WP for Moms — A Sample of Most Recent Designs

Colour Resources for Blog Design Inspiration

Source: Uploaded by user via Helena on Pinterest

It’s no secret that colour in our environment (clothes, home furnishings, paintings, nature) can have a huge impact on our emotions. The blue of the ocean or the green of a park can be calming and relaxing, a woman wearing reds and oranges could be considered passionate (and perhaps even a little aggressive) and grey clouds can make you feel a little somber.

So just as the clothes you wear and the environment you live in can impact on your emotions, so too can the websites you visit (which you have no control over other than to click away if you don’t like them) or the website/blog you own (which you do have complete control over).

Your Brand New Blog

Let’s say you’re interested in creating a brand new blog (self-hosted WordPress of course) and you’re looking for some inspiration. While some people may start looking at different theme templates (a theme is simply an outfit for your website), this can be overwhelming because there are so many to choose from, both free and premium. Some themes have set colours, a few have 2-4 colour choices, but remember, the majority of web designers are men and so you’ll see lots of masculine colours (sometimes uninspiring).

So whether this is a DIY adventure for you, or you are planning on hiring a designer to create your site for you, choosing colours you love in advance will make the design process so much easier.

My Favourite Colour Inspirations

A few months ago I was introduced to Pinterest - a beautiful form of social networking that can provide you with some amazing inspiration. On Pinterest I discover some excellent colour websites - here are two of my favourites that I want to share with you to help with your colour inspiration:

Photo Card Boutique – be sure to choose the “Cool Colors” category in the blog to see an almost never-ending stream of beautiful colour inspirations;
Design Seeds - Either scroll through the multiple colour palettes posted daily, or use the “Palette Search” and select a colour theme to see related colours.

If you’re wanting something a little different, one of the early colour tools I used was Kuler by Adobe. My two most used options here are either the browsing the “Themes” – different user submitted colour palettes which appears when you first go to Kuler, or choose “Create” from the left menu to create a palette from your favourite image. There are two buttons underneath the picture that allow you to either upload your own image or choose something from Flickr. The site will then select colours from the image to create a palette for you. Don’t be scared to experiment with different images and different moods (from the left menu). You’ll be amazed at the different colour combinations available.

Web-Based Colour Tools

If you already have a colour you love and would like a monochromatic colour scheme (shades of a single colour) for your website, the website 0 to 255 will make the job of choosing lighter and darker shades of your favourite colour that work well with your original colour very simple. You may have already chosen a palette from either Photo Card Boutique or Design Seeds so all you need to do from there is type in the hex code of your favourite colour into 0 to 255 – simple.

My final colour tool is a site called Colour Lovers. Here you can search through colour palettes, individual colours and patterns. You can create a free account where you can store your colour/palette/pattern likes or create your own to share with others. This is another site like Pinterest where time just magically disappears while you’re exploring.

Where Do You Find Colour Inspiration?

Now that I’ve shared my colour inspiration and some great colour tools from the web, now it’s your turn – where do you find your colour inspiration?

Real Life Inspiration – Sports Marketer to Zumba Queen

Real life Inspiration is a new addition to WP for Moms and I plan to share stories like this whenever I come across a Mum living her dream.

Rebecca Rogoff is featured on the website London Mums and she shares her story about the move from a career in sports marketing to becoming the Zumba Instructor and absolutely loving it.

You can read the full story here:

http://londonmumsmagazine.com/2012/zumba-queen

If you have an inspiring story you’d like to share (about yourself or someone you know) I’d love to hear about it.

Blog or Website – What’s the Difference

Confused by jargon?

Being a web designer and completely immersed in the technical world designing and coding, I sometimes forget that the average person isn’t up to speed on all the jargon in the web world that seems common place to me.

Blogs or Blog Posts?

When I hear people on Facebook referring to the “blogs” they have written, I cringe and want to tell them that a blog is actually the entire site – a collection of articles – and that the “blogs” they are referring to are actually blog posts. You have one blog with multiple blog posts/posts/articles (whatever you like to call them). This is very separate to those people who actually do have multiple blogs (separate sites on separate domain names).

While you can call me pedantic, I think it helps your credibility when you can actually use the correct terminology – you can then be taken more seriously about your area of expertise.

Is a Blog a Website, is a Website a Blog?

The next misunderstanding is between the terms Blog and Website. Recently my sister started a new blog on Tumblr and when I asked her why she didn’t ask me for help to set up a self-hosted WordPress site (because that’s what I do, I make websites), she told me she thought I just did websites not blogs. Well, a blog is a type of website and in fact all the websites I make contain inbuilt blog functionality because all my sites are built on WordPress.

To put it another way, a website is a collection of information online sorted by pages, a blog is also a collection of information, a list of posts/articles, so it too is a website.

