One of the things that most inspires me is helping people to understand subjects that they previously thought beyond them. I love watching (or hearing about) someone go from feeling helpless in the face of a subject they initially consider difficult to feeling competent and empowered when they successfully learn something or complete a challenging task.

So many people have blocks when it comes to technology. For various reasons, people shy away from ‘tech stuff’, thinking they don’t have the knowledge or skills required. It can be a crippling place to be when you’re running your own business and a large part of what you need to do involves running your website and being online.

I hate the idea of people feeling powerless or not in control of their own website.

That’s part of the reason why I gravitated towards setting up websites for people using WordPress. It’s easy to use and gives people control over their own sites. I’m simply not the kind of web designer/developer who likes to keep her clients technologically disempowered so that every single little thing they want to do with their website has to come through me.

It’s also largely the reason why I’m in the process of releasing a range of ‘do-it-yourself’ guides related to various aspects of setting up and using WordPress to run a small business website. The first guide has just been launched, and it deals with the very beginning stages of setting up a WordPress-based website. Over the next few months, I’ll be releasing guides related to the other stages of the process, such as the design of the site, plugins, using WordPress as a Content Management System, integrating WordPress with social media, RSS feeds, Search Engine Optimisation, WordPress security, site optimisation, and site statistics.

(If you have any subjects related to using WordPress for a small business site that you’d like to see covered in addition to those mentioned above, please let me know!)

These DIY tutorials are written specially for people with minimal knowledge of technology (though people with more knowledge will benefit as well). Usually, when subject experts write tutorials they leave out huge chunks of assumed knowledge – I’m often quite surprised at how full of holes so-called ‘WordPress for beginners’ tutorials are! As a result, people trying to follow these tutorials often end up getting themselves into a bigger mess than they were before they started.

I’ve always been able to explain things to people really simply and in language that they’ll understand, bringing order to the chaos of confusion . I used to assume that everyone could do this, but based on feedback I’ve received over the years have come to realise that it’s a natural skill that I have, which can be put to good use to help people. I like to think of myself as a translator, from geek to good ol’ plain English!

It’s my sincere hope that these DIY WordPress guides provide value to you. As always, they’re one of the ways in which I aim to help small businesses achieve their big dreams .

Visit the DIY Resources page

Have you ever changed WordPress themes and lost your widgets in the process?

You know how it goes… you think to yourself, “Self! How about trying out a new theme on this here blog o’ mine?!” So you perform the old theme switcheroo, only to notice something a tad disturbing: your sidebar widgets have disappeared.

“Eek!” you think, followed swiftly by, “Well, I’ll just switch back to my original theme and all will be right with the world again! This new theme isn’t actually right for me anyway and I prefer my original design!”

So, the reverse switcheroo happens in double quick time. But: still no sidebar widgets!

It’s like the widget equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle… when you change WordPress themes, your precious widgets seemingly disappear. And changing back to your original theme doesn’t always bring the widgets back from the ether.

The reason why this happens is that each theme uses unique IDs for its sidebars, and widgets are ‘attached’ to specific sidebars. When you change themes, the new theme therefore doesn’t recognise the widgets in the old sidebar because the old sidebar’s ID doesn’t exist in the new theme.

The widgets aren’t really lost – often they’re found lurking in the inactive widgets area and need to be dragged back into the sidebar. Easy enough if you only have a couple of widgets, but reconstructing an elaborate sidebar can be a pain. Sometimes, too, things go wrong in the whole process, and widgets end up floating free or otherwise stuck and inaccessible.

It can be a frustrating experience, to say the least.

Enter the Widget Saver plugin!

The Widget Saver plugin, developed by Zorgbargle specially for Phenomenoodle, is a godsend when switching back and forth between themes by allowing you to save your widgets for your current theme before changing to a new theme. In the event that you then return to your original theme only to find your widgets still missing, you can use the restore function to return your initial theme sidebar to its original state. In worst case scenarios where widgets become stuck, you can use the plugin’s reset function to remove all widgets and return to factory defaults.

Because of the little issue of different sidebar IDs in different themes, the Widget Saver plugin won’t unfortunately allow you to magically transport your sidebar widgets from one theme to another. But it will make life much more pleasant for those times when you want to try out new themes on your blog by keeping your original widget settings in a safe place for you until you return.

