Wisdump

Dumping wisdom on design and the web

How To Turn Your Blog Into Your Business

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If you’re a blogger and you enjoy doing what you do, you may someday decide you want to turn your love of blogging into a business, perhaps by taking out a personal loan for expenses or to tide you over until you start making money. You might want to simply monetize your blog, or maybe you’ll want to do more than just that. Have you watched the movie ‘Julie and Julia’? In this movie, the protagonist turns her blog into a book after getting many offers.

So, when you decide to make something more of your blog than just a place to talk about the things you know about or the things that you experience, here is what you may want to do. [Read more…]

The Latest Launches from 9rules and Paul Scrivens

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There was a time then the words Paul “Scrivs” Scrivens and 9rules were synonymous to Wisdump. It feels like those days are so far away, but every once in a while something takes us back, like today.

9rules Relaunch and Submission Rounds

9rules is one of those communities that you have to be part of to understand. There’s no community on the Web that is quite like it.

It’s both exclusive—official members are handpicked during each submission round—and open—my.9rules brings everyone else into the conversation. It’s not just a social network, it’s a social content network. It’s constantly evolving, growing, and concocting experiments that redefine what it means to socialize on the web.

On April 30th, 9rules will launch a new (or is it old?) version of its website, but that’s not the only date present and future members should mark on their calendars. There’s also a new set of submission rounds, the first of which is on May 7th (followed by August 6th and November 5th).

More from 9rules

As an aside, check out these 9rules-related links they’ve been cooking up:

  • 3by9, a blog written by the 9rules team
  • Quofda, which stands for question of the day
  • Expert Idiot, a blog about internet companies

There’s one more website I’ll discuss with more detail below.

Emersian, a design blog by Paul Scrivens

Just how prolific Paul Scrivens is boggles the mind. Emersian is an unpretentious blog about design. One of his latest entries, You Are Not A Designer, is sheer proof of that. I particuarly enjoyed this bit:

The problem is how many people can design solutions to fix the problems a site has? How many people can take the ideas of their client and translate them properly to the screen? How many designers can look passed their own style and design a site that fits the current project?

… Push your limits. Test your boundaries. Designers like to work within their comfort zone because they know what they will like. Make something ugly to possibly come up with some ideas on how to make something beautiful. When you need inspiration create your own.

He ends the piece saying Emersian is an exercise in expressing his love of design, not his expertise in it. Once again we come across a website redefining what popular notions dictate otherwise. That design is more about learning prevailing over knowing, purpose over trendiness, foundations over superficiality, possibilities over limits. It’s always a struggle balancing these pairs, but that’s part of the job.

New Look Lounge And List

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Two of the best looking websites recently changed their look. Devlounge and Ordered List have been leaders in the blogging community for some time. But that is not all they have in common; they are also both 9Rules defectors. However, I do not want to dwell on that, because it will only lead to trouble. Anyhow, these two popular sites have been refreshed and I would like to take a look at the new looks of each of them.

Devlounge and Ordered List

Ordering Up A New List

Steve Smith’s Ordered List has been one of my personal favorite designs since I began blogging. His black and blue color scheme with subtle highlighting was fantastic. Well, now all of that is gone, but let me be the first to say that I love the new look.

The motivation behind the redesign was actually to enhance the business aspect of the site. He has deemphasized the blog while enhancing the exposure of his personal company. Of course, besides the shift in the site’s philosophy, he also refreshed the look. A new brown color scheme is the most obvious change. If you would have said that it was going to be brown, I probably would have thought it was going to look terrible, but Steve pulled it off. He also subtly realigned elements, which makes sense for his new business orientation.

Ordered List

The only thing that was changed about the logo was the color scheme. Interestingly enough, I noticed that the logo was actually an unordered list, not an ordered list… But, it is still a great logo, conveying the basic idea about its namesake.

On a typographical note, I am a big fan of the way his actual posts look. The large font of the opening paragraph with the subtle line beneath really set it apart. It also helps to draw the reader in to the article. Additionally, there is a refreshing lack of advertisements. In fact, he doesn’t even have a sidebar, leaving all of the focus on the article, which is presented in a very easy to read font. Overall, the redesign is great.

Relaxing In The Lounge

The folks over at Devlounge have utilized a major technique that we preach about here at Wisdump; whitespace! That’s right, they have cleaned up their look and reemphasized their content. But somehow it still leaves something somewhat lacking.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the overall look. Yet I can’t help but notice that it seems like a bit of a step backwards, whether that was their intention or not. It resembles their previous look to a strong degree. I know that isn’t a bad thing, but I just feel slightly cheated. Again, I like the look, but a part of me is somehow slightly resentful.

