studionashvegas | design and social media

Tell Santa he made me a Cole’s shopper.

I’m coming here for everything but toilet paper. Any store that puts the parent ahead of the buck at Christmas deserves my business.

Tell Mr. Cole his Santa Claus ought to get a raise.

I am such a fan of Miracle on 34th Street (yes, both the original and the remake).  It’s a classic Christmas movie with a great storyline – even though the original was pretty much a commercial for Macy’s, but that’s a whole different blog post.  Point is, it’s still a great movie.

For those of you who don’t recognize the quotes above, they are from the remade version that came out 14 years ago.  In it, Santa (a Cole’s store Santa) tells parents of the kids in line that other stores have the toys they are looking for – at lower prices.  Yet, the mother who spoke the quote above makes it very clear: if Cole’s is going to put the spirit of Christmas first, they made her a customer for life.

Blog owners, online business owners, even brick-and-mortar business owners could stand to learn a thing or two from Ol’ Saint Nick.  We seem to get caught up in making sure our own brand is successful, pushing them to the wayside and even going to the point of alienating our customers and driving them off.  But once we start to take our customer’s needs into consideration, magical things happen, and our customers see us for who we really are – a company that is run by real people.

Take Motrin, for example.  They could have ridden the wave of the backlash against the “Motrin Moms” ad and created something positive both to customer and company (as Jeremiah Owyang points out in his blog).  However, they chose to protect themselves, go on the defensive, and issue an apology letter.  A letter which has been up since November 20th.

As a designer, I have no problems kicking work to friends who may have more experience in a certain area than I do (mostly Flash – I know my way around, but that doesn’t mean that I thoroughly enjoy working with it).  Likewise, I have personal relationships with a lot of other designers, and I love synergizing with them on techniques, tutorials, and how-to’s.  If someone tells me how to do something cool, I’ll share it on my blog.  Are they competition? Yes.  But there’s plenty of design work for us all, and we all have our specialties, so I’m not concerned.

Go out of your way to help a customer.  Go even harder to help your friends and fellow peers.  People take notice of good things that happen, and that will only make your business shine out even more.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.  And he knows a lot more about marketing than you could ever imagine.

Today marks the first anniversary of studionashvegas.  A lot of people don’t know my story – they just know that I’m some guy on the Internet who does design, social media, and fools around with WordPress to the point of obsession.  But, it’s actually a really funny one.  Want to know how it all started?

I was fired.

Yup.

I was an employee with the Tennessee Baptist Convention from June to around Thanksgiving.  I actually enjoyed the work – I was a print designer then, mostly doing postcards and brochures.  I did some pretty cool stuff (and I still like doing the print elements even though I’ve mostly moved away from print).  Thanksgiving came and went, and the TBC had their annual budget meeting.  Needless to say, budget meetings are never a good thing, and I ended up with a month’s salary out on my butt before Christmas.

Truth is, it was really a motivating factor to go out and start my own thing.  I’d been kicking the idea around for some time, and the TBC allowed for freelance work, so I had seriously considered it for a while… I just didn’t have the time to do it properly.

Getting fired was a great motivator and time-freer.

When I was let go, I went home that night and researched some good names for my new business.  Studionashvegas wasn’t taken (thank God!) so I bought my domain ($1.99) secured hosting ($6.99/month) and started a twitter account (those were the only expenses, minus business cards, that I had to spend).

The latter would be the catalyst for the business’ success.

I started following people in Nashville who were on twitter to try and make some contacts here in town.  Not being from around here, I thought it would be nice to start making friends and getting to know the locals.

Enter @davedelaney.

If you don’t know dave, he’s one of the Twitter Elite of Nashville (having written, videotaped, and spoken on his love of Twitter).  I followed him and learned about the Geek Breakfasts that had just started up.  I missed the first one, but managed to drag myself out of bed at 7:30 AM for the second one.  I’ve missed two since then (because of baby and… well, baby… lol) but most of my close Nashville friends were met there, and I still love the chance to keep up with them every month.  Being a designer in a room full of marketers is pretty lucrative, especially when you know the marketing too.  There was a point where I had done work for a lot of the Geek Breakfast attendees.  Now, there’s so many people that attend every month, I’m lucky if I even make it over to talk to everyone.

About this same time, Scott Schwertly over at ethos3 was looking for some graphic work. His wife Cara worked with my wife at the time, and so I freelanced for them, eventually getting hired by them part-time to fill in some gaps.

From the Geek Breakfast, I was introduced to @RemarkableWit (Marcus Whitney), who was helping Dave put together the first PodCampNashville.  They had ran a BarCampNashville before, but that was before I had gotten into the scene.  I attended, and spoke at, PodCampNashville, and it was apparent that studionashvegas was starting to at least gain some traction.  Scott and I parted ways and studionashvegas became my official full time gig.