Many years ago, before the rise in popularity of WordPress, a blog was something you signed up for with Blogger and wrote about your personal stuff (like an online journal) and if you wanted a website for your business, then you needed to hire a web designer/developer to create a site for you and you were reliant on this developer for all upkeep and any changes required on the site. If you wanted a blog for your business, it had it’s own domain name and was separate from your main site. You can still find sites like this now – this is strange and foreign to me because it’s the fresh content on a blog within your business website that will help you climb the search rankings for your business and get you onto page one of Google for the keywords people would be searching for you on.

With more and more individuals and businesses venturing online, smart, savvy businesses are choosing web developers that create sites on WordPress that integrate their business information with a blog. After all, WordPress is one of the most popular content management system (CMS) and blogging platforms in the world.

What is a “CMS” or content management system?

For the average website user/owner, having a website built on a content management system simply means that they are able to easily update and add content to their site, using an interface similar to a word processor, without ever needing to have any coding experience.

There are many different content management systems available, a few popular, well know platforms such as WordPress and Joomla, and others are small custom built systems. The beauty of WordPress is that it’s open source (which effectively means all the code is available for anyone to look at and use to develop custom solutions). WordPress is also free (that’s right – you can download the WordPress platform for use on your site for free) and it has a large developer community very passionate about building, refining and advancing the capabilities of the platform. That is the beauty and benefit of using WordPress over other custom built small solutions, there is excellent support for the platform and constant innovation.

Over the years, WordPress has grown from being used just as a blogging platform, to a full featured powerful CMS used on popular business websites such as Mashable, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others (see more sites at the WordPress showcase).

Why do I use WordPress (self-hosted)?

This is really a topic for a whole post on its own so I’ll outline briefly.

I use self hosted WordPress as the basis for all my client websites because it gives me the flexibility to build you a personal blog for your daily thoughts, an authority blog for you to build expert status in your industry, or a business website to promote your products and services and anything in between.

If you were to start on a free hosted solution like Blogger, when your popularity, traffic and readership grows, your creativity may be flourishing but your ability to expand will be stifled. You’ll be faced with having to move all your posts and reader comments to a new platform, reconfiguring all your internal links and your page urls and you’ll have to create a new design (or have your current one replicated) on your new platform. Not a fun (or cheap) process that can potentially lead to losing your content.

While I hesitate to say there is a right way of getting started, I truly do believe (at this point in time) that creating your blog or website is best done on a self-hosted installation of WordPress on your own domain. And if you’re concerned about the startup costs for WordPress (not including the design of the site itself) then read “Budgeting for your new blog or website” and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Budgeting for Your New Blog or Website

Setting up your own blog/website doesn't need to break the piggy bank

The temptation when starting out on the internet is to sign up to one of the free blogging or website builder platforms – after all, they’re free, easy and you can be up and running in less than 10 minutes.

You might be surprised at me saying this, but if you’ve never had a blog or website before and you’re wondering how they work, then absolutely go ahead and give it a go. The three I’ve tried are Blogger, WordPress.com and Tumblr. Each has their pros and cons, and from a beginners standpoint, they provide a great opportunity to play, without the fear of ruining something you’ve paid a lot of money for.

However, if you’re choosing one of these (to start a business or build a reputation) because your budget is tight and you think it’s all you need – please think again. Please put a higher value on the image you are portraying with your online presence.

The Real Cost of Getting Started

There seems to be a misconception with newcomers to the web world that to get your own website is expensive, that there are two extremes, either free (as I mentioned above) or tens of thousands of dollars. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In actual fact getting started with a view to long term success is actually very affordable.

Here is a breakdown of what it costs to get started:

Registering your own domain name -

for a .com domain – USD $9.98 per year
for a .com.au domain – AUD $12.oo per year (minimum 2 years up front required)

Hosting your own website -

Paying monthly or 1 year in advance – USD $7.96 per month
Paying for 3 years in advance – USD $6.36 per month

So if you want to dip your toe in the water and just have a one year commitment, register a .com domain name, and pay 12 months of hosting in advance and your outlay will be just USD$105.50. That equates to a measly USD$8.79 per month – less than 2 coffees a month.

With this domain and hosting account, you can install your own copy of WordPress (it’s free) - the worlds most popular web software that you can use to create a beautiful blog or website. Then choose from one of the hundreds of free themes from the WordPress repository (a theme is like an outfit for your website) or if you want something to really set you apart, then a premium theme is the way to go.

There are a number of excellent companies providing premium themes – I use only use the Genesis Framework and Child Themes from Studiopress to build all my sites on - you can get your own premium theme from Studiopress for only USD$79.95. This is a one off fee and you can either use the theme as it is, or if you are handy with backend coding and photoshop, you can redesign it into anything you like (or get someone like me to do that for you).

Total price including the premium theme then becomes USD$185.45 (equivalent to USD$15.45 per month) for the first year and then just domain name registration and hosting ongoing from there.

Overall, whether you choose just the domain name registration and hosting option, or splurge and include a premium theme, I would say that $8.79 – $15.45 per month is an incredibly low investment for your new online presence.

Transformation

Metamorphosis I’ve learnt this past year that a web designer should never work on his/her own website.

