I have been getting to know Calgary’s communities slowly. First, I broke into the creative writing circles—reading at various literary readings around town and even at a music festival in Fort McLeod. As I began working and meeting more people, I became exposed to different people and places—soccer teams, coffee shops, local pubs, restaurants, etc. The most recent is getting to know the web design and development community in Calgary through Twitter and Demo Camp Calgary. Plus, for the last eight months, I started working in the field.

Like all cities, Calgary has its own web dynamic. Calgary isn’t San Francisco, but it’s has a few notches on it’s belt (iStock, for instance). There are a handful of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts in Calgary, but for the most part there doesn’t seem to be (or I haven’t been introduced to) any companies that are really embracing Web 2.0—specifically social media and blogging. There seems to be a pause because, I can only assume, they are not sure if the web is going to be social or not.

Spoiler alert: The web already is social. Passive and static read-only web sites are a thing of the past. With web agencies not embracing the social web, the majority of companies haven’t embraced it either. I think there are two ways to deal with this:

1. The Calgary hillbillies don’t know nothing about the web and I’m darn tootin’ angry.
2. Calgary hasn’t embraced the social web and that means there is a lot of opportunity for me to share that knowledge.

I choose the latter of the two. Companies that aren’t embracing the social aspects of the web are going to be less and less visible online and—in turn—reality. There are many values to building a socially-based website: better search engine ranking, recognized as leaders in any given field, potential for ecommerce or other monetization options, etc. but the ultimate reason to build a social site is to build a community. Just like when I came to Calgary, I sought out a community. Everyone wants to be in community.

I am in Calgary and here to help you build or consult on a blog or a social website.

Photo by D’Arcy Norman

I have updated the feed source with Feed Burner and resynced the feed, so it should now be delivering a full feed. As long as FeedBurner works right. I tried this once before and it didn’t work, so I hope it did. Hopefully, I will see you back here later.

On Tuesday, after watching my project/client list slowly get smaller and smaller, I was called in and made aware that I was being “let go”. It seems I may have been hanging off the side of a building and they couldn’t hold on anymore, because after that meeting, I certainly felt like I had fallen.

Frankly, this only happened two days ago, so it might not be a great time to start giving out advice like a seasoned expert. This has never happened to me before and I hope it doesn’t happen again. Maybe I will just have to do a follow-up post in the future. But without further adieu, here are my tips for how to handle it:

• Take a day off: Don’t jump right into looking for a job again. Relax. Let your head and your heart settle. Hike up a mountain. Have a beer. Smoke a cigar. Go for a run. Take a nap. Watch a movie. Listen to music. If you can, take two days.
• It’s not you, it’s them: You aren’t George. You weren’t fired. Even if you were, I bet it wasn’t you. I don’t know that there is a way to avoid this situation shaking your confidence, but if you need a mantra I would recommend this.
• Don’t wallow or do anything destructive: I am an excellent wallower and if I can get into a good groove I can stay in a self-pitying mood for a couple days (read: weeks). You need to relax, but not over do it. You need to have one beer, but not twelve.
• You will think about it anyway: Even while you relax, there will be no way to avoid thinking about it. Likely, you will move through some semblance of the five steps. No one has died, but grieve for yourself, for stability, for friendships. And more. It’s a shitty process, but just keep moving.
• Assess Your Finances: Depending on and if you received severance, start looking at what you need to do to survive. I don’t think this is time to jump back into a career necessarily. It’s like breaking up with a girl and immediately dating another one. You don’t need a rebound job. Go down to the temping agencies or a previous employer and get some temporary work.
• Do not be ashamed: There are times in my life when I have been humbled and this is certainly one of them. Being a proud member of the Protestant Work Ethic, I believed that you worked hard and nothing would go wrong, right? Those other people got laid off because they are lazy, etc. But it’s just not the case. There is nothing to be ashamed of. We are often affected by the choices of others and this is one such time. This happens to a lot of people. We survive and we are stronger for it.
• Talk about it: Once I got over the feeling of shame, I started to talk about it and I was surprise by the waves of support. I was feeling jaded and being that I am a little melodramatic sometimes, feeling like the world would never be happy again. But people surprise you. A friend took me out for lunch. I received emails and calls from friends and family alike. It’s a great time to be reminded that though one person/company has let you down, there are so many others willing to do anything to help.
• What else?

When looking around at the state of the world and wondering if we should be worried about making mortgage payments and so on, I always tell my wife Leah that if we can’t afford mortgage payments then we will likely have a lot more to worry about than paying the bank. I think in perspective, being laid off is far from the worst thing. I think my mom said it best:

In fifteen years you will look back at this moment and possibly not even remember it because there will be so much more good in your life.

For me, I am moving forward. No time to wallow. Working on the aforementioned web consulting project and meeting with a few temping agencies and applying for jobs. Do you need help with your website or writing? Maybe I can just go freelance.

