I’m doing something some would say one should never do. I’m redesigning this blog while it is live.

I’ve been working on all sorts of new stuff, which I have been talking about for a long time, but nothing much is showing yet. It would probably be wise to work behind the scenes, get everything working and looking just right. It would just take forever before anything shifted. Instead I am going to pick away at it and slowly morph the site into its new form.

Am I insane?

Maybe. But the approach serves two purposes. First it keeps me focused on the next step rather than being overwhelmed by the scope of the whole project. Second, it forces me to let go of perfectionism. I’m not particularly good at achieving perfection, so I might as well just throw all caution to the wind.

Shall we play find the changes?

Think of it as a game. See if you notice anything different. Or as compassion training, become curious. Of course if you read in a RSS reader or on email or Facebook, you won’t see much right away since the changes will be mostly to the theme itself. But you may have noticed I am diversifying the content, shifting its focus. Lots more to come. Hope you can be patient with the mess!

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It starts out innocently enough. Too many things to do. The thought that the blog can wait. The weeks go by. Then it becomes months. The longer the time goes, the easier it is to forget. Or ignore. Depending on the day. Just don’t look.

Victoria Brouhard ran into a similar blogging delay and offered some questions in her post,  When the Thing Becomes Too Important

So what had happened?

What rules are you trying to follow?

What are you trying to avoid?

What’s the kernel of truth in the fear?

How can you take some of the importance out of writing a post?

In the interest of actually breaking through and posting, I will answer her questions, then hit that publish button. Ready?

So what had happened?

We added an operations person to VisualsSpeak. An organized, business and detail oriented person to help strip down and rebuild the core business model. To come in and take the idea we’ve been working on and put the structure under it to support a different level of business. So now we have two artists and one business person. Two focused on big picture concepts and one how are you going to make it happen.

It’s exactly what we have needed for a long time. But it hasn’t been easy. Exhausting. Watching everything we did to the best of our ability get broken down, much of which got thrown out. Having to look deeply at entrenched behaviors that are getting in our way. Having to re-guess what might work. Change management in all its grueling finest.

What rules are you trying to follow?

That I’m supposed to offer something to my readers, something spectacular, insightful, full of wisdom. Certainly not whining about the agony of change. Or reciting the litany of things I was struggling with on a daily basis. Or admitting the vast list of really bad habits I have developed to attempt to keep my head above water.  It took all I had emotionally to get through the process, there was nothing left to allow me to take the risk of posting anything online.

What are you trying to avoid?

I discovered a limit on my ability to be transparent. A line beyond which a fragility cut off words. I wanted to paint, and couldn’t find the time. Or more truthfully, allow myself the time. The visual is the doorway to a well of emotion. I didn’t think I could process any more.

What’s the kernel of truth in the fear?

The professional is personal. No matter how much I try to manage the edges, they bleed together and affect each other. And I have limits and boundaries that keep it all in check.

How can you take some of the importance out of writing a post?

I’m declaring just posting, the act of sticking something up is enough for now. Maybe someday I’ll be profound, but in the meantime, I’m just going to start sharing as feels right. Not trying to be more than the person trying to do the right thing. Working on accepting my limitations. Trying to make a difference somehow.

Now, pressing that publish button.

Kevin Jones was stuck in an all day meeting, twittering on his iphone. I tweeted back that he should be playing iphone games. Long story short, I suggested one of my favorites for boring meetings and classes, Trism. He tweeted back, what about something not about color?

I forgot. He doesn’t see color the same as I do. And I realized all the games I like to play are based on color. What does this really mean? I went over to Vischeck, a tool that enables me to see things like he does.

Kevin, as you would say— I cry.

Nuke that website!

It all started with a colleague saying she got a strange notice when she visited our VisualsSpeak website. Then she called her web guy, who came and cleaned something off her computer. That’s how the summer started. I upgraded the software on the backend and did everything I knew how to do.

Have you noticed how vague this is? So now you know how it has felt.

While I was totally occupied with learning how to communicate over technology across cultures, Google sends me an email. Is it real? Or is it another phishing scheme? It sounded pretty dire:

We recently discovered that some of your pages can cause users to be
infected with malicious software. We have begun showing a warning page
to users who visit these pages by clicking a search result on Google.com.

and it goes on

If your site was compromised, it’s important to not only remove the
malicious (and usually hidden) content from your pages, but to also
identify and fix the vulnerability. We suggest contacting your hosting
provider if you are unsure of how to proceed

Hidden content on a WordPress site. Great. I know there is a database involved somewhere? So into the other side of the tech world. A place where they speak in tongues and letters. Since Google suggested contacting our host, we sent an email off to Bluehost. Their response?

