Is Social Media Week over already? It went so fast, and we learned so much here at The Blog Studio. We’re just starting to process and make sense of it now. We’d like to take a second and send a heartfelt ‘Thanks’ to all of you who came out to our office for our ‘No Cheerleaders Allowed’ talk. We wanted an honest conversation about social media, and thanks to all of you, we really got one.

If you’ll indulge us for a moment, we’d like to take a quick stroll down memory lane and recap some of the interesting discussions we had that evening, and share what we learned for those of you who couldn’t make it in person. For those of you that braved the Canadian cold to squeeze into our offices, we commend your moxie!

The biggest lesson we learned is that social media means something different to everyone. Everyone in the room had a different opinion on what social media is, how you can use it personally or for business, and what works and what doesn’t. This make a whole lot of sense, because the one thing everyone agreed on is that social media is powered by the individual behind the keyboard. So to all the ‘experts; out there trying to define social media, you’re being shouted down by the rabble. There is no solid definition that everyone in the industry feels comfortable with.

We started the conversation off by asking everyone to discuss the early experiences they had with the web, and with social media. I got the ball rolling discussing how I miss the days where social media was a free for all, and everyone shared their ideas free of charge. Maybe this is a bit of nostalgia, but it still holds true for. Early memories in the room ranged from telnet to Twitter, and I quickly realized the age of people in the room started in the early 20’s and went all the way to people in their 50’s. How cool is that? Social media crushed the age barrier. It isn’t just for young tech savvy whippersnappers.

The hot button topic of the night was definitely using social media to make a buck. Is it OK to do this for profit? The answers ranged from absolutely to absolutely not. Fair enough. The consensus seemed to be we all want to make a living, but it can be very difficult to quantify ROI on social media campaigns. It’s great to hear that people really want to show their clients and employers they can demonstrate real value with social media, and hopefully prove it.

A thorough discussion of tools and analytics followed, and again the room was split. Many of you felt you can use analytics to show success with the numbers. A second camp felt that while numbers are important, you can’t always quantify the intangible way that people view yourself, or your business in the social media world. Personally, I agree with both points of view. In a perfect world a combination of analytics and conversation is able to tell the whole story. That isn’t an easy concept to explain, but we’re trying, and as time goes on we’re getting better at making our case.

This brought up the idea of whether it’s more valuable to target a select group of people on the web, or get your message out to everyone and see what sticks. Here’s one point where just about everyone in the room agreed: the targeted approach is the way to go.  Speaking to your specific audience, in the space where they live, generates the best results and the most clear communications. This is genuine two way engagement. The ‘scatter gun’ approach is headed out the door with the old media world, because it gets in the way of having a real conversation.

This led to a discussion about where people live and hang out online. We all agree that fewer and fewer people are watching television, at a set time, on an actual television. More commonly, viewers are tuning into their favorite shows online. This has a huge impact on the way we buy and consume advertising, or what even constitutes advertising anymore. While online viewing hasn’t eclipsed traditional TV watching yet, it’s coming.

Our favorite loudmouth American at The Blog Studio, Michael Dolan, turned a few heads when he said “Everyone who watches TV will be dead in a few years anyway.” That’s one way to put it. Maybe a more optimistic way to look at it, is you can get great bang for your buck by participating in TV online, either through ads or social media conversations around these shows.

Mr. Dolan gave a quick rundown of one his favorite topics: Social Media Trainwrecks. We discussed the Saatchi and Saatchi Toyota social media campaign, The Motrin Moms Debacle and the Steve Rubel Wal-Mart bloggers screwup. All interesting cases with a lot to teach anyone who gets involved in this space. The takeaway here is to enter at your own risk and be certain to keep things honest. Your audience is as smart as you are, don’t forget that.

The discussion continued with people and brands who are honest, and using social media in a fun and transparent way. Shaq, PDiddy and BlogTO were three names that popped up right away. I agree. They all do it well, keep it honest and make it fun. They also engage with their audiences and don’t use social media as a way to blast out ads.

The last part of the evening focused on Facebook, and opinions were all over the place. Some people love it, some people hate it. That’s the only honest assessment I can give of this discussion. Every person had a wholly different opinion. Some thought it was the future of online engagement, and some thought it’s already seen its’ day. The line of the night came out of this conversation, courtesy of Meghan Warbly of Argyle, “Facebook is the Nickelback of Social Media.” Ha.

