Author: Hilary Baumann

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Where can I find supplemental video tutorials for WordPress

Custom site tutorials:

If you are a FascinationDesign.com client, you likely also received some custom video tutorials specific to your website setup and / or as a quick-start guide to posting and editing on your specific site.

Supplemental video tutorials:  

Lynda.com can describe these basics WAY better than I can.
  1. Advanced text formatting [9m32s]:
    http://www.lynda.com/WordPress-tutorials/Advanced-text-formatting/154417/160998-4.html
  2. Adding website Links [7m7s]:
    http://www.lynda.com/WordPress-tutorials/Creating-managing-links/154417/160999-4.html
  3. Adding images [9m36s]:
    http://www.lynda.com/WordPress-tutorials/Adding-images/154417/161000-4.html
  4. Image gallery – you will get a few additional styles such as mosaic tile with the plugins I typically add to WP sites. Be sure to use the style already being used on your site for consistency [9m59s]:
    http://www.lynda.com/WordPress-tutorials/Adding-image-gallery/154417/161001-4.html
  5. Comparing and restoring an older version of a post (or page.) [4m47s]
    http://www.lynda.com/WordPress-tutorials/Comparing-restoring-old-versions-Revisions/154417/161005-4.html
There are other WordPress video tutorials with Lynda.com that you may choose to explore but many regard setup or things that may not be applicable based on how I set up sites.
How to subscribe to Lynda.com:
If you live in Lexington KY, there is a free subscription option through the Lexington Public library using your library card and pin. The instructions page from the Lexington Public Library website has been removed but they offer classes if you need help.
Other libraries throughout the country also have subscription access so check with your local library.
OR if your library does not have a free subscription option (or if you want to use the Lynda.com apps on iphone or ipad)  the basic subscription is currently $24.99/month and you can easily cancel after learning what you want to learn. You do not need project files from Lynda.com for the tutorials I have selected so you do not need the higher priced subscriptions unless you want to learn other things too.
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Soliciting feedback from friends & family

In a field that is very subjective  such as design (or art or writing) it’s best not to ask people if they “like or don’t like” something during the creation process.

Instead ask:

  • “is there anything that is unclear or confusing?”
  • “were you able to find information you were looking for or expecting to see?”
  • “how does this make you feel? Confident? Frustrated?”

It’s also a good idea to understand the difference between valuable and invaluable feedback. If you ask your cousin Bob what he thinks and he says “I hate the green” and cousin Bob always hates green, it is a personal preference and not a good reason to change your website.

It’s not the same as having 10 different people say they dislike the color pallet as their first response. That you should pay attention to. (But not if you asked “don’t you hate the color pallet” when collecting the feedback. People will want to be agreeable when there’s nothing at stake for them.)

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Why wordpress? Why not squarespace or wix?

WordPress is extensible. What does that really mean? WordPress can grow well with a growing company and is a good base for that. There are a lot of plugins available for wordpress that add capabilities with nuances that go beyond that make it more customizable than Squarespace or Wix or Weebly or Websitebuilder.com.

These are also each hosted solutions so it can’t be used with the hosting through Fascination Design.

Also if you hire someone who solely works with Squarespace or Wix they may not know how to code and have a world view more limited to those platforms. I’m not a fan of Wix but Squarespace isn’t bad. If you want to DIY because you have more time than money then it would be a good choice.

Fascination Design does not build sites using squarespace etc. because it doesn’t give us the level of control and customization capabilities that we’re used to. I also do NOT offer support for the site options mentioned above so if you get started there and run into a problem, you must work with their customer support.

So it’s your choice, long term scalability or DIY.

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What is Lenticular?

What is Lenticular? Or rather this is actually a post about helping you find the term you are looking for for those things that change images depending on what direction you are looking at them from.

Imgur GIF

If you know the word “lenticular” you can easily look up a definition but I remember 15 years ago trying to find a printer who could print these and I couldn’t even search because for the life of me I couldn’t find the term.

I remember searching for things like:

  • “images that change from cracker jacks boxes” I’m not crazy, they were flicker / tilt-cards in Cracker Jacks boxes.
  • “image changing card from cereal boxes” Sometimes these were the prize inside, sometimes they were the whole box front or just a card you could cut out.
  • “images that change as you move the card”
  • “images that change as you walk by”

I may add to this as I remember some more examples. Do you have an example of lenticular printing that you would like to add? Leave it in the comments below. 🙂

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Why do you ask for a single point person on a project?

Because the buck has to stop somewhere.

