Well here we are, standing at beginning of a new year called 2011. This is the time of the year when we always start looking towards to future, planning for the new year, with all the excitement and potential that it has to offer us. For me, this is an exceptionally exciting year, both personally and professionally. My wife and I are expecting our second (and we’re thinking last) child to be born in early April, which we are obviously super excited about. Then there’s Survd, the new survey product that I launched just before Christmas.

Between those two things, 2011 already looks to be a busy and exciting year!

I am also looking forward to lots of awesomeness happening here on the Echo Enduring Blog over the next twelve months, and I hope that you will join me in making it an even better year than 2010 (which was pretty darned good).

So, for the first official post of this new year of awesomeness, I would like to draw upon the spirit of hope, excitement and possibility that seems to permeate this time of the year and offer what are, in my way of thinking, a number of things that can be done to really amp up and improve the overall quality of your design blog! These are just some general thoughts and suggestions, and not targeted at any specific sites, but hopefully that will be interesting, challenging or useful to you!

Can the Mindless & Filler Lists

Yes, I’ve said it before. Yes, others have said it before too. And, yes, I’m bringing it up again, the subject of the infamous list post. I have nothing against lists, showcases and roundups. In fact, I peruse these types of lists quite often and have found many of them useful. But there does come a point where enough is enough.

Wondering where that point is? I would suggest that it’s when the lists start to become mindless or, perhaps even worse, just plain old content filler.

Lists should be useful, interesting, inspiring or challenging in some way. If you find yourself including designs, tools, resources or anything else because you deem that it’s “good enough” that would be one warning sign that maybe the list is just mindless filler. If you’re throwing together a list because you just need to publish something, that would be another.

Also, be wary of straying too far from your niche. I love photography as much as the next guy, but I have to say that in the vast majority of cases, roundups of cute baby photographs or stunning landscapes really have nothing to do with design. If you want to roundup photos, why not start a photography blog?

Lastly, use yourself as a measuring stick. Before I ever write any kind of list post (which I do from time to time), I ask myself whether I would be interested or benefit from it. If it’s not something that I would be interested in or glad to have found, then for me it’s not worth writing.

Stop Trying to be Someone Else

There are a lot really awesome and successful design blogs out there. Some of the big ones that everybody would probably recognize would be Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions, Webdesigner Depot, and the entire Tuts+ network of sites. As important as it is to learn from these sites, it’s equally important to stop (or at least avoid) trying to be exactly like them.

These sites are all successful because they fulfill their individual roles admirably. Each has its own purpose, and each does its own thing well. As such, is there really any need to emulate them? Chances are that you won’t be able to do what they are doing any better than they are already doing it.

Instead, work at finding your own voice. This doesn’t necessarily mean that should abandon the magazine style blog or that you need to come up with something so completely unique that the web has never seen anything like it before. It just means that you should allow yourself the freedom to infuse your blog with your own voice and personality.

More often than not, the more you try to emulate someone or something else, the more flat and generic your efforts will seem. Just focus on doing what you do best, and that’s being you.

Learn How to Write (Better)

I will be the first to admit that I can be a little bit of a snob when it comes to language. I apologize. Five years studying English will do that to you. Regardless, if there’s one thing that turns me off of an article, and sometimes and entire site, it is poorly written content. And I’m not talking about the odd typo or misplaced comma, which you will probably find around here. I’m talking about the garbled, broken language that I find on so many sites, and which makes the content so entirely inaccessible that I normally just bail and hit the back button.

In my view, there are a few major issues that tend to cause most of the problems. The first is sentence structure. Languages differ from each other by more than just their words and their letters. There are structural differences too, in the way that words are strung together and sentences are formed.

Given this, one of the biggest issues that I see is authors who misuse the language through improper sentence structure. If I had to guess, I would probably say that it’s usually a matter of using the familiar structure of their native tongue and unintentionally forcing English words into that structure. I know I’ve been guilty of doing that with French from time to time.

But then, you’ll notice that I don’t write in French.