The content of your site is your responsibility. We do not provide support for coding, development, or design. If your site has been hacked, you will need to consult a developer to resolve the issue.

Any hints? What kind of developer? Developer of what? We have no context. What do you type into Google to find such a person? What do you ask them for?

We are getting emails from our customers and collegues. Some people can get on the site, others are getting dire warnings about their computers being destroyed by our site. Not so good for PR.

Back to Bluehost. Do they know any developers? Yes, they refer us to edynamo.com Let’s just say they took our money and after 18 days have done nothing. Not happy.

Desperate acts come from not knowing what else to do.

Today we are just ripping down the whole site. Having Bluehost remove it completely from their servers.  It will take down all our email and everything else. And we’ll start over.  Then we’ll have to convince Google we have it taken care of so they remove the dire warnings from our site.

Biggest lessons?

• people who are not experts in what you do don’t know the language you speak
• search is great, but useless if you don’t know what to enter
• there are a lot of different kind of developers, I still can’t tell them apart
• there is a huge gulf between the tech side and the user side of technology
• being a fairly savvy user means nothing when there is another kind of problem
• never take a customers money if you can’t deliver (this one is a review  for edynamo.com – NOT recommended)
• we should try to meet people who understand how to fix viruses, malware, trojans, worms etc

How do customers talk about the problems they are trying to solve?

Never once during this period did I say I was concerned about a malware injection attack. If that is even what I should have been concerned about. And when I googled malware, I got sites on how to remove it from my computer not my website. I never figured out what would get the results I needed. I did get pages of what I think were code? With instructions that made no sense at all to me.

What did I say? At least the things that are fit for print:

• My site is a mess and I don’t know why.
• Malware, what do I do?
• What do I do with a broken blog?
• Help, I’m infecting my customers!

Important

If you have visited our VisualsSpeak website this summer and do not have up to date virus software installed on your computer, you should run some kind of checker/detector program. I’d like to be able to guide you to resources, but honestly I still don’t understand this whole thing. Perhaps someone who does will leave some resouces in the comments?

I’m not leaving my usual focus on all things visual, just adding my weekly report on an online blogging project I am participating in.

Day 9: Should we comment on blogs?

The thing I most appreciate about blogs is the diversity of approaches. If a blog is new, I recognize that someone may have not decided how they want to approach the blogosphere, but for a more mature blog, it seems reasonable that a blogger may make a variety of choices for reasons that are individual.

Day 10: Comment Audit

This day asked us to look at how our blogs might affect whether we get comments. Over the course of this blog, I think I have done everything on the list that might deter people. I still struggle over voice, who I am talking to, who I want to talk to, and who might care about what I have to say. Of course, this reflects some of my own confusion about the direction my business in general is moving. It’s an ongoing action research project. I try things, watch how they go, and redesign.

Day 11: Comment Policy

I have a bunch of redesign I am working on behind the scenes, so a comment policy will be added to it. I was particularly taken by Kevin’s concept, where he extends an invitation. So much more appealing to me than a policy per se.

Day 12: Comment Friendly?

Since this is a business blog, I do not feel comfortable taking moderation off for first time commentors. I have caught enough objectionable comments to feel comfortable with this.

Day 13: Post using comments

Since the comment challenge began, I have been writing posts based on reader comments or requests. It started with a comment on Sue Waters blog from Christy Tucker about her new blog header, and I responded with Does my header make my blog look fat? . Jabiz Raisdana asked about his headers on that post, so I wrote, What makes these blog headers effective? Then I got an email from Fred Deutsch so I wrote What to do with a visually noisy blog and Suggestions for a visually noisy blog.

I have enjoyed writing these posts since it has provided me concrete examples of visual patterns to demonstrate how they affect what we do online. I can’t do it all of the time, and it might be very boring after a while, but I hope it has been helpful to readers and the blog owners alike.

Day 14: Turn blog over to readers

Ok, so have you found the series on blog headers and patterns helpful? Interesting? What could I do to be more helpful? Any opinions, I’d love to hear them.

I’m not leaving my usual focus on all things visual, just adding a weekly report on an online blogging project I am participating in.

• Day 1- Commenting self-audit

Commenting has always been somewhat sporadic for me. In phases. I read over 150 blogs, most of which I read the majority of the posts, so that alone is a major time commitment. I find when I am short on time, I skip the commenting. I’m also noticing I gather insights across the blogs I read, often making connections between tidbits that mash up with pieces offline. So the responses I find emerging don’t make sense attached to one place.If I knew ahead of time which tidbits were going to align, I might be able to write the type of posts rich with links that Sue Waters, Michele Martin, and Beth Kanter are so brilliant at doing. I seem to have a more retroactive thought alignment process rather than the anticipatory ones others seem to have that know what they might need and bookmark it for later.

