Fresh ID » Art of Blogging

WordPress vs. Tumblr – A Simple Overview

Kristi — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:10:56 +0000

This post, originally published a year ago, has been updated as of December 3, 2011 to reflect changes on both platforms and offer new ideas. This is the single most-read post on our site, and daily searches of WordPress vs. Tumblr and Tumblr vs. WordPress is how people find it – so apparently lots of folks are debating this question! The ever evolving world of blog platforms can be confusing so we try to help our clients understand the basic differences between the options they are considering. Much of the discussion regarding platform benefits is often slanted from a developers point of view, making it a bit frustrating and hard to understand for someone who isn’t living in the coding world. Therefore, we created this quick and easy overview to help our non-techy friends grasp the “so what” of both platforms.

Important Note! This is a comparison of using Tumblr vs. a self-hosted WordPress site, NOT using the free, hosted, WordPress.com version. WordPress.com is great because it’s free to have a blog there, but it is much more limited in design unless you pay for very expensive VIP hosting, plus we can’t do custom features on it so as a creative agency we don’t utilize it for ourselves or clients.

Benefits of BOTH platforms include:

They are “free”, meaning there is no cost to use the platform software, though hosting and design/development for these platforms is not necessarily free.
Free themes can be found and easily installed for either platform.
Both platforms can be customized with unique design and development of features.
Both platforms are Content Management Systems (CMS) that can be updated from anywhere you have an internet connection.
Both platforms allow you to name your pages with keywords that can help them be found in search engines (though Tumblr has a search engine disability we will discuss below.)
Both are somewhat easy to use, but training may be necessary if you’re not computer-savvy.
Tumblr & WordPress both are VERY popular platforms that are well-maintained and will likely exist for some time to come. Both of them have export capability so if you need to move your content you can, though.
Both platforms allow some importation of content from other CMS-driven platforms like Typepad and Blogger.

Functionality & Control

Example of a corporate WordPress site

A WordPress site can easily be expanded to replace your current site if you choose. Here at Fresh ID we have redesigned a number of corporate sites as WordPress sites so that clients can update their content without messing up our design. WordPress is a robust Content Management System that has an easy user back-end that allows for page, plug-in, widget and sidebar updates to be made by non-tech experts. It can support multi-page navigation and serve as a robust and comprehensive website with database management and control. WordPress software can be hosted on a server that is user controlled allowing better control over stats and personalization OR you can use wordpress.com to create a hosted blog (making it more similar to Tumblr in that regard.) We often switch many corporate sites done in .asp or html to WordPress, so that marketers, customer support and others in the organization can update content immediately, instead of having to wait for Marcom or worse, the IT department to update site pages for them. Tumblr cannot be installed on your server, ever… your site is hosted on the Tumblr.com platform, though you can use a unique url instead of the subdomain.tumblr.com address. You have complete control over your content, and can export it and move it to another platform if you want to take it off of Tumblr. For some reasons why we love Tumblr, read this older post called, aptly, Why Tumblr? that Kristi published some months ago. BOTTOM LINE: Some people make a big deal out of the fact that WordPress can be hosted on your server, giving you “control” of all your content. While that is certainly an aspect to consider, it doesn’t rule out Tumblr (to us) as a viable business blogging platform. The Tumblr TOS clearly states: ”You own and control what you share on Tumblr” so content posted there is considered yours – but like Facebook and Twitter there is language around letting Tumblr use and aggregate that content for subscribers to see it, should they want to. (Placing it in featured areas, or possibly using it in a book or a television ad, etc.) This language is not uncommon to public-facing social platforms these days.

