Sharpen before you chop

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When we’re building a website at GreenMellen, it’s typically around a six month process. Despite a website being largely a visual creation, the design doesn’t begin until we’re roughly two months into the project. How is that possible?

When it comes to websites, or any kind of marketing, the message is what’s most important. Wrapping it up in a beautiful design will help to catch more eyes, but when those people start reading hopefully you’ll speak to them in a way that they appreciate. Aiming to serve your past self can be a good way to start, as your past issues (that your company now solves) will likely speak to a lot of people.

It’s like the old quote from Abraham Lincoln that said:

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Diving in an picking a theme and colors for your new website might be fun, but taking the time to establish your messaging and purpose first will lead to far better results.

WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin

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I’ve not talked much about specific gadgets or plugins lately, but I’m finding tremendous value from the (free!) WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin.

While I publish a new post every day on this blog, I write them in batches as I have time. As a result, I generally have 5-10 posts ready to go that are drafted in the system.

Pretty quickly I saw how messy this could get. In the normal WordPress view, drafted posts are just mixed in with published ones, and it was hard to get a quick glance at what’s ready to go.

Further, I sometimes have a specific order for a few posts (if one concept ideally follows another), and that was kind of tricky as well. This plugin helped a lot, and it’s very simple.

Here is a screenshot of how it works:

It shows a history of what I’ve published, and it puts any new draft posts in the “unscheduled” bucket on the right. When you know where you want to put it, you just drag it to that date on the calendar.

From there, you can choose to have posts automatically publish at the scheduled time, or just leave it as a draft for you to manually post. I personally leave them all as drafts so I can give it one last readthrough before I publish to hopefully catch any lingering typos.

If you have a lot of posts to try to keep up with on your site, I’m finding the Editorial Calendar plugin to be a great help!

If you’re not yet blogging, I’ve created a course to help you get started, including a video that goes more in-depth on how I use this specific plugin. Check it out here if you’re interested.

Learn to answer the same questions

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I refer to Seth Godin a good bit on this blog, as he’s someone that puts out excellent content — and has done so consistently for the last 20 years.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that along with Seth, Chris Lema is someone how has made great use of a daily blogging habit. From my perspective, the value comes out in their ability to clearly articulate answers when people have questions.

This comes from them chewing on and answering those questions in their blog over the years, as I’m trying to do to some degree here. As a result, they have well-formulated answer to common questions.

With Seth in particular, I notice that he has the same set of answers for the same set of questions. At first it bothered me a little bit because “I’ve already heard that story before”. As I pondered it, though, I came to see the good side of it.

First, it’s a great answer. He’s heard the question before, and has a solid answer for it that he’s ready to share.

Second, most people haven’t heard it before. The fact that I recognized an anecdote in The Practice that I heard on his podcast six month ago probably isn’t something that many people notice.

If I continue down this path, I should begin to have solid answers for a lot of great questions. If you are around me often enough, you may hear some of the same stories pop up from time to time, and I realize now it’s perfectly fine (and even ideal) to do that.

Graduate from Harvard or just drop out?

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While it’d be almost impossible to prove, it’s been said that the average Harvard dropout has a higher net worth than the average Harvard graduate. When you factor in a few insanely wealthy dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, it might be right.

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Of course, this is just a good example being able to lie with statistics. While the average/mean net worth of Harvard dropouts might be higher thanks to Gates and Zuckerberg, the median net worth is likely higher for those that graduated. Dropping out probably isn’t your best move.

Just get accepted

Related, Seth Godin says that simply being accepted to Harvard is good enough:

It turns out that students who apply to Harvard and get in but don’t go are just as successful and at least as happy throughout their lives as the ones who do attend. Try to imagine any other branded investment of that size that delivers as little.

This comes from an amazing 36,000 word piece from Seth a few years ago called Stop Stealing Dreams, which is free for anyone to read. His main idea is that our educational system was built for training factory workers and society has out-paced it.

His bigger point with that quote, though, is that being smart and driven (which often go hand-in-hand) is the key to a happy life. Being smart and driven is a great way to accepted to Harvard, and you can attend if you want, but if you’re a self-learner that is always striving for more you’ll succeed either way.

If you’ve never read that piece of his before, consider it your next “book” — it’s going to take a few hours to work through it but it’s well worth every minute of your time.

Reputation vs Character

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Your reputation is important. At GreenMellen, we help companies with reputation management to make sure their best side is showing to the world. However, we don’t do that for just any company; we need to know that their character is solid first and that’s a very different thing.

The late, great basketball coach John Wooden said it best:

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

I’ve seen a similar quote from Bohdi Sanders, who says:

Your reputation is what others think of you; your character is what you truly are. Reputations can be manipulated; character can only be developed and maintained.

That’s the key. We can help with your reputation or you can work on it yourself, to some degree, but if you lack character there is no way to hide it for very long.

Who is that feature really for?

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I was in an interesting Twitter discussion recently where the idea of having website links open in new tabs came up.

You know what I mean; sometimes when you click a link on a website, the new site replaces what you’re viewing, but sometimes instead they automatically open up in a new browser tab. So which way is better? It depends on your perspective.

Most of the arguments in favor of new tabs come from a personal perspective, the most common of which is “I want to keep my site open so that people don’t really leave it“. That makes sense, but is it best for your user? Probably not.

Chris Coyier wrote a great post a few years ago with reasons against it, which I tend to agree with. Along with his solid reasons, opening those new tabs are bad for some users with disabilities, as it makes it more difficult for them to browse the web.