Another, lesser but related issue can stem from improper word choice. Sometimes its just a matter of using one word where another would have been more appropriate. Other times, it can be an issue of homonyms (and other, related linguistic relationships). Loosely defined for our purposes here, these are words that sound alike but are not spelled the same and have different meanings (though true homonyms are actaully spelled the same and sound the same but mean different things, which puts the responsibility for deriving meaning back in the hands of the reader and is thus not relevant here).

Unfortunately, when this kind of homonym-based mix up occurs, it can often render an entire sentence nonsensical and difficult (or even impossible) to understand. Similarly, word use issues can also arise when phrases or sayings that are common in one language simply do not translate properly to another.

And speaking of translation, never ever use an automated translation tool such as Google Translate and leave it at that! These tools are certainly impressive and may be able to move text from on language to another in a form that can be understood, but rarely are they eloquent enough to be published as is. They are strictly mathematical. They have no heart, no soul, and while they might provide a good starting point, their output will invariably need to be heavily massaged and polished before it can actually be published.

I know it may sound harsh, but if you’re writing content in English, one of the best ways to really improve the quality of your blog in 2011 is to take the initiative to make sure that your writing is the very best that it can possibly be.

Offer Up Something New

One thing that can potentially drag a blog down is just posting the same old type of content over and over and over again. Of course, this is not always the case. Sites like Clients from Hell and the ever-popular Fail Blog do tend to publish the same type of content, but they are also primarily driven by user submitted content.

For those of us who run our own blogs and write all of our own content (or even for a small team of writers), sometimes it can be worth mixing things up. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life.

Stretch your authorial boundaries. Try writing on somewhat different topics, or try finding a unique perspective on your subject. One great technique is to mix your interests. For instance, if you love to fish when you’re not rocking out designs (which I do not), why not try coming up with an article or two that touch on some of the parallels between fishing and design? If you love them both, chances are they share some commonalities that draw you to them.

These kinds of unique articles are a great way to keep things fresh, and will often help to truly engage your readers. And they’re fun to write too! On of my favorite articles on this blog is still “If Photoshop Was Batman, Then Illustrator Would Be…” which certainly presented a different take on the subject of two of Adobe’s Juggernaut applications (no Marvel/DC crossover pun interned… really).

Of course, as you come up with new ideas, don’t stray too far from your primary subject. Make sure you find a way to tie it back to design!

Stop Playing it Safe

I think that there are a lot of design blogs out there that really try to play it safe, by publishing content that will appeal to a wide audience, and which won’t really stir the pot or elicit any negative responses. I can understand that. To some extent, I probably fall into the same boat. I’m certainly not a confrontational person, and like most people I dislike trolls and negative comments.

That being said, however, you can’t please everybody and when you try to, content has a nasty tendency to become flat, dull, emotionless editorializing that people may scan but then just as quickly forget.

On the other hand, a passionately written article with a clear perspective and point of view has a tendency to actually elicit a response from readers – generally either as an affirmation or a rejection of what you’ve written. This, in turn leads to comments, debate and discussion. It can trigger tweets, response articles and even offer inspiration for other posts that you can write later on.

One person who does this as well as anyone I’ve ever seen is Andy Rutledge. His articles are bold (but not brash), impassioned pieces that never sit on any fence, but rather make it extremely clear where the author stands. He makes no excuse, no apology and his writing certainly benefits from it.

Of course, be wary of the temptation of embracing controversy simply for controversy’s sake. Sometimes, it can be tempting to embrace a topic that we know will be hotly debated. That’s not such a bad idea. Just make sure that you have a solid position to present. I’ve seen a few articles that try to tap into some sort of controversy, only to fall flat when it becomes clear that its just trying to feed off the debate itself rather than present a particular position within it.

Conclusion

So there you go! Five simple (or maybe not so simple) things that I think you can do to really help amp up your design blog this year! Even if you just address one or two of them, you will be on your way towards improving the overall quality of your site content.

And I want to stress the word quality here, because that’s precisely what I’m talking about. If you’re looking for techniques to help crank as many people as possible through metaphorical doors of your website and into the proximity of your banner ads, then maybe these techniques aren’t for you. Many of them will require more time and an added commitment, and may even result in your producing fewer articles of higher quality which you initially hurt your traffic (though it should ultimately help over the long haul).

