Posts Tagged ‘creative tools’

In the last few weeks, I have gotten some amazing two word responses to my two words on Tuesday. However, that was not my original plan for these words.

Originally, I hoped that people would take my two words and either create a longer blog post with them, then link back, or to add a comment that does something with them…adds to them. But now, I realize that no matter what I thought it was going to be, once you give something to your readers, it is up to them! So, I am stepping back from what I though this should be, and letting it become whatever it is. Thanks to my amazing readers for showing me what happens when you ‘plan’ and forget who actually executes that plan. Take these words and really, do with them what you will (don’t forget to share, of course)!

Face Reality

Photo by Ori Bengal

Yesterday, I talked about the fact that I need to get into a more set routine. Today, I’m telling you to shake things up.

Maybe I should make up my mind.

Nah, I’d rather share some ways that I shake things up and get my creativity flowing:

1. Blast music and dance around my living room. yes, I actually do this. My hubby has come home many evenings to find me singing and dancing (and then he’s laughing).
2. Shut off all technology and hit the beach (one of the definite perks of being in So Cal)
3. People watch. Pretty much any Starbucks or corner bakery will suffice for great people watching.
4. Call a friend. Catch up on life and get your mind focused on anything but work.
5. Design something/write something just for fun. I get tired of writing and designing things I am supposed to. Sometimes I just want to play with photoshop and see what my crazy ideas create. (I’m considering creating a page on my blog dedicated to my random creations…what do you think?)
6. Spend an hour or so laughing at a few of my favorite nsfw sites (textsfromlastnight, fmylife, awkwardfamilyphotos, notalwaysright, passiveaggressivenotes and failblog
7. Stumbleupon. Keep clicking, you’ll find something awesome.

How do you shake it up?

We’re almost halfway through 2009. Unbelievable, right? While I have never been good at sticking to a New Years Resolution, I always try to set goals for myself each January 1st. But, by this time every year, I seem to have either completed all the goals or have forgotten where I put the list of them. So I have decided to create a new list for the second half of the year, goals (both business and personal) to achieve by the end of 2009. Some are small, some are big, and some are a little unrealistic. But, if all the goals were easy and small, there wouldn’t be much to strive for, would there?

1. Focus on my writing. A lot of times with my blog, I tend to stray from the ‘writing’ and focus on numbers of readers, advertisers and all the other stuff… For the next 6 months, I want to just focus on my writing and let the numbers fall where they will.

2. Take a train ride down the coast for inspiration. I am a very adventurous person in my head. In real life, I don’t do quite as many things as I would like. I want to change that, and the first thing I want to do is hop on the Surfliner and ride it up the coast. Bring my laptop and spend the afternoon writing and enjoying the scenery.

3. Contact someone I admire. In the first half of the year, I reached out to Chris Brogan and learned a lot. I’d like to do it again, with someone else I admire. Not sure who just yet, but I’ll let you know.

4. Take a class. I have wanted to learn flash for a long time, but haven’t dedicated any time to doing so. I love learning something new and think flash would be a great challenge.

5. Complete 4 more chapters in my book. U have been working on a novel in my free time for about 3 years, but it has been entirely on the back-burner for the first half of this year. I need to dedicate time to it during the next half.

6. Convince my hubby to play hooky with me. Everyone deserves a break, and after the rough first half of the year that we had, it would be great to act like kids again and take him somewhere special for the day.

7. Crack the top 150 on Ad Age’s Power 150 list. I know that #1 was to focus on my writing, but I would also like to have one measurable task, and I think cracking the top 150 would be a great accomplishment.

8. Get a Greyhound. This is where my list becomes a little “unrealistic”. I know that down the road, the hubby will let me get one because he misses his (passed away 2 years ago) , but I definitely don’t think it will be this year…I can still attempt to convince him though!

9. Make a difference in someones business. The entire reason I started the site was to help others, and although I am not sure how to measure this one, I will still make it a goal.

Now that I have all these tasks, I need to plan out how to accomplish them…that’s the toughest part!

What things can you do to make the rest of the year even better than the first half?

