“Are you on the design side or the developer side?”
Um, neither and both?
That’s one of the questions that WordPress geeks ask one another when they get together. It’s an obvious question because most people tend to focus on one or the other. Do you geek out in PHPland all day making Plugins or coding your own templates? Or do you geek out in Photoshop and hang out on user experience sites playing with the latest jquery add-ons?
McLane Creative is a full-service company. We do both development and design because we are a group of designers and developers. But we do a lot more than that.
We get content. We will help you not just have a pretty site, we will help you build a following for your content and fans for your products.
We get marketing. With years of experience in running ecommerce sites, managing email marketing campaigns, producing knockout print marketing (and everything else) we can build your WordPress site AND help you grow your business.
We get small business. Whether you’re a local restaurant or a national speaker, we get it and have worked with both.
We get bloggers. I’m surprised at how many people in WordPress design/development aren’t actually bloggers. Our team is built with people who blog… every day.
After two weeks of drama, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, is now officially out at the popular tech blog, and he’s no longer an AOL employee.
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After word leaked that Arrington was out at TechCrunch, Arrington issued an ultimatum to AOL stating that he would leave if the company didn’t sell the blog back to him or let him keep his job as co-editor.
With Arrington out, questions now remain over how that will or won’t affect TechCrunch’s roster of reporters, some of whom have stated they’d leave if Arrington leaves.
The other day, during the talk back time at WordCampLA, someone asked me about why I named McLane Creative after myself instead of something else.
It was a good and fair question.
My response, “In 2008 I sold my first company to a large conglomerate. I thought that was my dream. I got a nice pay day but it also broke my heart. So when I started McLane Creative I figured that if I named it after myself I couldn’t sell it.”
As an entrepreneur, I know that the dream for many of my fellow entrepreneurs is to start small and grow your business for the big pay day. It’s a noble goal that will drive you in the wee hours of the morning to work that extra hour.
My only warning to those people is that the dream isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. It’s hard to grow something from infancy, love it, poor your soul into it… then go through a process of selling it where you are commoditized and sold to investors. And there’s nothing like going back to an employee when you’ve been the CEO.
For Michael Arrington that transition wasn’t possible. And he learned the hard way… “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em. Know when to fold ‘em. Know when to walk away. And know when to run.”
Godspeed Micael. I’m sure you’ll disrupt wherever you go.
I had a great time presenting today at WordCampLA. Here are my slides.
If you were at WCLA today I’d love your feedback! Today was the first time I presented this content and I am presenting it later this month. If you could help me refine it that would be awesome.
If you’d like coaching or help getting building a tribe around your ideas, drop me a line.
Looking for the notes? I’m happy to share. Please email at adam@mclanecreative.com and I’ll send you a PDF.
The complexity of this project went well beyond WordPress as we also created the branding, design, and online strategy. But let’s look at the WordPress build.
Tipsy adds outgoing links to social media sites on the sidebar, simple and sexy.
Note: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. But hey, I’m just sharing stuff I use. If you buy it why not hook me up with a little slice of that pie?
All of our web properties (and the few clients we host) are on 6sync hosting.
I have this theory about webhosts. Most of them suck. It’s like a trip to Home Depot… you just wander around looking for what you want and the people working there are hit or miss. I have lots of experience with the big ones. Godaddy, Bluehost, Hostgator, Network Solutions, Dreamhost… they are all 5 shades of the same color. (Of that bunch, I recommend and use Hostgator for blogger clients.)
Why do I like 6sync?
They specialize in VPS. [virtual private server] I don’t need (yet) a dedicated box. And most hosts really suck at VPS because they specialize in either shared hosting or dedicated hosting. And I’d really love cloud hosting but I really can’t afford that either.
They have great gear. I don’t know how these guys are financed, but they have great equipment.
They are personable. I actually like them. You actually get to know them as opposed to live chat operator Steve B. When I’ve had a problem I’ve been able to get my questions answered within minutes. (By comparison, on Thursday night I had an htaccess issue with a client site and didn’t get a response from MediaTemple for 7+ hours!)
They built their own user interface. The backend of most webhosting packages is typically ridiculously difficult. This one is almost too simple. When I login it gives me just what I want an not a lot else. But if I want to drill deeper, I can.
They are flexibile. I prefer to use WHM/cPanel for my hosting stuff. That’s not native to them, but I asked and they set it up within a couple hours. Try that at one of the big guys.
They are beginner-friendly. VPS is new to me. I’ve always either used shared hosting or managed dedicated hosting. Their team helped me with the learning curve whereas most hosts just brush you off with links to their help area.