We really had a great time, and were extremely impressed with the wide range of opinions and backgrounds that all came together in one room for a smart and civil conversation. That’s why the social media world is a such a great place. We’d like to take a second and thank all of you for coming and sharing with us. A few of you went far beyond the call of duty. Like Crystal Gibson, who shared her excellent great notes with us. Carolyn Van who showed up early to help us set up, and @tourdedufflet for bringing over some yummy dufflet treats.

It was lovely to meet some familiar Twitter avatars in the flesh like Toronto PR gadfly @J_Lab, @interpretivist and man about town @mynameisguygal. We also got a chance to play Smush. CA, and meet the brilliant minds at Atmosphere industries who thought it up.

Also a special thanks to Marijke Daye from Sweet Something Design for her awesome candy table that kept us all hopped up on sugar for our chat.

Thank you all for taking the time to visit, we’re looking forward to having you over for drinks again soon. 

You’ll notice a multi-colored balloon under the inbox icon in your Gmail account, which is the Buzz button. When you click the button, you’re brought to a screen that is aesthetically familiar to most Google users. You’re offered the option to use your Google Public Profile as your Buzz profile, or you can create a new one. Next, you’ll see your photo icon, with a comic book like speech bubble coming out of it. This is where the action happens.

You can type a random thought snippet, similar to Twitter, or post a picture, video, or a link. You have the option of sharing this information publicly, with your followers, or keeping it completely private. The interface is nice, and it definitely has that Gmail snappiness to it. It feels very solid right out of the gate.

Look down the page a little farther, and things start to get interesting. You’re given the option to connect other social media sites you participate in. This very simple interface allows you to link up your YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, Google Reader and even...your Twitter account to Buzz. It works like a charm. I imagine over time, Google will begin to offer support for more and more services as the number of Buzz users increases. Whenever you update one of your other social media sites, your buzz followers will see that update in their stream. It’s a social media catch all. There’s a mobile, location based sharing feature as well with features similar to Foursquare.

Google has managed to bring your entire online life into one place, with no hassle and no fuss. It’s just there. It’s like Friend Feed on steroids with great UI. You can comment on the updates of the people you follow, ‘Like’ their updates a la Facebook, or email that person, all from the same screen. In the short time we’ve been playing with Buzz, we can already say it’s extremely convenient. If you spend a lot of time in Gmail as it is, you now have access to all of your other social media networks right from your inbox. That’s a timesaver as well as a powerful sharing tool.

We haven’t really scratched the surface of all the features and potential uses for Buzz. Hey, it’s only been 48 hours, give us a chance! It’s too early to make any predictions, but we’re betting Buzz is hugely popular in the very near future. With so many built in Gmail users, and the simple to understand interface, Buzz may be what brings microblogging to the masses. We will say this: for hardcore social media geeks, Buzz is a convenient way to ride herd on all the accounts you have. What does everyone else think so far? Leave us a comment and let’s discuss. 

Leave your pom poms and megaphone at home! We aren’t hosting a panel, we’re not giving a talk and there definitely won’t be a slideshow. There will be good eats, cold booze and Toronto’s smartest people (that’s you!) having an honest discussion about what is actually going on in social media. We aren’t selling anything, we don’t have an agenda, and social media ‘gurus’ and ‘mavens’ will be stopped at the door.

I’ll be your hostess with the mostess, while we all sit down for a chat about our industry that might end up anywhere. Submit your questions and RSVP beforehand to socialmedia@theblogstudio.com. I really hope to see you there. There are some more details below, and keep your eye on Social Media Week site to find out what else is going on during Social Media Week: Toronto.

No Cheerleaders Allowed: An Honest Conversation About Social Media

You ever get the feeling that the social media ‘experts’ are only telling half the truth? Do you get the distinct impression that the Big Time social media mavens and gurus are painting a pretty picture because it benefits them directly? We do to.

