New WordPress Theme. New Blog.
After moving to a new host, I thought it was about time to update to a new theme. I was unhappy with many of the free themes I have been seeing, and right now I don’t have the time to build my own. I have been noticing the amazing themes being created over at ThemeForest and saw one that I thought would fit perfect with what I want out of the site. Clean with great UX. I pulled the trigger and bought the Dispatch theme, which I have been thrilled with so far.
On top of launching the new theme, I’m going to really attempt to write more often. My writing is a little rusty and the only way to get better is to write more often. Expect to see articles from all types of topics and coming weekly. 2010 has been a great year so far, and hopefully the last couple months will be great as well.
Wiki This! Tips On Deploying a Successful Wiki
Wikis have been around for a number of years, but it is becoming more important for business to provide a simple yet powerful web solution to share information between departments and teams within a company. None of this is new, but many have tried to deploy a wiki within an office with little success for a number of reason. Perhaps the team doesn’t want change? Rollout timing is never good? Feature set doesn’t fit needs? Fear of ramp up? Well there isn’t a perfect wiki or a perfect answer to many of the concerns above, but the best thing you can do is to deploy a solution and grow it with your team with some specific caveats.
1. User Experience is #1
There are tons and tons of Wikis out there, all of them do something great, but every single one has faults. Deciding on which wiki to use can be difficult, but the first thing you need to look at is the user experience and the ease of use. How difficult will it be for a user to enter information in and how difficult is it for a user to find and use that information? The answer to these should be as easy as humanly possible.
I tend to get a lot of people overwhelmed by showing them a wiki with a good WYSIWYG editor. So many buttons, but really all you need to start is bold, italics, numbers/bullets, alignment, linking, and image embed. These are the basic that 99% of most documents would use. Using these should be SUPER EASY! Easy as if they were writing the document in Word.
Also all WYSIWYG editors aren’t the same. Some are unduly complicated and still force the user to perform some tasks as HTML, which is unacceptable.
2. Search is King
So you have all this amazing information in your wiki, but it doesn’t mean a thing unless you have a robust search. While getting information into the wiki is important, robust and easy search is the feature that will allow it to gain traction within your company. Your search should allow the user to sort and filter in various ways, and it should be simple. Find all documents by Collin posted in the last seven days. This should be an easy task to perform, and if your wiki doesn’t allow you to do this, then it fails.
3. Easy to Link to Internal & External Documents
This goes along with the WYSIWYG editor being powerful yet easy. One place where wikis breakdown is a poor search which leads to duplicate pages. One way to reduce this is to make linking to other pages within the wiki extremely simple. In the ideal world you can just highlight the text you want to link, click a button which leads to search, and then you can just select a page. Making it easy for someone to find and link to a relevant document makes your documentation more robust as well as cuts down on redundant information.
4. Allow Easy Exporting
As your wiki grows and documents change or updated, you sometimes will need to review them out of the office. Having ways to easily generate a Word Document or Adobe PDF come in very handy for reviews. This feature should be built into the wiki and should be performed by a single click (or two). Using Print to PDF is not a great option as formatting may change.
5. Define a Template for Certain Documents
If you have documents that will be written up a number of times, then it would be a good idea to define a template that anyone can use. Having a base format has a number of benefits including, easier to read, consistency in where specific information location, and naming conventions. This can sometimes be a sticky subject as everyone writes in their own fashion, but once you setup some documents as the key or have the ability to create new documents based on a template allowing users to just enter information, it will catch on.
6. Task someone to be the Librarian
As awesome as some of the better wikis on the market these days you still have pages being placed in the wrong places, incorrect links, or duplicate document. You will need someone to manage not necessarily adding the content, but watching it mature over time. Someone that can be an expert on the software used as well as maintain a clean information system, such as naming conventions and labels.
These are just five simple rules that can help your wiki gain popularity within your office. If you have some comments on what has worked for you I’d love to hear it. Please post in the comments with your suggestions and feedback.
Company Videos. Selling Yourself Through Humor.
I am a huge fan of self produced company videos. Providing a view from inside is always compelling and the consumer is expecting this type of material to be standard. Many companies spend a great deal of money on these videos and while some are well produced and do the job, I am a fan of the more off the cuff style videos. The videos that display the personality of the company as well as provide good insight on the products or services the company provides. I personally become more attached to a product, company, or personality if I can easily relate with them, which is why humor is so important in these types of videos.
While researching business cards, I found Moo, an international print house specializing in custom printing with a great sense of humor. While searching I stumbled across some videos promoting their paper stocks and their processes. These short, both under two minutes, videos provided me with compelling information why I should order cards from Moo, but also provided an entertaining display of humor via smart dialogue, catchy music, and slick motion graphics.
[jwplayer config="video" mediaid="731"]
[jwplayer config="video" mediaid="735"]
[jwplayer config="video" mediaid="736"]
As you can see from the videos, they are filled with great information on the product, but also provide some insight on the personalities and humor of the company and staff. You don’t see many videos become viral that don’t have some level of humor in them. Either it be the Old Spice Campaign or 99% of the Super Bowl ads. Making people laugh is good. They aren’t laughing at you or your product.
New Category. Social Media
I have some time on my hands these days while I search for a new job, so I’ll be writing about some of my opinions on Social Media. Lots of exciting things going on and it changes everyday. Stay tuned.
The Blog Once a Week Challenge
So I have been running Shinyidol.com for ages now, 2004 to be exact, but my updates are somewhat scarce. Well I am making a challenge to update once a week. Yes, I think I have said this before, but I really think it is time to push the blog for good and heal humanity of its limited voice of myself. So get your reading glasses going and get ready for more posts, more content, and more coll stuff from yours truly.