Last week I wrote a guest post on The Everyday Web Expert about writing tips for designers. These were basic writing tips for people whose focus is the graphics, not the words.

Today, I am tackling the other side of the coin – design tips for writers. Just because your writing is fantastic doesn’t mean your design skills have to be sub-par. Here are 4 simple design rules that every writer should know:

1. Color is your friend. I can’t count the number of writer’s sites that I have seen that are simply blah. Black, white and one other color for emphasis. Boooring…. Just because you are trying to show off your writing skills doesn’t mean you can’t use color and make it pop. I’m not talking following in my footsteps (I love bright colors) but by adding some eye catching graphics and colors to your site increases the likelihood of people sticking around longer. People like attractive images, colors and creativity. First impressions are important, whether you mean to or not, a bland site will create an idea about your writing…

2. Images make your writing stronger. 

3. Text can be beautiful and creative. Typography (or the art and techniques of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs.) is just one simple way to make your writing better. Many writers chose whatever the standard font is, assuming it doesn’t make a difference. But, your font can make a huge difference. Next time you are ‘just going to go with times new roman’ (or if you’re wondering what that means), choose a different font!

4. Google Images is a search engine. Many writers think that their writing is just for the main site, and will forget that they need to label images properly. When you do place images on your site, make sure to title them with a search engine friendly name. Google Images scours sites for the titles of the images and will help your seo if you label them correctly.

Last month, I stayed on top of my blog calendar. I had it mapped out, easy to change and maneuver, something that was going to make sure that May was done right and it was. I only missed one weekday post all month. I was thrilled, proud and motivated. And apparently, I motivated others. Unfortunately, as I stare at my blog calendar for the month of June…it looks like this:

Other than the American Issues weekly posts and the articles for the OC Register…there’s nothing. No post ideas, no where to start. Wright Creativity doesn’t have any creative ideas. Okay, so that’s not completely true…I have a ton of creative ideas, I just haven’t put them on my calendar yet or gotten myself organized. I have been so focused on everything else in my life that despite having quality writing up through the end of May, I didn’t even think about June. So, I am going to fix myself a glass of Chardonnay and focus on my calendar. When I look at this calendar tomorrow morning, it will be full of brilliant ideas for posts and will keep me motivated and writing all month (or so I hope…)

Do you keep a calendar? Do you make sure it is updated before the next month? If you haven’t, do it with me today and let me know how it goes!

Have you ever reached your creative breaking point and wondered where to turn for help? The usual coffee/glass of wine/rock music/running/etc just isn’t cutting it? Try breaking out your favorite tools from when you were 6 (okay, my favorite tools still!): A coloring book and crayons.

I am serious! I even talked about how my 10 year old niece reminded me of how powerful coloring can be last Christmas! But, as we ‘adults’ seem to do too often, we forget that it’s okay to turn back into a child once in a while, let our hair down and turn up our creativity. Next time you are in a rut, try letting yourself have a little fun – color outside the lines – and give your inner child the chance to show you how creative you can really be.

When is the last time you gave yourself the okay to be silly? Have you ever tried the crayons/coloring book for creativity method?

With only 2 days left of the Problogger challenge, it is time to analyze the traffic to my blog. If you have never looked at analysis statistics and want to know what to look for, he gives you 17 different metrics to look at.

Analysis of my stats is one of the reasons I love wordpress – there are great plugins that make it so much easier! I use both google analytics and statpress reloaded plugins to monitor visitors, feeds, posts, etc. Why do I use both? They both serve different purposes.

If I just want to take a basic look at my stats, statpress allows me to do so without leaving my dashboard. It gives me weekly and monthly visit numbers and compares them to the prior week and month. It gives me the top visited pages, the number of visitors vs pages viewed and where they came from. I can also see prominent search terms that get people to my site and which search engines and browsers they use. Of course I can also see what sites refer people to my blog (twitter is #1, no surprise).