This doesn’t mean that one person has to be the point person on every project for a single company. For example: one person can be the point person for social media related projects and have a set budget for that. Another can be the point person for the website and have a set budget for that. AND discussions and meetings for each project can occur with more than one person.  BUT one person has to sign off on anything major so that the one person who has taken responsibility and ownership for the project on the client end and is fully aware of how things are progressing.

Tale of two owners & two point people: each owner wanted to be a point person and split the responsibilities on a single project. Each approved different parts of the project AND increases in budget. They never really looked at the whole picture or even realized how much each of them was spending. Each assumed the other was keeping track of everything. They were happy with the results but then they got the bill and had a cow. EVERYTHING had been approved but they claimed they had been overcharged until we sat down with the paperwork and they begrudgingly accepted that they had each approved things the other wasn’t aware of and thus spent more than they had meant to.

Moral of the story: Some businesses are better at internal communications than others. Also some people are bad at considering accounting and costs when starting their business ventures. AND it’s good to have one person taking full ownership of a project so that they are paying attention to the big picture.

Why does the project point person have to be someone who has sign-off capabilities? Reality is that whoever has sign off power is the real point person. If that person can’t find time for a few meetings then they shouldn’t be the point person and someone else should be given the authority to sign off on the project. They don’t have to be able to sign checks but they have to have the authority to approve expenses on your behalf if you are the business owner or manager and are making someone else the point person.

If you are a business owner or manager in charge of a project but you don’t want to be the point person: pick someone who is a responsible individual capable of making decisions on your behalf.  This is not the kind of thing you delegate to the summer intern that just started last week! 🙂

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Post-event quick web & social analysis for the Southland Street Fair 2015

Special notes about the event:

There are MANY factors outside of my own efforts that impacted the success of this event. From the 10th district video clip that ran on G3TV and youtube to Kristy going on Lex18 and Channel36 the day before the event. And many people shared this event info with their own subscriber lists via email and social media. So this kind of growth in this short of a period of time was accomplished through participation of many different parties and individuals.

What some of you might not know however is the efforts that I put into social media and the website and are some of the things I do for clients of Fascination Design. The things that weren’t event paperwork to secure police or the stage (because I don’t do that for clients!) Since I don’t often speak about what I do for the Southland Association and also because website details and social media efforts are often ignored if they aren’t mentioned, I put together this quick overview.

The Website:

  • The website is multi platform multi device friendly and worked on browsers back to ie 8 (older still worked but wasn’t as pretty in older browsers.) It is a responsive website and will adjust in size and look good from desktop to smartphone.
  • The website evolved as deadlines passed. Vendors & sponsorship opportunities were in main menu and moved to a less prominent location for example.
  • FAQ information was added as people asked questions that were general enough that other people might also ask the same questions.

Website Analytics:

  • Unique viewers “user” growth: from March 27th when the site went live at zero to May 18th 2015 there were a total of 4,733 people who visited the site at least once.
  • 2,690 (56.82%) Mobile / 1,628 (34.39%) desktop / 416 (8.79%) tablet
  • Traffic sources :
    • 8% social : of that percent 95.62% facebook / 1.80% twitter / 1.43% yelp / 1.15% meetup
    • 8% direct
      17.3% organic search (google, bing, yahoo)
    • 1% referral (other websites, e-blast/enewsletters etc.)

 

Facebook:

  • Growth of likes to page: 0 January 14th to 825 likes May 18th 2015
  • Issues and benefits of a Facebook event. For an event there’s no tracking of posts made to the event listing and inaccurate tracking of event info in insights BUT each announcement posted to an event goes to entire audience. Too many announcements and you annoy people. Final tally on the Facebook event was 1.7k “went” and 2.1k had been invited
  • There were jumps in followers, shares and likes each time posts were made to the page and event listing.
  • Posts to event were made at specific intervals and ramped up closer to the event. All posts to the event were also made to the page as well. Posts were intended to give people something visual and informative so they could get an idea of what the event might be like. Many also included the date and time info in case someone shared the photo instead of the page or event.
  • Most questions from users were responded to in a timely manner. Interaction increases likelihood that someone would attend.
  • Photos were posted the day of the event by a variety of people (Fred, Jamie, Jim and Kristy each had access to the facebook page to post as it.)

 

Twitter:

  • Twitter ended up a low priority due to character length but posts were made and shared there and still had an impact.
  • Impressions: 8,405 tweet impressions in May. 2,200 tweet impressions in April. 265 tweet impressions in March. Total of 10,870 tweet impressions.
  • With only 86 twitter followers.
  • Each post on Facebook had a Twitter counterpart I just wasn’t able to tag as many people on twitter because of how I had done some of the post graphics.