However, if you are dedicated to quality over quantity, then I hope that you will at least consider some of the things I’ve written. Here’s to providing the best content yet in 2011!

Happy New Year!

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If you’ve frequented the Echo Enduring Blog at all in the past (and I hope you have), you may notice that things are looking significantly different now. That, of course, is because I have finally launched the redesign that I have been talking about for the better part of eight months now. It was a long process, made longer by my own innate perfectionism, but I finally finished it and turned it live last night.

Now, you may have also noticed that when design blogs like this one introduce a new design, there is a common trend to post about the new design. So, that’s what I want to do in this article. Actually, what I want to do is take a very quick look at six of the key objectives that I set for myself when I started this redesign, and how I attempted to solve each problem.

Readability

If you remember the old design, I had a very dark background. In fact, it was black with (almost) white text. It looked kind of cool when I first put it together, but I received more than a few complaints about how that particular colour combination actually made it difficult for people to read. Given that the bulk of the content on the site is actually comprised of articles that are meant to be read, this was hardly good for usability.

This shot of the old design shows what the text looked like on the dark background

So, when it came to doing the new design, this issue was first and foremost in my mind. I had to make reading articles on my blog a more enjoyable experience.

To do this, I turned to the tried and true white background. Sometimes it can seem dull or cliched, but the fact of the matter is that it works. I also opted to go with a dark grey type rather than pure black. I find that this softens the text, and eliminates some of the hard contrast of black on white. Lastly, I bumped the font size up just a tad.

Overall, I think that it’s much more readable now.

Typography

In addition to just readability, I definitely wanted to do more with typography in this design. This desire was two-fold. First, I’m a big fan of carefully mixed typefaces in a design – especially the combination of serif and sans-serif. That’s more of a personal preference than anything, but since it’s my site, I wanted to pull some of that into the design.

The previous design just used a simple Helvetica (which apparently doesn’t render well on Windows machines).

I also wanted to try my hand at using @font-face, so as to introduce some non-standard fonts into the mix. I chose two. The serif font is the lovely Latin Modern Roman, which is really just a subtle variation on the classic Times family (which is used for non @font-face compliant browsers). The serif font is Carto Gothic, which I really like. Despite my fondness for it, however, I may change it at some point in the future.

Anyhow, I built an interplay of variation between the two typefaces, working to find that balance where the typography adds both interest and visual hierarchy to the page, without becoming to cluttered and confusing. That’s a fine line, and I hope I’ve managed to walk it.

Organization

The last design was not organized as well as I wanted, on several counts. The first was the widgets in the sidebar. There were lots of them – and mostly the standard fare: categories, twitter updates, archives, recent posts, popular posts, blogroll, tag cloud and so forth. It was a bad case of trying to make my blog look like what I thought a blog should look like, and needed to brutally and efficiently corrected.

The old sidebar was full of widgets like this Twitter box

Now, you will notice, there are no widgets in the sidebar.

I took the Twitter, recent posts, popular posts and blogroll (friends) and shifted them all down into the footer, making them easily accessible for anyone who wants that information, without allowing them to crowd out the main content. As for the tag cloud, I just completely trashed that.

When it came to the archives, I don’t think that people used them all that much, so I just set up a dedicated archive page, which contains all of the posts, broken out by month. It’s clean, contained and easy to navigate.

Then there was the issue of categories. As of a few weeks ago, I had way too many, which was symptomatic of poor content organization. I just created a category for this or a category for that, and before I knew it, I had this ridiculously long list. No more! During the design I factored all of my content into just a few categories, with the key ones being articles, tutorials, freebies, interviews and roundups. These, of course, make up the core of the main menu.

I then meticulously went through all of my posts and re-categorized them appropriately. This helped enormously with the overall organization of the site and with the reduction of unnecessary clutter.

Improved Forms

The forms on the old site sucked big time. At first, I was using a JavaScript library to beautify the forms, but that just caused more hassle than anything else. It made them look nice, at least most of the time. The rest of the time, it caused weird things to happen, such as text areas becoming a few hundred pixels too wide, or content falling out of the box.

