The JoshCanHelp Recommended Reading list
This post is because you don’t have enough to read. Scratch that… you don’t have enough useful stuff to read. These are must-reads for anyone who has or thinks they should have a website out there and gathering eyeballs.
I’m a firm believer in understanding why things are done. I also believe that anyone can understand anything if it’s important to them to understand it. People love to tell me “I’m not technical so I’m not going to understand it” but that’s a cop out. If you find value in what you’re learning, you’ll learn it.
Having a website without knowing what goes into it is like having a car and not understanding your gas tank or oil changes or tire pressure. You can go from here to there but, one of these days, that car is going to break and you’re going to be stuck. With that in mind, I strongly suggest you understand the basics. These should help. Best way to go about getting through these is to read the parts that pertain to what you’re doing, absorb the parts you get, and look up the parts you don’t.
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This is a post I wrote almost two years ago on my previous blog. I find myself in the same room that I wrote post previously and thinking about the same things in a slightly different light. I’m re-posting it here with minor changes and notes indicated with square brackets.
talent.
I have a Hotmail address that includes the word “talent” in it. I’m not going to broadcast the story of how this address came to be simply because the entertainment to embarrassment ratio is far too low. Regardless, every time I give this address out over the phone or in person to someone, it makes me think about the word “talent” before I think about the genesis of the address. I think ‘does this person think I’m full of myself because I have the word “talent” in my address?’ Then, I think ‘do I deserve to have this word in my email address?’
talent.
Talent is a funny thing. Being talented in something is a product of chance, practice, both, and neither [these days, I'm leaning much more towards practice]. By chance, you can be a talented writer. By practice, you can be a talented basketball player. By both, you can be an inspirational painter. By neither, you could have the potential for something within you and never even know. Talent is born and built and wasted and ignored.
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I finally made the time to finish my site’s re-design and re-build. Part of me thought this would be a minor remodel with a new WordPress theme but, in the end, I re-did all of my page content and changed my whole organization.
I had two major goals with this site:
- Showcase my design and WordPress talents better
- Make it easier for people to find information about me and what I do
With this in mind, I sat down a few months ago and began writing out the plan for the site. I wanted an area to highlight work I’ve done for specific clients and a better representation of what I do. I wanted a simple, clean layout and to ditch the ever-present blog sidebar.
After settling on a structure, I went to work in Photoshop putting together a design. For whatever reason, I always find it tough to design websites for myself. It’s tough to balance what you want to say with how you want it to look. It was my chance to do whatever I wanted but I was still constrained by business sense and usability. I think the combination of being able to say anything and do anything makes the process harder. Design is about constraint, art is about freedom.
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I was approached recently by the owner of a popular blog using WordPress software. This blog gets a lot of traffic on a regular basis but also has articles that reach the front page of Digg.com on a regular basis. For those of you not familiar with social media, this translates to very large traffic peaks. He wanted to know if there was anything he could do. As usual, Josh Can (and did) Help.
Step 1: Assess the situation
WordPress is notorious for being a big server resource hog but there is little else out there that provides the kind of flexibility and extensibility on such an easy-to-use platform. I’m sure there are debates to be had but I’m a huge fan of WordPress and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.
In this case, the WordPress core along with several essential but potentially resource-heavy plugins were causing the server to become unresponsive and, at times, crash for several minutes. This happened during short periods of intense traffic caused by the aforementioned temporary Digg.com front page position (called “the Digg effect”).
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If I could recommend one skill to business owners with a website it would be a solid understanding of their site analytics and they are affected. So many people treat their website as something they need to have “just because.” If you build a site for services you offer or products you sell, what people see and how they interact is directly related to how much money your site pulls in.
Knowing what pages are the most popular, what keywords people are using to find you, and where people are going paint a picture about your customers, one that you might not be aware of. You probably want people on your product pages and your sign-up sheets, right? How do you know they’re getting there? How do you know they don’t get there and leave? How many leads are you missing?
This post outlines the very basics of Google Analytics and what it can tell you about your website.
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I have, accidentally and otherwise, come across several articles about content creation and information architecture lately. I am fascinated by how people are able (or unable) to consume the amount of information that is available on so many topics. I am also perpetually interested in improving my own ability at presenting information. These two things together keep me reading about this topic.
The articles I’ve been reading, particularly lately, do two distinct things for me:
- They show me how often I get it wrong and exactly where I can improve (example: I write too much)
- They show me how often I get it right by just planning, thinking, and iterating (example: the transparency and accessibility of what I write)
It occurred to me recently that the content I write ranges broadly from senseless, boring drivvel to concise and insightful statements. It got me thinking about how I, personally, arrive at either end of this spectrum and the mitigating factors for creating the content that I do.
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