creative briefing

User-generated content is not uncommon to websites today and its popularity has grown over the years with the public’s demand to have control and input over what they’re seeing on websites. Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and countless others will typically offer a form on the front-end of their website for users to submit content for immediate publishing, enhancing user interactivity and overall experience.

For WordPress users, this is usually a problem because the post and page-writing functionalities are hidden away in the back-end admin panel of WordPress. Not only that, but users are required to have a registered account before being able to access these functions. Add on the fact that logging into the admin panel exposes the user to a different interface and visual environment, and you’ve got yourself a bad user experience and little incentive for the user to want to submit content.

So how do you create a site that offers a usable front-end form that will allow users to publish content immediately onto your site while still taking advantage of the powerful publishing engine of WordPress?

This tutorial will break down one way of overcoming this obstacle using cantwaitforchristmas.com to illustrate examples.

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If you’ve noticed that you haven’t heard from me in the last few days (since my Inspired post), it’s because I’ve been completely submerged in the wonders of WordPress! I had the hang of it after the first night, but I’ve spent the last few days diligently perfecting the ins and outs of this underestimated platform.

Most of my time has been dedicated to building out my new agency site. The technical development progress has now sped far beyond the development of the content for the site, so it’ll still be some time before it’s ready to launch.

But to give some proof of my progress, and to alleviate some of the WordPress energy, my buddy and I decided to run our first project marathon last night - 24 hours of pure creative magic with the end result being a polished, functional, and stylish website. With that, I present to you the launch of cantwaitforchristmas.com!

In light of the holiday season, Satish and I decided to build a simple site that would celebrate all the things everyone is looking forward to come this Christmas. For extra umph, we added a giant timer so that we could countdown the days, hours, minutes, and even seconds left til all the wonderfulness of Christmas would arrive.

I will do a follow-up post soon to share some of the tricks and techniques used in the development of this site. But in the mean time, I hope you guys can go and support my first marathon project and join us in the countdown to the official best day of the year!

If anybody is particularly feeling the holiday spirit, you can also help spread word of the site by blogging about it or sharing it with friends.

Looking forward to seeing what you’re all looking forward to this Christmas!

I met with a local distinguished graphic and web designer this past week and came out of a two and a half hour enlightened, thought-filled, and inspired. It was great to get the perspective of a formal designer (by formal I mean someone who has gotten formal education in design - whether it helped them or not) on the industry and how businesses operate in the marketplace. For the past 4 years, I’ve been running a design agency as a business professional (it may or may not come as a shock to you that I have no formal design training - just a business degree and a passion for creative work), so comparing my outlook and heuristics to that of an actual designer running a design agency was refreshing, to say the least. I’d like to think that my twist in perspective was also helpful to him, so all in all it was a enjoyable chat for both of us.

We left the Starbucks with a few takeaways and potential areas of collaboration to think about. One thing that excited me the most and made me want to rush home and get straight to work was his expertise on using WordPress as a full-fledged CMS. That’s right, the same platform that runs this simple blog used as the backbone editor for an entire website. If you haven’t already labelled me as being slow to jump on this bandwagon, then you may be skeptical about the concept like I had been prior to this conversation. I’ve read about it, but always doubted its potential to be flexible and adaptive enough for sites that require more than just the blog functionality. I stand corrected!

Eager to add a new skillset to my arsenal, I dove into the WP infrastructure the next night and came out sometime between 3 and 4 am feeling on top of the world. I’ve learned a lot in this short amount of time, and I plan on sharing a lot of these lessons soon. In the mean time, I’m happy to say that there is hope for those who’d like to believe that WordPress can be used as a CMS, and I’ve possibly figured out a way to finally advance the development process of our new agency site. Score!

Stay tuned to see what I’ve been playing with in my sandbox. :)

Watch the opening sequence of Antitrust (sorry, the page has since been taken down). As typical programming cliches go, lines of syntax run down the screen, flashing complex functions and protocols, and alluding to, in this case, an advanced and scary language that supposedly sets the dark and diabolical tone of this movie’s premise.

… unless you pay attention to it and realize it’s just HTML. Well, everything but the <trust></trust> tags. Those are a bit scary.

These days, everything is branded. You brand your company, you brand your products, you brand your swag, and you even brand yourself. The purpose of branding? Quite simply, to make it yours, and to make others remember that it’s yours.

Certainly, your website is also no stranger to branding. But when you think of branding your website, you’d likely first think of tailoring the site’s design, the site’s logo, or even the site’s copy to whatever you’ve decided your brand should be. What you’d least likely think of is branding your URL.

But think about it. Half the time, if your visitors aren’t arriving to your site from linked text on another site or from a bookmark, then they’re typing in your URL to get there. The act of reading your URL off your business card, or off the napkin they wrote your URL on, and then typing it into their browser is just about as direct an interaction with your brand your customers can get. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from branding, it’s that you should brand all your touch points.

Thinking about branding your URLs yet? You should be!

Here’s Part 1 of how to brand your website’s URL: to www or not to www?

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