For a more in-depth analysis, where I can customize the comparisons, check on what links inside of a post have been clicked or which post is most popluar via rss feed, I need google analytics. It can show me seasonal trends, referral sources from months back, and I can transfer all the data into a spreadsheet. Lastly, it will also show me the time spent on my site – what pages they were on the longest and what pages they left from most often. This allows you to check those pages and see of there is a way to keep people there longer.  Of course, all of this is in addition to the stuff that statpress can do. The upside to google is that I can get way more data than statpress gives me. The downside? I have to go to google analytics’ site to see the data.

Basically, I use statpress on a daily basis, to watch for changes and trends. I use google analytics about once a week to delve indepth and see what is really going on with the traffic on my blog.

What do you use to track your stats? If you don’t track your stats, why not?

Hello to all the readers of Wright Creativity! I would like to introduce you to Kyle Reddoch, the new weekly web/code guru. He will be writing weekly post to help my readers on the more technical side. He is not only a great resource, but a good friend who I rely on for all my coding work. Enjoy (and check out his bio at the end of the post)!

The first step in getting your website up and running is picking your domain name. You want to pick the right one that best portrays your business, industry, or relevat to what your website is.

Company Website

You first will want to try seeing if your company’s name is available as a domain name. If so, great then you are on the way. If not, you will have to do a little more research. What does your business provide? What is your industry? For example, my company does web design, hosting, maintenance, domain registration, etc. everything a person will need to get a website up and running. Now, luckily my business name was available as a domain name! I currently have registered; www.theeverydaywebexpert.com and www.kylereddoch.com, both of which goes to my company’s website.

Let’s say that my company’s name wasn’t available. What would I do? Well I would have to look to what my company does. Maybe even the region where my company is located, or town. I would then put all those together and find the right domain. Here are some possible domains that I could use for my industry:

• www.yourtexaswebexpert.com
• www.texaswebexpert.com
• www.mywebsiteexpert.com

Just take some time to search available domains and find the right one that fits your company.

Personal Website / Blog

If you are creating a website for personal use or a blog, you might want to go a different route to decide your domain name. For personal websites or blogs, you can have your name as the domain name. For instance, www.kylereddoch.com is a great one for me . You can also have a domain name that suits what the purpose of the website or blog is about.

You want to make the domain name easy to remember though. You don’t ever want a person trying to remember your domain name…because in all reality, they won’t.

There are thousands of possibilities for domain names out there, you just have to find the RIGHT one!

Kyle Reddoch is the Owner of The Everyday Web Expert, a full service web design firm located in Amarillo, TX. He is also a featured writer on many blogs. He loves every minute of his life with his wonderful wife and two kids at their home in Amarillo.

We all know what a squeeze page is – those irritating one page sales letters that start out ‘dear friend’ and end with something like ‘it will change your life’. But problogger’s challenge today teaches us about sneeze pages. He explains it is a term that he created in the 2007 31DBBB challenge.

The way that a blog works is simple – the newest articles are at the top. So what happens to all your archives? Most likely, they rarely get looked at unless you link to a specific post in a new post. A sneeze page fixes this problem. Basically, a sneeze page is a page on your blog with a collection of your top posts about one topic, or from one period of time (he uses the example of his ‘How to make money blogging‘ page) to make it easier for people to find past archived articles.

He recommends to think about the top questions your readers or clients ask, or a type of post that you write a lot – then create a sneeze page for that topic. I did a bit of brainstorming and came up with a couple topics. I finally decided that the best option was to create a page that answered the most common question I get from clients and readers: “how can I improve my writing“?

What can you create a sneeze page about?

How many times have you just felt like today is just a little too serious? Today, I was reading through some of my favorite blogs, a strong mix of business and humor, and ran across an image that I couldn’t help but share:

Although I know that creativity and math smarts are not always ‘have one or the other’, but for me, they were. I was never the math whiz, so luckily, they explained the problem below. I would love to see the faces of the Verizon rep that opened that check and had to show it to their supervisor. What would they do? Is it a valid check? More than likely, he was required to send another check, I can’t help but be impressed at the creativity of Mr. Munroe.

Would you accept the check? Looking for a bank person’s answer as well – would this be considered valid assuming the math problem was correct?