Cost and Usability

Tumblr is typically cheaper as it does not require the installation and configuration that WordPress does – the cost for hosting a Tumblr site is free, and our cost for custom Tumblr design is less expensive than it is for a custom WordPress theme, because it is much simpler to code (but also more limited.) Tumblr offers an extremely user friendly dashboard that makes updating posts easy for text and multimedia alike… it guides you in posting various types of media which no other platform does in the same way. Tumblr is also easy to update from your mobile device and most smartphones have a Tumblr app available that can be downloaded. WordPress.com allows free hosting, but the design and functionality is more limited than what you will have access to if you host the WordPress software on your own server. So the “cost” is for hosting, design and development of custom functions, not for the software itself. WordPress also offers a fairly simple (for computer savvy folks) back-end and supports multiple media formats like pictures, audio and video. When it comes to sharing content others have posted, Tumblr is the hands-down winner – WordPress does not have built-in community functions of ‘following” like-minded people, “reblogging” their posts, and “liking” what someone else has posted so that others in your friends list can see it. Of course, there are ways to use tools provided by web browsers like Firefox, or bookmarklets that you can keep in a toolbar, to share things, but with Tumblr this functionality is built in (to share posts within your community there.) BOTTOM LINE: Tumblr is simply fun to use, for writing posts and sharing images and video content. WordPress is fairly easy-to-use, and if your requirements demand additional features that Tumblr does not offer, it’s no less easy to do posting of text, pictures and embedded video.

Design and Customization

With WordPress a developer can create different layouts for internal pages, posts and your homepage. This is nice for the corporate sites we do, as we often code about 5-6 different page types for a single site, and then apply the right one when we need it. Tumblr on the other hand is limited with one type of page layout that must be applied to every page on the site. Tumblr has now added Page support for the platform, and you can have normal looking page names. Woohoo!! The url’s for those pages used to be really ugly by default and getting to these pages to edit them again was very difficult, but that has all changed for the better. See the url for the “About Kristi” link on the kriscolvin.com site to see the old ugly format. Page support was necessary because so many people using WordPress for a full site (and not just a blog) require pages and not just posts. Adding the page names in Tumblr is done in the “Customize” backend section. WordPress supports widgets/plug-ins that can easily be added/customized without hard coding, but Tumblr that must be custom coded for pseudo plug-in functionality (having things in the sidebars of a theme.) WordPress allows you to include native calendars and contact forms which mean you can update them all from the same WordPress back-end. Tumblr can support calendar and contact pages but only from third party sites that requires a separate log-in from the Tumblr back-end and some trick coding. You can use Wufoo for contact forms on Tumblr but it will require a developer or knowledge of javascript to make it work well. That said, Tumblr has a NEW feature called “Ask Me” that comes with every site, but you will have to enable it from the Community section in the backend to make it work. If that meets your needs you may not need a contact form. You can see it here. BOTTOM LINE: Both platforms can be customized beautifully and have navigation to other areas in-site and off-site, but WordPress is by far more extensible and flexible if you want to mess with your own site design and layout a lot. If you need to do big business with ecommerce, forms, listings, heavy content, advertising and the like, WordPress is the direction you need to go.

Social Tools and Integration

Tumblr is well-built for social integration. You can set up your Tumbles to post to Twitter as links automatically, to drive traffic back to your site. On Facebook, you can set up your Tumblr posts to come in whenever you make them, and most of my Facebook friends see my Tumblr content that way, vs. my Twitter friends who actually go to the site. For some reason people like to just hang out in Facebook all day if they are active participants there it seems. You can set it up so that RSS from other sites you might own will be fed into your Tumblr as links, text or pictures automatically. And using simple HTML or custom coding you can integrate just about anything with a widget or api function into the sidebar of your Tumblr theme (such as Twitter updates, an Etsy mini widget, a Facebook widget, Amazon book widget, etc.) With WordPress, you have to use plugins to accomplish the same thing, though there are several. You would also have to use custom coding to find the right spots in the many files that make up a WordPress theme for more complex integration, though Twitter & Facebook & widgets of all types can be inserted easily using a widget in WordPress. Social sharing tools like ShareThis or AddThis usually require some understanding of development in order to implement into posts or a sitewide area, but it’s not too difficult. Third-party services such as Flickr are jumping on the Tumblr bandwagon and adding sharing to Tumblr from within the site. For WordPress sites they give you embed code but you have to insert it into the HTML portion yourself vs. using an easy mechanism that just feeds the content into your Tumblr like you may have experienced with auto or push feeding content to your Facebook or Twitter account. BOTTOM LINE: Both platforms handle sharing well, but you have to get the hooks in place to do it. Tumblr comes with a few more out of the box that enable the average person to connect things more easily and in less time than it takes to implement WordPress plugins and widgets.

