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Why Web Development Skills are Becoming as Important as Online Content

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hands-coffee-cup-apple

There’s an interesting trend right now in online activities. Ever since the Internet came into its own, people have constantly declared that content is king.

But more and more, the web development framework around the content is playing a vital role as well. In fact, at some point, how well the web development is executed may come to mean more than the content. In other words, we have nearly achieved “the medium is the message” status on the web.

What does that mean to you as a web developer or content generator? The answer lies in the notion of a blog itself, inside premium WordPress plugins, and bundled up with the essence of new SEO methods.

We must also take into account the degree of specialization that some of this knowledge requires. That means you have to work in teams with people who have different skill sets from yours. This is forcing developers and generators to — gasp! — learn to communicate better.

Begin with the Idea of a Blog

When you’re setting out to create a blog, what mental steps do you go through? You have an idea, and you convert it to text, perhaps with some images inserted, and then post it.

But then what? How and where do you share it? Through social media channels? By individual messages to people? Through a subscription list?

Every question you ask about how to spread of the message relates directly to the concepts of web development. As a content generator, you have to know how to set of a framework of sharing and publicizing, or your idea will go exactly nowhere.

The simple blogging skill set is no longer enough for even a mild level of success.

Check Out Premium Plugins

Further into the idea of web development, consider how much you can accomplish with free tools associated with the WordPress blog format. It’s amazing, really.

You can have a full-featured presence without spending any money. But … if you want to tweak the format; if you want to express yourself more professionally, more succinctly, in a more streamlined way; then that’s where further web development skills are going to come into play.
Because buying plugin licenses and learning to use them effectively is your fast track to standing out visually and technically.

Think About the Importance of SEO

To be a successful content generator of any sort, you now have to know the web development aspects of SEO. You can’t write the way you used to.

Certain stylistic changes are now required, both in terms of raw content and understanding how to put together headlines, titles, subheadings, and image captions.

Teamwork Becomes More Integral

Another thing you’ll quickly realize is that you can’t create a successful online presence on your own anymore. There’s a good chance you’ll need a graphic designer, a photographer, a web developer, a social media guru …  all of these positions are necessary!

And though any person can double or triple up on these tasks, it’s nearly impossible to do them all yourself. Get a team, or get left in the digital dust.

Communication Skills Become More Important

Accompanying that team effort is going to come some communication frustration. Especially when you try to mix the creative and the technical together, serious cultural and language barriers exist.

A web designer won’t likely understand the drive of a blogger to use poetic words and phrases any more than a fiction writer understands why tiny adjustments in color scheme can any difference at all. But together, web development and content generation will create the perfect marriage of skills for online success.

 

The Marks of a Minimalist Blog

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Daring Fireball is perhaps one of the best known and most minimal blogs out there.
Daring Fireball is perhaps one of the best known and most minimal blogs out there.

There a lot of great resources about minimalism and web design which highlight several basic principals:

  • Form follows function
  • Content is King
  • Include only what is necessary
  • More white space!
  • Typography is awesome
  • Use simple color palettes

I wanted make these principals more practical by identifying common design choices made by the designers of some of the best minimal blogs.

Blogs surveyed

I informally surveyed the following 15 minimalist blogs with 23 questions, which I answered by scouring each site until my eyes hurt. They are all fantastic examples of great minimalistic blog design and have been featured on many design galleries.

Here are the reoccurring items that are used, and not used, in minimalist blog design.

Main menu

Inca Un Calator is beautiful and VERY stripped down. No menu, no widgets, just content.
Inca Un Calator is beautiful and VERY stripped down. No menu, no widgets, just content.

Most blogs have a main menu with links to home, archives, and about. Some had a contact page while others had one or two more links total.

  • 86% used a site menu
  • 86% have an archive page
  • 73% have an about page

7 posts on the home page

While some blogs displayed upwards of 50 posts on the index page the majority of minimal blogs averaged seven.

