Since I run a Wordpress blog, I rarely talk about the Blogger platform. It is mainly because I never used it. A new developement on the Blogger platform enables me to share a good news for all of you who are on the Blogger platform. The news is a response to the lack of flexibility when it comes to the layout options and the template choices in Blogger.

Google took a step forward yesterday by releasing the Blogger Template Designer, which only  available for the moment via their Blogger in Draft site. Blogger in Draft is just like regular Blogger, except with new, in-development features. One big improvement is the choice of one-, two-, and three-column layouts for each template, with complete control over the size and arrangement of the columns. If you are interested in switching right away to a new template.

As you can see from this video, you do not need programming skills to custom made the look of your blog.

If you are on the Blogger platform, you should have a look. You will find all the details of how to use it on Blogger in Draft.

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• Balsamiq Mockups Feels Like Hand Drawing your Interface

Balsamiq Mockups is one  tool I use to build my upcoming community site. Following a tweet I made last week, I saw that many of you were curious to know what I was thinking of Balsamiq Mockups. So, here we are.

Before you build any software, Web site or even a blog, you need is to draw mockups of the interface. This step is not about being pretty. This step is about defining how the Web pages will operate. Plus, you identify what content and how it will be shown to the users.

I used many tools and methods to create wireframes/UI mockups over my UI and Web design career. The most efficient I found so far is Balsamiq. It feels natural and you work fast.

How Balsamiq works?

Using Balsamiq Mockups feels natural since it reproduces hand drawing on a piece of paper done but quickly done with a computer. Once you learned where are the 75 pre-set controls, it goes fast to create your interface. You have access to more than 150 icons. For the expert users, they are plenty of keyboard shortcuts.

The pre-set controls come with context-sensitive properties to give you more options. You can import an image if there is no ready-to-use controls that fit your need. Plus, you can download custom control made by the members of their Mockups To Go community.

In team meetings, you could easily modify and create new mockups while you are having a discussion. For all these reasons, I love it!

+ Balsamiq Mockups
+ Google Maps Mockup

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A quick note to tell you that I will be giving a session at the next PodCamp Toronto that will happen on the weekend of February 20 and 21st, 2010.

I started working on adding a community site to the KimVallee.com brand. I analyzed many angles to make sure I get the right ingredients. My session will explore what you need to consider before building your own community site. I will tell you why, what, and how I will expand my blog with my upcoming community site.  I will deliver food for thought, practical tips and a toolkit. I would be honored if you put it on the agenda. The exact time and date will be revealed later.

+ Register to attend PodCamp Toronto 2010

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When it comes to social media, you can do a lot if you take the time to think about how to use what already exists? A good example of using a feature that people are familiar with is the IKEA Showroom Facebook campaign. The beauty is that any business with a small marketing budget can do this.

For the opening a new IKEA store in Malmo, Sweden, their agency Forsman & Bodenfors devised a simple Facebook contest. The store manager uploaded showroom pictures to his profile. Participants won a product by being the first to tag their name to a product that appeared on the showroom pictures. Clever! They used the tagging function of Facebook, one of the most powerful features in Facebook to spread the word about their campaign. The nice thing is that anyone can do this.

This is what Guy Kasawaki refers as $0 marketing. It is not totally zero since you need influencers to market it, a person to run the campaign and in this case, the prizes. But now that I shared the key elements with you, assuming that you already built a good network online, you could bypass the agency and forget the ads in the newspapers. View like that, it is a very affordable advertising method.

Profile versus Fan Page

The IKEA Showroom Facebook campaign was built on a Facebook profile for the manager of the new store, Gordon Gustavsson. They opted for a profile instead of a fan page because a profile feels more personal. Nobody can deny that. You can set the photo permissions on your profile to be visible by everyone so that people do not need to become your friend before starting to tag themselves. Know that Facebook automatically asks the owner of a photo to approve the tagging requests from people with whom they are not friend.

If you opt for a fan page,  you could still communicate with the voice of the store manager on a fan page. Things to consider is the amount of time you can put on campaign management and your long term objectives. Creating a profile requires you to accept the friend requests. Fans are accepted automatically. Fan page has more promotional values. You may want to use the contest to build your fan base and not just a one time buzz.