Join Managing Director of The Blog Studio, Lucia Mancuso, for an intimate, no holds barred discussion about the on the ground state of affairs in the wired world. Submit your questions anonymously beforehand. Then join us February, 1. 2010 at the The Blog Studio space in downtown Toronto for apps, booze and a rollicking discussion about what’s really going on. No punches pulled, no smoke and mirrors and no self-proclaimed experts. Just a diverse group of smart people who engage the social media space talking about their ideas and concerns.

Afterwards we’ll compile a list of the sharpest, wittiest, nastiest and most useful answers to see if we can make sense out of what social media is, and what it might become.

Please RSVP as soon as possible. Space for this event is very limited.

RSVP to socialmedia@TheBlogStudio.com

2010 is upon is. We’d like to thank all of our clients, co-workers, friends, freelancers, geeky colleagues, fellow tech workers and everyone else that we’ve met and worked with in 2009. You’ve made the last year absolutely wonderful for us, and we’ve enjoyed every interaction. The great people we talk to everyday are what makes everything worthwhile. We’re extremely proud of the work we’ve done in the past year, and we’ve had some brilliant successes. Thank you, thank you and thank you again.

We’re looking forward to the upcoming year. Thinking about our plans for the future, we realized that there is always room for improvement. We want to share some of the goals, ideas and improvements that we’re going to make happen immediately in the upcoming year. Everything we want to do comes down to one thing: providing you with best web presence to make your business successful.

Put You First
The most important thing we can do is improve our customer service. You, our clients are the sole reason we exist, and we want to treat you even better than we do now. We want to get things done more quickly, do them better and create the best sites that we can. We want you to be happy with us. In order to help things along, we’re expanding our team so there is more of us to go around. Your project always comes first. This is a promise we take seriously, and if something falls between the cracks let us know and we’ll make it right.

No Agency BS
We’re not an agency, and we’ll never be one. What does that mean exactly? We’re a boutique size business with small to large size clients. You won’t get your project passed off to an underling after we win your business, because we don’t have any underlings. We’re a team. We’re proud of every project we’ve done, and take it personally if something isn’t right. We don’t care about running up billable hours, that isn’t how we work. We’ll quote you for your project, and we’ll stick to that quote. Since everyone at The Blog Studio does a little bit of everything, you don’t have to pay for a bunch of unnecessary management costs. There aren’t a bunch of overpaid executives sitting in our office that need to keep the Lear Jet gassed up. We all get our hands dirty, so all the hours you pay for get your project closer to perfection. We’ll never pad your bills, we’ll never give you the runaround, we won’t bill you for vapor work, and we’ll make sure the work is done right. In short, we’ll treat your business the way we like people to treat our business.

Adding New Services
After we finish a site, many of our you have asked us for help getting the word out, creating content strategies, advice on copywriting and how to get a PR program started. We’ve got you’ve covered in 2010. We’re happy to say we’ve expanded our menu of offerings in these areas, and we’ve brought in some new staff with loads of experience in these areas. So whether you want to learn about how Twitter can help your business, what taglines work the best for your site or how to get your business featured in a big name magazine, we can help you build a program to expand your brand.

Offering More Advice
We’re very proud of our blog, and the most popular posts are the ones where we share advice on how to get things done. In 2010 we plan to post more how-to’s, more software reviews, and more of the methods we use to get things done. We love to share our ideas and working methods with you, so you can make your business better. The ongoing conversation in our comments section teaches us a lot about what you want to know more about. From WordPress to Google Wave, we’ll try our best to cover it all. If there’s something you’d like to hear more about, please drop us a line and let us know. We’ll also be offering more advice and continuing to answer your questions on Twitter @TheBlogStudio, so stop by and say ‘Hello’ anytime.

Keeping Up With the Joneses
Technology wise, things are moving faster than ever. We keep up with the newest of the new, so you don’t have to. In the coming year we plan to work even harder to ensure that every site we build is compatible with the new best of breed browsers like Google Chrome. Our improved cross browser support and testing will make certain you don’t miss a single slice of your online audience. We’ll be extending this testing to all the software, plugins and code that we use. We want every site built by The Blog Studio to work flawlessly in every situation, every time. 

Thanks for making 2009 a great year, and here’s to 2010.

