Some Design Work

I spent the day editing a video for distribution on social channels. I do love that kind of work. This image is one of the thumbnails I created on Canva. It boggles my mind how quickly I can create something like this. I have many memories of using Photoshop for such things. I love living in the future!

Today’s Dad Joke


How do you fix a broken pizza? With tomato paste.

Crafted this one up on Canva, which lately is my go-to for quick graphic needs. Whether YouTube thumbnails, a quick poster (like this one), or to add text of a haiku to one of my images, Canva is solid. It is very powerful, with lots of templates, lots of fonts…you get the idea. Of course, it’s nowhere nearly as powerful as Photoshop, but most folks never need that kind of “umph”.

Being Strategic With Social Media

facebook application icon

I’ve known people whose business is dependent completely upon a single platform. YouTube is a huge one, but I also see people 100% dependent on Instagram, TikTok, or even Facebook, for their business. I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently.

A friend of mine, due to the LastPass hack, lost access to his YouTube channel. Then there’s the drama over at Twitter, with people being banned from the platform on the whim of Mr. Musk, and I can continue. So, I hope you’ll understand that I highly recommend that you DO NOT rely 100% upon a single platform where you have no control.

Social media sites are great tools for connection, but they’re best for directing people to a website. One you own, you control. Encourage folks to subscribe to a newsletter, or the website. Then, by combining your website with blog posts and newsletters, and you have a very powerful tool to stay connected with your audience even if you’re blocked from a key social channel. Also, if you have a website connected to your social platforms, your audience has a way to find and reconnect with you if you lose access to YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, whatever.

I particularly like sites built on WordPress, as it’s extremely portable. Wix, Squarespace, and the like are tied to a single provider, too. With WordPress, I can port my website to another hosting company with relative ease (related: make sure you back up your files somewhere other than on the hosting platform).

Be strategic with your digital portfolio. Be prepared for various calamities, as well as for the eventual falling out of whatever must-use platform the people abandon next. Technologies evolve. Audiences evolve. Platforms evolve. Business sustainability requires you to be thoughtful and strategic.

Some thoughts on the Dark Brandon thing

mad formal executive man yelling at camera

A blogger I highly admire, Bernie Michalik, posted this article looking at the whole Dark Brandon meme that’s running through the internet right now: On The Good and Bad Aspects of Dark Brandon (a quick aside for those unaware of the meme “Let’s Go Brandon”, it’s basically an anti-Biden euphemism. If you wish to explore it further, here’s the Wikipedia article.)

I understand that it feels good, at one level, to meet political invective head-on. However, I find it counterproductive. Bernie pulls an apt quote:

“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

George Bernard Shaw

So, my thoughts? As Luke Skywalker put it, “This isn’t going to go the way you think”.

It’s best to keep our end goals in mind. Which, hopefully, isn’t just to score pyrrhic points in the eternal game of poltical one-upmanship.

My Work Over The Next Few Months

top view photo of people near wooden table

In my current role, I’m preparing to cover for our communications coordinator while he’s out on paternity leave. This will last through November, and my contract is up at the endo of December.

I covered for him 2 years ago on his last leave, so I know quite a bit about the work (check out samples of that work here). Last round, though, we were at the beginning of the pandemic, so my main focus was on creating and editing video for our services. This round, our video production needs are minimal (we’re fully back in person and streaming. Not much video editing at all). Though we’re launching a stewardship campaign, which will have a video component, we’re outsourcing that. Most of this round’s work will be newsletter maintenance and bulletin creation. I’ll also be doing social media work, some graphic design, and some writing. It’ll be fun.

This gives me pause. I’m good at communications work. The main reason I chose to study web development grew out of comms. I get consulting work for my comms and marketing knowledge. Yet, I also love more general tech. I really enjoyed my Cisco networking classes, the hardware classes, and my current Enterprise Architecture class. Of course, more traditional IT work seems to pay better. And there is a lot of competition for communicator roles, especially with all the changes in journalism careers.

So, I’m not sure what will come of all this. Will I try to leverage my experience in this contract role into a FTE comms role somewhere? Or do I want to be straight tech? Or is there something else I haven’t seen yet? Oh, the mystery of life!

