How WordPress Keeps Our Writing In Check

Frustrated with the limitations of fonts, colors, sizes and other customizations you’d like to use within WordPress? These limitations are due to something called Style Sheets. This article is aimed to reduce your frustration and help you understand (and utilize) the benefits of your site’s style sheets.

What’s a Style Sheet?

It’s one of those fancy, 25 cent words that designers like to throw around. To those of us who blog every day and aren’t designers, we are more familiar with words like WordPress Edit Tools. The style sheets that exist are present for us in the options we have for changing our font. For example, we can BOLD, underline, and italicize any words we want. We can create Title Headings like the one at the beginning of this post, and sub-headings that are slightly smaller like the one introducing this paragraph.

What we can’t do is bring in all kinds of different fonts or vary the look of the headings that are pre-determined by the style sheets associated with your WordPress theme.

What We Want Isn’t Always Good for Us

In many cases, people want to deviate on a whim from the confines of a style sheet so they can highlight or draw special attention to something. While this may seem like a good idea, it results in an inconsistent look throughout your website. A consistent look and feel is a good thing. It brings professionalism to your site, conforms to usability standards, and reduces confusion for your readers.

Besides, style sheets almost always provide one unique method of drawing attention to something using what is called Block Quotes, like this one.

Imagine if someone thought it was a good idea to turn lots of their text blue and underline it? I bet you’d think it was meant to link somewhere, right? What if you were on a site, and navigated to another page that looked nothing like the previous one? You might question if you accidently left the site, forcing you to hit the back button or check the URL to figure it out. Style sheets prevent people from taking customized text changes too far, and they keep writing ideas in check.

If inconsistency and confusion weren’t enough, consider that some fonts you might want to use are not compatible on some browsers and operating systems. If it weren’t for style sheets, your website could look really bad to some people, depending on how they are viewing your website. Instead, style sheets insure that everyone sees your website exactly the same- how it is intended! RSS feeds are a preferred method of viewing articles for an increasing number of people. It’s important to make data look consistent when syndicated, and style sheets do that too! Cool, huh?

Too Much of a Good Thing

Style sheets do allow you to change font color, add headings and sub-headings, use block quotes, and other items listed above. However, just because you can make things stand out, doesn’t mean you should over do it. You can create too much of a good thing. A common mistake we see is people trying to draw attention to everything on a website. If you draw attention to everything, you draw attention to NOTHING.

Take Away Tips:

• Write your post and then take a break, before you publish it. When you come back to proof your work, you’ll often see where you can make changes that make your writing more professional and appealing.
• Another tip is to get to know your writing style. If you prefer using Red, “quotes”, or underlining things, always go back through your articles to watch for your tendencies. Chances are you can reduce the frequency of these each time you write.
• Also, if you want to make sure something gets read, try using more bullet points. Bullet points are quick to read and usually get read first.

Now that you know more about style sheets, have we convinced you of the benefits? Do you have any lingering questions we can answer for you? Please share your thoughts.

Three Photos You Really, Really Want to Have

Take a guess at the answer to the following questions. We promise you won’t be graded.

1. What is the MOST clicked on tweets on Twitter?
2. Where does your eye go first on a blog post, web page, or even a brochure?
3. What is the quickest way for people to put a “face to a name”?
4. What is the trend in business cards?
5. How do you start to build personal brand?
6. What stimulates the most interest and some of the fastest comments on Facebook? [Read more]

Pull Facebook Out of Your Toolkit As Needed

Three times this past week I have had people come up to me or send me an email asking the exact same question.

I’m trying to convince my boss/volunteers/co-workers that our business/organization needs to have an active presence on Facebook. Can you help me argue my point?

Well, I’m certainly not in the business of helping people win arguments, nor do I invariably defend Facebook. Here’s why. [Read more]

Each Time I Teach, I Learn

It’s no secret that I have a passion for rural Minnesota and helping small businesses. That is why I love traveling around Minnesota, teaching others how to grow businesses or non-profits using technology and the web. [Read more]

How Do I Get a Little Picture by My Comment?

The “little picture” you are referring to is called a gravatar. Like the one next to this blog title (top-left), a gravatar is a globally recognized (picture) avatar. If you’ve seen the movie Avatar, I guess the two are loosely associated in that what you choose for a picture will be how people recognize and interact with you all over the web wherever gravatars are enabled. [Read more]

Wordless Wednesday: Philanthropy One Glass at a Time

The kids of Vivid Image staff had their first lemonade stand of the summer at a recent business expo in Hutchinson, MN. They raised $25 for our local food shelf, selling little glasses of lemonade. [Read more]

Wordless Wednesday: iPad

Your thoughts or insights? Please share. Stay tuned for ours.