Friends & Commenting

Tumblr has a key advantage over WordPress in the aspect of friends and followers, in that you can follow other people and they can follow you as you do on Twitter/Facebook, etc. This gives you two key aspects of a Tumblr experience: people see your content in their own dashboard and can like it (they click a heart icon to signify that) or reblog it (share it with their Tumblr network and possibly beyond if they have Twitter/Facebook hooked up) AND you have content readily available to you, to share with others by reblogging or liking it. WordPress just can’t compare as it does not have the social networking aspect built in as a function of the platform. On WordPress, blog comments are the way to develop friends and a “network” or community, and very popular blogs have many commenters who mainly participate and interact via the article postings in this way. Commenting on WordPress is built-in, whereas on Tumblr you have to (oddly) set up a separate account at a site called Disqus and then implement that into your Tumblr theme. A bit of a pain, and I hope someday Tumblr will make commenting automatic but I don’t know they will, Disqus is such a part of the way things is done. That said, people like Disqus so much they have been implementing it on WordPress sites also (replacing the default commenting system), so Disqus is a good system to use and offers some great features that can enhance comments functionality regardless of where you use it. It should be noted that Disqus is a global commenting system and not on your site only, so some corporations would not like this aspect of commenting as comments will be displayed other places and not only on your site. BOTTOM LINE: Tumblr’s follow feature is one of the reasons we love it so much. Once again, pure fun to have neat things that interest you at your fingertips to reblog if you want to, or just to read, sort of like having your own personal newspaper.

Authors & Permissions

Tumblr is a one-id-and-password pony, whereas with WordPress you can have granular levels of permissions and multiple authors, with pics and bios on each post, and many levels of permission, from public to private, password-protected pages. We are setting up a site now with an Intranet area on WordPress that only the company’s board members can access, and it will have multiple posts and areas inside it, and that is all made doable with the WordPress platform itself. BOTTOM LINE: If you need many authors writing only in their area, with limited permissions, WordPress does this but Tumblr does not.

Ecommerce

You can sell goods and services from either platform, but there are more limits with Tumblr than with WordPress as far as shopping tools go. Basically Tumblr can have a Paypal or Google Checkout button added to any post or page where you have something to sell, as can WordPress or any platform where you can add HTML to the site in order to enable payment. But WordPress has several ecommerce cart plugins available, and if you have the need for a “store” of any type or quantities of merchandise, you will find Tumblr too limiting. We used the free WordPress e-Commerce Plugin to design a custom store experience for our plastic surgery client, for their beauty and skincare products. This is a highly customized version, coded by Tom Jenkins who is a very skilled developer… not everyone could have done what we wanted with this WordPress store, so bear that in mind if you have dreams of a beautiful, customized experience using WordPress and a plugin. BOTTOM LINE: If you have a few products you can sell via Paypal or another service you can add buttons to each item to sell, Tumblr is definitely feasible as a site that will allow selling. If you need a shopping cart and have multiple items and categories, WordPress with a plugin is a better way to go. If you need a complete ecommerce solution with cross-promotion and email promotion capability and coupon codes, etc. for a large ecommerce site with many items, you’d be better off looking at Magento or possibly Business Catalyst as a platform. Magento is strong on ecommerce, not so strong on content – there are many costs/payoffs with these platforms and each case is unique. We recommend WordPress for content and Magento for ecommerce for large-scale needs in many cases.

