Moogaloo

On our way back from New York we wandered through a book shop at the airport.  I picked up various books and the title of this post was inspired by one of them.  The thing is I can't remember which book it was, but I think it may have been "The Four Hour Work Week" by Tim Ferriss.  I've come across this book before but I've never read it and I cannot say for sure that I was definitely inspired by it.  But let's just say I was!

I flick through books in book shops, or I read the back cover.  This book was a flicking book becasue the pages were often broken up with bite size nuggets of content.  Much like a great website!  One nugget of content was this idea of what your 'busy' looks like.  I had never thought of that before but here's the thing - you can be super busy and complaining there are not enough hours in your day but at the same time you're not seeing any results either.  Or, you can be busy being productive and the results come flowing in sure and steady.  Just like when you work with Lego.

I admit I am often busy being busy.  So now I am focusing on being busy by being productive.  It sounds so easy but so far I'm finding it's the opposite!  There is a fear in me that I'll not be productive.  But fear is not my friend so, quite frankly, it can get lost!  It all comes down to baby steps.  Rome wasn't built in a day, but it will built slow and steady with the right tools and materials for the job.  

And productivity breeds productivity.

And productivity brings in results and success.

What does it mean to you to be productive?  Talk to me here or on twitter @beamoogaloo.

The title of this post was written on a sign in the window of a New York tattoo parlour.  It jumped out at me because there is so much truth in it.  Not just about tattoos but about many things that we pay for.  We ate burgers at The Corner Bistro in the West Village - said to be some of the best burgers in New York.  Now, they certainly weren't expensive but they weren't cheap either.  But they were brillirant.  Absolutely delicious.  Compared to a McDonalds burger?  Don't even go there!

What about "Good shaves aren't cheap and cheap shaves aren't good"?  Are you going to let someone who charges very little go to your face with a cut throat razor?

Often potential clients contact us without a clear idea of what a suitable budget for a website is.  And more often than not, when I let them know that our sites start at £2500, they realise that a website can be a lot more than they thought.

Good websites aren't cheap and cheap websites aren't good.  

Of course, you're going to be able to find me the exceptions to the rule if you go looking.  But the web design industry is hugely saturated by companies all offering the same product.  Or are they?

1.  Are they offering you bespoke design or a template that you may be sharing with other companies?

All the websites we create are designed for one specific brand, product or service.  The essence of your brand is unique and we work with our clients to ensure that we communicate this unique essence within the design.  By doing this your web users start to have an emotional experience of you from the minute they visit your website.  Much like you decide to go into a shop based on their window display or initial customer service.

2.  Are you limited to a certain number of design revisions?

We don't limit our clients at all.  We ensure that when we deliver an estimate to a client we have allowed enough time to ensure they sign off on a design that they absolutely love.  We hope they have a little bit of the feeling a new parent has - the feeling of awe that causes them to show 50 almost identical photos to anyone who'll sit still long enough!  If you have niggles about your design then what confidence will you have to show it off to everyone you meet?

We have a client who asked, "What happens if I see the first deisgn and I hate it?"  I said, "We listen carefully to why you hate it and then we start again".  This inspires confidence and also means that you, as the client, feel included and valued on the journey.

3.  Are you guided through a creative briefing process?

As a business owner you may have a great sense of exactly what you need in a website.  Or you may not have a clue.  Either way, at the end of a well-crafted and delivered creative briefing process you'll find yourself equipped with far more understanding of your brand, marketing and web design needs than you ever were before.  And this means that the end result is going to be even better than you first imagined.

4.  Is your web designer constantly checking and testing to ensure that what they are creating is meeting your goals?

If your website doesn't meet the goals you set for it then it won't deliver a good ROI (return on investment).  A design can look brilliant but when someone starts using it all the visual loveliness can descend into a pit of frustration and ineffectivity.  This is why we run UX testing at different stages of design and development to ensure we are giving you a product and service that will work for you.

5.  Does your web designer talk to you about ongoing strategy for your website and how best to drive traffic to it?

Your website is part of your overall marketing activity.  We all approach this differently and I'm not suggesting you have your Marketing Plan written out before you because, like me, that's the last thing you'd think to do!  But sometimes writing things down gives them weight and meaning and it's easier to aim for something if it's got substance.  

Your website is a little bit like a shop on a street.  If you never tell anyone about it, don't have an A-board outside on the pavement, don't use creativity to draw customers in then you'll find that you do't get many customers at first.  If the insides of your shop are absolutely fantastic and the service is stunning then word will start to spread and visitors will increase.  But we're talking fantastic content and fantastic service.