The original form from the old design caused too many headaches

It was a nightmare, and I eventually just removed it in favour of standard form elements, which looked more than a little ugly in the overall design.

So, with the new design, I wanted to do better. And, I think I have. I used basic CSS styles to format the actually inputs. I also added labels on the right side of the inputs, in much the same style that I did for captions on images. Overall, it makes for much clearer comment and contact forms.

I improved the search form too, throwing it up in the top bar to clear out some more sidebar room, while making it leaner and more compact, but still readily accessible. I also used the submit button much like a label, to keep a visual connection between all the forms.

Loading Times

Though you won’t notice it as much in terms of the actual design in front of you, another area that I wanted to address was that of load times. With the some of the big background images that I used in the previous design, load times could be a little slow. It wasn’t a huge deal most of the time. When I had the occasional traffic spike, however, it started to become an issue.

In terms of the design itself, I tried to help keep things moving quickly, by limiting the number of graphics that I used, and keeping them small. The cross hatching that should be seen in any browser that fully supports the :before and :after psuedo classes is only one small 10 x 10 PNG, and the textured backgrounds are 100 x 100 GIF files of just a few tiny kilobytes each.

Then, of course, there are the CSS sprites. All of the icons are broken out into sprite files. Currently, there are three different files, which made sense for organizational purposes right off the bat. Eventually, though, I will probably look at merging them all into a single file to help reduce HTTP requests even further.

I still have some work to do tweaking WordPress and the guts of the site in order to squeeze a bit more speed out of it, but overall I’ve found load times to be greatly improved.

Tasteful Ad Space

You may also have noticed that the site now has room for advertising. I put a lot of work into the content here, and I’ve been wanting to implement ads for a while now, but kept waiting until the redesign. So now it’s finally happened.

One thing that was important to me, however, was to not overload the page with advertizing. So, I decided to take the one ad per page approach. Once I’ve actually sold some ads, there will only ever be a single sidebar add served up with each page.

This will benefit the reader by not clogging the page itself with dozens of ads, which all just become visual noise. It will also benefit the advertisers, since they will have sole possession of each impression and won’t have to compete with other advertisers. It probably means less money, at least in the short term, but I’m okay with that!

Wrap Up

Anyhow, that’s pretty much covers the major points I think. Obviously, there was a lot more to the overall design that what I outlined here, but those were the six major areas that I wanted to address with the redesign, and the thinking behind solving each problem.

What do you think? I would love to get your feedback on the design, both in terms of what I outlined above, and the site as a whole. I expect that this will work as a foundation upon which I will build and tweak things in the coming months, so your input will be helpful.

P.S. Wasn’t that easier to read?

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Hey guys. Today’s post is going to a little bit different from what you might typically expect to find here on the Echo Enduring Blog. I’ve been thinking about life and this blog and my freelancing career, and I’m just trying to get things more in order. I do pour a lot of time into this blog, and I would like to improve on a few things here. So, I’m throwing a few questions out to you, which I hope that many of you will answer in the comments.

What do you like about the blog?

It’s a pretty straightforward question. What are some of your favorite things about this blog and it’s content? I’m not necessarily looking for all kinds of praise here. I just want to know what you guys enjoy, and why you’ve become dedicated readers and followers of the Echo Enduring Blog.

Let me know what I'm doing right

With this information, I hope to be able to focus my content and vision a bit more, and really start to offer you more of what you want. I recognize that the topics of content can be somewhat broad. What I’m looking to do is get a bit more focused. If I have interesting ideas for articles that are a bit more off topic, well I have many alternate avenues for publishing that content on other prominent sites and blogs!

What do you not like about the blog?

Okay, I’m bracing myself for this one, because I know it will probably sting. Still, go ahead and let me know what you don’t like about the blog! Again, I’m looking more for information about the site’s content, and less about the actual design. We’re approaching the my one year anniversary in June and I’m aiming to have a completely new redesign up and running by then. Of course, if there’s something that you absolutely hate about the design (other than the white text on black background, which will be gone by June), go ahead and tell me that too.

Please, just be gentle!