Cheers,

The Blog Studio

The most exciting improvements can be found in the way WordPress handles images. While we love WP, we’ve always found the image handling a little clunky, and it’s the most common complaint we hear from users. Carmen adds a feature packed image editor to the WP dashboard. It’s now possible to resize, crop, flip and scale images right inside the program. This is a huge improvement that will save you time and trouble of having to edit images in a 3rd party app, and the fly them into WP.

The image editor works beautifully, and photos fit painlessly into the post. Images look the way you’d like them to look in your posts on the first try. Say ‘Goodbye’ to the old system of editing, inserting an image into the post, viewing the post, and going back to do it all over again. This feature is a huge win for bloggers that include many images in their posts, or users who aren’t familiar with image editing software.

Carmen also makes it dead simple to handle video embedding, which was a bit of a nightmare before.  Video embeds usually required a plugin, and many times the video formatting ended up looking funny in the post. Now, you just paste the video URL on its’ own line in the post, and the video will show up. That’s it’s. It couldn’t be simpler. WordPress 2.9 supports most popular video upload services including YouTube, Google Video, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler and many more. We gave this a quick test this morning with some videos from YouTube and they went up without a hitch. This is a big time saver, and will let users add video with zero hassle or technical skill required. If you can paste a link, you can embed a video in WordPress 2.9.

Though not as flashy, Carmen overhauls the WordPress Plugin upgrade and compatibility system. One of the best things about WP is the staggering amount of useful plugins available, and most users have at least a few installed. The new system allows you to update your plugins as a batch, up to 10 at a time. It also improves the way WP checks plugins for compatibility with WordPress updates. As time goes on, the feature will become more useful as more plugins, and WP itself continue to release new versions. You can upgrade without having to suffer through plugin/WP compatibility issues.

At one point or another we’ve all accidentally deleted a WP post, and lost some sleep because once it’s gone, it’s gone. Not anymore. Carmen includes a powerful Global Undo feature. Now, when you delete a post or a comment, it goes into your trash, where it can be resurrected. As developers we LOVE this feature, because we no longer have to tell clients that the post spent hours working on is gone into the ether forever.

There quite a few less glamorous technical improvements going on in the background too. The most useful is that WP now supports rel=canonical, which is nice bonus in the SEO arena.

WordPress 2.9 Carmen has only been out for a couple days, but we’re already deeply impressed with the new features. Carmen takes two of the most frustrating aspects of WP, image and video handling, and completely overhauls them to make your life easier. The next time you create a post, you’ll immediately notice a difference in how simple it is to get media into your posts. The next time you accidentally delete a post, and can recover it, you’ll want to kiss Carmen on the mouth. The other improvements, while aren’t as obvious will become useful over time. As usual the brilliant people working on WP have cleaned up the code, stomped out some bugs and tightened things up all around.

Should you upgrade? Absolutely. The only reason not to upgrade would be if you rely on a certain plugin that is currently incompatible with Carmen. Other than that, you should switch over as soon as you can. It will simplify your blogging, and make using WP an even better experience.

If you’re currently using a previous version of Wordpress, you’ve got a lot to gain from this update. At The Blog Studio, we’re currently offering an upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress for $150! The service includes a backup of your current site and database (an essential, yet often ignored step), as well as performing the upgrade itself.

If you are comfortable performing the upgrade yourself, upgrading to WordPress 2.9 couldn’t be easier. Login in to your WordPress Dashboard, and you’ll see a link that asks if you’d like to upgrade your installation. Click it, and in 30 seconds you’ll be ready to go. We didn’t have any issues at all, and the process was ultra fast and painless. You can also go the more technical route and download the package and perform the upgrade manually.

As always we’d like to take a second to extend a huge ‘Thank You’ from The Blog Studio, to the wonderful people who write, update and improve WP. You’ve done another excellent job and we appreciate your efforts. 

Google Chrome, has recently become available for OSX, and we’ve spent some time taking it for a test drive.

The first thing you’ll notice is how fast Chrome opens and launches your homepage. It starts noticeably faster than Firefox or Safari. The address bar, is by default, a Google search box. You can type in what your looking for, and Google will start displaying results in the bar. The search also feels extremely snappy, and it’s a nice convenience to be able to search without having to open an additional tab.