You can drive traffic to your site in any number of ways and you need to do this.  But you also need to ensure that you are bringing people to a place that's worth visiting.  So we ensure that our clients incorporate their website into their marketing strategy.  And if they don't have a marketing strategy then we help them out with that.

There are many more ways that we work with our clients to make the price of our work worth every penny.  If you want to talk to me further about this then chat to me on twitter @beamoogaloo.

I woke up yesterday to a text from Bea (who had left early for a networking breakfast) that simply said, “Steve Jobs has died”.

My first thoughts were a mixture of inevitablility of someone with serious longterm illness and also surprise at how quick that was. He only stepped down as CEO maybe a month ago… but/and then the iPhone 4S had just been announced to fairly universal dissappointment.

It’s been no secret that I’ve always had a major issue with Apple, and never been a huge fan of Steve Jobs, and whilst I have found myself owning and using Apple products on a daily basis, for both work and fun, there’s still a part of me that also resents their presence in my life.

But when someone dies, no matter how much or little people knew or admired them, we can all find reasons to remember them in a positive light, to remember the good they did, the ways they changed our lives for the better.

So here’s a few quotes from Steve Jobs that I can take away:

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice!”

It’s easy to get pulled around by what other people want from you, what they expect you to do, how they want you to work. If you have a vision (and despite those little round glasses of his, Steve Jobs was certainly not short on vision!), stick to it.

“None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” (on how much consumer research went into iPad.)

When a client comes to us saying they want a website, it’s not their job to tell us how to do ours. Our job to draw out from them what they need, to help them dream dreams, to give them the opportunity to be excited. Stay one step ahead, anticipate how a product / service / website will be used and always make it better.

“We don’t ship junk”

That’s a simple commitment to quality. Don’t sell yourself short - be critical of your own work. Make it better. I often need to look back at something and say to myself, “which one thing would I change, improve”. There’s normally more than one thing. Great products require hard work.

RIP Steve.

I have a fear of failure and rejection.  Both are totally out of my control and both are unfounded.  But they are two small snags that sometimes have a big effect on my behaviour and mental attitude.

Paul Arden wrote some great books.  One is called "It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be."  Victoria Beckham once said she wanted to be as famous as Persil Automatic - note that she didn't set her sights on a famous singer but on a household brandname.  And look at her now - she is not only famous as a singer but as a WAG, fashion designer and icon in her own right.

Page 50 reads:

THE PEROSN WHO DOESN'T MAKE MISTAKES IS UNLIKELY TO MAKE ANYTHING.

The typo you may have noticed is not mine but belongs to the person who typed up this page for the book.  Her name is Lucinda.  They left her mistake in to prove a point.

Paul Arden's book goes on to say:

Benjamin Franklin said. "I haven't failed, I've had 10,000 ideas that didn't work".

Thomas Edison said, "Of the 200 light bulbs that didn't work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate into the next attempt."

Theatre director Joan Littlewood said, "If we never get lost, we'll never find a new route."

All of them understood that failures and false starts are a precondition of success.

Any mistakes I make and failures I experience are a normal part of being human.  In fact, I'd go as far as to say they are a vital part of being human.  So, rather than fear the failure and the rejection that might go with it I choose to embrace my mistakes and failures with a fresh perspective.  

Because that fresh perspective is what makes me a better choice for the next client and the next project and the next opportunity.  It is also what makes me a safe place for someone else to work through their own failures and mistakes.  And finally, it gives others around me the freedom to go ahead and use their initiative because, I hope, any failures or mistakes will be greeted warmly and with encouragement to keep going.

How do you feel when you fail or make mistakes?

How do you respond to service providers or staff who fail or make mistakes?

The UK's largest fashion week outside of London takes place in Sheffield between the 6th and 13th October. Showcasing the best of local designers, retailers and models the week brings together music, fashion, architecture and the business community.  

There will be fashion shows, dinners, charity events and networking opportunities.  A great opportunity to support local designers as they pursue industry excellence.

http://www.sheffieldfashionweek.co.uk/

Seeing sites that feature an up-to-date Twitter feed is becoming pretty standard these days. For a while I was getting a bit annoyed with them. I then figured out what was bugging me - here is a persons / company's professional twitter feed, as showing on the home page of their site and half the tweets are conversational ones between the site owner and someone else.

Of course Twitter is great as a quick, conversational medium, but you don't want that showing on your homepage. If nothing else, your site's visitors will have no context for that conversation and will feel alienated. They can also come across as perhaps a little too informal, and various Retweets, whilst useful, don't really say anything about you yourself.