• Day 2- Comment on a new blog

This was easy. The comment challenge is full of blogs that are new to me. Since I train adults, I don’t follow K-12 blogs as a general rule, and the group has a lot of them. It’s been fun to explore them, they certainly have a different flavor. Not quite sure how to add value to the conversations on them yet. Instead I find myself telling those who are expressing anxiety about being behind that it’s OK. I guess I’m trying to find a common ground to share.

• Day 3- Set up comment tracking

Like so many other things I discover on these challenges, the tracking software is a matter of strategizing how I am going to change the patterns of how I engage with daily practices. I center my online life around Google Reader and Mail, so things that integrate easily are the ones that I can adopt quickly. I have installed both co.mment and cocomment, but certainly have not fully adapted to them. And so far, I have found the RSS feeds from these tools to be confusing. Especially with so many similar conversations occurring across multiple blogs.

• Day 4- ask a question in a comment

This is something I do with some regularity. What is interesting to me is how often bloggers ignore the questions I ask. Now I can understand if I ask another commenter a question that they may not see it. But as bloggers, we often get multiple notifications of comments. And I’m not talking just about the blogs with a huge amount of traffic. Leaves me wondering if it is the type of questions I ask, or the type of bloggers I’m asking.

• Day 5- comment on a post I don’t agree with

By far the hardest task for me. This is totally contrary to my online behavior, and has sparked some of the deepest reflection. Offline, I certainly have no problem disagreeing with others. I suspect there are people around me who would say I voice my disagreement too much. So why is it so different for me online? I still haven’t figured it out, and I still haven’t disagreed.

• Day 6 – engage with other commenters

It’s been nice to see the engagement with other commenters on the challenge. I have found it difficult to do this in the past. I read all/most of the comments on a post before I comment, and often try to engage with others. It’s almost like there are unspoken norms that develop on certain blogs. My favorites are the ones where the blogger and the readers talk freely and back and forth. I wonder what it takes to foster that norm?

• Day 7 – 3 Learnings

The three things that jump out to me from the first week:

1. Dedicated commenting takes an organized system to stay manageable
2. I really don’t like the idea of disagreeing online
3. There is a gap between what I like and what I am (not) creating on my own blog

August was the month for the 31days to a better blog challenge. Only there weren’t enough hours in the day to get 31days of tasks done with all of the other things in my life. So, I have extended into September, and it may take even longer.

It’s not that I haven’t been working on this every day. Blogging is pretty simple to do, but very difficult to do well. All of the little details that make a difference collectively take time. Commenting, for example, can be really important to building community. In order to comment effectively, you have to read and think about the blog you are commenting on. Takes time. And when you are reading a wide variety of blogs, there are endless links to follow and interesting paths to run off on. Soon enough, one cat is sitting on the keyboard reminding me her food is a higher priority while the others are trying cute, leg rubbing and other assorted tactics. They are pretty hard to resist.
Days 20-22

The day 20 reader survey has been postponed through the infinite wisdom of Alex Miller. I am working on my Day 21 Reader focus posting about Sue Waters for BlogCascadia, as we have a program coming up on M-Learning next week. Sue’s blog, podcasts, and wiki are incredible resources in this area. Day 22 is posting to help new readers catch up on the focus of my blog, which I’m thinking will be a good follow up after determining my blog’s mission for Day 28.

Day 23: Go on a dead link hunt

This was a surprising task for me. I assumed since my blog is only 5 months old, I wouldn’t have dead links. But I did. I learned when I link to pages for specific events, often those pages are taken down after the event is over. I used two services to find the problem links, W3C checker and Xenu.

The W3C checker was fast, but it returned a list of broken urls, without telling me which page they were on. I didn’t want to sit down and fix them all at once by following the links then going to the admin for each one.

Xenu Link sleuth just seemed easier to use. The reports include multiple ways to listing the dead links, which were more conducive to working on them in smaller batches.

Day 24 is for search engine optimization. At this point if I can write for humans I’m happy. Someday when this all becomes second nature, I will be happy to focus on writing for machines.

Day 25 sent us shopping to learn about blogging, but I decided to go bike riding for blog learning instead.

For Day 26 we linked up to a complementary site. I chose to write a post about the book Visual Learning that Xplane, The Visual Thinking Company has republished. Today I got a call inviting me to facilitate at a conference as a result. Sweet!