Search Engine Optimization and SEO Performance

WordPress content is very well-received by search engines and can be easily optimized with various plug-ins added to the back-end, such as our favorite “SEO All-in-One.” WordPress can also easily support ads which can be placed in different places on pages as you choose, using Widgets. WordPress also has clean code in the back-end which allows for faster performance, providing a better user experience. Google has a problem with Tumblr, it has been reported. There is a coding trick that can be added in the HTML to optimize the way page title url’s are created, and it is recommended you use this trick and also read and follow the advice in this post. But Google reportedly doesn’t quite know how to distinguish real, quality posts from frequently reblogged ones, and so has not included Tumblr in keyword searches as it should. We hope this is something they will rectify in the future. We also believe the best SEO is to write good content and share it other places, so we don’t dismiss Tumblr based on SEO reasons but it IS important to be well-informed if you have content you particularly need to show up in search engines. BOTTOM LINE: What is your site about and what kind of SEO traffic do you truly need? That’s what you have to answer first – not every site needs high-ranking search engine traffic (shocking, we know, but true!) If you do, you probably want to go with WordPress unless you have a very large, active social network that will help spread content around.

Multiple Blogs in Central Location

Tumblr and WordPress are both free, so you are free to have two or two hundred more blogs should you choose to create all that content. Tumblr makes it easy on the site and on the phone app, though, to hop between them or choose which blog to share content to, which I have found handy when posting a food image to my Weary Princess Tumblr vs. something random to my personal Tumblr. It is easy to add a second, third, etc. blog to Tumblr yourself. WordPress used to have something called WPMU, which stands for WordPress Multi-Site, and it was a separate setup, but since version 3.0 they have integrated it into the core features and now you can run many blogs from a single WordPress installation… HOWEVER, I have not myself seen how to do that and think it requires a developer to help set that up right, and I am not sure you can use one login to access them – I will check with Tom and update this paragraph accordingly. BOTTOM LINE: I love Tumblr’s easy-add for blogs and use it for personal sites, and in the past did use it for a corporate site with multiple niche topics. It works well. We tend to use WPMU not for multiple sites of our own, but for allowing users within a site to have their own blog – a totally different set of purposes.

Joining a Community vs. Creating Your Own Community

Tumblr has an awesome design function called the Dashboard. When you login, you will see content posted from anyone you’ve followed. When you sign up for Tumblr, you are essentially joining the Tumblr community, and within it are niche Tumblr’s on topics like food, animals, fashion, art, comics, cars, interior design, sports and more. You can explore the most popular tagged content and find people on Tumblr you want to follow this way, so that you always have a variety of content interesting to you to look at in your Tumblr dashboard. The only way to really interact with these people is to leave a message on their posts and try to get to know them that way, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter if they offer that information on their Tumblr. If you install Disqus you can invite comments on your posts and encourage a community to form around your content too, like any blog. With WordPress, you don’t have this dashboard of content – - you have an admin area where you put in content, unless you use wordpress.com (they aggregate content in the system with tags too but you have to subscribe via a reader or add links to a blogroll to keep up with these blogs later.) Your site is the hub where you can create a community that interacts on your blog posts, with whatever your niche interest is as the central theme. If you want to go further than that and create a community like Tumblr where people can follow each other and private message friends, and talk in forum discussions, you can use a WordPress extension called BuddyPress that we love. This is how we created the Sporting Membership community for the pro soccer team, and we’re looking to do more with BuddyPress for clients since it is so powerful. BuddyPress out of the box is not sexy – it needs to be dressed up with design and development and that is not inexpensive, so be warned it takes time and money to develop, but if you need a community site we highly recommend this path. Check out some really stunning BuddyPress sites on this Pinterest board I created – you’ll need to click on the image for each to see the actual site design. BOTTOM LINE: For playing with looking at content and generally wasting time online immersed in other people’s content, Tumblr can’t be beat! Given the short format of many posts (often a picture or video), it’s easy to see lots of interesting things in a single session. But WordPress with BuddyPress gives you the ability to create and market your own community – a service we see doing more and more of for clients going forward. There is a lot of community software out there, but we love Buddypress because it is allows us to custom develop around it and it offers our clients the ease-of-use of the WordPress CMS for inputting content.

The Verdict?

