imjjss

Nowadays, upgrading might be cheaper than repairing. If you have some vivid computer hardware shop around, upgrading a component is very convinient, you gain a better performence at a reasonable cost.It'd be great if it's a small problem and you can fix it at home. Otherwise, the repair shops killing. Not mention the cost of bringing the computer on the traffic. The worst case is the repair shop couldn't solve the problem.

I've been going throught a lot of stuffs since 2 years ago when I start thinking of blogging.
Till recently, I still didn't have a nice blog.
I've build some blogs, all of them end up abandoned--
either because I see it's not what I wanted, or I see nobody else want to read it.
Some of them started with a good idea, then, go too far till my thoughts become unmanagable.
 
I was frustrated--
Why some people's blog is about a small topic but hanging there shinning. Why my brilliant ideas can't get implemented.
 
I did some deep thinking, joined an online web design training course.
Finally I understand my failures were not in web design itself. I failed in the process of building a blog.
 
Following a professional process leads to efficiency and success. Unorganized actions leads to nowhere, merely waste time.
 
Since I learned my lessons, I followed the professional way. Within 3 months, I made my first completed blog and feel sattisfied at how it looks and how it works. The rest is for my audience to judge.
 
I want to share with my Asta fellow bloggers the professional process that I learned from the training course. Because I know many of you are going through the same mess as I did. Hope it assist you to your blogging success!
 

=====================================================================
Core Process of Designing Website
======================================================================

-------------------------------------------------------------Step one: Define
-------------------------------------------------------------
In this step, you should establish a firm idea of "What's it all about". Without a clear defination, our "creative" ideas might bring us travel too far beyond our ability or beyond our real needs.
 
1 Research
I'm sure most of us are doing lots of research before and during blog design. But, does the result of your research efficiently provide you valuable insights to move on? Write down the following questions and give yourself answers. It will help your idea become clear, become a project that can be implemented within desired scope. It helps you stay with what you really want and what you can do.
 


1.1 Know yourself What do you really want to do?

1.2 Know Your Site Users Who are your audiences?
Why are they coming to your site?

1.3 Know your competitors What are the other doing right now?
How your site fit into the landscape?


2 PlanAfter research, we establish a clear defination about our blog. How to start implement it? We make a detailed plan to tell ourselves what to do next, when to do it, how much money should be involved, how many resources are needed. We also setup a high level goal which can be achivable if things going well. But at least we should achive each stage that we planned in order to move on to the next.
 


2.1 Create a Project Plan
2.2 Set Budget
2.3 Create Schedule
2.4 Assign Team-- if it's a group blogging, or you cooperate with others to design blog for clients.
2.5 Set up Stage
2.6 Plan for Testing

3 Clarify 


3.1 Set High-Level Goals
3.2 Prepare Communication Brief-- if design blog for clients, you need to provide a well designed picture to show the client how it looks and get their feed back, then, adjust your plan according to client's opinion.
3.3 Kick off the Project
-------------------------------------------------------------Step Two: Structure
-------------------------------------------------------------
A well designed structure is what keeps our blog alive. On this step, we not only make sure our content is meaningful but also we will make sure how to deliver it.
 
1 Content Plan
 


1.1 Audit Existing Content
1.2 Outline What's neccessory
1.3 Create Content Delivery Plan--where you get the content? OUtlines each page or section in a phased deliveray process


2 Structure Site

2.1 Create Sitemap

How the site is layed out at high level content and user perspective?
Key tasks-- users come to learn,download,listen to music...?
Function Area

2.2 Set Naming Conventions-- a good naming convention makes the site looks organized, not confusing users. 

2.3 Structure Pages 

2.4 Create Wireframes-- there are softwares helping to do this, but you can also draw a picture on paper.

Outline Contents that is needed
How the Contents are organized in the page

2.5 Address Navigation-- Your navigating system should not leave users in difficulties in finding stuffs in your site. 

2.6 Naming & Labeling 

2.7 Define User TasksSuppose your site provide a file to download. Start from a user landing on your page, what are the clicks he/she will go through to finally arrive the download link?