Some people may argue that activities from a profile are more likely to show up on the news feeds. With the recent changes in the news feeds, Peter Deng of Facebook told in an interview that pages with many comments and likes should come up at a good rate  in the news feeds. It is up to you to trigger the buzz. As you can see both methods have values. Consider all elements before making your choice.

Watch the video for more details.

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Before you choose a blog template, consider form and function. Keep in mind that the Web is evolving all the time and we are always experimenting with new ways to display our content. And remember that content is king. The blog design is there to enhance your content, to provide a good experience to your readers and to convey what your brand/blog stands for.

Based on my experience and what I see in the blogosphere as of autumn 2009, I feel that:

1. Pictures sell. The trend is to go with bigger images. Aim for 500 pixels in width.
2. The the blog is becoming the hub of your social media activities. The blog layout is morphing and designers are experimenting with different options. There are no clear winner at this point. The multimedia blog template is an option. But clearly, we look for what will replace the magazine layout and the classic blog layout for your home page.
3. Make sure to display where to find you on other social media sites. Put a link to your Flickr and You tube account, a Follow me on Twitter link or a Twitter widget. The Fan box from Facebook works well to grow your fan base. You must leverage your participation in social networking sites.
4. Make sure your posts display well in Facebook when people add the link to their profile. You want to show the title, show the contextual picture and display the first sentences of your post. Click here for explanations. Any blogger should leverage the power of popular social networking sites to grow their traffic.
5. Assume that your readers use a screen resolution of at least 1024×768. On at my At Home blog, I get less than 2% of my readers with a 800×600 screen resolution or lower.
6. If you still prefer the classic blog layout (no harm in that), opt for a 2-column design since it allows your content to breathe. Allow a content column of 500 pixels or more to publish big pictures and properly embed You Tube videos. To give you an idea, the white section of my blog measures 1002 pixels in width.
7. If you publish many posts per week, display blog excerpts on your home page. This way, if a reader is not interested by the first post, you may grab his or her attention with the second or third post.

Make your Image Google-friendly

Do not forget to fill a short description of what the picture represents, think of describing the scene on the ALT attribute of the image. I am telling you, it makes a huge difference. As a bonus, putting ALT attribute helps on accessibility.

+ photo: Aperture multimedia blog template from WooThemes

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Like many of you, I lost control of my inbox over the last months. I received too many emails every day. Once in a while, I would try to sort everything but I often gave up after an hour due to this immense task. Not anymore! My inbox is empty and it will stay that way.

Sort Your Emails by Priority

If you switch to the priority technique, you will never have to deal with a full inbox. The revelation came from the fact that you need two sorting systems for your emails. First, you sort your emails by assigning a priority level to every email. Once a task is done (email is answered), you move the email in the right filing category. This way, your inbox stays empty at all time. As a bonus, you will not forget important and urgent things.

Make it Fit Your Needs

Define your own priority level. Do it in function of what you do for living. You could have 3 levels: Urgent, Important but can wait, Later. This is the simplest and quickest way. You can find inspirations on organization office supplies, like the Make it Work bundle that I am showing you.

I define instead a 7-priority level system that is task oriented for my work as a blogger.

• Rush
• Must respond
• Daily Reads – I create a filter on Gmail to immediately send my favorite newsletters to my daily reads
• To Do – it is a mix of current meetings and tasks
• To Write About – to remind me of potential stories
• To Read when time
• Project.

Everything else is deemed trivial. I either archive the email, with or without further classification, or delete the email right away. I went over my full inbox in 2 hours using these rules.

My inbox was full because my old classification system required too much thinking to determine how to file each email. Plus, it failed on the urgency of the emails. Assigning by priority forces you to take an easy decision. I am convinced my inbox will stay clean from now on.

I wish to thank my good friend Nathalie Rivard for telling me about the task oriented sorting mechanisms. Nathalie got that advice from Isabelle Lopez, who got it from a friend. We can all learn from each other.

SOURCING:
+ Make it Work Bundle by Knock Knock $30.60 USD

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One thing that is difficult for many bloggers is to define their niche. As the competition on the blogosphere becomes fiercer, you need to position your blog in order to stand out. People needs to quick get what your blog is about and how it is different from the pack.

Whether you talk about one topic or many topics in your blog, you need to find one direction that summarizes what your blog is about.