What you really want on there is the interesting tweets - the links, the opinions, the thoughts, the activity - this is what will communicate your personality, your brand to your site's new users, the visitors that know nothing about you yet.

Ways to actually implement this had been floating around my head for a while, but more recently, I've also noticed a few other people have also flagged this up.

So I decided to try out what was in my head, see if it would actually work.

First try, no such luck

The first thing I tried was to use a standard Twitter Plugin. Twitter Search 2 seemed the best one to use - it constantly and dynamically pulls tweets from a users feed and displays them with certain meta info in a page.

The trouble was, the Twitter Search API doesn't allow a great deal of flexibility - you can't filter out @mentions, you can't search for more than 1 feed (Moogaloo being made up of @moogaloo and @beamoogaloo).

Back to the drawing board (and what I'd been thinking I'd have to do all along), and I've now cracked it. You can see a rough version here - http://dev.moogaloo.in-the-safe-hands-of-moogaloo.com/twitter/ - this is just a development site - I'll push this to our main site soon.

Cooking up a recipe of Twitter activity

A brief overview then on how it works.

1. Pull all your tweets from all your twitter user accounts into EE using Datagrab
2. Use the standard Channel Entries tag to display these
3. Filter out the tweets you don't want
4. Make the tweets look pretty

So, some details.

All good recipes start with a bunch of fresh ingredients (or addons in this case):

DataGrab
Low Replace
Tweetify
CE Gravatar

And the instructions:

First you want to create a channel. I created 2 channels, one for each of the twitter accounts to be pulling in, but no reason not to use one channel for all of them - you can separate them out later if needed.

The fields I used were:

• Tweet Text (so its's not limited by the standard title character count)
• Tweet link
• Date timestamp
• Source

Then you need the correct Twitter API address to pull it in on:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&screen_name=twitterapi&count=2

or in my case:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=moogaloo

This just pulls everything into the channel with DataGrab each time the import is run (I used the RSS (Magpie) setting within DataGrab), and map the fields accordingly, setting the author to be the person tweeting.

Next, some template code:

{exp:channel:entries channel="tweets_moogaloo|tweets_beamoogaloo" disable="categories|pagination" limit="10" orderby="date" sort="desc" status="open" dynamic="no" search:tweet_text="not moogaloo: @"}
    <li class="gr_img {username}">
        <img src="{exp:ce_gravatar:single email="{email}"}" width="70" height="70" alt="{author}">
        <strong>{exp:tweetify}{exp:low_replace find="moogaloo: " replace=""}{tweet_text}{/exp:low_replace}{/exp:tweetify}</strong>
        <cite>
            {entry_date format="%d %M '%y"}
             | via: {source} |
            @{twitter_name}
        </cite>
    </li>
{/exp:channel:entries}

You can either set up a Cron Job for the URL that triggers a DataGrab import (Notes in setting up Cron Jobs for DataGrab) or set it to pull manually using the template tag.

Then when the tweets start filling up your channel, you can spit em out using the channel:entries tag in a template.

In the above code I've got it pulling the last 10 tweets from 2 twitter feeds (Bea and me), and showing only tweets that don't start with the @.

You'll notice that tweets come in with the username: at the front. Not being a technical API genius, I'm not sure how to stop that, but I've placed the span style="display:none" before the Tweet text, and then used the Low Replace addon to close that span, thereby removing the username: from the visible tweet, but check the code and it's still there.

Killing  the conversation, and other such refinements

To remove the conversational tweets, we're targeting tweets that start with an @. I've kept tweets that include an @ in there as I often use these to mention someone in a tweet but am not directly replying to them, so figure these are OK to keep. For this, I'm using the search:tweet_text="not moogaloo: @" parameter, as can be seen in the top section of the /twitter/ page I created, “filter: @mentions”.

If you want no tweets with any mentions in you use search:tweet_text="not @"

If you want tweets that have a the #eecms hashtag in, you use search:tweet_text="#eecms", the 3rd section, “filtered for #eecms”

If you've pulled various tweets into one channel and want to show only tweets just by one person, use the author=”” parameter.

If you want to remove a whole stack of content, like Retweets and stuff from your GetGlue auto-tweeting, use a more extensive search parameter, eg search:tweet_text="not moogaloo: @|RT|@getglue", section 2, “filter: @mentions, RTs & Social Networks”

And all that's left is a garnish

I used Gravatar to supply the image. Ideally I could pull the actual twitter avatar, but I don't know how to do that.

And Tweetify just makes mentions, links and hashtags become actual links.