-------------------------------------------------------------Step Three Design
-------------------------------------------------------------
In the Designing process, we should always keep in mind that we are design it for the users. Why they come here? How to make them interested in your stuffs? How to make them get what they want?
 
1 Create
 


1.1 Review Site Goals Make sure the design take out the Communiction Brief
Undertand where the original goals were set up for the site

1.2 Develop Concepts
1.3 Design for the User
1.4 Presenting for the Designs-- if you are designing for clients.
2 Confirm 


2.1 Create HTML protosite
2.2 Test Functionality
3 Hand-off-- if you are designing for clients 


3.1 Create Graphic Templates
3.2 Create Design Style Guide
-------------------------------------------------------------Step Four Build
-------------------------------------------------------------
Most of us start building blogs from this stage. Read back, what did you miss? I'm sure if you go through the above 3 steps before building your blog, you will save a lot of time and hassles.
 
1 Prepare
 


1.1 Assess Project Status
1.2 Establish Guidlines
1.3 Set File Structure

2 Build 


2.1 Slice and Optimize
2.2 Create HTML Templates
2.3 Implement Light Testing
2.4 Populate Pages
2.5 Intergrade Backend-- since most of us are using WordPress or similiar software, this job become easy.

3 Test

3.1 Create a QA Plan. Ask your friends or clients questions, get their feedback.
3.2 Prioritize and Fix Bugs
3.3 Conduct Final Survey-- After bug fix, get feedback from friends or clients again.
-------------------------------------------------------------Step Five Measure
-------------------------------------------------------------
Finally, our blog is ready to show up. One thing I would address here is -- blog design process is not static. It's a dynamic interactive process. After launch, during the entire life of our blog, we continuing get feedback and we continueing discover better solutions, so we keep the process going, Everyday Closer to Perfection!
 
1 Deliver-- publish our blog or deliver the design to our clients
 
2 Launch


2.1 Prepare Announcement Plan-- in case you need promote your site at lanch
2.2 Register with Search Engines
2.3 Launch Site
3 Maintain 


3.1 Maintenance Team
3.2 Capabilities
3.3 Internal Maintenance
3.4 Develop Maintenance Plan
3.5 Measure Success
3.6 Confirm Site Security
3.7 Interactive Redesign
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Final thoughts- the way we organize our jobs directly impact what we get as final result. I hope the above notes that I took from my training course help you as much as it helped me.

I was with other software before I fall for WordPress-- one of the most powerful content management software. While I enjoy the vast features WordPress presents, I do feel something missing-- where to write the page descriptions and keywords. I've got used to write those stuffs when building pages in other software. Now with WordPress, I can't find a place to enter those stuffs. I felt bothered because I've been taught that page descriptions and metadata keywords are important for search engines to determine how to category the pages.
After some search and study, with the help of my friends, I finally found my way out.
Here I going to share my finding with you-- a simple way to add keyword for SEO purpose.

Step one. Adding "keywords" field
Since WordPress doesn't provide us a way to write down our "keywords", our first job is to create a "keyword" field. Then, we will find ways to populate data into this field in following steps.
On Page or Post editing page, you have a Custom Fields panel, right? Go there, we add a new field "magicwords". For the value, you can enter any text you like for this current page or post. Our purpose here is to create a place "magicwords" to store our future inputs.

Step two Create a function to generate matadata tag
Add this code in your theme's functions.php file

function set_magicwords(){ global $post; $magicwords = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘magicwords’, true); $default_magicwords = “type, in, some, default, magicwords”; $metatag= “”; if (empty($magicwords)){ $magicwords = $default_magicwords; } if (is_home() || is_front_page()){ $keywords = $default_keywords; } $metatag=”\t”; $metatag.= “<meta name=\”magicwords\” content=\”"; $metatag.= $magicwords; $metatag.= “\” />”; $metatag.= “\n\n”; echo $metatag; } add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘magicwords’); Step three Enjoy a better SEO result
With the above funtion working atutomatically for you, everytime when you create a new page or post, it will set default metadata keywords for this page or post. You can also enter different keywords in the "magicwords" field for different pages or posts. Either way, you are done.
 
Use the same technique, we can create and populate our page description field. You can try to code it in the same way by yourself. I will write another article for the page description if necessary.