A Sneak Peak at New Email Marketing Features

Vivid Image and Constant Contact have been teaming up for years to help hundreds of small businesses and organizations harness the power of email marketing campaigns.Over the years, this service has grown into a valuable tool to do so much more than just managing mass emails. Soon, you are going to hear about even more that can be done using Constant Contact, and we thought you’d appreciate a simple list of some of the best and new features available to help your business grow. [Read more]

Fun with Marketing and the Minnesota Lynx

The Vivid Image team is proud to be working to help promote the Minnesota Lynx sponsored event coming to our town of Hutchinson on May 7th, aimed at celebrating the achievements of Hutchinson’s own Lindsay Whalen. [Read more]

Time for Spring Cleaning

Today’s WordlessWednesday post is a reminder that even websites and blogs need a weeding of old information, a cleaning away of debris, and fresh new content.

Have you given your site any spring cleaning attention?

Lighting A Fire with Ideas

This is our first Wordless Wednesday post from Vivid Image. Therefore, I hope you’ll forgive me for giving a little explanation into what Wordless Wednesday is, why it’s important for small business, and how we plan to participate in the future. [Read more]

Why Your Small Business Needs a Facebook Fan Page

Did you know that Facebook gets as much traffic as Google, and some days even more?

At Vivid Image we are dedicated to spending hundreds of hours teaching small businesses and non-profits about social media tools like Facebook. We break social media, like Facebook, down into easy to understand bits and pieces. We know it’s important to help small businesses understand why they need Facebook and how to use it effectively.

Over 400 Million on Facebook!

Millions of people use Facebook, and it’s not just young kids and college students. In fact, the fastest growing demographic is people over 35 years of age. This means your customers and potential customers are using Facebook, and they are spending an average of 55 minutes a day on Facebook too! [Read more]

5 Creative Ways to Use Flickr for Business

Flickr may be in cahoots with Yahoo, but a well built Flickr site optimized for search engines and used creatively for marketing will do your business good in Google and beyond. [Read more]

Common Facebook Frustrations

I want small businesses to be able to make the most out of Facebook, which means I am always pushing the limits of what Facebook can do. Somewhere along the way, I found myself compiling a list of frustrations in my head. I decided to share list of the common frustrations I hear that people have when using Facebook for business. My hope is that I will alleviate needless frustrations and help small business owners understand the abilities and confines of Facebook. [Read more]

Frustration with Facebook Fan Page Invites

Frustrated lately?

If it has to do with your fan page invites, you are not alone!

Facebook is growing and changing at unprecedented speed. I’m not talking about the number of people joining Facebook, but rather the changes and enhancements made to its infrastructure, interface, and functionality. With such rapid growth, somebody should have predicted the extensive use small businesses and non-profit organizations would have for fan pages. [Read more]

The Repetitive Social Media Question

“It seems so repetitive, doesn’t it?” It’s a common question I receive when working with people who are new to the social media scene. So common, in fact, I decided to write a blog post about it. Hopefully I can ease the fears of other people starting out with social marketing. [Read more]

The Three Pitfalls of Business on Facebook

Setting up a fan page on Facebook is a great way to reach people who are passionate about what your business or organization does. However, the choices you make when setting up your page dictate the success and effectiveness of your fan page later. [Read more]

5 Tips to Writing Regular Blog Posts

One of the most common concerns small businesses have about starting a blog for their business is the task of writing regular blog posts. [Read more]

A Quick Chat About: The Time Honored Tradition of Promo Gadgets and Do-dads

With budgets tight, expenses such as promotional items are bound to be reviewed. To some this would be a tough area to cut, as giving out promotional pens, hats, and water bottles is ingrained in the advertizing psyche. However, most of us rarely come across a promotional item that we use, much less can’t live without. Besides the ever handy supply of pens in your drawer or purse, which items have you received that you found yourself using repeatedly?

For me, I have to admit that some pop can cozies sat in the Tupperware drawer for years until our recent addition of our infant daughter. I now advertise for a construction company while keeping her bottles warm. I also use a discrete metal business card holder that I received from the telephone company. I must admit that I use it to keep my coffee punch cards and coupons readily handy, more so than business cards. Is it ok if you don’t necessarily use the promotional item for its intended purpose?

I think so. After all, I decided to keep it rather than chuck it. Email me at beth@vimm.com which promo items you loved (or disliked, or couldn’t figure out what it was) and I’ll compile a list. If you have a funny story to tell, let me know. (Hey, it’s a free plug for your company to several hundred people, right?) Our collective ideas can help one another spend wisely. This way if you are intent on spending advertising dollars on promotional items, maybe you’ll get a bigger bang-for-your-buck!

Contact Beth with your thoughts at beth@vimm.com.

Dang That Was Great! – Referral Marketing

No one has a problem coming out of a movie or a restaurant and gleefully exclaiming to others about the great quality of the product or experience. Each time we spoil the plot line of a movie to someone or contemplate the ingredients of an awesome new dish, we are embarking on a journey of helping others build their brand recognition and grow their client base. With focus turning to local economies and keeping money within our home tax bases, it is more important than ever to pass along good business experiences to each other. This is the process of building referrals, also called word-of-mouth marketing. Referrals can make a substantial and dramatic difference to a business, but unfortunately most people flounder at how to stimulate a proper referral system.

[Read more]

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