So my first question to you today is this: Is your site easy on the eyes?

My second question: Are you sure?

My creative exercise for you today is to come up with your own top 10 list of the most beautiful site designs.* These lists are popular, and you may even choose some favorite designs from these lists if you like. In any case, once you choose your top 10, make small (400-500 pixels in width) screenshots of each. Now, make a screenshot of your own site. Look at all the screenshots side-by-side and answer the above questions again.

Pay attention to the symmetry, balance and harmony of your chosen designs’ layouts, graphics, and color schemes. Then judge your own site based on those same criteria. Remember that a site can be simple and minimalistic and still be easy on the eyes.

This is your own judgement call, but if you can tweak your design even slightly to appeal to more users, you may find that you retain more users or increase conversions. There are other considerations of course, such as usability and focus, but this is just one small step that can be taken. I encourage you to take it today.

* A few “most beautiful” lists others have created in the past to get you started:

40 most beautiful and inspirational website designs of 2008

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: beautiful site, beautiful Web site designs, but I know what looks good, designer, HTML
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Here’s what I do when I’m faced with the monster of all monster task lists. I divide it up into 3′s: Must-Do’s, Should Do’s, and Everything Else. Each item on my to-do list has to be re-routed to one of these three new sublists. Here’s how to determine which items go into which list.

Must-Do’s are tasks that you are obligated to complete, either because you have an agreement or a contract with someone else to do so. If you are a freelancer, for example, you have clients that you’ve contracted with to perform certain tasks. Those will always go into the Must-Do sublist. Likewise, you may have items on your list that absolutely have to get done for yourself (such as paying bills and/or taxes on time) or there will be fairly impactful consequences for inaction. Move all must-do tasks onto this list first.

Should-Do’s are items on your to-do list that are important because accomplishing them would be beneficial to you or your business in a rather large way. Not getting them done won’t necessarily hurt you or your business, but getting them done would make a nice difference in income or sanity or happiness, for example. Move these types of items into this sublist now.

Everything Else is … well … everything that’s not a Must-Do or a Should-Do.

Now that you have your 3 sublists, you are going to divide the Everything Else sublist into 3′s yet again. Because these items are the least important of all the tasks you have on your list, you’ll want to get as many of them off your shoulders as soon as possible. Divide these up into the following sub-sub-lists:

Kick ‘Em Off: These are tasks that really aren’t important enough to waste a moment of time on, but somehow they snuck onto the list for one reason or another. Often we think something might need to be done for a moment, and then later realize it really wasn’t important at all. Dump any of those right now.

Put ‘Em Off: There’s a good chance that a large majority of the Everything Else list will be moved into this sub-sub-list. Most of the items are important enough to get done at some point, but there’s no great urgency to any of them. Throw those here.

Pawn ‘Em Off: If you’re lucky, you’ll find a few items on the list that could be pawned off on someone else. We don’t always have a large number of people that we can rely on to help us with our daily tasks, but hopefully there is a short list of people that are there to help us on occasion (and vice-versa). If you’ve been networking, then you probably have a few virtual friends that would be happy to give you a hand. Maybe that designer friend of yours would edit a photo for you, in return for that time you helped her brainstorm an idea. That’s one of the great things about networking, so don’t forget to make use of it (without abusing it of course).

Now that you’ve divided your list up into smaller chunks, it should make the monster look much less threatening. Tackle the Must-Do’s first, then the Should-Do’s, and eventually the Put ‘Em Off’s. What was once overwhelming will become actionable, and you’ll be back on track in no time.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: designer, GTD, tackle, task list, Time management, to-do
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The only thing missing now is an actual web site. In the old days, that would have meant hiring a designer and spending lots of money and time developing a nice-looking site. Those days, luckily, are gone. You can have a site up and running very quickly. You’re going to do this by installing a free WordPress blog.

Just in case you didn’t get the significance of that, it means you became a blogger when you installed WordPress. And just in case that doesn’t mean anything to you, it means that you don’t think in terms of competition. Bloggers do things just a little differently than old-school webmasters. As a webmaster, I was always thinking of my competitors as adversaries. As a blogger, I think of others sharing the same niche space as I do as “fellow bloggers”. There’s a huge distinction to be made there, as the mindset governs actions in completely different ways.

• As a webmaster, researching competitors puts your focus on an adversarial level, in which you concentrate on how to outmaneuver and beat the opponent.
• As a blogger, researching others in your space put your focus on collaboration, in which you concentrate on ways that you and your fellow bloggers can work together to collectively create wins for each other.

While either of those methods can work for any site, the very nature and history of blogging makes collaboration with fellow bloggers a piece of cake. All you have to do is participate.

We’ll be discussing the many methods of participation in several future posts, but we’ll take one thing at a time. First things first…find out who else is in your space. Back in Part Two of the series, you focused on “The What”, in which you decided upon “what it is you know best, or what it is you do best, or what it is that you have the most interest in.” Now that you know what your niche space is, start reading the blogs of others who also have that same interest. What? You thought you were the only one? Well, maybe. If your niche is the mating habits of the Tibetan microscopic beetle, then perhaps you are alone. But if your interest lies in almost anything else, then it’s a safe bet that there are others blogging about it. That’s ok. In fact, that’s great! That means that you have an instant team of people with which you can collaborate. Again, we’ll talk more about that later.

For now:

• Find your new niche teammates.
• Read their blogs.
• Make a list of the 20-30 most popular.
• Then determine of those, which are your personal favorites? Which make the most sense to you? Which bloggers’ personalities mesh best with your own?
• Rearrange the list in the order of your favorites. Sometimes that will bring some of the more obscure blogs up to the top of the list.