Devlounge

As I mentioned before, their content has become the focus. Everything has been simplified; there are no distracting elements and advertising is at the bare minimum. There is a distinctive lack of graphical elements, which is impressive, because the site still has a tremendously professional feel. Again, this redesign was more about removing things than it was about changing or adding things. It is a quintessential grid design.

Personally, I would have preferred to see a tweaking of their previous design. I liked the artistic flair of the banner and I also thought that the magazine layout of the homepage was interesting. It was a bit complicated to navigate, but I thought it really stood out. So some enhancements would have been preferable for me, yet overall, I still like their new design.

This article was written by J David Macor.

my.9rules: Bringing Social Back

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Yesterday we launched a new version of 9rules that we like to call ‘Ali‘ (sidenote: We started using codenames for all the new versions of 9rules starting with Version 4, Phoenix, and trust me it makes things easier from a historical perspective). This version does a lot of things differently than previous versions of 9rules and adds quite a bit of new functionality. What I wanted to discuss in this entry was one of the new features of the site that we named my.9rules.

If you actually read what I write you will notice that I called my.9rules a “feature” of 9rules instead of trying to describe it as a full-blown social network, when in fact it does basically everything that other social networks do. However, there were two things that we kept in mind when working on my.9rules:

  1. We didn’t like how current social networks handled us.
  2. We wanted to actually make a social network have meaning if we were going to attach it to the 9rules brand.

Last week I asked the question of “What don’t they do well?” and I had Ali in mind when I was writing it. For me, most social networks try to sell me on too much stuff that I don’t need. I already have sites that I write on so I don’t need a blogging option. I use Flickr for sharing online photos so I don’t need another place to do that. del.icio.us handles my links and last.fm watches my music. So as you can see I really don’t need another platform to handle this data, but it would be nice to have a place outside of my sites for others to see what I am getting into.

That is the approach we took with my.9rules. We live in an open data world now. We have so many accounts setup in so many different places that it is hard to understand why some sites believe they have to give you another way to store data. In all honesty we probably couldn’t do photo-sharing better than Flickr or bookmarking better than del.icio.us so why even bother? The point shouldn’t be to lock people in so they are forced to use your site, the point is to offer them a compelling solution so that they want to use your site.

Another issue I have with social networks is they aren’t very social. Usually you get to leave a comment or send a message and that’s it. Maybe you get to be a voyeur into someone’s life, but most places simply offer a one-to-one conversation mechansim. At 9rules, we have Notes where great discussions take place yet there was no way to really get to know the people who you were having these conversations with. In a nutshell we had the “social” without the relationships and created my.9rules to fill that void.

So now you can get to know about the people you are having conversations with through their blogs, photos, links and music. This isn’t about aimlessly adding friends just to see your number go up. This is about actually building relationships with people that share the same interests as you and this is only the beginning.

Making Nothing But A Name

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When you start a company you start down a path to not only create the legacy of your own being, but the legacy of a company. I’m sure a lot of people don’t sit back and think what legacy they want their company to hold, they just want to make it rich, but at 9rules we always seemed to keep that in perspective. Of course we had a plan of how we wanted to grow and the different ways we could make money, but we wanted to stick to a couple of principles no matter which way we decided to grow or how we wanted to make money.

In any decision we make we always ask ourselves if this will be a benefit or detriment to our Members and our readers. If it ever is we scrape the idea, no matter how much money it might make us or how popular we could become. Because of decisions like that we get asked what our business plan is and how do we make our money? We always have to smile back and ask why does that matter if all we do is continue to help out people.

If 9rules was to disappear tomorrow would our legacy be that we just couldn’t make a dime (we do make our money, just saying) or that we created something special to a number of people? What about any other web company that has started up in the last two years, what’s their legacy and were they even around long enough to have one? Today is our Round 5 and as of this writing we have been averaging over one submission per minute.

One submission per minute…

So many people were waiting for us to open the doors for this round that we had 100 submissions in the first 15 minutes. It’s hard for me to offer advice on how to make a lot of money since I haven’t done that yet, but I can offer one piece of advice that I think should apply to any company. Stick to your founding principles that aim to do good and even if you succeed or fail in other areas such as financials, you can walk away at the end of the day with your head held high.

Still going for those millions though.