Blogging
July 21st, 2010 by Matt Haff
Pulling some great advice that I got from John Saddington in a post last October, I’ve decided it’s time to really make this a good blog worth your time.
4 Ingredients for a Good Blog
- Have a schedule
- Less about passion & more about discipline
- Have goals
- Team effort
So here it is, I’m going to start off with some easy goals and re-evaluate them next year…
For a schedule, I will be posting once a week on Monday’s.
While I will continue to have passion about what I discuss I will be using this as a tool to help others with their online ministry and overall marketing, social media, web design, etc. It’s NOT about passion but you do NEED passion if you want to make a difference.
My goal is simple, if I can help just one person advance their knowledge and skills then it’s worth it!
The ingredient that I’m missing right now… team effort. I don’t have a team that works with me but if you’re interested in blogging for free about anything having to do with online ministry then email me.
Blogging
April 26th, 2010 by Matt Haff
Even within the past couple of months I’ve run into mission trip teams taking the liberty of publishing their own mission trip blog. These are usually very tacky, random URLs and no proper church branding attached to them. I’ve begun implementing a standard mission trip blog for each of the different locations and giving each team their own login information.
This is what we have as of now:
http://missiontrips.12stone.com/guatemala
http://missiontrips.12stone.com/bolivia
Right now I’m just using a basic template, I didn’t know about the first one until a week before they left. I will be doing a design for the blogs soon but I wanted to get some feedback from you all about what you are doing for mission trip blogs?
Blogging
February 1st, 2010 by matt
So last night Mack Kitchel and I were up at the Catalyst office working with Tyler Stanton, one of the emcees of Catalyst, until midnight doing some final touches to his blog. I think late nights pay off, at least I hope they do or else I’m wearing down my body for nothing -smile-
Go take a look around TylerStanton.com let me know what you think.
Blogging
January 9th, 2010 by matt
Presented by: John Saddington | human3rror
Five things that will help you
- how do you price an install
- what do I need to learn about servers and hosting
- platform knowledge, how well do I know wordpress?
- begin to understand your network
- managing expectations
Steps to build WordPress
- Themes
- Hosting
- Upgrades
- Plugins
- Strategy Consulting
How you develop your business
- Where you want to grow your business is where you have fun
- Legal stuff & taxes
- Building a team & expand
- Full Time or Part Time?
- Time Management & Project Management
- Developing that business
Contracts & Managing Expectations
- watch for scope creep
- Saves you time, money & heartache
Keep Growing – keep learning, be curious
Connections & Networking – get with people that are better than you, get with people that can bring you business
Take a break, have a life, vacations - have fun, if you’re not having fun then don’t do it
Pricing – the better you get, charge per project not hourly. The less sure you are, charge by hour.
Resources
Blogging, Web Design
January 9th, 2010 by matt
Presented by: Mitch Canter
to STAND out
to have CONTROL over CONTENT
to PERSONALIZE your brand
to {re}FRESHEN your online image
It Boils Down To Three Tenants:
- readability – if they can’t read your content, they won’t
- usability – if they can’t navigate your content, they won’t
- findability – if they can’t find your content…
Basic Tips
- know your craft
know enough html to understand the basics
know your blogging platform
- use discrection
widgets distract from content install widgets readers will utilize if you want fun widgets, put them in a widget section
find widgets that style to your theme automatically
- use good markup
(im)proper markup can make (or break) a site’s SEO
Utilize H Tags (h1-h6) accordingly
One h1 tag per page (main keywords)
Allow specific CSS targeting.
- use color theory
1-3 colors work best (2 primary/secondary and 1 neutral [black/grewy/brown])
Font colors too – stick to a pallete and be consistent
- use good images
a good image tells a story that accentuates the content
good images should work with your design, but good designs also have styles built in for images
- it’s the little things
most overlookd “polish points”
bulleted lists
hover colors
headlines
post format
comments
Resource: WEloveWP.com
Recommended Plugins
- akismet
- disqus comment system
- exec-php
- feedburner feedsmith
- front page excluded categories
- get the image
- google analyticator
- lifestream
- mailchimp
- recommended reading
- redirection
- tweetmeme retweet button
- twitPic
- Twitter tools
- Woopra
- wordpress.com stats
- wordpress database backup
- wp greet box