Chrome supports tabbed browsing, and when you open a new tab you’ll be brought to a favorites page that displays your most visited sites and recently closed tabs.  The tabs can also be dragged visually to arrange them in any order, and you can pop them out to start a tab in an entirely new window. This seems to offer a nice combination of the way Safari and Firefox handle tabs.

In our completely unscientific tests, Google Chrome does seem to load nearly every page much more quickly than Firefox, and is about as fast as Safari. Plenty of people have done head to head browser tests for speed, and Safari seems to show up as slightly faster in technical tests. We found Chrome very fast overall.

The user experience with Chrome is fantastic. It’s clean, uncluttered and very easy to find and tweak the settings. There is no fluff in the user interface, and Chrome seems built for simplicity. Either choose a favorite site from your thumbnails, or type what you’re looking for into the search bar. It all happens in one place, so you don’t need to jump around.

The Preferences pane is the most well organized we’ve encountered. It has three tabs: Basics, Personal Stuff and Under the Hood. You can change every setting that matters right here, and each setting is clearly explained. The preference panel here is much more user friendly than Firefox or Safari, where you sometimes need to dig a bit to find the setting you’re looking to change, and the function of these settings can be somewhat confusing for inexperienced users. Google has done a solid job of highlighting the setting most users need to change, and eliminating some of the more confusing setting you find in other browsers.

There’s one feature we really love and have been getting a lot of mileage out of. You can set Chrome to open up a few sites in separate tabs whenever you start the browser.  When Chrome launches, Google Wave, Co-Tweet and some of the other web apps we use open automatically. Basically, you can pop open the browser and get ready to work.  This is especially helpful when you’re trying to get used to using a new app, like Wave.

There’s also some interesting technical stuff going on under the hood as well. Each tab in the browser is it’s own separate entity. What’s going on in one tab, doesn’t effect the others, which is an added layer of malware protection.  If you have the bad luck of opening up a data stealing site in one tab, and happen to be purchasing something or looking at your bank account in another, your personal information is safe. It’s a solid security feature that is built right into the design of the browser.

The one place where Chrome for OSX fails, at least for now, is with addons. Firefox and Safari have an enormous amount of plugins, addons and hacks available that can make your life much easier. Chrome doesn’t currently support any extensions, although this is set to change in the future. If you’re a power user, who has a suite of plugins you can’t live without, Chrome isn’t the browser for you. Yet. We’ll reserve our judgement in this area until Chrome starts adding extra functionality, but it will be difficult to replicate the large hacker community surrounding Firefox, that are always adding new functions.

However, there is a hacker build of Chrome, called Chromium that addresses some of these shortcomings. Chromium has a full suite of extensions available, features daily updates and removes the Google branding from the browser. Chromium is a good choice for tech savvy power users, and does a great job of showing the future potential of Chrome.

Chrome does offer some very cool themes to change the look of the browser, including ones by Jeff Koons, Karim Rashid and Anna Sui. These are wonderful looking, but just window dressing. Very cool attractive stuff, but they don’t add any functionality.

Overall, Chrome is a very light, solid and fast browser. Safari users may be tempted to jump ship, as it seems more stable and nearly as quick. Firefox users will enjoy the speed increase Chrome brings to the table, but without the plugins, Chrome won’t be the best choice for geeks who live inside their browser. Our feeling is that Chrome is a great choice for casual web users, especially those that aren’t very tech savvy.

Chrome is still in beta. When the community expands, plugins become available, and Google tightens things up, we imagine Chrome will become the number one browser on the web in the near future.

When you’re building a new site, it’s common to spend considerable time brainstorming, planning, wire framing and conceptualizing. You want your site to be perfect. So do we. When it comes to hosting your site, you probably give a hundredth of the amount of consideration to the company you use. This will make your developer grouchy because it makes their job much more difficult. Choosing poor hosting companies is extremely common. Sadly, we deal with substandard hosting outfits on a daily basis.

Choosing the right hosting company will make all the difference in the development and success of your site. A bad hosting company can cause the development process to drag on much longer than it should, knock your site off line for extended period of time and cost you lots of money with little return. Bad hosting can turn your dream site into a nightmare in a few seconds.

Here are the three most important factors to investigate when looking for a hosting company for a new site.