Let me know what I'm doing wrong

By knowing what you guys don’t like in terms of content, style, post frequency (or whatever), I can work on improving in those areas, making a better reading experience for you and all future readers.

What is you favorite content?

My WordPress stats give me some indication of what some of the most popular posts of all time are, but that information is based entirely upon page hits and some of the highest ranked pages are the ones that have been picked up by some of the bigger players on twitter and other social media. Here are the top 10 articles according to my stats:

• 5 Things to Consider Before Designing Your Next Website
• The One Thing You Need to Do to Become a Better Designer
• Free Stock Photos for your Website – 11 Solid Sources
• If Photoshop Was Batman, Then Illustrator Would Be…
• 10 Photoshop Filters You Should Definitely Know
• The Most Important Site For Any Web Designer?
• 25 Creative Website Footers
• 9 Wickedly Free Heraldry Vectors
• 25 Stunning Examples of Avatar Fan Art
• The One Design Tool You Absolutely Need to Use

But what about you guys? Are these also some of your favorite articles or is there other content that you really enjoyed that just didn’t make it onto this list? Personally, I also like some of these lesser read articles:

• 13 Key Elements to Mastering Photoshop – Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
• Six Technologies that Changed My Life
• Defend your Designs Against Unexpected Defaults
• A Broader Understanding of Value
• 8 Reasons Why You Probably Shouldn’t Start a Design Blog

The Fictional and Completely Made-Up Origin of Freelancing

What about you?

How do you feel about the Echoes posts?

For the past 30 weeks or so I’ve been doing a weekly post that includes one logo, one artwork, one tutorial and one website that I really like, and giving a bit of a review of these. I call these posts Echoes (as a not-so-clever play off of the name). I’ve received some positive feedback on these, but the posts generally don’t get huge traffic. Of course, I don’t really promote them as hard, since I don’t feel that these are the types of articles that appropriate to be featured on various social voting channels (which are already getting a bit clogged).

Should Echoes become monthly rather than weekly?

These posts do, however, take a good chunk of time to write. So, I am thinking of shifting these a little bit by changing it to a monthly occurrence. This would be a bit bigger and feature some of the best stuff that I’ve found over the course of the month. It will probably also be somewhat less structured, without necessarily including the same exact amount of different types of content.

What are your thoughts on this?

How do you feel about guest posts?

I am also hoping to get a few more guest posts going here on the Echo Enduring Blog. Every Saturday morning, I publish Brad Colbow’s The Brads comic, and last month I published an interesting guest article from Amber Weinberg, but I am still looking to have some more great guest authors on here from time to time.

Looking for guest posts

How do you guys feel about that? If I remain committed to still maintaining the highest quality posts (which I do) are you cool with having regular guest posts on the blog? I’m looking to eventually have one guest post a week, but let’s start small though. Maybe one per month?

If you’re interested in being a guest author here on the Echo Enduring blog, feel free to hit me up and we’ll chat.

How am I doing on the other stuff?

Finally, I would like to look beyond just the content and look at how I am doing in some of my other interactions. For instance, I am pretty active on Twitter and I hope that most of you are following me there. How am I doing? Is there anything else you would like to see in my tweets or are you pretty satisfied as a follower?

Some of the things that I am definitely wanting to get better at is to respond to more of your comments (I do read them all in detail, I promise). I’m also looking to get more active on my Facebook page (and I hope that you will too, letting us build up a meaningful conversation).

Is there anything else I could be doing, though? Are there any other ways that you would like to connect with me? Please let me know. I’m always looking to improve in these areas.

Well, those are all my questions for today. I hope you can take a few moments to answer some of these questions in the comments and provide me with some much needed feedback. Thanks! Looking forward to providing a better experience and having more contact with guys in the future!

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Looking to start a design blog all of your own? Maybe you should think again. I certainly wouldn’t be presumptuous enough to tell you flat out that you shouldn’t start your own blog, but make no mistake, this blogging thing is a tough business. Just look at the number of design blogs (and others) that are just sitting out there on the web, sites that haven’t been updated in months – sometimes even years. The outnumber the active blogs by a significant margin.