I know this isn't exactly the slickest, easiest way of doing this, but it does work where other addon's hit their limitations and offers you a lot of flexibility in terms of which tweets show on your site. I'm also sure there are some more technical minds out there that could refine this process too, get the correct Twitter avatars, remove the username: from the tweet text, in which case, please do comment up and let me know!

For a long time people have been saying, "You really need to be on LinkedIn" and I initially replied, "I've tried it before and found it really unhelpful, in fact I would say a time-waster".  Until I gave in and re-joined LinkedIn.  But once again it has become a beast of its own, running away from me and I have found myself with a tool that takes up my time with no reward.

So I have started to take action.

First identify why it's not working for me:

1. I have too many connections of people that I don't actually know, may never have had other contact with.
2. I am a member of too many groups so my inbox is spammed and I have no time to be active in any of them.

Secondly, take action.  As Einstein stated, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

This is the action I have taken:

1. Reduce my group membership to a small handful that i feel I can have regular activity and influence within.
2. Start being active within these groups.
3. Contact any connections that I have on LinkedIn but who I don't feel I know* and send them the following message:

How are you? 

I'm currently streamlining my LinkedIn activity - I've been finding it spiraling out of control and then becoming pretty useless! One of the traps I fell into was building a long list of connections, many of whom I don't actually know very well! 

I want to take the time to ask each of the people I'm connected to, but don't know well, to consider whether they feel there's benefit in us being connected on LinkedIn. I wonder if you even know, by my name, what I do as a business? Just in case you're not sure, I own a company called Moogaloo and we create visually stunning web design that has high usability and is goal-focused which means a good return on investment for our client. You can see examples of our work at www.moogaloo.com . 

I would love to connect with decision makers in businesses that know their web presence is a vital part of their marketing strategy. We are always looking for exciting and stimulating projects to take on - but that doesn't mean the organisation has to be exciting and stimulating to us! In fact, at the moment, we're coming to the end of a project for a Relocations company and it's been a great site to develop. 

If you think you can connect me to the kinds of folk I'm looking for and you think I can be of use to you let me know and I'll happily keep our connection! 

I look forward to hearing from you, 

Best Wishes, 

Bea

*My rule of thumb for determining if I know someone well enough to be a useful LinkedIn contact is whether I can recall what they do by their name OR if I can remember where I met them or came into contact with them initially.

So far so good.  I have a potential workshop lined up to deliver to Sheffield Business people.  I have successfully engaged other users in a discussion within one of the groups I'm in.  I am clearly communicating who we are and what we do to a wide range of people and giving them the option to join in the conversation.  I have initiated a connection for one of my contacts through my involvement in an existing group discussion.

Not bad work for something I only started taking action on less than a week ago!

How do you manage your LinkedIn connections and activity?

What are the challenegs and the rewards for you?

Most days, most of us just go through the motions.  It can seem hard to think that there are other ways to do things, other ways to look at things.  Those of us working in the Creative Industries (and those of us who'd love to be but are stuck somewhere else for the moment) find that we work best when our minds can go outside of the box.  

When we can think differently.

When our brains can create and re-create.

When we can dream.

The impossible suddenly becomes possible.

A stuck place becomes a springboard to somewhere glorious.

And something ridiculous can be the inspiration for thoughts that move you.

Like this...

A status update that appeared on my facebook feed.

If you can read this you have a strong mind or perhaps too much time on your hands! :

7H15 M3554G3 53RV35 7O PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5! 1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5! 1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG 17 WA5 H4RD BU7 N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3 Y0UR M1ND 1S R34D1NG 17 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17, B3 PROUD! 0NLY C3R741N P30PL3 C4N R3AD 7H15. R3 P057 1F U C4N R35D 7H15

Now what are you thinking?

Are you marvelling at how wonderful and creative your brain is?

Just think what possibilities lie ahead of you when you let your mind spread its wings and fly!

Sheffield is a great place to live and work.  For those in business there are fantastic networks and opportunities to access support and encouragement.  Sheffield also hosts a not-to-be-missed festival for Entrpreneurs.

Are you a Start Up, a High growth business or a well established business looking for inspiration and ideas?  MADE is for you.  It's an opportunity to rub shoulders with high profile entrepreneurs, VC's and other funders, Government ministers, leading journalists and broadcasters.  It has the potential to be the perfect place to get networked, learn from experts, and have a good time as well!  MADE is the UK's premier business festival for entrepreneurs and business growth.

You can stay in touch with MADE festival through their twitter account @MADEfestival or find out more at on their website.UK's premier