Before I give you the suggestions, identify what you would like to achieve and what the problems are right now. This will determine what sort of action to take.

Do:

Number 1: Submit your blog to www.boagworld.com/forum

This will allow real web designers to give you help on design, content, and spelling mistakes!
When submitting it there, put it in the Website Critique section and read the posting notes before you post anything.

Number 2: Make a viral video and post on Youtube

If you make a viral video you can bring more potential customers to view your work and you may get all over the world!

Number 3: Email advertising

Once you have a blog set up you can send emails out to your readers/subscribers and tell them what they will expect each month. You can include your video viral in emails. It is great to look professional so make your email stand out from the crowd. HTML emails are great, but provide a plain text email option too.

Number 4: RSS and Apps

If you want to you can learn how to make an app for your iPhone/iPod. This will let your audience read the blog without being stuck infront of a PC to read it! Also you may make a page on Facebook or any other social network to help your blog grow. And when you have that page you must engage with your fans/followers and post often, relevant content. No spamming though.

Number 5: Blog Awards

If your blog is good enough it may get onto other sites and win awards.

Dont:

Number 1: Pirate Content

Copying other sources word for word to make it look like your own is illegal and will not look good, so may damage your reputation. If you are going to copy then put what you want in quote marks (those are those things that look like a single/double speech mark).

Number 2: Don’t Spam

Spamming other blogs with your links will not look cool, and it is not clever either and will also damage your reputation. By all means post a link, but only one and make sure it is relevant to the blog that you are commenting on. Also on social sites spam may not be tolerated by people.

Number 3: Don’t Neglect

Once you have a blog, do not neglect it! Post things that you want people to read, but dont post till you have something worth while that people want to read. Read other magazines and articles telling you how to get the most out of your blog and treat your users with respect!

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I’m sure there are things here I have forgotten to mention but if there is then I’m not perfect!
Please leave comments below and add any ideas that you wish!

In this post I want to give a rough guide to the blog environment. I’m using WordPress to do my blogging because it is known all around the world.
Although I am pretty good when it comes to technology I was scared to delve in at first as I didnt know the software, but I am glad I did because I now use it on 3 websites of my own.

WordPress is free and you can get your own URL for your blog. I recommend buying a domain to host it on but that is the easy part. WordPress can be accessed from anywhere as it is an online platform. Usually your website address for logging in to your blog will be:
http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/blogname/wp-login.php
From there you can do all your normal blogging and maintenance and start to build yourself a mini community.

Here is a lowdown to get you understanding WordPress:

Posting

Big topics can be split into groups and categories. WordPress lets you assign your own categories and tags.
Categories are different from tags. Categories are to do with what groups a certain number of posts together in a wider range and tags are to do with what sort of things are mentioned in the blog.
For example if I had a blog about celebrities, I would have each celebrity I wrote a post about as a category and in each post I’d have tags to give a quick brief single word ‘summary’ of what you would expect from that post.

Media uploading

You can upload media (pictures) to make your blog pretty and break up text on your blog. Media is a great way of helping your readers to understand what it is that you are blogging about.

Blog themes

You can use blog themes to ‘wallpaper’ your blog. When you are ready for a challenge you can mess around with these themes and change anything that you want. If you are even more clever you can write your own.
There is a big library of themes to choose from and explore, and you can buy themes later on when you cant see any free ones that you like.

Plugins

A Plugin is a mini program that sits inside your blog till you want to use it. You can use a Plugin to stop spam occurring when people comment. Spam is usually comments that are not related to the post or blog and must be deleted. You have complete control of this in WordPress. Remember to check back often to see if the Plugin that you have got has been updated. Sometimes there will be a complete WordPress update and that may give you new features.

Blogging with WordPress is the easiest that I have come across yet. There is so much out there to help you have the best blog on the web!