Day 27 had us searching for a sponsor for our blog. Somehow I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet. Visual communication just hasn’t quite reached the pulse of the blogsphere mainstream yet.

Day 28 is for blog mission statement and I intend to work on this on two long flights across the US this weekend.

Day 29 was focused on thanking people who link to us. Common courtesy, which Alex Miller wrote a great post about.

Day 30 Social Media Sites. I’m really trying here. I have my Linked in profile. I have a Facebook account with only a couple of friends, and I keep trying to get the value of Twitter by following around a couple of other challenge participants. The key learning for me is these sites work when you have a critical mass of connections who are actively participating. My professional and personal networks still prefer face to face and email. When I do go to most of these sites, I feel like someone who has arrived at the party too early, or maybe better yet, the chaperone who just knows the real fun stuff is happening just out of my sight. I’m going to keep trying.

Day 31 is to take a strategic look at our blogs. This will come after setting the base line in my mission statement.

There have been a lot of really wonderful things that have come out of this process, and I will write about more of them soon. One of the best is that the group who worked on this, motivated by Michele Martin, has decided to go forward with the Building a Better Blog Community. After only five days, the group has more than doubled. I look forward to continuing learning with this global online community.

I have been participating in the 31 days to a better blog challenge for 28 days, and I must say I will be sad when it ends. Not because I don’t have enough things to do to finish said challenge, as a matter of fact, it will probably take me more than another 31 days to do it. No, it’s the community of people who have formed around it. All slogging through a similar experience in very different ways. It’s been great journeying with you, and I hope it goes forward in some new form.

It’s hard to even isolate the daily tasks anymore, so I’m taking a new tack, and bringing forward a new type of reflection. At the beginning of the summer, I attended a workshop with Rita Bailey, during which we came up with an example to apply the learning. The result of which was me getting a new bike. This is the bike I rode in the Providence Bridge Pedal where I learned about Spontaneous Stereotyping and Storytelling. So I’ve been off riding again, this time on a 21 mile trail created on an old railroad bed. I learned a bit about training, and a realized a few things about blogging too.

This bike ride was very much like the 31 day blogging challenge, in that it looked pretty easy at first. It was a gentle uphill grade, but it went on for miles. Sort of like the daily challenges, each one is simple enough, but adding a new one day after day, it accumulates. Just like my thighs on that long hill, I started to feel the burn. Because really to improve your blog, you have to take each challenge and incorporate it into a new way of doing things as you move forward. After two weeks, you are adding 14 new things to an already busy schedule of work and family.

In the center of this 21 mile path, you hit gravel, then mud, then a steep downhill and uphill with loose big gravel. Suddenly, the ride gets a lot harder. There have been some challenge days that felt like that. Great idea, but do I really want to take the time to figure out how to do it? On the ride, I didn’t want to disappoint my husband who was riding with me, and on the challenge, I didn’t want to disappoint the rest of the challenge participants. I had to find a way to keep going.

After a bit more gravel we hit a gentle downhill that was a great relief, and reminded me of the days the challenge tasks were to do something around advertising or monetizing a blog. Yes, I get to rest a bit. But guess what, after getting to the end, we had to turn around and come back up that gentle downhill. More tasks.

Then back through the gravel, the mud, the steep hills with rocks. This time though, it was easier. We knew what was coming, we could pace ourselves. Like the tasks from the earlier days of the challenge are getting easier to incorporate into the blogs.

Eventually we got to the top of what had been the long slow climb uphill. Only this time, it was a glorious several mile downhill coast with the sun streaming through the trees. I hope in a few months the tasks from the challenge will be incorporated into how I do things, and it will feel like a glorious downhill ride. I’m looking forward to it.

So, instead of going shopping to learn about blogging as per the day 25 task, I went on a bike ride. And I realized I have to ride at my own pace and enjoy the process. Tasks completed, at least they will be in their own time.

Creative ways to manage challenge overload.

The challenge continues, and it continues to be challenging. The crew is getting creative in finding ways to get the TASK COMPLETED, Done , Progress = Completed

Day 15: Make your posts sticky. Hey that worked! I have made posts on related themes.

Day 16: Create a heatmap of where readers click on your blog This was helpful as it showed me I had a category that was named About VisualsSpeak as well as the usual About at the top of the page. People were clicking on both, so I assume it was confusing. I went to change the name of the category, and realized the posts that were in there weren’t always remember to click on it.

Day 20: Run a reader survey I’m going to wait on this one until after the new site/blog is up. We will be going through user testing and asking for feedback on the new designs. Perhaps some of you will take a look?