I recognize that I am not a developer, programmer or a designer. I know what works well and what looks fantastic—often I can see it in my head—but I do not often have the skills to bring them to fruition or it takes too much time. Therefore, I started looking around at Premium or Commercial theme options for this WordPress site. When looking for a premium theme, I was already aware of all the WordPress heavy-hitters: Brian, Adii and Chris. I think, for good measure, I would throw Ian into the mix as well (though he’s not really a premium theme developer/designer).

I eliminated Brian from the running because I wasn’t interested or in need of a magazine theme. Chris’ Thesis theme is really nice, but there really isn’t a huge difference from his other themes (superficially at least). Ian is doing some brilliant things with Thematic, but his commercial themes were too minimal. I even emailed him and asked if he was planning to release another theme with a little more cowbell, but he told me not to hold my breath.

I just realized that I have used themes from each of those guys in the past and have found there stuff to be top notch. Frankly, I have rarely looked outside of their portfolios in the past. I am currently using Ian’s MNML them on my personal blog, Bailing Bucket. So I what did I do? I risked it all and I am giving Adii a try (which has got be pretty obvious at this point).

I chose WooThemes because of the variation and how complete the theme was. Obviously, a lot of people are much better DIY’ers than myself and so taking a minimal theme is easier for them. But I wanted something that felt original and complete. The great thing about Woo is that they have several designers and are always bringing more on board so I have never found myself in a situation where their themes started to all look the same.

So far everything has been incredibly smooth (except when the theme wouldn’t update, but then I realized WP-Cache was on… duh). The documentation was really helpful and when I did have a question I quickly found an answer in the forums. At this point, I would definitely recommend WooThemes, but this might be an opinion that needs to mature.

Have you ever bought a WooTheme or other premium theme? Who did you go with?

Yesterday at work, I had a meeting with a potential client who works for a charitable organization in Calgary who had questions about what social media and networking is all about. We got onto the topic of viral videos as a means to spread a message. Generally, we think of viral videos as being goofy, weird, eccentric, but mostly just funny videos. However, they can also be serious, you just have to do them right. I couldn’t think of any yesterday (but now that I think of it the Amnesty International torture videos (disturbing) are a good example). But I saw a great one today.

WorldVision has created a new video (thankfully that moves away from posh celebrities telling me how I need to donate) that is very much a viral video (thanks Boing Boing) and extremely powerful.

Video is probably one of the best and key ways to communicate (especially online). Having a video go viral will only happen when there is a solid and clear idea in any genre and a good understanding that the internet is a conversation and not a lecture.

I am not a programmer. I can program, but my skills really lie in being, what I call, a web generalist or an internet linguist. I keep my ear to the ground, I know what’s going on and I try to juggle and monitor all the ways that the internet is changing and then I bring that knowledge to each site I manage and build. But, I know that when it comes to programmers, they are often uncomfortable working within another’s work. Everyone does things a little bit differently. I never really understood that until I recently took on the project of retrofiting an already built site to be search engine optimized.

There are two things that should be considered before any work begins on a site:

1. How will you market the site?
2. How will you ensure your site is built to be search engine optimized?

The site that I am working on is a real estate site in Manzanillo, Mexico—Perla Del Mar. It isn’t ranking very well (or at all). I suspect it isn’t for many reasons, but most likely it’s META/Title tag information was terrible (ie: Keyword: Pearl of the Sea). But when very little thought is given to SEO when a site is built, it is difficult to go backwards without building an entire new site.

How Do You Choose What to Search Engine Optimize on a Retrofit?

Currently, I drive a 1990 Honda Civic (wagovan). It has 400,000 KM. She runs pretty good, but she’s no spring chicken. I recently took it to the mechanic for some brake work. And he told me the same thing I am going to tell you—We don’t want to rebuild the entire car. It’s not worth it. We just want to make sure it’s safe (read: works).

I am not interested in pushing some sort of fear rhetoric. The site is good looking and it works for their prospects—except that no one can find it. So, I did what would hopefully lend a positive return without rebuilding the entire site and spending a lot of my client’s time/money.

1. Optimized Keywords and Description
2. Optimized each page’s Title
3. Optimized content on Index (main/parent) page and second level child pages.
4. Added a few anchor links inside of the content
5. Added descriptions to images (ALT tags) within content areas
6. Added a robots file
7. Added “nofollow” tags on the links on the Links page.

We could’ve re-built the site. Completely revised the content. Created a site architecture that is logical and straight-forward. But that would have taken time and cost a lot. With this method, I paired down the endless list of things that could be done and picked the above handful which could be done quickly and hopefully yield the best results. However, this is a work-in-progress, so the results aren’t all in.

Phase two of this project will be external: purchasing Google Adwords, writing a Press Release and getting links from other sites (like this one).