You could also ask the designers who are running successful blogs. These sites take time and energy, and require constant motivation. So, while I’m not going to tell you not to start your own design blog, if any of the 8 points below apply to you, it might be a good idea to think again.

8 Reasons Why You Probably Shouldn't Start a Design Blog

You Don’t Have a Passion for Design

If you’re going to start a design blog (or any other blog, for that matter) you absolutely, positively must have a passion for your subject – in this case, design. If you don’t, then why do you want to start a blog to begin with? If you don’t love what you’re writing about, it’s going to be hard to stick with it, and if you’re not going to stick with it, then what’s the point of starting at all?

I’m sure there are much better things that you could be doing with your time.

Personally, I would say that design has to be with you at all times. You have to notice it everywhere – think about it, analyze it, start trying to figure out how it was done or how you could do it better. I’m not suggesting anyone become obsessive, but it has to be more than a job. It needs to be one of your life’s passions.

All You Have is a Design

If all you have is an awesome theme for WordPress (or any other blogging engine), which you want to unveil to the world, starting a design blog is probably not the best avenue for getting it out there. Your design may be slick. It may be the single most incredible blog design ever seen my man – but unless you’re ready to present meaningful, interesting or useful content, it’s eventually going to flop.

Sure, you may get a surge of traffic out of the gate, since everyone will want to see your design, but it won’t last. Visitors will only come back so many times to gaze upon the beauty that is your blog.

They will, however, come back if you are offering a constant stream of good and meaningful content. Trust me, I’ve seen dozens of blogs out there that, while they don’t have the prettiest designs (in some cases, they are borderline ugly), have achieved a strong readership and following. And that, folks, is one of the key measurements for the success of any blog.

You Don’t like to Write

Here’s a revelation: blogging involves writing, and preferably good writing. There’s really no way around this one. If you don’t like to write, then starting any kind of blog is probably not for you. Meaningful content takes time to research, write, edit, re-write, and edit again. Generally speaking, I figure that any good post should take at least an hour to write, and most will probably take more than that.

Do you dislike writing?

If you don’t like writing – and especially if you dislike writing – committing this much time to producing quality content is likely to become tiresome for you!

You Can’t Commit to at Least Two Posts a Week

There is no steadfast rule that tells us exactly how often you need to post, but it is generally agreed upon in the blogging community that a minimum of about twice a week is pretty much a necessity. Many design blogs post more frequently than that. Some post every day. Some even post multiple times on the same day.

This isn’t to say that your site will fall off the face of the internet if you miss a post one week, but producing good, regular content is one of the best ways to engage your audience and transform casual visitors into regular readers.

If you can’t deliver more than at least two posts a week, then maybe your own blog isn’t the right choice. Instead, consider guest posting. This would allow you to write one article every week, or even every two weeks. Depending on where your articles get published, you could even make a bit of money!

You Can’t Think of Seven Great Post Ideas in Five Minutes

Good bloggers are always coming up with new ideas. Granted, sometimes they may hit a dry spell, where inspiration doesn’t come as quickly as they might like, but for the most part they are always finding new things to write about.

Can you think of seven different post ideas in as little as 5 minutes?

This should be especially true when you’re just starting out. So, I would say that if you can’t sit down and think up about seven good and interesting post ideas in a fairly short span of time (I’ve allotted about five minutes), that might be a reason to pause and reconsider what you’re getting yourself into.

There’s nothing worse that sitting down and racking your brain just to come up with an idea for your next blog post.

You’re Not Willing to Interact with your Readers

You may have heard this said before, but a blog is generally thought of as something of a community, or at least one part of a larger community. That’s why they almost always contain a comments form. Readers expect to be able to interact with a blog, with each other, and most importantly with you. They want to feel that their voices are heard, and the best way to achieve that is to be generous with replies and comments of your own.

I try to respond to comments on a regular basis, especially if those comments have something meaningful to say about an article – such as an interesting counter argument or an additional resource. I also do my best to respond to any emails that my readers send me. This is a great way to help make them feel a part of the community.

If you’re not willing to commit to this level of interaction, that would be another indication that maybe a design blog isn’t for you.