Other challenges of the challenge.

Noticing those highlighted t’s are you? That is the Diijo demon at work. On Michele’s suggestion, I installed the toolbar to make it easier to keep track of things I find on the web. For some reason, it thinks t should be colored, or is it only on my computers? I have gone into the code and removed it four times, and the demon keeps putting it back in. If anyone knows how to tame this monster, do let me know.

On the Google versus Netvibes, the battle continues there also. I must say, I keep going back to my Google Reader, it is easier to read long lists of blog posts for me. Netvibes also continues to mark posts as unread that I have already marked read. Will function overtake beauty? Will my art degree be revoked? Stay tuned.

And how incompetent can a usually competent person feel? Try Twitter, Faceboook, Ning? So far, it’s like a junior high party where no one knows what to do, and I am feeling awkward and unsure. A colleague referred to it being like parties where everyone is watching the Cheetos go stale. Yes. I’m hanging in there waiting to see the great value I hear about.

And Tim keeps reminding me of the importance of photos. Yes, we are professional photographers and visual communication specialists. And I have used less images in the past 20 days than ever before. I’m going to have to do a photo post just to remember how. I do most of my posting from home on a PC, but all the software and images are on my Mac in the office. More organization needed to get what I need accessible from where I need it.

Hang in everyone, I am thrilled to be learning with you. And if you didn’t join the challenge this time, it is a great learning experience. I’m sure you’ll be seeing more from this group in the future.

The blogging challenge continues. It is getting harder and harder to execute the cumulative suggestions, keep up with all the other participants, keep commenting on their work, and execute all the ideas fostered by seeing what they are all doing. Especially multiplied by two blogs. And run a start-up business alongside my volunteer board work. I am still fully engaged, I am just having a hard time getting to everything. I am enjoying learning about all sorts of new things through the regular posts the challenge participants are writing beyond the challenge posts themselves.

Day 11: Look at your stats

I have Google Analytics on this blog, and MyBlogLog on BlogCascadia. While MyBlogLog gives quick and easy overview, it was not nearly as instructive for looking at what was really going on. For some reason I have yet to identify, I have not been able to get Google Analytics to work on BlogCascadia, perhaps because the blog is in a directory rather than the root folder?

In the meantime from MyBlogLog, I can see Blogcascadia is building readers, and people are reading and clicking on the whole range of categories of posts. By the clustering of articles, it does seem that people are coming with particular interests, and reading the posts related to that topic. We only have 28 posts so far, but have 46 comments on them, so we are building some engagement. It started between the multiple authors, but more people have joined us recently.

This blog is a bit older, just under four months. In the last month I was pleased to see the visits up 67%, pages up 33%, bounce rate down 17.3% pageviews up 124%, time onsite up 45% and new visits down 13%. While this did help me see I was improving, drilling down is where the more helpful things emerged.

The referrers section was particularly helpful. Readers coming from other blogs I have commented on are mostly new readers, spend a minute or two on the site and read a page or two so the bounce rate (those staying a short time or reading 1 page) is close to 100%. Readers coming from the challenge sites, have about a 75% bounce rate. Those coming from BlogCascadia are at 57%. This all shows me the majority are not finding value on the site. Could be that it is primarily aimed at my customer base?

I think so. Here is where things improve. Those who are coming in directly read an average of 4.36 pages, and spend 20:53 minutes on the site for a bounce rate of 44%. Those coming in from my company newsletter read 5.15 pages, and spend 21:20 on site for a bounce rate of 35%.

I certainly seem to have a better sense of how to engage my customer base than I do readers from the general blogsphere. This may be perfectly OK. It’s part of a larger strategic analysis we do on an ongoing basis for the company. Our original intent was to serve our customers by delivering more application ideas through the blog. If we decide we wanted to use it to reach new customers, we would probably need to make some significant changes to the current content. Since the blog is young, I am watching, but not ready to jump to a new direction yet.

Day 12: Introduce yourself to another blogger Day 13: Join an affiliate

I am giving myself a break here. I know my limits, and I am close enough to them to not seek new contacts right now. I am not blogging to build traffic for advertising, so an affiliate doesn’t apply.

Day 14: Analyze your peers

The original suggestion was to analyze competition, but I think of other blogs as peers. Great suggestions here, and nowhere near enough time right now to spend doing a thorough job. I do look at other blogs all the time with an eye to what they are doing well, and follow a considerable number on a regular basis. I wish I could find more companies who are developing facilitation tools. Love to hear of any you know about.

New challenge participants

Welcome to the minilegends, a group of 9 year olds from Australia.