You can read more about the Widget Saver plugin and download it via our Free Resources page.

The problem

Have your image, video, audio, and other media buttons stopped working? Are you clicking on them, but nothing’s happening? Is your visual editor showing html tags rather than a WYSIWYG interface?

Aha! You, my friend, are probably experiencing a case of too-many-page-revisions-itis.

How can you tell if this is indeed the cause of your non-responsive buttons and suddenly non-visual visual editor? Scroll down your WordPress editing screen: Does it end abruptly after the Page Revisions box heading, like this…

… when it should be looking more like this…

That’s a sure sign that you have too many page revisions in your database, which has thrown its metaphorical hands up in the air at your penchant for constant change and gone to sulk in the corner, leaving your editing page only partly loaded and partly working.

The solution

The solution is a two part one: First, you need to clear all your old page revisions out of your database, and secondly, you need to take steps to manage your page revisions to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Let’s look at each part in turn.

Part 1: Remove old page revisions from the database

Firstly, as is good practice when making any significant changes to your site, backup your database.

Then, do the following yourself or grab a geek and ask them to do the following:

Open phpMyAdmin, select your database and run the following command:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

This will delete all post revisions in your database. You can also tailor the command to only delete post revisions for specific pages if you prefer.

Part 2: Manage your page revisions

Even if you haven’t experienced the panic and confusion that can set in when your WordPress editing screen stops working as it should, I’d recommend doing one of the following to manage your page revisions before they do become a problem. Prevention, as the ubiquitous “they” say, is always better than cure, after all.

Option 1:
Add the following line to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',10);

Replace 10 with the number of revisions that you want the database to store for each page.

Option 2:
Install the Revision Control plugin to manage the number of page revisions for your site as a whole or on a page-by-page basis.

What stories are people telling about your business?

I’ve been pondering this question for the last couple of weeks. Us humans are natural storytellers: it’s largely how we communicate with each other. Plus, stories are sticky… we remember them long after the boring ol’ facts and figures have faded from our brains.

My ponderings all began with contact lenses. My husband and I get our contact lenses from a local optometrist. Every three months, like clockwork, they send us our lenses for the next three month period.

Usually.

See, this particular time, the person responsible for paying the optometrists’ account with the lens suppliers went on summer holiday. Said bill went unpaid. And, as a result, my husband’s lenses didn’t arrive.

The optometrist screwed up.

But we aren’t telling that story.

Yes, they messed up. It was inconvenient. But, whenever we tell anyone a story about these optometrists, we don’t dwell on this. It was a minor glitch.

Instead, we’re telling the story of Sheila, the receptionist, who after only meeting us once at our initial consultations, remembers our names and faces and prescriptions; who is always incredibly on the ball; and who on this occasion went out of her way to sort out the problem for us. We’re telling the story of how the optometrist provides really great service, sorts things out quickly when they do go wrong, and takes care of us and our eyes in a way that makes us feel like a million bucks even though we’re paying a third of what our previous Edinburgh-based optometrist (who never remembered who we were) used to charge.

What stories do you want people to tell about your business?

You can tell your own stories about your own business until you’re blue in the face. That’s marketing. If you take all the marketing material in the world at face value, every business out there is wonderful. According to themselves.

And people do buy on the basis of fancy schmancy marketing. No doubt about it. But people are also swayed, immensely so, by the informal stories that flow through the grapevine about you and your business.

These stories tell the truth about your business.

These stories can make you. Or they can break you.

What stories are people telling about your business?

We’re very excited to announce the release of our Featured Product plugin, an extension for the WP E-Commerce plugin. The Featured Product plugin, developed by Zorgbargle especially for Phenomenoodle, allows you to add a “Featured Product” widget to your sidebar. You can choose to either display one specific product or let the plugin choose a product at random for you every time the page is refreshed or your site visitors move from page to page on your site.

Visit our Free Resources page for more details and to download the plugin.

Head’s up, folks: WordPress 3.0 has just been released.