Ditch the widgets

Widgets make it so easy to add all sorts fun stuff to your blog. Before you know it your sidebar will be filled with badges and buttons, friends, and feeds. Most widgets are clutter. In fact in the minimalist blogs that I surveyed:

  • 93% did not use recent comments
  • 80% did not use recent posts
  • 80% did not use related posts
  • 86% did not use a tag cloud

Skellie has a great guide to uncluttering your sidebar.

Avatars, trackbacks, and bookmarks

There a few items that popped up that were barely used at all among minimalist blogs. I mention them because they did come up occasionally. Here is the general rule of thumb for minimizing clutter:

  • No Avatars on comments
  • No trackbacks
  • No Social Bokmarks

The “it depends”

Write Hype strikes the perfect balance between content and design. Where's the logo?
Write Hype strikes the perfect balance between content and design. Where's the logo?

There were a lot of items that turned about to be borderline. These are the “it depends” items. In other words, it depends on your overall goals. Consider function first when approaching these items:

  • Comment counts: If you don’t have comments you don’t need comment counts. On the other hand, a comment count can be a useful indicator.
  • Sidebars: Only 60% of the blogs surveyed used them. Do you absolutely need a sidebar? Why?
  • RSS Links: The holy RSS button turns out to be a little less popular in minimalist blogs than you would think. Since browsers detect RSS Feeds automatically, a link might be redundant.
  • Contact Page: A contact page usually contains a form. In some cases you may be able to get rid of the form and just go with an email address. Many bloggers choose this approach, simply including it in the about page.
  • Profile Links: If you’re trying to cut some fat, you might be able to get rid of all those profile links like Twitter and Delicious. Alternatively you could move them off to a page or blog of their own. Tumblr does this well.
  • Next/Previous links: The next and previous links are commonly displayed on permalink pages. I question whether these are actually useful and would love to see a heat map from a popular blog to prove conclusively whether to keep them.
  • Search: A surprising amount of people did not include a search form anywhere on their site. This is strongly discouraged by usability experts.
  • Post summaries: It may be useful to excerpt posts on your index page. This can help to reduce the amount of space that is used.

Everything else

If I didn’t mention it, don’t add it. Err on the side of simplicity by avoiding any extraneous elements. In general you must approach your blog with an understanding of why it exists. If you can answer that question then your design should follow naturally.

3 Reasons Why Web Designers and Developers Should Blog

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I know many web designers and developers blog. But for those who don’t, here are couple reasons why you should.

1. Marketing

Ask most internet marketers and they’ll tell you that blogs are great for driving traffic.

If you’re a freelance worker, getting more traffic to your site can increase your leads and sales. Even if you’re working for a company, your blog can send more traffic to your company’s site. In this economy, you probably want your firm to have more business so that you can stay employed.

Blogs can get a lot of traffic for a couple of reasons.

First, they often do well on the search engines. Blog have lots of pages for the search engines to rank as opposed to static brochure-like sites that only have a few pages.

Second, blogs usually get more repeat visitors. Internet users are much more likely to bookmark a blog since they expect blogs to get updated and they want to check back for new content.

Third, blogs are usually better than other types of sites at attracting links. There seems to be a culture of “linking out” between bloggers that’s missing with other sites. Most bloggers are open to sharing their traffic by linking to other bloggers. Of course, if you want to share in this traffic, you’ll be expected to link out too. It’s a win-win for you, since you can point your readers to interesting blogs while receiving traffic back.

2. Learning

Blogs can be great learning tools.

You can create helpful posts for your industry. This is a great way to solidify in your mind the things you’ve learned.

You can use your blog as a reference guide. Think of it as your old school notebook where you kept important notes to help you do your homework and pass your tests. Your blog has an advantage over the notebook because it’s online. This means you can save useful links with ease. Also, other people give you useful information by leaving blog comments.

You can also use your blog as a work diary or journal. By keeping track of your work activities, you can look back at your posts and be encouraged by your progress. You might uncover unproductive trends that you need deal with and productive patterns that you need to focus on. Again, other web designers and developers can interact with you through the comment section. They may leave helpful information or just a general encouraging word.

As your blog grows in traffic, you can start using your blog to get valuable feedback. You can ask your readers to answer questions that you have about your industry. You’ll need a good amount of traffic to make this work since most readers don’t leave feedback.

