Over the past several weeks I've been reading everything I can get my mouse on about blogging. There are thousands of blog posts containing lists of  reasons why business owners should have a blog. Most of them mention that blogging about what you know will establish you as an expert in your field. This brings up an important question: Should you write from the point of view of an "expert", or should you write about your experiences as you go through the learning process?

Writing for the Chitika Blog Bash, Wendy Piersall from eMoms At Home writes,

"Many great blogs are ‘learning’ blogs – the author writes about what they are learning rather than what they already know. But whatever you write about, it’s important to have real-life experience behind your posts. Hollow writing makes for a hollow readership."

One of the things I've learned in my reading is that one of the most compelling reasons for a business owner to have a blog is to create a community where real conversations can take place between the business owner and her customers. A blog can bridge the communication gap that often exists with a more traditional static web site alone. If you decide to start a blog to create a more personal relationship with your readers, then (like any relationship) honesty must be foremost on the list of what to bring.

With that in mind, it makes the most sense to me to throw away the mantle of "All Knowing Expert" and don the more comfortable "Guy who is taking the time to learn about web technology and sharing this acquired knowledge with his customers" one. Hopefully by sharing my experiences as I go, I can shed some light for those who are trying to promote their small business web sites.

"Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

It’s time we learned the answers to these and other questions about web design..."

Another great resource for helping you deal with content theft is Jonathan Bailey's Plagiarism Today.  Jonathon is not a lawyer, but offers great advice and a simple guide to approaching thieves and getting stolen content removed with the least amount of hassle, the goal being to get you back to your business as quickly as possible.

I'm in the process of launching a new (and long overdue) design site for my Oregon business. Blue Hat Design is the new moniker and it will serve as a blanket site for all of my web design business. The old site, JackWheeler.com will remain operable since I am still serving Chicago web design customers.

Writing copy is the biggest barrier for me. Good sales text is never easy to create and the difficulty is compounded by the need to be aware of SEO considerations. The first step for me was to do some Google searching for web design firms in other major cities and find out how others are currently presenting themselves. I randomly chose Atlanta and did a search for "atlanta web design". The third site I opened gave me a BIG surprise. Much of the content on the home page was identical, word for word to the content on my long-in-the-tooth Chicago web design page at http://www.jackwheeler.com! I was stunned to say the least.

My first thought was Gosh! I didn't think my old sales text was of such a high quality that someone would actually steal it. Then I started to get angry. It's the epitome of laziness to steal someone else's hard work. I mean, how much more effort would it take to keep the general idea, but change things around a bit and clean it up with a couple of original thoughts?

A little bit of research and asking around brought me to Copyscape.com. These folks offer a free app on their site in which you enter a URL and it will tell you up to ten other pages with identical content. How could I resist? I popped in my URL and lo! There were 5 other URLs besides the site in Atlanta! Now I was truly stunned. A total of 6 other web designers including one quite near Chicago had the same text copy copied directly from my web site. Maybe I should go into the copy writing business. I've always thought that was a weak link in my skill-set.

One of the sites had been recently updated and had my text removed. I sent polite but firm e-mails to the webmasters of the other sites and three of them responded immediately. Two said that they had hired others to write their copy for them. The third was confused and had thought that she had written all of the text on the home page and therefore couldn't have stolen it, but she couldn't be sure that she didn't have some help from others working on the site at the time. All three of them were polite and offered to remove the offending copy right away.

It's an interesting scenario and it brings up some questions regarding duplicate content. One being, "Do the major search engines penalize you for hosting duplicate content?". I will be looking into that and other aspects of content theft and/or reprinting as I move forward since along side my own writing,  I'm considering hosting some articles that are freely distributed around the Internet. I believe the usefulness of the content will out-weigh any possible SEO penalties. We shall see.

In the concept for the BlueHat Design web site, I decided to avoid using tables for any part of the layout. My goal was standards-based, validated markup accompanied by a style sheet that would handle all of the layout tasks. Really, this should be the goal for any professional web site. Accessability is important and if your site is not readable on your next customer's Blackberry, you could be missing out. Also important is accessability for visually impaired users.

The search for a good three-column layout approach that would hold up in most browsers was not a simple task. I had several false starts before settling on the version used for the main page. I chose not to re-invent the wheel and use a template as a starting point. The one that I finally settled on is from Alex Robinson's Five Easy Companion Pieces. This is one of many options listed here: ThreeColumnLayouts (home of the css-discuss mailing list). I added quite a bit to the template including a wrapper for the content that includes a background image for the left and right borders along with the left column background color. This all could be done without the images, but both the markup and the style sheet were less complicated this way. I've done some fairly extensive testing, and I find the layout works pretty well across the board with the exception of some quirks in Opera 7, Opera 3 and of course, Netscape 4. I drew the line there. If you find bugs, please comment and let me know what browser you're using.

BlueHatDesign.com is finally coming together. The site has proven to be much more work than I anticipated. It gives me a renewed appreciation of the process each of my clients is going through as we work on their respective sites. With all of the work going on with client's sites, it's dificult to set time aside to work on my own site.

The meat of any site is the content. Everything else is just window dressing and facilitation. Granted, design and presentation along with search engine optimization is crucial to a site's success, however the content is the very purpose for the sites existence. As a designer and a (lightweight) programmer, I tend to focus on the areas that I'm best suited for. We all like to do things we're good at. Copy writing is not my first love. I can get it done, but it's like squeezing mana from rocks.

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