It represents a major update from previous versions of the software, so that means it’s time to upgrade your installation if you haven’t yet done so. You can do this quite easily from your WordPress dashboard, but please, please, oh pretty please remember to backup your site before you get all giddy on the excitement of a one-click update

For the most part, upgrades to WordPress 3.0 have been progressing smoothly, but some people have experienced problems. If you end up being one of the unlucky few to have bugs come a’crawling through your upgrade party, WordPress has been keeping a list of all the common issues and solutions with WordPress 3.0.

Business cards. The must-have fashion accessory for any self-respecting business person. Not only do they provide a practical means of exchanging contact details with others, but they are also a vital part of conveying your business brand to potential clients.

As such, woe betide you if your business cards are not thick and luscious and full colour and professionally designed to make you stand out from the crowd. And heaven forbid that you should pitch up at a networking event without any business cards. It’s akin to committing professional suicide. A cardinal sin.

Or is it?

Are business cards really necessary?

I’ve been conducting a little experiment for the past five months. It all started back in January, when the first networking event of the year rolled around and I realised that I had run out of business cards. I’d heard all the advice about how important it was to always carry business cards with me, plus all those dire warnings about how my business was sure to die a horrible painful death as a result of my ineptitude as a business owner who couldn’t even get the basics, like business cards, right.

But, I didn’t exactly have a choice. So I went along to the event unarmed.

And nobody noticed. Nobody cared.

When it came time, during conversations with people, for the business card swap, I simply said, “I don’t have any on me at the moment. I’ll email you tomorrow with my details.” No-one batted an eyelash. Only once did I encounter a gentleman who also didn’t have any cards with him. No problem – each of us wrote down each other’s details in notebooks that we had on us.

Of course, the possibility exists that my fellow networkers thought terrible thoughts about me or muttered to one another about me behind my back. But I don’t think so. Here’s why: That first networking event without any business cards was one of the most successful (in terms of connections made and business generated) that I’ve ever had. In fact, since I stopped taking business cards with me to events, I’ve felt a definite shift in how I approach networking and in how others relate to me.

The reason why networking without business cards has worked for me is because it has opened up a space for me to be more myself in networking situations. I love chatting to people, finding out what they do and why they do it. Formal networking with business cards makes the process very transactional. The point seems to be to swap details, collect cards, work the room. Networking without business cards, on the other hand, makes the process a bit more informal, a bit more social, and encourages genuine connections. I found I had far more in-depth conversations with people without feeling any pressure to exchange business cards.

When these conversations ended naturally and the time came when business cards would usually be exchanged, I took others’ cards and promised to email them. And followed through on my promise. It allowed for a way to renew the connection we had made the previous day, and I’m betting (even though this wasn’t the aim of the exercise) that I stood out in the minds of people that I met as a result, more so than just being a name on a card in a pile of many collected.

I’ve only capitulated once in the last five months, taking business cards with me to one event where I was the speaker. I needed a quick and easy way to hand out my contact details to people who came up to chat to me after the event. It worked – in that situation. But, following my experiment, I now know that the conventional wisdom regarding business cards doesn’t necessarily work for me. I now know that I can break some of the so-called cardinal rules and not only get away with it but actually prosper as a result.

What are your thoughts on business cards? Do they work for you?

Earlier this week, I wrote about making something your own, whatever that something may be. A song, an article, marketing copy, a product… it doesn’t matter. Making something your own gives it an edge and makes it stand out from everything that is similar to it.

Learning how to make something your own is a process.

For some lucky people, the learning curve is so short that it can appear almost non-existent. They seem to have been born with an innate knowledge of and confidence in who they are and a talent for effortlessly demonstrating this to the world.

For the rest of us, though, it can take time to get to this place. And to help us along the way we often look to role models – people who have walked this path before us.

Role models are great. Imitating them is a necessary and important part of growth. But, imitation can go too far: learning from someone else’s experience and applying their advice in your own way to your unique situation is helpful; copying someone else’s personality and morphing into them in an effort to become as successful as they are is not. In fact, it’s downright harmful to you and your success.

The scary thing is that this latter form of imitation is not necessarily intentional. And it often happens so subtly and insidiously that the person involved doesn’t realise that they’ve got themselves stuck in the imitation phase and not actually moved on to making the advice their own.

