Work

The above two pieces are the nearly complete invitations for the Garden Art Party, a really great event held each year (this year is April 12, 2008). All the art used is created by Alzheimer’s patients and is auctioned off along with  a host of other art. (www.alzca.org)

Have put a good bit of energy in getting this invitation completed, but I’m happy with the results. Below is one of the options rejected before we came up with the above option–I came up with several additional options, but this was my favorite of the ones we didn’t go with. (The option below only includes the front panel.)

One of my favorite projects, Your Town Alabama, has a blog now. I’m trying to add information to it on a weekly or more frequent basis, so keep checking it if you want to learn more about Alabama’s small towns and communities. www.yourtownalabama.org/blog

The Blog does seem to be helping, as I’ve noticed a significant increase in traffic since posting the blog. Hopefully, this will continue and provide more people in Alabama with the information that they need to make our state a better place to live.

Really excited about creating a blog for Your Town Alabama. The blog is located at www.yourtownalabama.org/blog. I’m hoping that it can take over some of the role that the bi-monthly newsletter has held. I’m imagining adding information to it as I get things, but then every two months or so requesting information and adding lots of entries in a row (may decide to do this monthly instead of bi-monthly, but we’ll just have to see how it goes). So far, I’m pretty pleased with how it is going. I’ve got almost twenty entries, with many of the them categorized. Your Town Alabama: Designing Its Future has an annual workshop (this is the 10th anniversary–the first workshop was held in 1998. I went in 1999 to, I think, the third workshop, and have been involved ever since).

I’m still working on getting my head around all this social networking and using blogs to promote websites. I was talking with a friend on Monday and thought I’d come up with a great new term, “cross-blogging.” Well, turns out someone else had the same brilliant idea that I had. Anyway, in an effort to try to make my blog more than just personal information and rambling self-adulation, I’m trying to include the occasional piece of information that might prove useful to clients, friends and, hopefully, that random lot of folks on the internet that I’d like to learn to reach better. As a result, I’ve created accounts for myself with youtube, digg, stumbleupon (my personal favorite for getting random good stuff) and several others. I’d suggest anyone who’s blogging or trying to promote their site do the same. Here are a few generic tips, some my own and some pulled from other sources:

• Reader Attention Span. It is pretty well documented that the typical web reader has a short attention span when it comes to reading content online. My own little investigation into length of stay on blogs found that average blog readers stay 96 seconds per blog.
• Keyword-rich. If the goal of your blog is to increase your visibility, include related keywords in the title of the blog. Use the title as a headline to attract interest. Each item post should have a title that will attract attention but still be relevant to the post. The title should be no longer than 10-12 words.
• Lists and bullet points, please! You can’t go wrong with breaking down your content into ordered lists and bullet points. Readers will understand your message much more clearly if it’s separated into single elements.
• Use bold and italics typefaces. Proper usage of the bold and italics typefaces can greatly improve the clarity of your content. Use the bold attribute on words that need to be highlighted or that are delivering important messages. Italicize the title of books, publications, movies and so on.
• Readability: Put two line spaces between each of your paragraphs. This will help to break up the text into more accessible blocks of copy. Use bold to highlight sections of text that are particularly important. Think of what you are writing not as one long article, but something that can be read in bits and pieces. Make sure that it “works” for someone who is just scanning the page.