I am getting really annoyed at my hotmail friends accounts which keep on sending me spam emails…. so I urge now for people to use Google Mail (Gmail in the UK) for their Emails. Here’s why:

• Users can create documents online and share them with friends
• Users have a cleaner less hectic mail space (useful for businesses!)
• Users can easily see and add people to their buddy lists
• Users get less spam and more space (and counting.. (google says))
• Great mobile access
• Quick loading
• Threaded conversations in Emails
• Ability to have Youtube account linked to your mail
• Google Buzz (Video of GBuzz)
• Share photos and much more!
• Save chat history online instead of on your PC…Also download a desktop client for chat if you want to!
• Vacation responder – for people when they are away from a PC
• Forwarding for emails (POP and IMAP)
• and loads loads more!

So there is lots of different things to try out in GoogleMail so go and sign up, have a play and tell me I’m right!

I was at a private event/party and I knew a few weeks previous that Channel 4 were going to be coming to film us having fun in our group I belong to. I didnt know that it was to be a ‘celeb’ event and Anna Richardson was going to be intervieing people for the show. My mum came along and she was interviewed too and will hopefully go out in July… Date to be confirmed.

I danced the ‘Macerena’ and the ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ with Anna and it was all great fun!

I had a picture taken with Anna and I found out she is on Twitter and Facebook so I added her to Facebook and she added me back

Add her now on Twitter if you have it : http://www.twitter.com/annarichardso
Link to Anna Richardson on Wiki

Ah, only kidding. I am not giving away food nor even talking about the classic Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwich, but I am talking about cyber blog-food… SPAM.

As I go through my blog comments this is what I have been reading:

a) I am definitely bookmarking this site and sharing it with my friends
b) Very outstanding site
c) The message here is genuinely important
d) I will invite my friends
e) I usually don’t post in blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work… beautiful
f) I am reading this article second time today
g) Keep up the good work
h) Look forward to read more from you in the future

Question is: Do I or do I not post them? I’d like to think that they were really thinking that my blog was amazing and had some genuinely important messages but I dont feel it is because the real people arent stepping forward…
I know spam means that it is usually bad, but at times like this when you see an excellent comment you want to post it because you like it when people like what you have said and understand your reasoning behind the article…

I’m not asking for sympathy or even a reason why this is happening. I think it is great my site is being found, but not if only by bots, droids, martians, dodos, daleks and anything else that is programmed by hackers etc. My blog is far from being a spam ground for the insects to feast on… It is however a haven for all the real people who wish to gain advice and knowledge on most easy to moderate web publishing/editing tools, and the tricks of the trade!

I have had this blog/site since July 2009 and I have had a mass of spam. Most of it being about things totally unrelated to this site. It has really annoyed me and I have enabled the necessary spam catcher, in my case Akismet, but not sure if I want to go the whole hog with a capture too. I would like something like I have seen on other blogs where there is a sum like 2+2 and you have to put 4 in the box… but would that turn posters away or would it make them feel safer because they knew the site was safe and capturing spammers?

I hope to have some ideas on this please, so feel free to comment. Bots comments of course will be EXTERMINATED!!

Hope you now have some fun in downloading and adding the videos you want for your convenience!

1. Open youtube.com in your browser and search for the video you want on your iPod (iPod Touch in my case)

2. Copy the URL of the video for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWzrVVZ02ok
(YOU MUST WAIT FOR THE VIDEO TO COMPLETELY DOWNLOAD INTO YOUR CACHE BEFORE DOWNLOADING IT !! Waiting for the video to fully play is a great idea to make sure you have completely downloaded the video!)

3. Open in another tab or window the website www.keepvid.com and paste the copied link into the box on the website and click download (When prompted enter the code)

4. Chose the .mp4 filetype and right click the download link and select Save Target As (or simillar)

5. Save in your computer to a movie folder

6. Plug in your iPod and ipen iTunes and locate the video you have downloaded and import it into your library

7. Sync your iPod with the video and you should now have a video on there!

(8) GO HAVE FUN

I think it is important to set out these ‘guidelines’ so no confusion is made.

1. The Proposal…

You need to spend time with your client in making sure you fully understand what each other requires and what your client wants in content. Take a notebook/pad or even a laptop to write the notesin digital format so you can print copies to give the client and to file for later.