Give Room to Your Niche to Evolve

If you are starting out, think about how to categorize your blogs in directories. Take my At Home blog. It is a design blog for women well positioned as a stylish living blog. It started in 2007 as a blog about entertaining at home with style. In time, I found out that it is the stylish living aspect that my readers are attached to.

Think about directories

In a real conversation, people would easily describe the scope of At Home. But I have a hard time selecting a category for it in Web directories. Lifestyle blogs are not exactly what I am since I do not cover cultural events or musics. I am not only about food or home decor. I also touch family life without being about kids and parenting. Women magazines are rarely there and when they are, it is often filled by feminist blogs or women issues blogs.

There is also another impact. I consider myself a design blog. But when they are blog awards on specific topics (interior design, food, etc), I realized that people would not instinctively think about my blog. I am not complaining. I am happy with my positioning. I just point it out so you could fully grasp the extent of your decision.

Examine Your Content

Ask yourself that question: Are you mainly

• a creator of new content – ex: a crafter,
• a collector  – blog is about what you like,
• a curator  – like I am
• a news publisher – being the source of all the news about a specific topic
• a problem solver
• one that inspires people to act or create
• a commentator, someone who shares his/her perspectives on issues and ideas, etc…

The content you produce may also influence how you define your niche. Lastly, you need to consider your competition since you need to differentiate yourself.

Remember that helps growth and maintain a readership:

1. Regularly write posts with original content
2. Concentrate on being useful for your readers
3. Be active in the social media community, not just in the blogosphere

For the last point, I refer you to an excellent post about how to get noticed by the right people written by my friend Lara McCulloch of Ready 2 Spark.

+ photo that I took when I went to the after-party of the Social Gaming Summit 2009 in San Francisco

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A reader asked me to tell him how he can post text on a fan page. The same way that you can decide if your Facebook friends are allowed to post comments on your wall, the owner of a fan page can define their wall settings. In short, a fan can post text, photos, videos and links on a fan page if the page owner has granted permissions to their fans.

To not allow your fans to write or post content on the fan wall is a big no-no on my book. I will go as far as saying that if this is your philosophy, your brand is not ready to be on Facebook. I encourage your brand to go over its fear since you are missing out a big opportunity.

Encourage Participation with the right Wall Settings on your Fan Page

Web 2.0 is based on interactions. The value of a fan page is to have a true dialogue with your fans. For that to happen, they need the power to express themselves. I advise any brand or blogger to use the above settings for their fan page.

There are two elements that you can customize. The first are the View Settings. To not miss any intervention by your fans, set the Default view for wall at “Post by Page and Fans”. For the Fan Permissions, I allow my fans to post anything on my page fans. As the fan page administrator, know that you can always delete inappropriate or unsolicited marketing (spam) material.

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I put that story on hold after the long weekend. Plus, the summer vacations are at our door. I am writing this now because it is always after a vacation or a break that it is the hardest to get back to our blogging schedule.

People often ask me if I get the writer’s block. I don’t! I always have more stories than time on my hands. Many elements contribute to that fact. Let’s explore the ones that could be useful to you.

Frequency

The main reason in my mind is the fact that I write every day. The more you write, the easier it gets but most importantly, the more ideas pop up. But that does not mean that you have no chance to succeed if you do not write every day. There are other ways to achieve frequency.

You can write a few tweets about your topic every day, have a conversation with peers, post a few comments on related blogs. The idea is to concentrate on your blog topic for at least 15 to 20 minutes every day.

Do not waste any ideas

Develop a fast system to track potential story lines. I use the notes on my iPhone to do that. Audio notes will work too. Before my iPhone, I used the old fashioned way where I scribbled my thoughts on a pocket notebook that I carried around everywhere.

When you are hooked to your computer, create a draft post on Wordpress or Blogger for each future topic.  They will be there whenever you need it.

If you do that daily, it is enough to keep the creative flow active.

RSS Feeds

When I started blogging four years ago, I used to read my RSS feeds every morning before writing my first post. I bookmarked my favorite posts. Sometimes, I would write a post about the best of what you read that day. Most of the times, simply reading your RSS feeds puts your brain in the right set of mind and a story will emerge from nowhere.

Be sure to select a wide enough niche

The key to my inspiration is not only that I write about what I am passionate about. The fact that my topics (home design, entertaining and social media) are very dynamic universes helps a lot. There are always new ideas, new products, practical tips or solutions, sharing experiences to talk about.