The truth is, we recommend WordPress to some clients, and Tumblr to others. ~~We are about to deep-dive into Business Catalyst so it will also be a platform we recommend, based on need and business goals.~~ (We never did get into BC and are sticking with WordPress for CMS and Ecommerce.) Making the choice between WordPress and Tumblr depends on what you want to do, who your audience is, what your technical threshold is for learning, and who is going to be using the site to write content, plus your gut instinct. Both are free to set up an account with to try out, so why not take a peek at both and see which one you enjoy using more? If you don’t enjoy using these tools, you won’t do much with them and that’s what really matters if you want to start blogging or posting content. Both are great platforms in their own right, and we will continue to provide services and use both platforms for our content. What do you use for your sites or blog? Tell us in the comments. If you’re an Etsy seller you might also want to read “The Etsy-Twitter-Tumblr Triumvirate” which describes why we feel connecting platforms together is the best thing an online seller can do for themselves.

How To Enhance Your Tumblr Site

Kristi — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:14:51 +0000

Given the vast majority of our site traffic coming to us with Tumblr (vs WordPress) questions, I’ve decided to add some posts on these and other blogging platforms to help people get the most of our their chosen platform. I will update this post of Tumblr “How To’s” as I get specific questions from folks. So let’s get started with some basics!

How To… Choose a Theme

Tumblr has a theme set up by default that you will likely want to change, as it’s just generic. They make “trying on” different themes super-easy though, by using the Theme Garden. Login to your Tumblr site, and then go to http://www.tumblr.com/themes and look at the available themes. They are organized by Featured, Premium (which cost money), Recent and Popular themes, and they show you how many people are using each theme. You can click the “Preview” button at the bottom of each design to get an idea of what your site would look like using this theme. There are a few additional places where you can find paid themes. These themes look good as-is, but can also be customized by professional design agencies (like ours) to coordinate with your brand. For an example of this, see the original Style Hatch theme “Savory” and then look at our client’s site, Cowgirl Cravings. Using the same brand identity elements that we use on her other sites, we adjusted the Savory theme to make it unique for her brand. Sites who have Tumblr themes we admire and use, that are loaded with great features:

For a totally custom theme, contact us. We’ve done quite a few, our most popular being my personal blogging Tumblr theme, which has been featured in hundreds of sites online: http://freshid.com/portfolio/kris-colvin Prices for a custom Tumblr theme range from $950-3000 depending on required features and desired design style. For some design inspiration, check out these Tumblr theme collections:

How To… Add Comments

Tumblr does not come with Commenting enabled automatically, like WordPress does. So you will need to add Disqus in order to allow people to comment on your posts. Go to: http://disqus.com/admin/tumblr after setting up your Tumblr site and these instructions will guide you through the process of adding comments. You will only have to do this once, and then you will only need to visit the Disqus site to moderate comments if something inappropriate needs to be deleted.

How To… Add a Contact Form

Tumblr does not have a built-in contact form, but you can add one to a Tumblr page that you create for this purpose using a Wufoo form, which is free for a basic account. After creating a Tumblr page on your site, create a Wufoo account and set up your form on their site. Then follow the directions in the Code Manager for integrating a Wufoo form onto the page (you will need to be using the “HTML” method of entry in your Tumblr page. See an example of how this will look afterward at an old site we are no longer using.

How To… Sell Things on Tumblr

Right now, there is no plugin or add-on or even a specific theme I have found to use Tumblr as an ecommerce site, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible with a simple solution or downright ingenuity. Let’s talk about both.

Easiest Ecommerce on Tumblr
The easiest way to sell something on ANY blog is to use a Paypal or Google checkout button. Both services have reasonable fees (compared to the overhead of taking credit cards and bank drafts on your own) and both are fairly easy to use as a novice seller, once you know the process of adding a button to a post or page. Learn about PayPal’s “Buy Now” button or Google’s Checkout method and select the one that makes the most sense to you. In both of these cases you should be able to redirect buyers back to your site somehow at the end of the transaction. Another easy way to do ecommerce is not to let people pay directly, but send them an invoice using an already established process. See the above information on how to setup a Contact Form, and set up a form that includes basic invoicing information, then send the customer an invoice to pay.