2. Drawing up designs….

This is your job as designer as you need to show what you can sell to the customer and how you can change it to make it a clean site to navigate.

3. Getting photographs or images…

This can be done by either but usually the client will want specific pictures up and they need to find time to do that. If it is a simple site then you may consider using a free site that you dont neet to pay anyone to use images from. If you do use graphical content from other sources dont forget to state where they are from.

4. Timing…

It is your job to keep time on a task as you dont want to be wasting the clients money. Note down the times that you work on each individual project and work out your rates accordingly. The client should not pay for time that you, as designer, have not worked on
the project for. Keep a diary to space work out so you avoid working on one project for too long at a time. That also helps because you can stop falling behind with work.

5. Signing off…

You need to make sure that you have done everything in the proposal, and even made it better than that if you can. Talking to your client at the end of the project about extra things they may want is great and will earn you respect. They may want to pay you to keep the site updated on a regular basis.

6. After the sign off…

So basically much of the planning rests on your head to complete a project but you have to work well with your client to get exactly what you need to know to complete it all on time so they use your company or services again.

I have been a loyal Geocities (fan?) for 3 years, updating my website and changing the look etc, but now it is time to put it to bed to rest.

I had my first ever site on Geocities and I’m in some way sad to see it go. Why?

- It was the first website I ever had up. Without Geocities I would not have got this site that you are looking at right now.
- Following on… Geocities was a great starter package for me to get to know what a web server does and how to make sites… I could experiment with it and change the layout as much as I wanted.
- I had a way I could show my friends and family what I was doing with my time and show them my skills and what sort of things I was into.
- I had not got the money for a real address.

But why not also say some bad things about it? Why not?

- I couldnt connect Geocities free to a FTP client which made it useless if I wanted to upload multiple files in one go. I would have to select the files each individually.
- There were adverts.
- There wasnt enough customisation room / space for me to go put up something really snazzy.
- Having my e-mail address in the url stopped me from sharing the website with The Whole World. Thus only close friends and family I could allow to view it.

There may be more things but anyway I enjoyed using Geocities and hope that it has changed some peoples lives in the way it did mine!

I really didnt know what I was going to ask so I thought for a while and I knew I wanted to ask about music. Then I got rung back by THE Ronnie Herel (presenter on 1Xtra) and he asked me what I wanted to ask Beverley. I hadnt decided on the exact words then but I just made something up and that was ok.

I got called back 15 minutes later and I was able to ask the question “How did you get into music?” – Which was virtually the question I wanted to ask in the first place when I spoke to the presenter.

Listen to what I said and Bev’s answer here!

They all looked after me really well and I have got to thank @BeverleyKnight and @ronnieherel for the experience they both gave me!

Follow me too! @GoldChoiceUK

So far we have looked at ways to get feedback and the feedback you may experience.

In this final part I would like to go through how you can approach changes and how to maintain a healthy site.

With all the feedback you have (if a large amount) it may be a good idea to put it into one document to pick over.

I submit my sites for review on Twitter as I have followers that specailise in design reading my feed there. The more places, and people, you submit the url to the more views you will get from different people thus helping your design skills.

My tip: The feedback I get I could do what I described above but in Windows Vista I like to use the Snipping Tool. With that I don’t have to worry about the ‘have I copied/pasted that’ problem because I’ll have the data in .jpg format. Then I can disregard all of the pointless comments. If they are major changes they will need to be done first. Small tweeks wont be as noticable so they can be done later on.

You may like to thank your friends for helping you as they are a good second-eye for spotting mistakes, and I know I miss them occasionally.

Finally when all the hard work is done you can relax and let visitors come to your page. However… one slight catch… to maintain a healthy site you should update it often. Maybe you could have a set day in the month where you check for broken links or you may want to add new features… all to keep people interested!

You could add:
A blog – assuming current site is only a showcase
A forum – depending on type of site
You come up with something more fantastic than I can? Tell Me!

I hope you have enjoyed my 3 part blog post topic- I hope to do one again sometime.