You See Other Designers as Rivals Rather than Peers

The same thing is also true if you look at other designers and see them as rivals or competition. Generally speaking, I’ve found the design community to be open and inviting and more than happy to help and support each other. Also, if you’re starting a design blog, you need to realize that the vast majority of your readers are going to be designers.

Do you see other designers as rivals or competitors?

So, if you’re looking at other designers and seeing them as competitors, does it even make sense for you to start a design blog, and start feeding your own knowledge and resources to these people? Probably not. Of course, I would always advise against this kind of thinking in the first place. The sharing, support and spirit of camaraderie that exists within design community is actually a benefit to everybody.

You’re Planning on Talking About Yourself

Okay, you rock. I get that. I’ll bet that even your readers will get that. But you don’t have to keep preaching it. If you run a design business, or even if you are just freelancing, there is absolutely no doubt that your design blog can be a remarkably powerful marketing tool! However, it’s not the place for hard selling yourself.

People are going to visit your blog looking for information on one topic or another. They want to be informed, educated, sometimes entertained. They don’t want to be bombarded by posts which talk, either implicitly or explicitly, about how great you and/or your business are. Save that for a more traditional site (which you should link to from your blog).

An occasional post of this nature is fine. If you win an award or achieve something else significant, that’s something that your readership would probably be interested in. They just don’t want to hear about it all the time. I would suggest keeping these kinds of articles to less than 10% of your total posts.

Well, that’s it. So why did I write this article? Well it certainly wasn’t because I don’t want you to start your own design blog. If you’re up to the challenge, I say go for it! If it’s good, I’ll even do what I can to help support it! No, the reason that I wrote this article is that I hate to see blogs just fizzle away into oblivion.

So, if one of these things apply to you, you might want to take a moment to think about whether running a design blog is really for you. If several of these things apply, you’ll definitely want to take that moment. If all of them apply… well that’s a completely different issue!

What are your thoughts here? Do you agree? Disagree? Want to add something? I’d love to hear your views, so please feel free to hit this post up with a comment!

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Have you every noticed how, on most blogs, some of the comments are accompanied by images – usually of the commenter or their logo – while others, even on the same blog, may simply be accompanied by a default or otherwise generated image? Have you ever wondered how people get these images?

Most of the time, it’s simply their Gravatar.

You’ve probably heard the term avatar before right? In internet-speak, this basically refers to an image (usually square), which you use to represent yourself on a website or other internet client, such as MSN (sorry – Windows Live). Historically, though, you’ve had to set a separate avatar on each site or client.

Gravatars are a way of at least starting to get around that problem. The term itself simply stands for Globally Recognized Avatar, and the concept is to be able to upload a single image which is made openly available to all websites through a user’s email address.

That’s part of the reason that most blogs ask for your email address when posting a comment. When the comment is published, the site will attempt to retrieve a Gravatar using that email address. If no Gravatar is found, a generic placeholder image is generally used instead.

That’s the concept in a nutshell – to learn more about how it works (and how your email address is protected), visit gravatar.com.

Why are Gravatars Important?

Okay, so why are Gravatars important? First, they are an absolutely invaluable tool for helping to establish your online presence and identity. Whether you own your own business, work for an agency or just kick it as a freelancer, brand and recognition are always key.

Using a Gravatar helps you accomplish this. They allow you to attach a single image to a single email address. Then, whenever you post a comment to any one of thousands, even millions of sites from all across the world, this one image will be automatically attached to your name.

Think of the recognition! Think of the simplicity!

All you have to do is leave a comment on an article and your Gravatar will appear along with your message. There is no need to sign up as a member of the site, or to upload an avatar. It’s all automatic. Plus, if you ever decide to change your Gravatar, the image change will be automatically reflected on all of your previous comments, because the images are retrieved directly from gravatar.com.

This also means that it’s not too late. Even if you have already posted thousands of comments on hundreds of blogs, you can still register your own Gravatar, and suddenly see your image reflected in all of those old comments – as long as the sites support Gravatars.

Become More Recognizable

Basically, what we are talking about here is becoming more recognizable. Let’s say you’re a web designer and in one day you visit and comment on sites such as WebDesigner Depot, Line25 and Smashing Magazine, all very large and reputable sites.