Intermediate Ecommerce on Tumblr
Another way to sell things on Tumblr is to embed a store using a widget or iFrame. I know nothing about Wazala, but they are worth investigation as they have direction for adding a shopping cart to Tumblr and they have built their software specifically to be integrated into your website. Their features are pretty stout – and they say this works in Facebook business pages plus has a mobile browser optimized store, so I recommend digging further into this tool. An Etsy store widget can be embedded on Tumblr and when listings are clicked on, will take the customer over to Etsy. The downside is, now they are on Etsy and have left your Tumblr site so you don’t necessarily have a way to cleanly bring them back to your site. But you might be able to add your site link to the Thank You message delivered by Etsy upon purchase and at least encourage coming back. You can use the Etsy Mini widget, or check out the cute widgets at Craft Cult and how they look in a sidebar. This is the widget we have used on the kriscolvin.com Tumblr to show people our latest brand designs available at Etsy.

Advanced Ecommerce on Tumblr
So far, the only store I have seen was developed by Tumblr themselves and it uses Shopify for the cart, so it is not a custom cart, but rather a series of workaround and redirects to make this store experience work. It is called “Of a Kind” as in, ” a few of a kind only” and it’s an awesome example of highly custom Tumblr coding. There are some fancy things going on with listings, display and categorization that we will be reverse engineering to see how they did this – we believe we could do this for clients if needed and in fact, we’d love to, having toyed with ecommerce for Tumblr in the past but not going deep enough. This would cost more than the typical Tumblr project, but if you want to sell and use Tumblr as your preferred platform it can certainly be done and given the excellent searchability and ability to have followers who reblog your items, it’s a valid platform for ecommerce. If you need more help with ecommerce sites in general, check out this list of 22 ecommerce platforms to sell your products online. I’ll add some more “how-to’s” later, but in the meantime if you have specific questions please leave them in the comments. You might also want to read other articles we’ve written on Tumblr or check out our Tumblr themes for sale on Etsy also.

Happy tumbling!

Fresh ID out and about…ONLINE

freshid — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 22:04:48 +0000

The Fresh ID team believes in practicing what we preach. And you all know (or should know) that we try to share our world with you, online. We believe in exploring, updating, engaging and embracing all different kinds of social networks and sharing our thoughts and opinions. So we wanted to share with you all WHERE exactly we are hanging out, and invite you to “Follow” us. Also, if you’d like help setting anything up (Like Tumblr, Blogging etc.) you know we’d be happy to help! So here we are, you can find us 24/7… Introducing, Fresh ID ONLINE Lisa Qualls, CEO: @LQualls4444 Facebook.com/lqualls4444 Linkedin Google Plus Tumblr About.Me Slideshare Visible. Me Kristi Colvin, CCO: @KrisColvin @EatWellWorkWell Facebook.com/kriscolvin LinkedIn KrisColvin (FourSquare) Blogging Tumblr Tom Jenkins, CTO: @TechGuyTom Facebook.com/Techguytom LinkedIn Google Plus Blogging Slideshare Sherry Liu, Art Director: @SherryLiu Facebook.com/AznLiu Sherry Liu (FourSquare) Google Plus LinkedIn Tumblr Ryan McElhaney: Sales and Marketing Director: @RyanLeighMac Facebook.com/RyanMcElhaney LinkedIn Google Plus Tumblr Blogging Flavors.Me Fresh ID: @Freshid Facebook.com/FreshID Blogging Slideshare YouTube

Using Custom WordPress Design to Complement an Existing Site: Red House Media Case Study

Kristi — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:19:40 +0000

RedHouse Media is an advertising agency of long-standing in Brainerd, Minnesota, where they specialize in traditional marketing, creative work and photography for clients of all types. They have a well-defined brand and had a company blog that was not serving their needs as they began to grow and get more involved on social networks.