Who is that feature really for? Your users or you?

Footer Links

It was more than a decade ago when I first wrote this, but it still applies today — putting a “designed by” link at the bottom of a site that you build is selfish, and most discussions will quickly reveal it.

I’ve seen a number of posts about putting those links down there (or not), and they always say things that discuss the impact of it on the designer’s site (from getting that backlink), not from the perspective of the client. Those discussions are always about the site owner, not the end user.

Sliders

The other place I often see this is with home page sliders, where a bunch of images are in a carousel and they expect the site visitor to kick back and watch them go by. Yeah, they won’t.

I want…

The phrase I’ve learned to watch out for when building a site is “I want…”. It can come from a good place, but building a website the way you want, instead of the way the end customer would want it, is likely a bad idea.

Some quick tips for an ADA-compliant website

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While a website can’t technically be “ADA-compliant”, as they have no specific rules for websites, following the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) will get you a long way toward it. I’m certainly not a lawyer, and you can dig much deeper than what I present here, but these tips will easily put you in the top 1% of websites in terms of accessibility.

With website accessibility-related lawsuits on a rapid rise, here are some quick things you can do to help.

Use a solid theme. Picking some fancy theme with 10,000 built-in features is just asking for trouble.

Use alt text. If you add an image to your page, put proper alt text on it.

Don’t set links to open in new tabs. That’s a good thing for you, not for your users.

Add labels to form fields. Most form plugins will do this for you, but make sure.

Use headings. I don’t have many on this post, but I use H2, H3, etc as appropriate when writing.

Use text, not pictures of text. Include photos if you want, but don’t bury text in them.

Add an accessibility statement. If lawyers do come sniffing around, this will help deter them to search for easier prey. If you don’t know where to start, just steal and tweak mine.

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It’s beyond time to have any excuse to have a website that isn’t friendly to all of your visitors.

Bonus: All of these things are great for your search engine rankings too.

Make More Pots

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One of the core ideas in Seth Godin’s book The Practice is the idea of continually working hard to refine your craft. Case in point, he said that “if you want to complain that you don’t have any good ideas, please show me all of your bad ideas first.” People that have worked through a lot of bad ideas tend to come up with some great ones.

It’s closely related to an idea in the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland about making ceramic pots:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

The idea of focusing on making a single great pot sounds good, but most of us will do a stunningly better job on our 20th pot than our first one.

The same goes for your art, writing or anything else that you practice. Trying and failing more times than everyone else is likely the best way to make your work remarkable.

Learning in public

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The concept of learning in public has grown a lot in 2020. I sort of do it with this blog, but the idea of a “digital garden” has been a big way that people are taking their learning public. Anne-Laure Le Cunff has a great post about that, along with example of digital gardens that she likes to follow.

This leads to an excellent video I saw from Doug Neill, where he unpacks some of Elizabeth Gilbert’s thoughts (author of “Eat, Pray, Love”) on learning in public. Here is his video:

He references the full interview that Elizabeth had on the Chase Jarvis show, which you can watch here.

Doug’s summary included four great insights:

Keep the distance short between learning and sharing

When you learn something new, sharing it relatively soon after can be a good practice. It forces you to unpack what you’ve learned and try to gain insights from it.

Learning in public keeps you tethered to reality

As Elizabeth says, learning in public creates “compassionate alignment with reality”, because you’ll tend to treat yourself like you’d treat a close friend. You’ll give encouragement when needed, talk them down when needed, and help keep things on a more focused path.

Have more curiosity than fear

It can be scary to share things in public, not knowing how others might think. That fear will never completely go away, but you just need to have more curiosity than fear to keep going. Curiosity drives advancement, so don’t give it up too easily.

Focus on the path

Lastly, Elizabeth shares that she feels she has “responsibility to this path, not to readers or followers”. If you strive to write for your followers, you’ll stop being so curious and instead have a set direction to go, which isn’t the point. Praise and criticism are both vapor, so just stick to your path.

If you have three minutes, check out Doug’s video. When you have a spare hour, it’s worth your time to watch Chase’s full interview with Elizabeth. If you’re ready to start learning in public with your own blog, this short course can help you quickly get started.

Learning without memory is fruitless

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As I’m taking the time to read and write more often, I’m also trying to work on ways to better retain what I’m learning. For years, I’d read books and pick up new ideas, but those ideas would quickly fade in the months after reading the book.

Because of that, when I read books now I often wonder if maybe I’ve read that same book in the past and simply don’t remember it, as I explained about “Essentialism” in this post a while back.

That post about Roam Research is a big part helping me remember what I read, and I outlined it a bit more in the post about my big reading shortcut. In many cases, I’m literally putting more effort into remembering what I read than I actually put into the reading itself.

Anki and Memory Palaces

I’ve mentioned other memory tools that I’ve used, such as Anki, which gives me a handful of flashcards each day to help me recall things that I’ve chosen to remember. I get into more depth about Anki in my post about the Digital Efficiency Framework if you want to see how it fits into my day.

There are also techniques like The Memory Palace that I’ve read about and understand, but really haven’t make much use of. Joe Turner does an excellent job of teaching some of those kinds of techniques, so reach out to him if you need help with learning new memory hacks.

Daily Stuff

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More recently, though, I’m trying to work on the other daily ways to help improve memory. This includes:

It’s easier said than done, but hopefully as I get better in those four areas, it’ll help with clarity of my mind as well.

Do you do anything intentional to help with your memory? Let me know in the comments.