 

Instagram:

  • 134 followers on Instagram as of May 18 2015
  • Photo centric posts pre-event tagging businesses that were on Instagram. Hash tagged as well.
  • Photos day of the event.
  • Regrammed (shared) other peoples hash tagged photos of the event with attribution.

 

Social media general:

  • Leveraging partner social media – posts created specifically tagged to entice sharing on Facebook and Instagram. Could have been explored more with more vendors and Twitter wasn’t implemented as ideally but posts were made to entice vendors and partners to share them. (Leveraging the brand recognition of with those who would be there was also one of the reasons I put so much info on the poster.)
  • If someone was a vendor or sponsor for the event I looked for them and followed them as the Southland Street Fair on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter if I could find them there. Not all businesses were on all platforms and there may be some I missed if they were difficult to find. This caused some people to like/follow back and share information as it was posted.
  • Hashtag #southlandstreetfair was used on posts starting a month prior to the event. #sharethelex was also often used and #lexky #lexingtonky and #solex and a few others were used here and there.
  • Select posts were shared on the existing Southland Jamboree accounts and Southland Association accounts. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram
  • Information was also posted once to: Neighborhood Association groups, Bike Lexington group, you grew up in South Lexington if… group. Each message tailored to the group and their interests.
  • Stats for Social media and also on the website were something I loosely monitored throughout the last month and a half.

E-news:

  • Summaries of event info was sent out to Southland Association enews subscribers.
  • List was created for vendors and vendors were updated several times this way (we should have also made phone calls to all vendors, not just emailed. Note for 2016.)
  • List was created for vendors who were late and interested in the 2016 street fair (early notice list includes 2015 vendors.)

Snail mail:

  • With Jamie and Hilary A’s help, we mailed 310 vendor packets with info about the SA to Southland area business addresses.

If you’re interested in seeing additional reports or figures for this event, please contact Fascination Design.

Fascination Design also provided the designs for the posters, banners, and other key materials throughout.

It’s enough to deserve an additional post or two outlining those processes.

 

 

New SA members since mid-March: 7 new Southland Association members

Related goal for new SA Members: material on new SA website showing what we’ve done and public oriented info about event. Fun photos. Community. Should also help bring in more members once completed.

 

Overall this was an amazingly successful event.

The primary goal of the event was to have a large community event to show the viability of the Southland Drive area to the rest of Lexington and drive more people to area businesses over the long haul and emphasize our sense of community that Southland has. We incorporated a lot of businesses that were local to the Southland Drive area but also brought in other local Lexington businesses to participate as vendors.

We estimate that 7-9000 people attended the event over the 5 hour period that it ran. We had over 75 vendors. And LOTS of happy people despite the heat.

Hilary Baumann as well as Jamie Giles were involved in a lot of the logistics of planning the event from vendor organization to proper paperwork filed.

And we had a very strong committee and people key in making this event happen: Kristy Yowell of Good Foods Co-op, Jim Kreiner and Catherine Trout Mitchell of ReStore, Billy Sherrow of Sherrow, Sutherland & Associates, Bill Cole, Lori Rowland Houlihan,  Howard Stovall at Image360, , Fred Wholestein of Donut Days Bakery, previous 10th District Council member Harry Clarke,  11th Dist. Council Peggy Henson & aide Hilary Angelucci, Art Howard of the Ketch, Gail Lightner of Hill N Dale Neighborhood Association, Tom D’Adrea, and current 10th District Council Member Amanda Mays Bledsoe. And SO many more.

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Are there any key indicators that we are not a good fit for each other?

I have had a few clients who I have had to let go because they were consistently negative in all of their correspondence. It’s one thing to have a bad day but it’s too much of a drain on energy and focus when every incoming email is soul sucking whether something was done right or wrong.

Communication, collaboration  and working well together is key to what we do.

If you just want to assign blame then we are clearly not working together to achieve the goals laid out at the beginning of the project. If I have done something wrong I will try and rectify it but I will not tolerate being used as a scapegoat as it indicates a complete lack of trust and respect.

Example of a negative response:

“This video tutorial is useless crap, there’s no sound so I can’t figure out what’s going on” and 5 days later after trying to help them troubleshoot it I get an email “I found the speakers in the closet, I plugged them in and can hear the video tutorial now.” Not even an apology.

Example of a positive way to respond:

“Are you sure this video tutorial has sound? Can you check on this?”

 

 

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Do you take rush projects?

Rush projects are taken on on a case by case basis based on project workload and number of recent rushed projects. 

Living in a constant state of rushed panic is not healthy or sustainable!

For clients who on a regular contract such as a social media consulting and assistance contracts, if over 50% of correspondence is rushed /panicked we may not be a good fit and will review your account to determine if we need to ask you to find a firm with more staff to accommodate your needs.