Creative Collaboration

Because RedHouse does design, they had a good idea of what they wanted their blog to do, but didn’t have the developers or experienced blog designers to bring it to life. When Aaron met Kristi on Twitter in 2009, it seemed like a great complement of skills, so they hired us to design and develop what they envisioned. Since we are both design agencies, it was easy to stay on the same page regarding the creative approach!

Extending the Brand

Kristi liked the chalkboard effect they use in their website, and wanted the blog to be a seamless transition and extension of the site, rather than feel like a separate site like their existing blog did. To achieve the transition, she took the header, footer and page shell from the main site and used that as the framework for the blog. Now, when visitors click in the header navigation they go from site to blog without realizing they are actually on two different domains (the blog has a unique address so it can be used as a standalone site, too.) This level of detail is not something that can be done with an off-the-shelf theme. This blog was designed from scratch and new fonts and images were used that complemented the RedHouse Media brand so that it appeared to be 100% authentic for their brand… this is not the brand and style of a theme designer or even our particular style.

Development Details

Though it’s not immediately obvious, there are a number of small details we designed and coded in this blog that give it some enhanced functionality or enabled us to extend the brand:

They have an email newsletter, that we added a submission form for in the sidebar for easy subscription.
They have a special calendar of events that function like blog posts. Upcoming events display in the sidebar, and when clicked you can see full text, pictures, video or whatever one could put in a blog post, for the entry.
We found adorable and free social media icons that looked appropriately “chalkboard-drawn” in addition to some chalkboard-styled fonts, that bring character and distinction it in keeping with the main site design.
We used the Twitter api to post the latest tweets from each team member, plus the latest tweets that mention @RedHouseMedia
A lot of sites use the Tweetmeme “Retweet” badge, but we opted to use another one that we could customize colors for to match this site. A palette of reds, grays and charcoals is continually used to keep this brand tight and we didn’t want to alter that with third-party badges that would disrupt the flow.
The most recent video they post shows up automatically in the sidebar.
“Latest Comments” in the footer, in addition to Recent Posts, give visitors an indication of what’s being discussed right now on the blog and within the company.

End Result

The best end result for us is a satisfied client, and RedHouse Media has expressed satisfaction and appreciation for the details we brought to the process of designing theirblog. As Aaron Hautala, founder of RedHouse Media told Fresh ID CEO Lisa Qualls,

We’re getting good responses from visitors and clients; mission accomplished! We test all contractors on the RedHouse brand first, and we’re very satisfied with the style and quality of work you produced for us. I’d like to partner on client blog development in the future based on this experience. I like that we didn’t have to pay you to learn – other providers we spoke with kept telling me “how hard” it was going to be to do what we wanted, but your team didn’t. I appreciated the pushback on design problems and liked that Kristi used her knowledge to solve the design issues, instead of saying “that’s not going to work.” Having a designer with a similar vision (bigger than normal) who gets excited about our ideas is a major plus!

We were excited to hear that in January 2010, the RedHouse Media team won a Gold Addy for their site and complementing blog by the American Advertising Federation of Central Minnesota. As if we weren’t already pleased with how this project turned out! We look forward to partnering with RedHouseMedia on more creative work in the future. Check out the live blog now!

Legalities for Bloggers

Kristi — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:31:49 +0000

Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media has written a post a lot of our friends and clients who blog might want to read, called A Quick & Dirty Legal Guide for Bloggers. While we haven’t had our lawyer vet it, Lisa makes some good points about general things you should remember while blogging and stating your opinions, your case, your experiences, or perhaps how you stack up against competitors. Personally, I think many of us in business and blogging should consider drafting a simple “blogging manifesto” for yourself or your company, that outlines a credo you will live by when taking this sort of journalistic voice and spreading information to others based on your own gumption. These guidelines are something we will be writing over the coming weeks for ourselves, as our team is growing and multiple people communicate on our behalf. We will share that when it’s written, but for now, here are a few that have some good principles you might want to consider adopting. The Corporate Weblog Manifesto (Scobleizer, 2003) The CBC Blogging Manifesto (CBC, 2006) Notes from Home Blogging Manifesto (Notes from Home, 2011) Things to think about regarding intellectual property (Three Minds, 2007) IBM Social Computing Guidelines (IBM, 2005) & Condensed Version (Sensory Metrics, 2007) Blogging Policy (NewPR/Wiki – Compiled List) BBC Editorial Guidelines Do you have a manifesto or guidelines you follow, whether externally communicated or internally aware of when blogging? We’d love to know if you’re thinking about this or just sort of blogging on instinct according to internal ethics, moods or feelings.