It’s been almost a year since then, and a lot has happened in that year:

• I helped Andrew Chadwick get his restaurant’s web presence up and running
• I created business cards that got people talking!
• I gave Marcus Whitney a business card that really “hit the mark”
• I helped a Canadian social media guru get her start, and her business cards became collectable items.
• I found my love of WordPress (again)
• I helped an author and speaker get his voice online.
• I became an official consultant for Automattic (further raising the obsession level for WordPress).
• I helped a mission trip get video, pictures, and text out to the masses.
• I travelled to Memphis, Cincinnati, and Birmingham to speak on my love of WordPress.
• I tele-travelled to Toronto to help a fellow Mitch explain social media.
• I surpassed 1,000 followers on twitter… then 1,100… then my friends at church thought I was nuts when it became 1,200 (and yesterday… 1,300).
• I had a son… who’s flickr page has more photos on it than mine does.
• and I helped my wife do the same thing for herself as I am doing for me.

So much stuff has happened it’s hard to really quantify it as the most important.  All of it has changed my life, and made me who I am today.  To all of my clients, friends, acquaintances, twitter followers, and anyone who’s listened to me speak either in person or on Ustream: thank you.  I couldn’t have done this without you.

My plans for the coming year:

• (finally) release my first free WordPress theme
• write a book on WordPress
• learn AJAX, Flex, and some other cool languages
• learn Japanese, an even cooler language
• Start, and maintain, a podcast

It’s a busy year ahead, and I can only hope that I enjoy it a quarter of the amount I’ve enjoyed this one.  Thanks again everyone!

~Mitch

Step 1: Get a great product (you’d be surprised how many people forget this step…)

Step 2: Install WordPress

Step 3: Set up a static front page (Settings > Reading)… create a page called “front page” and a page called “blog”.  Head to the options menu and select the reading tab.  Change the “Front Page Displays…” options to ‘Front Page: front page’ and ‘Posts Page: blog’.  Now, add some awesome content to that front page about your product (please, please include some pictures).

Step 4: Set up another page and insert a full description of your product.  Get a PayPal account and use that to accept payments.

Step 5: Install the following plugins: Google XML Sitemaps, All-In-One SEO, cforms (at the minimum).

Step 6: Create a contact page to install that contact form – having a way for people to contact you that’s NOT email will get you questions you can answer to steer people to your product.

Step 7: Generate the XML sitemap in the options menu, then submit it to Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Step 8: The blog? Why, it’s used for press releases, testimonials, and any new content you get in.  The SEO will kick in as long as you use great keywords.

It’s not that hard to use WordPress to create great E-Commerce sites.  People get daunted or turned off by the fact that WordPress was created as blogging software, but with the new releases, it’s so much more.  And, if you’re really serious about getting some customers for your product, get a design professionally done.  After all, that is something I can help with, so of course I’d recommend it, but it’s just good sense to use a theme that is uniquely you.

The rumors are WordPress 2.7 will be coming to a download near you sometime tonight.  Release Candidate 1 is widely successful and I’m really looking forward to upgrading to the full version.  If you’re curious as to what the future entails, here are some great posts around the Internet showcasing the new goodness:

• The Official Codex Entry
• First Look at WordPress 2.7
• A Tour of 2.7 (narrated by moi)
• 2.7 Comes Soon (posted 2 days ago)

Get ready everyone – this promises to be the best WordPress version yet!

This post is part of the “Creating a WordPress Theme from a .PSD” series for designers to use for theme development. The other posts can be found here:

• Part 1 – Background / Introduction
• Part 2 – From .PSD to .HTML
• Part 3 – WordPress Structure
• Part 4 – The Header (header.php)
• Part 5 – The Footer (footer.php)

We’ve taken a look at one of the key files in the WordPress universe, the header, which kicks off everything else in a WordPress theme (including CSS, RSS, and all the other meta goodness). Now, going from beginning to end, we’ll explore the footer of a standard WordPress Theme. To be honest, a footer really only needs to have three elements:

1. the <?php wp_footer(); ?>
2. a </body> tag
3. an </html> tag

The first of those, the php function, serves the same purpose that <?php wp_header(); ?> does in the header – it serves as a hook for plugins and other WordPress functions that need to prophigate themselves in the footer. Think of it this way: if you were to install the Google Analytics plugin, how do you think it knows where to put the Analytic code? Answer: that php tag.

However, aside from those three lines, you can put anything else you want to show up under the sidebar and content. A lot of people add a second navigation to their footer (sometimes including other less-important site pages such as the privacy policy and legal information). The theme designer’s tagline/information can be found there too. And why not show your love to WordPress by including a statement saying that you are “Proudly Powered by WordPress”.

Widgets go great in a “footer-bar”. A great way to display them is to have three columns floated next to each other with widgetized data in them (a la Blogging Sueblimely and Lorelle). This looks very clean and provides a quick way to showcase a lot of information in relatively short space.

Of course, there are fun footers too.  It’s your theme – do what you want with it!

Well, Thanksgiving has come and gone, ushering in the Christmas/holiday season (whether its shopping, parties, or travelling that you do, you do so much more of it during the last 30 days of the year, it seems).  But it’s easy to forget sometimes that your readers, commenters, and online social network friends are there all year round, giving you great discussions and passing your words along to others.  So what can you do for your readers to share the love this Christmas season?  Here are a couple of great ideas!

