We all know there’s a certain age when boys run away from girls and never ever want to play with them. Well, imagine what it’s like to be a girl who likes boys’ games at that age! It all changes into: “I can’t play with you, the other boys will laugh at me”, “Go get your dolls and play with the girls”, “You, play football? No way!” and other such lines. As I was the type of girl who loved football, climbing trees, running and fighting boys, you can imagine I had a hard time doing the things I loved.

So basically, I was trying to get them to see things from my perspective. To get them to listen, understand and come to agree with me. Sounds a bit like PR to you? It does to me! So here’s a few things I picked up.

1. Giving up is rarely an option, but sometimes it’s worthwhile

I had a limited numbers of children to try convince on my street. The boys where the ones with power. I used to follow them around and keep asking them to let me play. It rarely worked. But it sometimes did. Right now, I am trying to reach a limited number of publications (online and offline). Let’s face it, mail servers are not as easy or as hot as cool phones and other gadgets. And for those interested in such matters, there are plenty of stories to tell. I just have to keep on trying.

On the other hand, trying to get the girls to play football and climb trees instead of making doll fashion shows didn’t work that well. I was really targeting the wrong group!

2. Whenever you have something really cool, everyone is interested!

Being the first kid on the block with a skateboard from Germany really made me a shiny star. And I negotiated a lot of fun games with the boys for rides on it. Also, having a new shiny ball when the one used for the game gets crashed under a car led to the same great results for yours truly.

Later I found out nothing beats a great story. If your product or service is really useful and what you launch or say is newsworthy, it will be picked up by the press. Having huge budgets helps, but so does playing smart.

3. When they need you, they know where to find you

My friend Dragos is a great example. We were raised together, living next door, and we were great friends. We were inseparable inside, but when we went outside, he completely ignored me. He didn’t want the rest of the boys to laugh at him.

Yet the moment we went inside and he had no other playmate, he wasn’t running away from me anymore. He actually came by or user our special knock in the wall to invite me over to his house. I would go wild playing with remote control cars

4. The situation changes in time

If you play your cards right, work on building strong relationships, they pay off. When it comes with girls and boys, we know how things get better a few years later. Same goes for your PR efforts. If you put your heart and mind to it, your emails are actually read, you see more reviews being published and people get to know your company’s name. It a really cool feeling actually!

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Guest post by Alex Cristache

Did you know that every second a new blog is published somewhere in the World? That’s 84,600 new blogs everyday! Some of them are personal blogs, others are targeted, niche blogs. If you are running a niche blog, just think about how many competitors add up each day, eager to overtake your position, authority and search engine rakings. It’s a tough world for a blogger and to insure your success you must take advantage of every “weapon” at your disposal. My weapon of choice for today is Blog Design.

No matter if you are running a personal or business (niche) blog, you should always keep in mind that your blog is who you are, it’s your profile on the internet and a mirror for yourself. It is said that you can’t find two identical people, so why should we find 2 identical blogs?

Blog writers allover the World, agree on one thing: Give your posts a personal touch; make your presence felt on your blog. The same rule applies when it comes to blog design. These days we have hundreds of resources at our disposal, most of them even free. We have free and premium themes, we have plugins and widgets and we have experts giving away free advice on their own blogs. What we don’t have is an excuse not to make a difference by using them!

While a designer will always choose to create a new theme for his blog, the rest of us will have to search for a premium theme that will best serve our interests, or get a free theme that would need to be customized for a better use. Premium themes usually come packed with almost every option that a professional blog would need, so I’m not going to talk about them. Instead, I’ll concentrate on things that need to be taken in consideration when creating a new theme, or customizing a free one.

Choosing the best resolution for you theme

At this time, there is no fixed resolution that can provide accessibility to 100% of your readers. It pretty much depends on your blog’s target and your statistics.
My preferred resolution for design is 1024×768, since it has become widely used, but still there are people using old monitors, or simply don’t need a higher resolution and are using still 800×600. Look at your statistics and compare the two. If the 800×600 users are only a small percentage of your total (mine is around 0.64%), you should definitely make use of more of your available space.