Does Size Matter? The Age Old Battle…Length vs. Quality

freshid — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:44:38 +0000

One of the oldest questions around…does size matter? Or is it quality that’s more important? You know you have fought for one side of the debate or the other or possibly both at one time or another in your life. We had the question posed to us today and have heard the experts debate the question quite a bit lately so as we always do when we don’t have an answer we turned to our friends online. Let us just say before we share our findings that people can be equally passionate for both length and quality…finding a clear answer is most challenging. Now, I know what some of you may be thinking but we are talking blog post size here people… you naughty types may be disappointed but we hope you’ll still love us (we do love you after all! LOL!) Two of our favorite bloggers are quite different in style: Chris Brogan writes shorter posts, more often – sometimes daily, and Olivier Blanchard writes longer posts less often. Both work and both pose problems: sometimes we are left wanting more with a post that feels too short, or we feel rushed and don’t have time to read and absorb a longer post. We did some quick research to see if we could get any fact-based data to determine if post length really makes a difference with organic SEO…and wouldn’t you know it? The facts are prey to the argument as well. What we found from blogbuildingu.com is there is a keyword density issue that may factor into post length and seo – there also might be a cap that search engines limit in terms of words on the page they search. The post says “it seems to be the best practice that you should create content with at least 250-300 words and avoid exceeding the 1000 words limit.” On the other hand, smallbusinesssem.com asserts that there is no perfect length and that variety is optimal. At the end of the day, what we found is there are a variety of ways to help improve your SEO results and size is actually of minimal impact. If you are desperate for SEO improvement and willing to try and manipulate the search engines (remember, if they find out they may boot you all together) you can get some good tips and tricks from the seoblackhat.com masters directly. This whole site is dedicated to exploiting search so enter at your own risk. We decided to take a look at one of our more popular posts to see if we could come up with any possible reasons to persuade us one way or the other. Our WordPress vs. Tumblr post is one the search engines seem to love based on our google analytics report. After reviewing the post we came up with three possible reasons it has had long-term search success….

We believe the post title can make a real impact if it includes solid keywords and popular phrases. WordPress vs. Tumblr is a phrase that people seem to search pretty often…at least per Google Adwords analysis tool.
We use the words WordPress and Tumblr throughout the post multiple times feeding the search engines the keywords they love.
We populated the ‘all in one seo pack’ plug-in for the post with all the information fields appropriately filled in.

Our final analysis… we should focus on WHAT words to use vs. how many. We shouldn’t get hung up with the number of words we write and instead just focus on writing…often. At the end of the day, don’t let quantity hinder your quality. A short meaningful post is always going to be better than no post at all. We would love for you to share your preference in our comment section! Cheers, Lisa

How Blogs Work for Business

freshid — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:29:34 +0000

This is a pretty good overview in cartoon-like format, for the uninitiated business considering adding a blog, created by @killer_bunnie. When it comes to blogging, approach and content is not one-size fits all… there are so many methods a company can use when considering a blog, so if you have questions about your particular situation, please let us know. In the coming months we will be covering a lot more about the art of blogging from the technological to company processes and cultural aspects to design and content approaches, so let us know if you have any burning questions and we will try to cover those first – we’re fortunate to be friends with many prominent bloggers/consultants and if we don’t have the answer, will tap into our network of friends to find it. But this overview covers a lot of great reasons “why” you should have a blog… and we strongly believe most companies should. Check it out…