, we’ve seen traffic jump by an average of 300%. If we were an ad-supported site, that would translate into significant increases to our bottom line.

To be sure, this won’t last forever, but after a traffic spike, the daily average is always higher than pre-spike levels. Statistically speaking, the extra traffic should result in an increase in requests for work. I expect that we’ll recoup our investment in just a few months.

As the blogosphere matures, we’re starting to see a lot of redesign work. Smart folks are realizing that a new design will help give them a competitive edge, and can result in significant traffic increases.

In addition to total visitors, a site that is well designed can increase the average number of pages viewed by each visitor. If your revenue depends on page views, a redesign can make a *huge* positive impact. Hmmm, do I smell a case study?

Here’s a little something I put together just now.

More on my flickr page.