1) Feature your best commenters in a special post

There are some WordPress plugins that allow you to count the number of comments a person has left (if they have registered, that is).  Take the people who leave the most comments and thank them with a blog post dedicated to them and giving them some linklove.

2) Feature your favorite blogs, posts, and authors that have made the biggest impact on you this year

But why stop at commenters?  Take the people who influence you and let them know how much you care.  Really enjoy Chris Brogan’s blog? Talk about it in a blog post of your own!  The only limit is the number of people who influence you, and if that’s a small number… well, find some more! We don’t ever stop learning, after all.

3) Offer a Christmas Contest with an Awesome Prize

Make a Christmas/holiday card.  Write a Christmas/holiday haiku.  Make a video and post it to YouTube displaying your love and affection for your favorite blogger.  Whatever the contest is, partner with some of your blogging/design/marketing friends to offer some wicked prizes to the best people.  It’s a good way to drive traffic, but make it to where anyone who’s commented this year gets extra points, and you show your readers that you care enough to put them first.

4) Give away something – it is the season of giving, after all!

Nothing says that you love and adore your readers than offering up a free… anything!  Are you a designer? Offer up a free web template.  Copywriter? Give away an article about Christmas for people to repost (and make sure your info is at the bottom)! There are numerous things you can give away for free to show people you care (and you’ll even pick up residual traffic as well!).

The latest issue of Web Designer Magazine has a LOT of resources for aspiring WordPress developers (and people who just don’t know what WordPress is) among some of their other articles. Since *most* of my audience is in the states, if you want to subscribe, here’s a link to do so via Amazon.

First of all, let me say that i am absolutely amazed at the response yesterday and today to my post wanting friend codes for “Animal Crossing: City Folk”.  I got a lot of comments (still getting them) and loads of emails (and posts on the Y! Answers Board).  Anyone who knows me knows that I am a hardcore gamer, and that’s one of the main reasons that I haven’t made the switch from a PC to a Mac; PC’s just do great when it comes to gaming, and Mac’s just don’t cut it (and yes, I know there are Xboxes and Wii’s, but I love sitting down to a good first person shooter, and a mouse is the way to go).

What I’ve seen in the last few days is something that I’ve noticed, but that people in the mainstream media are just starting to figure out.  Gamers are changing. We aren’t the closet dwelling, acne-infested nerds that society used to think we are.  In the early 90s, if you mentioned a person who was good at video games, it was almost always followed by a snide or demeaning comment (never amount to anything, lazy, doesn’t contribute to society, won’t get a girlfriend; the list goes on).  Well, gamers grew up.  We got jobs and cars and houses and wives and had kids.  And those people who said we wouldn’t amount to anything, well… some of them won’t ever learn, but others did.

Gamers have taken their hobbies out of the closet and into the mainstream.  Games like Guitar Hero, Halo, and Gears of War have brought gamers out of their closets and into the living rooms with other gamers.  Games like Little Big Planet, Spore, and Animal Crossing have brought gamers living rooms even further and connected them.  We all crave this social interaction, and games are letting us get that in more ways than ever.

Don’t get me wrong, we still do other stuff.  We still exercise, work, party, go hiking, skiing, and hang out with our families.  We have kids (sometimes more than one).  Will our kids play video games? Absolutely.  And we will be there playing with them.  Where in the 90s families gathered around the TV to watch their favorite shows, now we gather to play video games.  And we know which games our kids should and shouldn’t watch.  Or play.

Gaming has finally advanced to that social level that other (dare I say?) sports have risen to.  We get together to watch others play, even if we don’t play ourselves.  We enjoy it.  We actually look foward to it.  There’s no tournaments yet… well, not in the US.  Korea and Japan have leagues and everything.  They taking gaming to a whole new level, and it’s accepted.

But wen’re not there yet.  We will be, I think, and games can only get better and better as we do.

So don’t critcize the gamer… we’re just like you.  In fact, we are you.  We just enjoy games

(last non-design post – but it’s social media / marketing related, so I guess it counts, right?)

This isn’t technically design related, but it IS social media related

This post is a place for people who want to / have added me as a friend for Animal Crossing: City Folk. AC:CF is a game on the Nintendo Wii where you can basically chat, hang out, and have fun.  If I want to go exploring other people’s cities, I’d like to know who I’m visiting!

My info:

# Character’s Name: Mitch (or Holly – my wife)
# Town: Franklin
# Friend Code: 0431-1851-9005
# Email: mitch@studionashvegas.com
# Fruit: Pear
# Wii Speak: No

If you add me, please leave a comment below, with the same information (Character’s Name, Town Name, Friend Code, Email Address, Fruit, and Wii Speak) and any other info you’d like to leave (Age, Gender, etc).

Thanks!

A lot of people have been asking me to explain some of the new features in WordPress 2.7 – the main ones are the admin Interface and some of the new, movable widget-like items in the post menu and on the dashboard.  But, it’s hard to talk about visual changes when, to be honest, you can’t see them.  Enjoy this >5 minute screencast on some of the new features included in WordPress 2.7.

WordPress 2.7 Admin Tour (full size)