They upgrade crazy fast. This past week I needed to level-up my hosting. They were able to recommend what I needed and make the changes without any downtime or waiting. Minutes, not hours. (Or days!)
What types of folks should use 6sync?
Small business who need more power and security than shared hosting but don’t really need or have the ability to manage dedicated hosting.
Small sites with ecommerce. (Don’t do that on shared hosting, period.)
Power bloggers. (When you get past 2-3k uniques per day, shared hosting isn’t going to cut it.)
Web entrepreneurs who want to expand and contract with the needs of their business.
I’m just getting started. What kind of hosting do you recommend? Go with Hostgator. I recommend the Baby plan. A bunch of my clients are on it and it’s fine for 99% of bloggers out there.
* Note: Links to hosting are affiliate links. I’m no affiliate whore. But if you are going to buy stuff I’m recommending, I’ll take the kickback.
I’m in the midst of creating and launching a whole pile of projects. It’s both an exhilarating and exhausting season.
One drawback to having so many project crammed into so little space has been that I’m often forced to “just do stuff” without properly thinking it through. Being in a rush has me thinking in checkers when my clients need me to think in chess. Recently, a client pushed back on a comp and said… “Haven’t you read what ___ said about that kind of thing?” In truth, I’ve been so busy that I’ve not kept up with every last blog post about the latest of everything.
That’s why I love peer review. I have a group of friends whom I send things to and ask for opinions. Sometimes I’m sending them things I’m very proud of and am looking for approval and recognition. But other times I’m sending them things because I’m stuck and need help..
I always learn from the process. And I think that sharing ideas– even when my best ideas are completely dismantled– is a refining process that makes me better.
Question: Do you do peer review in your work? If not, why? If so, how does it work?
This has been a huge week of building. We have several sites about to launch and several more queued up to be built. That means we’re out looking for solutions right now BIG TIME!
Here’s 5 Great WordPress Plugins I discovered recently. (If you want more stuff like this sign-up for my Tips & Tricks newsletter, which is starting in September.)
This plugin mounts a little social share “dock” on the right or left side of your site. Once you install it you just go to the settings page for the plugin and select how you want it to work. Quick and simple, takes minutes to set up.
If you run a multi-author site but want to build a little editorial review and professionalism into your life… this is a great little plugin for that. Essentially, it takes advantage of the default member groups. So Contributors can save their post as a “pitch” (or however you’d like to call it) and you have the ability to have some internal comments and edits before the administrator schedules the post to go live.
This plugin is perfect for travel bugs or authors and bands on tour. It documents the when/where in a tidy list and displays your criss-crossing of the globe with a sweet Google Map.
This plugin grabs content from your site and places it into a widget which slides up, down, left, or right. (The developer has many cousins to this same general idea.) This would be great for a magazine styled site or even a great way to highlight backlogged content. Might also be good if you know your readers have the attention span of a sand flee.
I love this plugin! Sometimes on a longer post it is great to use a pull quote to draw your reader back into the post mentally. This plugin allows you to do that very easily from the editor. Literally, just highlight the copy in your post you want to put in the pull quote and push the button. Done.
Blog-in-Blog is a great little plugin.”> Blog-in-Blog is a great little plugin. It allows you to slice and dice your blog and put certain posts on different areas (pages) of the site depending on the category.
So you can have all of your regular blog posts go onto a blog page but redirect all of your podcast posts to a special podcast page. As a bonus you can even exclude that category from the RSS feed so that your podcast doesn’t go out to your regular RSS feed unless you want it to.
As a developer I know I could do the same thing by coding the template in PHP, but a plugin is so much faster for me, and I don’t have to worry about WordPress later changing the way the code might work.
Now here’s what I learned– Making it work, and making it look good are two different things. While it would make sense if the plugin natively called the CSS for the activated theme, it doesn’t because nearly every theme has a special way to call for the themes CSS.
So here’s how you make it pretty:
Navigate to the Blog-in-Blog settings.
Click on the Template Tab
Scroll down and click “Add new user template” and name it “podcast” (Or whatever you’re going to use it for)
Copy/paste the code into the HTML box from below, customize the CSS however might match your site best. (Note: I’ve removed the avatar)
Save changes.
Navigate to the page you’d like to drop the code. Then add in the shortcode, adding the template tag: [blog_in_blog template='podcast' category_slug='podcast' num=10] Save your changes on that page.
Presto! Done.
Need help or want me to help you customize this more? No problemo. Just leave a comment!