3. Networking

I’ve hinted about this already, but it deserves its own section. Simply put, blogs are an effective and efficient way to build relationships with other web workers.

You’ll still need to make the direct contact possibly with email or a face-to-face meeting, but your blog showcases your personality to anyone who has an internet connection. Over time, your readers will know you pretty well.

If you want to network with someone, you can contact them and point them to your blog to learn more about you. You won’t have to keep telling your story to each person you network with. Instead, you can just link to the relevant posts on your blog.

If you’re looking for a job, new clients, a business partner, or even online friends in your industry, your blog functions as a “living” updated real-time resume.

Over to You

If you’re a blogger, why do you blog?

The Types of Content in Web Design and Development That Send Traffic

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I’m not a web designer or developer. But as a blogger and a marketer in a wide variety of niches, I’m always on the lookout for the types of content that do well in a given industry.

I was curious as to what types of content get a lot of traffic in the web design and development niches. So, I looked at popular social media sites that have a design and development section. I researched social media sites that cater to web designers and developers. And I checked out popular web design and development blogs to see what they were linking to. Here’s what I found.

For both web design and development, tutorials and lists make up a big part of the high traffic content. One smart author even combined the two. He published 10 Seriously Useful Photoshop Tutorials and got a lot of traffic.

It makes sense that tutorials are popular since web design and development are both “how to” niches. Web designers and developers are looking to learn new things and tutorials are great learning resources. The key to making a quality tutorial is to be detailed. Make sure each step in your tutorial is covered well and include screenshots so that the reader knows exactly what you’re doing.

Surprisingly, I didn’t see any video tutorials except this one. That could be because many people are not creating them. I think they could be popular as the video I linked to did pretty well. If you have some screencast experience, try creating a screencast tutorial and see where it goes. You may start a trend.

Lists do well in any industry but for some reason, web designers really like lists. Whether it’s 22 cool fonts, 46 sites to inspire you in the hand drawing style, or 50 Creative 404 Pages, web designers find lists useful, inspiring, and/or entertaining.

For web developers, cheatsheets or reference guides seem to be popular. If you’ve created one or found one that’s been useful for you, you should write about it. They help beginners and even more experienced web workers.

Finally, cool web apps get a lot of traffic. If you’ve created one or know about one, let the world know. If you can give an in-depth review of the web app, that’s even better.

Much of marketing and promotion today is heavily based on content, so if you’re not publishing any of the above types of content, you’re missing out on a lot of traffic.

Over to You

What types of content has sent you a lot of traffic?

What types of content do you like to read?

Friday Focus 07/05/08: Bursts of Color and Collapsible Content

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Welcome to the first Friday Focus for the month of July. This week: strong bursts of color and collapsible content. Curious combination? Read on!

Designs of the Week

Goodworks Media

This is probably the “most different” from the rest of the designs here. But it’s a good thing. It’s 100% fluid, makes good use of to show the striking background, and is very colorful.

Pareja

A blog implementation of the collapsible content technique. Simple and effective design that pops.

Joel Delane

I personally am not a fan of what he did to the background, it’s a little too busy and competes with the portfolio images, but it’s a nice design nonetheless.

Fernando Kruger

It’s not colorful, but dark, monochromatic color schemes can be as rich as the rainbow too. The collapsing headers distinctly remind me of the legendary portfolio of Marius Roosendaal, but this design is unique in its own right.

Social Media Weekly

Design – 99 Free Canvas, Paper, Paint, and Metal Textures
People say grunge is the new “Web 2.0 look”. Whether or not you agree, it takes a lot more work to put together a nice textured design, but this page can help you out.

Design – Style Switchers Contest Results
Smashing Magazine held a contest that had designers coming up with creative presentations of website style switchers. Tons of inspiration here.

Programming – Improved Flash indexing
Google starts indexing Flash content. It’s what web designers have been waiting for…or is it?

Programming – Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes
If there is one part of a website that you should make sure works properly, it’s the URL. Some SEO advice for ideal URL design.

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