Email Newsletter Fail

gold letter y on black background

This morning I received an email where the content was predominantly jpegs. Nothing inherently wrong with this, I guess. However, putting blue-text “links” in the jpeg is almost useless. Sure, I can retype that 30-character URL, but most people are unlikely to do that. Lots of folks won’t even know to do that. This one was peculiar since the content is mostly text. Why a jpeg? Anyway, it pretty much ensures no click-through. Not to mention is not optimized for mobile, or for accessibility tools.

Personally, I retype these (if I only have an image to work with), though there are plenty of OCR tools to convert them to text. Often, the originator can provide the Word document that this was created in. One other option, which works reasonably well, is within Google docs.

  1. On your computer, go to drive.google.com.
  2. Upload the image
  3. Right-click on the desired file.
  4. Click Open with. Google Docs.
  5. The image file will be converted to a Google Doc, but some formatting might not transfer: Bold, italics, font size, font type, and line breaks are most likely to be retained.

Why I decided to study web development

information sign on shelf

I came to study web development a bit differently than most (more on that journey here). Much of my background has been in some variant of communications. Lots of writing (I’ve loved writing for years…it’s what got me started in blogging), but also photography, newsletter creation/editing/management, web content, public affairs and policy…my list goes on a bit here. Over the years, I started exploring website creation. Mostly just exploring on personal projects. In 2000, I created one for the church I worked at. I then worked specifically in communications roles in a few companies. The past 10 years or so, I’ve focused on digital marketing. This includes pay-per-click, SEO, content marketing, blogging and social media campaigns. Websites have been crucial elements of that. I created and managed several sites, mostly WordPress sites, but several others as well.

I was struggling to choose between web development and graphic design. Web development won since I’ve long seen the web as the future of communications. Now, though, it’s really, well, the “now” of communications. And I really want to grab hold of the now, and what’s coming. With web development, I guess I need to explore Web 3.0.

Help your audience find your stuff

man holding mug in front of laptop

A few days ago I was scrolling through Instagram, as we’re want to do these days. On a rather popular site (for some pop-star) was a post featuring some product. Whoever crafted the post wrote the standard “link in bio”. Then the top comments were asking “where’s the link”? Interest piqued, I followed the link. The landing page showed links to a blog and plenty of pages, but where to find this specific link, this product was unclear at best. This caused me to cringe. People are interested in this item and they’re having to play “hide-and-seek”. You don’t want to do this with your fans!

I am reminded of a developer maxim (I believe it was said by Jeff Hawkins, creator of the Palm Pilot) about minimizing the number clicks you need to access information. I can’t remember the specifics of that quote, but the basic premise is the fewer the better. Each click builds frustration, which is worsened when the process isn’t clear. Also, having to guess where to click next is a key element of bad UX. I assume they shared the information in that post hoping to engage their audience and sell some stuff. Clearly, that wasn’t successful, or at least not as successful as it could be.

There are a number of ways that this could’ve been executed better. Now, I understand that Instagram gives you one link. One! And no links in the content are allowed. Plenty of folks have developed solutions, however. The easiest (to me) is linktree. Elegant in it’s simplicity, linktree simply collects your links and serves them up in a clean, clear list. This is a highly used tool: you see it in many profiles. Here’s mine for example.

Another, perhaps slightly more complex solution, is to create a landing page on your site with all the links you reference in your posts. I would itemize them in list, with the dates and post titles and also the images of the Instagram posts to make it very clear which link goes with each post.

Put a little thought into your anticipated user flow, into how you want them to find your information. How easily do you want to make it to buy your stuff? To interact with your latest “thing”? Providing clear calls-to-action, clear directions, and clear paths to finding what they want makes your user experience good and enjoyable. That helps good ol’ conversion, which ensures your project keeps moving. Great things, right?

Communicating The Bare Necessities

clear communications

This morning I was talking about the importance of brevity in communication. Elegant prose has its place, of course. But when you’re communicating information, say in a corporate environment, in the blizzard of information that is today’s modern landscape, crisp, clear language is critical. Bullet points, sentence fragments, focus on key elements, don’t bury the lede.

“Wait”, you might say, “isn’t this guy studying web development? Why’s he going on about writing and communication?” Well, remember what purpose a website serves: communication. It’s a delivery mechanism for information. Interactivity, color schemes, layout all need to serve the function of the site. Cool features, in and of themselves, at best are distractions unless they serve the reader/viewer.

So, with that, remember, when it comes to most “business writing”, focus on the bare (bear?) necessities.