Support
What type of support does your hosting company offer? Ideally, you should be able to get someone on the phone who you feel comfortable communicating with 24/7. When you are first developing your site, there are numerous minor tweaks and changes that will need to be made to your hosting account to get things up and running. Most aren’t very time consuming. Having to send an email, get a ticket number and wait for someone to contact you can severely cripple the development process. Having to wait 4 hours or 3 days to have a change made that should take a few minutes is unacceptable. You may need to put your hosting provider in touch with your developers directly, so enquire if they are comfortable and capable of working with developers. They should be. In the best case, you will have one or two support people that are assigned to your account, that understand your site and become an extension of your development team.

Reliability
If your site goes down, you are temporarily out of business. Most hosting companies will tell you they have ’99% Uptime’. This isn’t always the case.  Things happen at even the best hosting companies, and sooner or later your site may go offline for one reason or another. Ask about the safeguards your hosting company has in place to prevent this. More importantly, find out how they have handled outages in the past.  Get a reference from other users, and get a first hand account of their recovery procedures.  A really solid hosting company will admit when they have had issues in the past, and will be proud to discuss how quickly and how well they have corrected them. If a hosting company tells you they never have issues, and have never had a server go down. Run away. Quickly.

Pricing
It’s really, really easy to get ripped off when you are paying for web hosting. Unlike many other things in the world, the most expensive hosting companies aren’t necessarily the best. Strangely, we’ve had nearly the opposite experience. Many of the less expensive hosting companies are some of the best we’ve dealt with. This is economies of scale in action. Larger hosting companies can offer very competitive pricing because they have so many clients. Some smaller hosting companies charge exorbitant prices, but not necessarily superior service, features or support. Take advantage of this, and shop around. Don’t make a decision based solely on the lowest price you can find, but there is no need to pay through the nose either. Investigate the amount of disk space, data transfer and other extras that are actually included in the available plans. In many cases, a low price upfront can easily soar out of control with data and transfer costs, or other fine print extras.

You do the research for every aspect of your business. Please do the same with your hosting company. It makes the job of a developers much easier, and in the long run it will benefit your pocketbook, your business and the people who visit your site. We’re always happy to help with any suggestions, so get in touch or leave your questions and favorite hosting companies in the comments. 

Working on a development project can be complicated. The days where everyone is sitting just a cubicle away are long gone. You need to keep the project manager, the clients, the copywriter, the developers, the marketing people, the designers and the SEO team in the loop. Every decision that’s made effects every part of the project. There are lots of project management tools available, and they all fall short. Email chains get unwieldy after a few replies and sharing files can become a burden quickly.

Google Wave might be the answer we’ve all been waiting for. It’s a combination of email, social networking and file sharing that brings people and ideas into one place. We’ve been playing around with Wave for a few weeks, and it’s impressive. It especially excels as a way to keep complicated projects moving along while removing the bulk that comes with other methods of project management.

Here’s a few reasons why we’re using Wave:

Media Handling Forget attachments

• Wave handles every media file we’ve thrown at it in an elegant way. Relevant links, videos, audio files, copy and code can be shared right in the message. You seem them right in front of you without having to click around. That’s efficient. There’s also an option to browse media files which is very cool. Clicking through the various stages of a design, or every photo being used on a project is very convenient when making design changes.

Latecomers at Different Points in a Project

• It’s sometimes necessary to bring a new person into the mix. Getting them up to speed can be a difficult dance of dredging up old emails, zipping groups of files and filling them in on past conversations. With Wave, simple include the new people working on the project in the Wave and they can get briefed on thier own time, see all the past revisions and discussions, and view the various iterations and changes that have been made. This is a gigantic time saver.

Tags

• Tagging your projects gives you the ability to build an archive of your work over time, making it easy to see how problems were solved in the past. If you’re diligent about tagging specific issues and solutions, when you run into a similar issues, just search Wave and see how you developed a working solution in the past. That’s something so valuable you can’t put a price on.

Contacts

• Having your contacts right in your project management software is very convenient. There’s no imports that fail, no proprietary data formats, and since Wave is spreading quickly, after you’ve collaborated with someone, you’ll be able to add them to new projects with a click. Over time you’ll build a database of old and new collaborators expanding your business network.