Also, when choosing the right layout resolution you should consider your blog’s structure: 2 columns or 3 columns. If you’re going for 2 columns, you could easily use 800×600, but if you’re choosing a 3 columns layout, you should give your content enough space to “breathe” by using a larger resolution, preferably 1024×768. Always, make sure to eliminate the scrollbar width from you layout’s width (~40 pixels).

Structure and layout

Before designing or choosing a free theme to customize, take a moment to think ahead. Consider you blog’s evolution, advertising needs, required sections etc. These are all important factors in your decision when choosing a 2 or 3 column design. If you’re running a news blog, a 3 column design would most probably serve your needs better. It provides enough space to list recent, popular and featured articles, archives and categories, authors, advertising zones, links and whatever you might want to add at a future time.

Another important thing to consider is your sidebar placement. As most of us are right-handed, and the website’s scrollbar is on the right side, I’ll almost always go for a right-aligned sidebar for navigation purposes, since it’s closer to the users’ action zone. Placing the sidebar on the left has its advantages too. There are many resources online that can confirm the fact that a website’s main heat zone is top to mid-top left. This means that your users will scan your blog starting there and loose interest while advancing to the right and further down to the bottom. Still, I’m choosing the right side, as the heat map is relevant only when providing good, interesting, content, and I’m still to see the internet user more interested on clicking links than reading a good article.

When using a 3 column theme, make sure that your main navigation items are place on the first sidebar, not the one on the right. This gives the low-resolution users the ability to further browse you blog.

Make use, but don’t abuse, the white space. Having a clear separation area between sections and between blog posts it’s extremely important, as it help users scan faster for the desired content. When fighting for a lower bounce rate, making sure your reader finds his way easily around your blog becomes a top priority! Consider at least a 20 to 30 pixels space between your sidebar(s) and the content, and between 2 successive blog posts.

Highly important items and sections

When building up traffic (visits), three factors are essential: the number of pages viewed per visit, the time spent on your site and the bounce rate. These factors can all be improved by providing your readers with means to continue their navigation on your blog.

Always consider having a list of recent and popular items displayed on your sidebar, or at the end of your article, when reading the full post.

Give your users the option to search for relevant content by placing a search box in a visible area in the upper part (above the fold) of your blog. While most blogs automatically place a link to your RSS feed, most of the time it’s placed at the end of your sidebar. Consider repositioning that link closer to the top, and also, adding an option of email subscription.

Place your blog’s categories in an easily accessible and visible area. It serves both as a way to further guide your readers and as a statement of what your blog is all about!

The tag cloud is a great section that can guide your readers through your blog’s most popular topics. Make sure you place it in a visible area, or create a separate page that includes the tag cloud, like I do on my website.

Through phrases in your post and links in your template, guide your readers to the comment section. It’s highly important to add interactivity to your blog. Debates can lead to new content ideas or you might even learn a few new things!

Final thoughts

While having a well designed and structured blog is not enough to ensure your online success, it can easily make a difference between two equivalent-content-quality blogs.
Think ahead, plan, make the right choices and you’ll have a better chance against the thousands of new blogs breathing down your neck every day!

Alex Cristache is 27 and has been working for top Romanian web design, development and consultancy companies for over 9 years. Quite impressive for his young age, don’t you agree?

He’s tried a lot up to now: web designer, senior web, print & logo designer, occasional copywriter, web & SEO consultant and project manager. Although he focuses on design, he’s also been working with PHP & MySQL on the side. He also fell in love with WordPress the moment it appeared on the market and changed our lives.

He currently blogs at Blogsessive.com and runs CREATIVEurope, a website bookmarking the best European creative portfolios available.

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Some of you might already know this because I started bugging you with it months ago. I will be spending two weeks in the US and in Canada in mid-May! I believe this is a really nice opportunity to meet some of you in real life, therefore I am posting my entire travel schedule.