Case study: Big Name Blogger and her fangirls

A certain current Big Name Blogger (who shall remain nameless as this is not about her) has a very large following. And rightly so. She is fantastic and excellent at what she does. She’s successful and she’s quirky and cool. In fact, she’s successful because she’s quirky and cool. And she teaches other people how to be successful by being their own quirky and cool selves.

Oh the irony.

Let me ‘splain. What’s happened over the past year has been painful to see. So many wonderful vibrant women flocked to Big Name Blogger, all eager to learn from her. But, instead of becoming more of their own quirky and cool selves as both they and Big Name Blogger intended, they instead slowly but surely morphed into clones of Big Name Blogger’s quirky and cool self.

I used to read some of these women’s blogs, and watched as their writing style changed. Now, all groups have a certain vocabulary in common, and this one is no different, but the types of changes I’m referring to went way beyond simple group jargon creeping in. I’m talking about the rhythm and tone of the writing changing to match that of Big Name Blogger. I’m talking about such similar ways of expressing things that in some cases sentences will match word for word – not plagiarism, just an exceptionally ingrained way of thinking. There’s more, but I can’t figure out a way of explaining it without giving away who I’m talking about. All I can say is that it totally freaks me out.

You’ll notice that I said I used to read these women’s blogs. Yup, I ended up unsubscribing from them. What attracted me to these women as writers and business owners in the first place was gone. They were no longer vibrant and interesting. Instead, they became boring repetitions of what I’d read over at Big Name Blogger’s blog. They were no longer unique. Instead, they became pale imitations of Big Name Blogger. Like Coke, they changed the recipe, leaving out that secret ingredient in their awesomesauce that made them so fabulous in the first place.

The world already contains Big Name Blogger. She’s an essential and brilliant part of the world. But, the world doesn’t need more clones of her. What the world needs are more people allowing their own special brilliance to shine forth.

I hope these women remember just how amazing they are, and start to let the rest of the world see it. I hope it’s not too late.

Make the song your own

The American Idol judges sound like a stuck record after a while. Without fail, they keep telling the contestants to make each song their own.

Every. Single. Time.

It’s annoying. But they’re right.

A contestant may have a beautiful voice and the song may be pitch-perfect. From a technical standpoint, everything is right. Yet, the performance can still suck. Big time. If the contestant hasn’t made the song their own, the performance overall is lacking. It’s bland and boring.

So, what the hell does it mean to make something your own?

Back in the day (er, round about 2002), I was still working in the field of Occupational Psychology, lecturing at our local university. In the course of my work, I came across some ground-breaking research in my field that blew me away. It wasn’t exactly new research, but it hadn’t received much recognition. I wrote a paper summarising the research and its implications, hoping to submit it to a journal and spread the word about it.

Before submitting my paper, I spoke to one of my colleagues and showed him my draft paper. I was quite new to the department and didn’t have much experience in submitting articles to journals. What he said to me in our subsequent conversation changed the way I viewed not only academic research, but all ways of expressing oneself creatively, including (and especially) business.

The conversation went something like this:

Prof: So, this is a really excellent synthesis of the research in the field, Taryn. Really well done.
Me (preening): Thank you.
Prof: But, it’s not suitable for a journal.
Me (deflated): Oh….
Prof: You’ve told me what these other guys think. But what I want to know is, what do you think?
Me: Well, I completely agree with them. So, I think what they think.
Prof: Yes. That’s fine. And?
Me: ??
Prof: Even if you’re communicating other people’s ideas, and even if you agree completely with those ideas, there will always be something that only you can add – perhaps a new angle to consider, or an additional viewpoint. Whatever it is, there will always be room for your own unique expression to come through. Sometimes you may have to spend some time looking for it – it won’t always be glaringly obvious, but it will always be there. And it is up to you to find it, because that will make all the difference.

Who knew? University Professors and American Idol judges have more in common than they realise! Because of course what he was telling me was that, while my writing was perfect in a technical sense, it lacked that special something. I hadn’t yet made that article my own.

So, I went away and thought about what I thought, about what I could uniquely contribute even to a plain ol’ summary of existing research. And I found it. I rewrote the paper from the new angle, submitted it and had it accepted with only a few minor wording changes (I am the champion of long sentences, but even verbose academics draw the line somewhere, and I had to re-write a couple of paragraphs…).

