A Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Technology & Locative Dynamics

Ok, finally I spent a full day on developing an own Wordpress theme for my blog and did everything I always wanted my blog to be able to. It should already be the third bigger iteration while blogging. The reasons have been the following.

Old Posts Without Future

I recognized that old posts not facing the front page anymore disappeared and got no more interest. So the new site cares a lot about older posts. I used the Related Posts plugin to refer to posts with similar tags, cleaned up the navigation, so the archive and the categories are more visible and easier to access. There is now one sidebar just showing links to find other posts of your interest, through search, categories, tags or by the rating of AideRSS.

The home page is now like a portal where you can explore stuff. Only on this page you see the widget sidebar and the footer with the recent posts, comments and recent twitter messages.

Content is King

It was not just supposed to be a redesign, it was clear to have the goal to write better and more interesting posts. Shorter with more unique aspects and better use of lists and font styles. I reduced the amount of categories to focus on the things everyone expects, entrepreneurship and technology and one catch the rest category miscellaneous. Good content will arise out of the fact that our mobile startup involves doing a lot of research about various topics and along the way our experiences and failures should be in the interest for other entrepreneurs. This blog should now exactly support this goal. A regular schedule is also planned from today on!

Widget Clutter

Widgets are nice but if the sidebar is longer than 5 full blog posts something is wrong. I decided to use one widget sidebar just on the front page at the right. So all content pages are freed of flashing Twitter messages and disturbing click-me-now buttons. I added the MyBlogLog widget to see who is visiting my page, an interesting concept and I will check it out for some months.

Search Engine Optimization

One of the biggest problems I recognized was the fact that I never cared about search engine optimization. A big mistake because thinking about SEO improves also your site concept and the way you write you blog posts which at the end should increase your search traffic. The All in one SEO-Pack Plugin is great and is super simple to install and use. From now on page titles are SEO-friendly and many optimizations are done under the hood to make Google & Co more likely to give higher rankings (e.g. care about double content).

Check also out the definitive guide for Wordpress SEO. The new single post pages have no surrounding clutter like the widget sidebar or the Twitter messages, so the keyword density is a lot higher and the ranking should improve. The URLs are also more SEO-friendly. Instead of including a date scheme, the format %category%/%postname% is used.

A Design Supporting the Content

My old wordpress theme was a typical big header two-column design. Nothing really exciting and the blue colors got more and more disturbing. The new design focuses on simplicity, the content is king. The post titles and the context of each post are now easier to recognize, achieved by improving the title area of a single post. You directly see the date, the category the post belongs to and the tags.

Tagging the World

On my old blog tagging was not really used. I assigned them but you could only see them after the content of a single blog post. Now you can see them directly under the title for each post and a tag cloud shows the most important tags in the sidebar. Related posts are also recognized by the used tags. Tagging brings semantic to posts that you should facilitate.

Personality

Blogging is presenting an own perspective on various topics, so it is an individual thing. I totally redesigned the header area to be more unique and easier to recognize. The inperspektive logo is now part of the new branding and it sets the main colors and supports the name of the blog. www.inperspektive.com is the new main address, without a subfolder /blog or different domain names.  Next to the logo there is a simple navigation presented as a sentence. The blog has no complex structure and sub pages, it is all about the individual posts. Still, I needed to refer to the About and the Resources page and wanted to express the importance of subscribing to this blog.

What do you think? More content will follow in the next weeks.

Today I attended the DemoCamp Guelph which was again a nice opportunity to meet with some web development and technology interested people. After several Barcamps here in Waterloo this was my first DemoCamp and the first time in Guelph. It was a nice atmosphere and we had some good discussions about various topics. Here are some snippets and thoughts about some of the demos.

There was the demonstration of Freshbooks, an online invoicing and time tracking service which is a very useful tool for freelancers and small companies who are regularly concerned with things like these and want to automate the whole process. Watch this video for a good explanation. Their presentation focused on the new reporting card feature which allows you to compare your invoicing data to the data sets of thousands of others working in the same area of expertise. Opening up their databases, which are normally completely locked by the service providers, to allow these kind of comparisons is a big advantage for this service and the user acceptance is giving them right. Freshbooks with over 200.000 users is pretty popular and growth opportunities are great. On their website I saw some marketing slogans that the service is used in over 120 countries but I could not find quickly detailed information about international usage. If everything goes as planned, I will give it a try back in Germany.

Norman Young talked about disruption in the market space. He mentioned some disruptive technologies and products like the Model T by Ford or the telegraph. It is pretty obvious that there are always disruptions in the market but the question is how to predict, create or react on it so that you can gain competitive advantages. Norman recommended the podcast Capturing the Upside and the book “The Innovater’s Solution” by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.

Another pretty amazing application was shown by Chris Thiessen. zoomii books allows you to find books online like you are used to it in a bricks-and-mortar book store with its book shelves. The key thing was the user interface that allowed you to zoom in fluently into a specific book category which is represented as a good looking shelf with book covers of various books of this category. It was very well done and I can see a lot of users being interested in finding their readings in this non-conventional way instead of the typical search / recommendation approach that everyone knows from Amazon. The used data set for the book covers is a small subset of Amazon’s offerings. The user interface can still improve a lot, especially the start page and the page for the book details. This will be essential to make users happy to use this service on a regular basis. By the way, another startup using the Amazon Web Services. The zoom technology reminded me a (very) little on the video I will attach at the end of this post.

To make the list complete, there was another demonstration of Castroller which allows you to manage your podcasts, Blogthot a Twitter clone and Avery’s amazing Delphi database-backed UI creation demo. The latter one was neat, because I created a similar interface by drag & drop with Delphi in grammar school 9 years ago. If the result would be a web application with web service integration I would use Delphi again.

Ok, there must always be a first post. I decided to create this blog to write about some more or less interesting stories and thoughts about topics I care about. So, expect readings about web development, information technology, entrepreneurship, Ruby on Rails or anything else. If you have some feedback just e-mail me or add some comments.

First of all, thanks to all Wordpress developers. This publishing software is a great product. Easy installation, nice user interface and extendable with hundreds or thousands of plug-ins and themes. It is not the technology anymore that could stop you from installing your first blog, customizing it, and start writing. If anyone has some recommendations for useful Wordpress plug-ins just drop me a line. Happy blogging, Cornelius.