How do you find the bloggers in your space? Do an advanced search on Technorati, scroll down to the bottom of the advanced search page, and type in your subject matter into the Find Blogs About field. (see screenshot below)

Read the blogs that you discover for the next few weeks. Subscribe to a few of them in your feedreader. Don’t have a feedreader? I prefer GreatNews, but Google Reader or Bloglines are two other very popular choices. If you aren’t sure what to do with feedreaders, we can discuss that in the future as well. For now, if all you can do is manually visit the blogs on a daily basis, do so. Once you learn how to consume feeds via feed readers, the task of reading blog posts will become easier. But any method of reading the blogs in your space is fine at this stage of research.

To sum up, find bloggers in your niche space, read their posts for a few weeks, and list them in order of your favorites. Over the next few weeks, we’ll discuss ways that you can begin to participate and become a part of a collaborative team effort of blogging.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: actual web site, collaboration, designer, Google, nice-looking site, research, search page, webmaster, working together
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There are many ways to connect with others, but the most effective method is the one that puts you in the most comfortable frame of mind. You need to feel relaxed in order to make other people feel that way. So if you don’t like noisy, crowded bars, don’t go to them! You’ll only feel anxious the entire time — not to mention the fact that you’ll meet people who like what you don’t like. Where you go and what you do is an extension of your personality.

While I agree with that premise completely when it comes to life in general, I also agree with it as it refers to you, your business, and your site or blog. Your site is an extension of your personality as well. Everything from its design to its content reflects you as a person – or it should!

While you may have downloaded and used a pre-made theme, or hired a designer to create something for you, you’ve hopefully injected your own personality by choosing a design that reflects your personality. Likewise, the content you create should be a direct reflection of you, and not just some stilted words on a page.

In this online world, the direct connection from me to you is missing. We can’t shake hands. You can’t see my facial expressions or see me smile. I can’t judge how you interpret my words when your eyebrows raise, and know that I need to clarify what I just said. Instead, we have a medium where you must judge me by the visuals that my site evokes, and the words I say on the page. You don’t really have anything else to judge me by, and I don’t have any other immediate way of communicating with you.

It is vital that my site reflect me if I hope to connect with you. Your site/blog must do the same for you. Our connections with our readers are tenuous at best, so the few strings that we have available to us must be utilized or the connections will never happen.

Doing business online requires establishing levels of trust via methods that are different than in the “real world”. This trust begins with the first glance at your site, and the first words that are read on the page. If you hope to make a connection with your readers, you must be reflected there. If you hope to do business with your users, you must make that connection.

Your business IS you. Make sure your site is as well.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: business, designer, levels of trust, online world, reflection of you, your site
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HostGator, like most hosting companies, has several plans to choose from. The cheapest is $6.95/month (called the Hatchling plan), but you have to pay for a year in advance for that plan. If you’d prefer to pay monthly, or in 3 or 6 month chunks instead, the next best plan is $9.95/month for the Baby plan. With the Baby plan, you also get to host as many sites as you want for the same price, so in the future that may come in very handy for you. If it were me, I’d choose the Baby plan, but the Hatchling plan will work as well. (Don’t worry about what all those numbers mean right now. Basically, that’s just letting you know how much space is available for your site under each plan. Any of the plans have plenty of everything for you right now, so that’s not a big consideration at this point).

Just click on the Order Now link in the column of whichever plan you choose.

You can see that the Order Wizard will ask you to choose a domain option. Since you already have your domain name, you’ll want to select I will use My Existing Domain and update My Nameservers only. Then, you need to type in the domain name you purchased (such as flykites.com) into the space that says Existing Domain:. Click Next and proceed to fill out the information requested to finish the purchase.

Once you’ve completed the transaction, you’ll receive an email from HostGator with information about your account. You definitely want to save this in a safe place. I usually save the email AND print it out. In any case, within this email will be the nameservers that have been assigned to your site. You’ll need to tell GoDaddy about these nameservers so you’ll want to look for them in the email that HostGator sends you. *

Ok, now let’s go tell GoDaddy about your new nameservers. Log in to your GoDaddy account and choose Domains / My Domain Names from the menu near the top of the page.

Select the domain name and click on the Nameservers button.

Copy and paste (or manually type in) the two nameservers that you received in the HostGator email. Save.

That’s it. You now not only own a domain name, but you’ve given it a place to live. It can take up to 24-48 hours for the rest of the world to be told about about your new domain name, so typing www.whatever-your-domain-is.com may not do anything yet. Eventually it will. (This is called “propogating” throughout the net).

The only thing missing now is an actual web site. In the old days, that would have meant hiring a designer and spending lots of money and time developing a nice-looking site. Those days, luckily, are gone. You can have a site up and running very quickly. You’re going to do this by installing a free WordPress blog. We’ll discuss this in the next part of the series, but rest assured that this is very, very easy to do. Once you’ve done this and a few more little things, you’ll be ready to roll.

Just a reminder. I’ve tried to make this process easy enough for anyone to understand, but if I still wasn’t clear enough, you might want to purchase a set of instructional videos that really step you through it as though you were watching it happen live.

The entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas:

• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part One (The Introduction)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Two (The WHAT)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Three (The DISCLAIMER)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Four (The Domain Name)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Five (The Hosting Plan)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Six (Installing WordPress)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Seven (Your WordPress Theme)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Eight (Your Blogging Voice)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Nine (Making Money)
• How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Ten (The Summary)

*

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: actual web site, designer, hostgator, hosting, hosting plans, make a living in your pajamas, nameservers, nice-looking site, web hosting, web servers, www.whatever-your-domain-is.com
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.