If you have problems finding good stories all year long, ask yourself if the angle of your blog confines you. Analyze if it would be appropriate to add a new dimension to your talk.

With everyone having a busy life, people are also looking for curators. Examine how and if you can write useful short posts (75 words or less) a few times a week. Ask yourself what will be useful to your readers may be the only question you should answer to release the creative juice.

For a boost of creativity, watch the handmade video portraits of an inspiring etsy seller, birdhouseaccents.

PHOTO CREDITS:
+ Birdhouses created by Fred and Lynn of Birdhouseaccents on etsy

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I selected the Wordpress Related Posts plugin which assigns the related posts based on the higher number of matching Wordpress tags. If you are good at tagging properly your posts, you will see that that this method is quite effective. I typically detailed the content of my categories using tags.

Installation Tips

I am lucky to have a test version of my blog. So I tested the results first to make sure the look and feel were the way I want it. It took me less 2 minutes, including testing, to add a Related Posts section at the bottom on every post to On the Web with Kim Vallee. For my design blog, At Home, my programmer modified that same plugin to show thumbnails arranged in a row instead of a bullet list. I did not use the image option for my social media blog since not every post has a picture.

You simply search for Related Posts on Plugin Browser/Installer of your Wordpress interface. Selected the one developed by Denis. Pay attention to the developer name since there are more than one plugin called Wordpress Related Posts. Like you do for any plugin, install it and activate it. Then, configure the preferences (available via the Settings menu once the plugin is installed).

Related posts is one of many methods that you can use to create serendipity in your blog and increase the page views.

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I prefer reading blogs through Google Reader. Still, they are people who prefer getting my posts through an email subscription. This is why I provide the option. With Google Feedburner is so simple to do and once you set up the service, it runs by itself.

Use it to Build Loyalty

The popularity of email subscriptions varies per blog. Between 15% to 25% of my subscribed readers (email + RSS feed) opt for the email subscription. Readers can opt to receive an email for every day where you published something.

Since it only takes a few minutes to set up the service on Feedburner and add the proper link to your blog, I advice all bloggers to add this feature. Instead of a link, you could add an email subcription form directly on your blog. The instructions are on Feedburner.

Immediate Access to a Backup

To make sure the system always works fine, I subscribed to my feed by email. This afternoon, I found an unanticipated advantage for me as a blogger. I wanted to delete a draft post. By mistake, I delete a published post. I was desperate since I have no clues about which post I deleted by error. I could have recovered the post via our backup but I was looking for a faster solution.  Simply opening on my inbox gave me all the information to reconstitute the post.

I verify that the post kept the previous URL. It is important to keep any links and trackbacks that refer to your original post (the deleted one). And to fully correct my mistake, I edited the publish date of the post to the original date and time. The information was on the email sent by Feedburner.

Because of my email subscription, my blog is back to  what it was before I made the wrong deletion. I made the corrections in less time that it took me to write this post.

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Every publication has a defined scope that they covered. It is important to define the boundaries of what you cover and what you do not cover. To complicate matters, bloggers are more and more solicited by a number of people to write about their story. The first thing I do after I like an idea is to test it against my blog bible. If it passed the test, then I can think about how I could talk about the story or the product. I also evaluate when and if it would fit within my editorial schedule.

Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers

Copyblogger gave that advice today. I told you that before: always keep in mind your readers. Your blog should provide a consistent whole experience if you want your readers to come back. Maintaining the content quality is crucial. You should aim for the best all the time. In a design blog, you also need consistency in the style you showcase.

Take my At Home with Kim Vallee’s property. It is about my design style and the way I like to entertain. My readers have certain expectations when it comes to the content and what products or design they will see. I make sure that my stories fit both agenda.

Be Consistent even if you get it for free

A few weeks ago a retailer wanted to host a giveaway for my AHWKV’s readers. The prices were valuable but their products were something that I would never put on my table. My readers would have spotted that right away. Although a giveaway costs me nothing and can attract new readers to my site, I said no because the pictures of the prizes will clash with my style. This would have impaired the whole experience and hurt my brand.

You invest a lot of time in writing your blog. Today’s lesson was to grow your audience and stay at the top of your game, you need to provide a consistent experience.  Having a blog bible helps you maintain the cap.

+ Zen and the Art of remarkable blogging on Copyblogger

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