What are the chances that somebody else, who is also interested in Web design, might visit these same pages? Or even the same posts? Probably better than you think, especially if you are both subscribed to all the RSS feeds.

Now, if you only leave your name, do you think that the other person would notice that you commented on all three posts? Possibly, but the chances are slim.

But what if they saw the same Gravatar three different times?

I would think that the probability of recognition just went up significantly, especially if you have an interesting an easily recognizable Gravatar.

Trust me – this kind of thing does happen. I’ve experienced it myself, visiting different sites and recognizing the same individual posting here and there, all based on their Gravatar! I can also tell you that the more often I see that person’s Gravatar, the more likely I am to click through to their website, because it becomes clear that we share similar interests (given that we are visiting the same sites).

Enable Gravatars on your Own Blog

If you don’t already have Gravatar functionality on your own blog, I would also strongly recommend getting it set up – even if it means a bit of a redesign on your comments section.

There are some pretty awesome people out there in the Blogsphere. You might even call some of them celebrities. For me, there are probably nine or ten different designers out there who I consider my design heroes, based on the status they have managed to achieve, and I clearly remember the first time I saw one of their very recognizable Gravatars sitting in my pending comments. Now that was a gratifying feeling – knowing that one of the designers that I admire the most had visited my site and seen fit to actually leave a comment!

However, there’s more to the need to enable Gravatars than simply laying the ground work for our own self-satisfaction! These same comments can also lend credibility to your site.

Here’s another example. Suppose you are browsing through a site that you’ve never been too before, and you see the Gravatar of one of your own heroes in the comments section. How does this affect your impression of the site? Chances are it will increase it’s credibility, as you think to yourself: “Wow, so-and-so reads this blog too! It must be good!”

Some Gravatar Tips

Hopefully by now, you are convinced of the importance of using Gravatars. Here are some simple tips for how to make the most out of this valuable tool:

• Make it recognizable – Use an image that people will recognize easily and immediately. An image of your face might work well if you are trying to promote yourself personally. Alternatively, you might consider using your logo if you are trying to promote a business, and if the logo will fit nicely into a square image
• Make it clear – Avoid using blurry or otherwise obscured images, unless the obscurity makes them truly unique. Remember that you want your Gravatar to be recognizable.
• Make it relevant – Selling freelance design services? A picture of your kid (no matter how cute) probably isn’t the best choice. Also, unless they are being used as mascots, pictures of your dog, cat, fish, rabbit, lizard or other pet should probably be avoided.
• Keep it consistent – Your Gravatar is not your Facebook profile picture, and should not be changed every six hours, or whenever somebody takes a cool photo of you. If you’re changing it all the time, it won’t become as recognizable.
• Keep it unique – Avoid using services that allow you to “create” yourself in cartoon format. Often, the generated images all look very similar and it can become difficult to tell one person apart from another. This is not to say, however, that you should not use cartoon or animated images. I know of some people who do this to great effect! Just make sure that the image has its own unique quality!
• Keep it clean – It is possible to upload naughty images as Gravatars, but Gravatars are also rated and many sites (including this one) suppress R or X rates Gravatars. So, unless you are selling something particularly naughty, let’s try keeping it PG alright?
• Think across platforms – Not all sites or tools are currently using Gravatars. For instance, Twitter allows users to upload their own avatars. Consider using the same image in both cases. This will help build even stronger recognition.

Well, there you have it. I feel that this article borders on a rant. It certainly wasn’t intended as such. I am simply amazed at the number of comments I see, even on my own blog, from people without Gravatars, and I felt that it would be a good idea to shed some light on the subject. I hope you enjoyed the article, and will consider heading over to gravatar.com to get your own Gravatar.

If you’re already using a Gravatar, well then I hope you found some of the tips helpful, or at least interesting! Also, consider leaving a comment, and show us all your Gravatar! What made you choose your particular image? Do you find it’s working for you? I’d love to read your thoughts and opinions!

Exclusive Content

To thank you for subscribing to my feed, I am including exclusive, feed-only content for you at the bottom of each post!

Current Freebie Code - 7ev165dd