Why? This site has been in the making for over 12 months. With no one to be accountable to but myself, it’s been all to easy to tinker endlessly on the design, tweak my service offerings trying to find the perfect combination of services, and just stop working on the site altogether for extended periods of time because of my overly critical self.

My serious website transformation (or metamorphosis) started late last year when I found an incredible mentor to work with. My mentor is a web/graphic designer herself, who has been through the tough early stages of starting a new design business and has the experience of creating a very successful web design business. This mentoring finally provided that much needed accountability to keep me on track to my goal of launching this new business of mine.

Transformation of old site to new site Now my launch day has finally arrived. My site is ready (and looking awesome if I say so myself) and ready for a brand new group of readers and customers. Prior to having this swish new site, I designed websites for anyone and everyone just via word of mouth and it wasn’t truly fulfilling. Almost to the point where I was close to giving up web design and moving onto something entirely new.

After much researching for who my ideal customer might be, I finally realised the answer was right in front of me – Mums like me who want to stay at home with their babies &/or children and still feel productive and contribute to the family finances. And what better way to do that than online, with a legitimate blog/website, created the right way from the start with the intention of being financially viable – i.e. actually making money.

I’ve learnt through trial and error over the last 6 years since starting my very first blog on Blogger (and it’s actually 6 years today since my very first post), that the money definitely doesn’t come from writing the odd post here and there & putting up adsense ads. The articles on this blog and the services I offer are about creating the best website for you and where you are right now. I’m going to share why some paths forward are better than others and how to avoid potentially costly beginner mistakes.

I know that free blogging platforms are really attractive when you are first starting out – after all they are free. But I can guarantee you that the budget required to get your own blog/website started will be much less than potentially paying hundreds of dollars (if not more if you have a custom blog design) in a year or so when your blog skyrockets in popularity and you need to move your content from a free platform that doesn’t allow income generation or has become restrictive in terms of functionality.

Of course I will readily admit there are many paths that will lead to a good solution for you. And it’s for this reason I’ve steered away from listing a dozen different combinations of services (that can be confusing if you’re new to the web world and it’s terminology) and instead you fill in an easy questionnaire and we have one phone call first (and it’s free) to determine what’s best for you.

So if you’re ready to start and you’d like to see what I could do for you, visit the Services page and click on the button at the bottom of the page to fill in the New Project Questionnaire.

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Here’s to a happy and successful year for all of us.

Time For You and Your Business

“If only I had more hours in the day”.

“I wish I could clone myself”.

“How can I sleep less so I can get more done?

Do any of these sound familiar to you? They are thoughts that I myself have fallen prey to on a number of occasions and that I’ve seen echoed by other Stay At Home Mums (SAHM’s). I have a hard time remembering what I did with all the time I had to myself before I had a child, because now it seems like one big juggling act managing a household, an active toddler, a husband and a business, let alone having a few minutes to myself. ( I can see you nodding in agreement )

I have a confession to make – over the past three years since my son was born, I have made many promises to people that I haven’t been able to keep, or that have taken me much longer to deliver on than I would have liked. I’ve made the cardinal sin in business of over-promising and under-delivering (it should be the other way around).

Being the perfectionist I am hasn’t been a winning strategy for me and since moving to the beach at the beginning of this year, I’ve made the time for a daily walk on the beach and it’s been a great opportunity to think about what changes I need to implement to enable me to launch this new business WordPress for Mommies.

Its been 3 long months of taking all my experience (and learnings) from my 6 years as a web designer and laying the foundation and gathering together a team that I can work with, that now enables me to once again be a leader in creating beautiful WordPress websites for serious bloggers and Moms in Business.

Most people have a hard time delegating, or even wanting to delegate, because you have been justifying your existence through your hard work, and you equate success with struggle; you equate results with struggle. And so, you sort of wear your struggle like a badge of honour. And all of that is opposite of allowing the Well-being. The only thing that ever matters in success or achievement is your achieving the things that you want to achieve. So if you are setting standards and you’re feeling uncomfortable about the standards that you’ve set, tweak the standards back a little bit. Ratchet it back a notch. Give yourself a break. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Lighten up. Be easier. Go slower. Take it easy. Have more fun. Love yourself more. Laugh more. Appreciate more. All is well. You can’t get it wrong. You never get it done.

–Abraham

Here’s what I’ve learnt so far:

I can’t do everything myself, no matter how good I think I am,
“It needs some tweaking” is better than “Not done at all”,
Today, pick one regular task you really dislike and delegate it to someone else (I hired a cleaner last week),
In your business, look at outsourcing some of the regular tasks that don’t require your specific expertise (e.g. managing your website),
If there is something in your business that you aren’t great at, hire someone that loves doing it (I’m looking for a new bookkeeper)
Reach out to your community and ask what tips they have on managing your “to do” list (Mums by their nature are very resourceful)

If just one of these items helps you to make life easier for you, that would fantastic and I would love to hear about it.