Fast

• Wave is fast. Really fast. It swallows big media files, updates in real time, and is hosted by Google, who overall have a solid record of data integrity.

Is Google Wave the perfect project management tool? Maybe. It’s still new, but so far we’re really impressed with it. So impressed we’re about to start a huge new project involving a big team in many different locations, and we’re using Wave to keep it together. We’ll keep you updated.

What are your experiences with Wave so far? We’d love to hear how you’re using Wave for business or fun. 

Web designers are less than a dime a dozen these days. They’re more like a dime a gross. Everyone with a web connection and a copy of Fireworks hangs their shingle out and calls themselves a web expert. It’s a lot like social media experts, but that’s another topic for another day. When you’re looking for a web designer, how do you separate the bad from the good, and the good from the great?

This is a topic near and dear to The Blog Studio, and something everyone who works with us discusses on an hourly basis. Choosing the best designer for your project isn’t easy. Here’s 3 topics you should explore when looking to hire a pixel slinger for your project.

1. Does their work appeal to other designers, or to your potential market? Some designers achieve notoriety because their work appeals to the creative fancy of other designers. This isn’t always the most practical choice for a commercial product. A good, successful design will appeal to the end users, the public & not only to the design community. These aren’t mutually exclusive, but in many cases it’s a choice between one or the other. Choose the designer that has your users needs in focus.

2. How many sites in their portfolio are still up and running? When you view a designers portfolio, take a second and chase down those sites live on the web. Are the sites still live and in business? Are they successful? Take a look at the site traffic on a site like Alexa, are they generating numbers? Have the sites been re-designed by someone else? It’s one thing for a designer to have a portfolio of great looking sites, but it’s another for a designer to have a track record of sites that have become commercially viable. Ask the hard questions above to get on the right track for success.

3. Is your designer active in the design community? While you don’t want a designer that is so wrapped up in the ‘art’ of design, they don’t put your audience first, you also don’t want a designer who works in a vacuum. Take a spin around the internet and see what other designers have said about their work. Find out which magazines, blogs and podcasts they consume. Have they won any awards, or participated in any design initiatives? Are they active in writing about design or commenting on other designers work? Check some of the Twitter hashtags like #design and #web and see if they pop up. Participation in the design community ensures they’re up to date on the newest trends and design techniques. You don’t want to hire a dinosaur.

This is just a jumping off point, because choosing a designer should be a conversation between the designer and yourself. I hope these questions spark some thoughts and conversations the next time you’re starting a new endeavor. What are your favorite questions to ask a potential web designer? We’d love to hear your successes and your horror stories, so drop some science in the comments.

Twitter is a great tool for finding new ideas, meeting the digital hoi polloi and spreading the word about your business. A new, potentially powerful feature has just made the scene: Twitter Lists. Lists allow you to create and share groups of people centered on a common topic. It’s a simple way to find new people that share your interests, or work in the same media sphere that you do. We’ll admit, it can be somewhat overwhelming digging through Twitter to find the gems, so here’s three of our favorite lists for tech savvy Twitterers to get you started. Lists are a wholly new feature and frontier, so expect to hear more from us as Twitter Lists begin to mature. 

@Scobleizer’s Tech People - We all know Robert Scoble, one of the best known and most reasonable, knowledgeable voices in the tech community. He’s created a list of his favor Twitter tech folks. This is a great place to start if you’re new to the world of Twitter, or need to make sure you don’t miss a beat in the geek-a-sphere.
http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/my-favstar-fm-list

Tech Bloggers - If you’re looking for inspiration, ideas and content you can use to improve your own blogging, thics list by @CourtenayBird will be extremely useful. There’s some big names, and some people you haven’t heard of, but I’ll well worth your time to interact with.
http://twitter.com/courtenaybird/digital-and-social-media

Designers - @Grainedit has a well curated list that’s a who’s who of designers of all type who tweet. If you’re looking for eye candy and visual web innovation, you’ve found the right list. http://twitter.com/grainedit/graphicdesign

If you need a step by step on how to use twitter lists check out Freelance Folders post on How to Get Started.

Stay on the lookout for @TheBlogStudio list of web design favorites coming up shortly.