Now, since you may not be familiar with the process of journal submission, let me just say that having an article accepted straight away with only minor changes represents nothing short of a miracle in a world where outright rejections are common. For the lucky few who don’t get rejected immediately, years of countless rounds of revisions follow. It’s a long and brutal process.

Yet I sailed through easily and smoothly. Thanks to my more experienced colleague’s advice, I rocked that article. And, during my short (yet, illustrious, I like to think!) academic career, I rocked a few more in exactly the same way. My success rate for journal submission, especially for a fairly junior lecturer, was exemplary.

Rock your business

This advice transcends the American Idol stage. It transcends academia. It’s applicable every time you write a piece of marketing copy for your business, every time you create a product, regardless of what form that product takes.

You can make something that is exactly like something someone else has already done. Or you can spend some time searching for that little something extra that represents your unique contribution to the world.

Whatever you do, you can make it your own.

Rock your business. Simon Cowell will be proud.

Blogs can be incredibly effective marketing tools for small businesses. There are two main ways to set one up, if you decide to take the plunge and introduce blogging to your marketing mix.

Self-hosted blogs

If you already have a website for your business, or are about to create one, the most obvious place to put a blog would be on your own website. Because you are hosting your blog on your site, this option is often referred to as a self-hosted blog.

To run a blog on your website, you need blogging software to power it. And the best blogging software out there is WordPress. I’m not just saying that because I’m a WordPress developer and set up websites for people using this software. Rather, it a case of me choosing to work with WordPress because it’s such an excellent product. WordPress has become very powerful over the years that it’s been around, and it can in fact power your entire website as a Content Management System, regardless of whether you have a blog on it or not. I often set up sites for people like this, with nary a blog in sight!

The WordPress software itself is free of charge, and to use it to set up a blog on your website, you will need to toddle along to WordPress.org to download and install it on your website. Some web hosts (like Hostgator) also offer an easy install of the WordPress software via Fantastico.

Either way, the process is fairly simple, although some technical knowledge can come in handy, particularly if you’re doing a manual install of the software. Please don’t let this put you off setting up a blog this way, though – as you’ll see in a second, having your blog on your own website has some very important benefits that far outweigh this small (possible) disadvantage.

Free blogging services

If you don’t have your own website, another way to set up a blog is to use one of the free services offered by the companies who develop blogging software. In this case, instead of your blog being hosted on your own website, it is hosted on the free services website.

WordPress offers this option at WordPress.com. The other biggie in this arena is Blogger. If you visit those sites, you’ll see that the process of setting up a blog there literally takes a few seconds: you fill in a brief form, and – voila! – you have a blog.

Now, in comparison to the first option with its extra technical knowledge requirements, this sounds like a Godsend. But… (why is there always a ‘but’?!)… because these services are free to use and so quick and easy to set up, they tend to attract two types of blogs: one is personal blogs, people’s online journals about what they get up to, and the second is spam blogs, also referred to as splogs (that’s probably the only funny thing about them!).

I’m a bit wary of throwing a business blog into that mix.

It’s fine if people already know you, like you and trust you, but for people who find your blog via a search engine query it can be difficult to distinguish your blog from the other thousands of blogs that all look exactly the same as yours – you’re all using the same free templates provided by the service for your blog design, so your business blog looks the same as a few thousand spam blogs and a few thousand personal blogs.

It’s not impossible to run a very professional business blog from one of these free services, but you’re sure starting off on the wrong foot and giving yourself a tad more work to do to convince your site visitors that you are, in fact, a genuine, legitimate business.

If you can, use the self-hosted option

All these disadvantages of the free blogging services fall away when you host your blog on your own website: you own your domain, and you can customise and brand the heck out of it (tastefully of course!).

In short, you’re in control over the impression that you provide to people finding your site via the search engines. It’s easier for you to demonstrate your integrity to them, and consequently easier for them to enter into a trust relationship with you.

[This blog post is based on a presentation I did for local businesses at the East Lothian Coffee Morning on 23 April 2010. You can download the slides from that presentation from the East Lothian Council.]