If you have any questions about what I mentioned in this post or how to retrofit your site to be search engine optimized please contact me or leave a comment. If you have suggestions, I am all ears (or at least I have two of them).

Photo by Danilo Prates

This website is going to be the home of my professional self. During the day, I work as a Web Project Manager. My job is to do a couple of things: (1) see the big picture, (2) translate between client and developer and (3) ensure that everything that needs to be done is documented and finished. I have found that on the developing side of web work that there is are usually people like me, web generalists, who know about everything, but there rarely are similar people on the client side, which unfortunately (as I have seen) has lead to people being taken advantage of (not talking about my employer). There is so much to know about the web and if you don’t know or have someone that knows all the acronyms and the ins-and-outs, you might not get everything you need.

This has lead to the creation of this place. Both to advertise myself as a consultant for those people who are entering the internet and are surprised to find that it’s not the static place it used to be and to share the knowledge I have.

When I started this project I was just trying to get the site to show up on search engines. I quickly learned the difference between a retrofit and a tear-down. After my initial attempt, the Perla site managed to sneak it’s way onto page 10 (using the keywords “manzanillo real estate” and it wouldn’t budge. The site just wasn’t optimized. It simply needed more than a meta tag makeover. That’s a good name. Someone should grab that domain: Meta Tag Makeover. You make a show and I’ll be the star?

Tough Audience

Your audience always needs to be considered. In the case of Perla del Mar, it is directed towards a retiring class of people who have extra money and are looking to either permanently move or spend winters in Manzanillo, Mexico in a very comfortable beachfront condo. There are simple things you need to consider for a 50+ crowd. Make the text size bigger. Create logical and intuitive navigation. The website is pitching to a somewhat limited crowd—especially in these economic times—and so it’s important if you have a potential buyer to keep him on the site and build value in any way possible.

So what did we do?

I called in my friend, business partner and web-demolitions expert Lee Robertson to help out. The design of Perla del Mar was well done. Easy on the eyes, had a good sense of flow. Not too much flash. But it was the foundation of the website that needed the work.

Foundation, Foundation, Foundation

I’ve said it before and I’m saying it now, you need to build a website with a strong logical and intuitive foundation. You need to structure a site so that it can handle additions and anything you might dream to throw at it. So I built a sitemap that followed a hierarchy. It’s a big site and though I hate third-level navigation, this site required it. When a site gets this big, it needs a strong sense of parent-child hierarchy—both for users and search engines.

The Code is the Key

Maybe that’s like the medium is the message. Another problem we ran into is that a couple companies had worked on this project and, by the time it got to us, the code had seen better days. Plus, lots and lots of tables. From my understanding—which is potentially incorrect—search engines don’t generally have the best time with tables. It can read them, but I believe the content will all be separated (meaning there won’t be flowing paragraphs of mappable text for indexing). So Lee took on the task of moving the tabled design to a stylesheet. And I worked on making the content a little more presentable.

Overall Updating

• Updates Area (blog)
• RSS & Email Subscriptions
• Search
• SEO
• Content optimization
• Easy to manage photo galleries
• Browser tested

Results

There were bumps along this process. There were several domain mix-ups (which resulted in the site being duplicated on search engines), domains being accidentally dropped from the server and a few other little fumbles. However, as soon as the dust settled, Perla was sitting on page 7 (on google.ca for “manzanillo real estate”). Which is already an improvement. Now with a bit of time and work, with regular updates and building some backlinks, I think Perla’s ranking will move up significantly.

The Future

We are looking at several options regarding directions for the future. They include doing a press release regarding the launch of their show suite (for SEO), offering a whitepaper on information about Manzanillo, Mexico and purchasing a property in Mexico and bringing more community information onto the site to create a hub of great, local information.

Update

Today, under the term “manzanillo real estate” the Perla Del Mar site sits on page 1. All it takes is time and persistance.

306 Productions is a full service, High Definition standard, creative and professional film production company based in Regina, Saskatchewan.

I pitched the idea of a new website to Jayden Soroka and TJ Kroeker of 306 Productions. Before coming on board, 306 had a flash-based website that was not user or search engine friendly. As a small business in Regina, Saskatchewan they really needed to take a personal approach to potential clients. As a new company, they needed to instantly introduce themselves and make a connection with their audience. In order to do that we installed WordPress. The site uses Chris Pearson’s Copyblogger theme as the base theme—though I did quite a few modifications to make it unique and engaging.

We used WordPress as a content management system (CMS) so that the guys at 306 Productions could update their website easily without requiring my help each time they wanted to make an update, plus we used the blog function as a “News” area so they could update their site with all the new projects they were working on. It was the perfect way to show off all their video work.

It was great to be able to support a young company that has so much to offer. Instead of being faceless on the web they are now well represented and are receiving steady amounts of traffic. I was happy to manage, write (and actually code) for this project and have continued to act as a consultant for 306 Productions.