First Stop, Chicago!

I will be attending ISPCON in Chicago, an Internet industry event mainly targeted at service providers. It will all happen from May 13 to 15, but I’ll arrive in Chicago on May 12 in the morning. My company is one of the events sponsors, so if you’d like a free invite to the exhibition hall, do drop me a line!

New York, New York!

We’ll be in New York from May 15 in the evening till May 18. We only have some meetings scheduled here, no big events. And Saturday afternoon is pretty much free, so I’ll have a lot more time to meet you!

Moving on to Washington DC

AXIGEN, through its lovely two girls, Silviana and I, will then be attending a two day (May 19,20) Parallels summit. Parallels is our partner and we’ll be there to get to know their customers and other partners. Honestly, I’ll be mostly there to meet the press We’re on a pretty tight schedule here, but I still have some spare time Sunday afternoon (May 18) and I am sure I can arrange other meetings as well.

Toronto, Last Stop before Home!

We’ll be arriving in Toronto on May 21 and we’ll be here until the 23rd. Our partner, Nina IT is organizing a seminar for potential customers here. I’ll be mostly open to press and friends meetings as the seminar presentation and networking will be handled by Silviana.

So, if any of you can find the time for a short coffee break with me, do let me know! It would be lovely to see you there!

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So lovely to see you all again on such a warm spring Sunday! It’s been a while, but our brunch is back and I can’t wait to share a few treats with you. I’ve prepared some really good dishes for you today and I for one will start with a fresh cup of orange juice! What will you have?

Today’s first reading recommendation is from Confident Writing where Joanna Young asks a very good question: do you realize the power of your words? Great piece pointing us to an aspect we should really stop and think about, also adorned with great photos.

Life happens to all of us. The long wait till today’s brunch definitely shows no one can get away That is why I believe you’ll all appreciate Karen Swim’s advice on Words for Hire helping you manage your business in such less desirable situations.

All bloggers realize how important it is to have a professional logo designed and how it makes it easier for other to visualize a brand, be it personal or corporate. If you are also thinking how to get a logo in a reasonable price range, head over to Blogging Bits to find just what you need. If you want to know where I got my logo, I can definitely tell you. Trisi of GreenIdentity is responsible for it and she’s one quite a few logo design contests on Sitepoint.

Wonder how to make StumbleUpon work for you? Tad Chef of SEO 2.0 has a great story for you. Find out how to get an SU submission reviewed 200 times.

Should you say good-bye to cold calling. ReadWriteWeb shows us that in the Web 2.0 world, warm introductions are far more effective. So switch from rolodexes to LinkedIn, blogging or twitter to build meaningful business relationships.

My last recommendation will really make you laugh. Yet everything it says is nothing but the truth. Copyblogger has just determined bloggers are very much like rappers! So, clubbing tonight, everyone?

Hope you loved today’s recipes as much as I did. See you next week with freshly squeezed juice of the blogging world!

Enjoy the last hours of weekend,

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To my mind, one of the greatest parts of social media, starting from blogging and going through twitter, social bookmarking and social news is the ongoing conversation. The opportunity to share thoughts, ideas and comments with other people with common interests from around the world. You can practically reach everybody!

Conversation is important for a many reasons: instant feedback on your views, different approaches, new ideas, new developments of mere drafts, building really interesting relationships and being able to find people like you whom you’d otherwise never be able to meet, even if you spent your lifetime travelling around the world.

So how can an PR specialists state they understand the importance on new/social media in the overall PR strategy and know how to get their message through if they run a blog with disabled comments? Where is the social part if a dialog is crippled and reduced to the same old monologue? I’m not arguing that there are no other means of communication, such as emails or trackbacks with comments. But why would you give up such an important part of the blogosphere and make it harder for yourself and others to have meaningful debates? Especially when you state you know your way around the Web 2.0

Would you hire someone like that? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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