Regrouping

According to my notes, on March 23 (Day 16) I realized I was stuck on presenting myself. This isn’t a design issue, but a content issue. I was fretting over not looking good, and this was making me overly fussy and frustrated. Compounding this was my dislike of using Photoshop for any kind of layout, so I “got over it” and told myself that there are plenty of people who like it fine; let me just be sloppy with layers and adjust to the workflow it offers. I have a tendency to use Photoshop as someone who survived a Great Famine and am stingy with using memory; I grew up programming computers with 1MHz 8-bit CPUs and 48K of directly-accessible memory total, so I’m like your grandfather hoarding rolls of toilet paper because he remembers what it was like to not be able to get the stuff during the Big War.

But I digress. I recognized I was paralyzed by just not knowing how to describe myself. I knew what I wanted to describe, from the cloud-tag work I’d done in previous weeks, but how to make it look good and not make me look like an ass? That was still bothering me.

The solution: Back to first principles. Let me not worry about style and pizazz, and just speak plainly. In fact, let me just list what should appear, following a simple visual hierarchy.

Here’s how the work broke down over the week:

Day 16

Here’s what I drew on the 23rd, in Illustrator I think. From top-to-bottom, I start with the header, “Dave identity”, and framing statements about creative independence. This establishes who I say I am, and also is the gateway to a lot of the productivity writing. Next is the “What I’m doing”, as blocks of content. Last is the list of things I have for sale.

Day 17

The first barebone stabs at getting the HTML structure setup on my staging blog. This is the first layout I can start to see how the elements might look, and boy is it ugly. It took a while to come up with the skeleton text in the top section.

On the technical side, I did make a spreadsheet to calculate the CSS values I needed to construct perfect multi-column layouts, and I did learn a few bits about CSS floats. Floats are really stupid, but at least I understand their use a bit more. This took another couple of hours to work out.

Looking for the next hit of work to liven things up, I next worked on the product area at the bottom.

I wanted “Pinterest-style” blocks, and had never made anything like that in HTML. My new understanding of CSS floating, though, made this relatively easy to do. I was pleased that it went quickly, though I didn’t like the ragged heights. I would worry about this later…it had been a long day.

Day 18

I worked a bit more on the look of the product area, moving the title up into the image area. This was a look I’d seen on Ars Technica’s redesign, and I had liked it.

I worked on HTML-fying the header as according to my earlier design markup waaay back from Day 9. This went fairly smoothly; I rediscovered the power of line-height in getting consistent text positioning inside of DIVs.

I also got rid of the first sentence, and moved the template to my actual website so I can see it with actual content (eventually). Only administrators such as myself see the website with the in-progress theme. I’m using WordPress, if that isn’t obvious, and a plugin called Theme Test Drive to do this. I’m making the actual changes to a child theme of my main theme, a custom theme I made called “Seah Unified”.

I took a break from HTML and spent a few hours shooting and processing a new header photo, which you can see here. I tried to bunch a lot of things into one photo that had some meaning to me. It was shot in natural light on a tiny fold-out tray table, shot at f/5.6 at ISO100 with my Canon 40D, using a USB cable to control shooting from my desktop computer.

With the photo taken, I was able to drop it into the new header. Now it’s starting to look like a site. I still don’t know how to handle the difficult inner content sections, but I’m too fried to take it on.

Day 19

Not sure why this screenshot is less vibrant than the others; it is saved as 8-bit PNG to save space (me being stingy with bits again), but the others are too.

Anyway, the changes here are in the latest posts section. This little list is pulling recent posts using a custom query, and I’ve implemented fancy sprite-based graphical bullets on the list.

Ok, we’re starting to get somewhere. I’m not loving it, but I have to forge onward.

Day 20

I have made some significant changes. I added a placeholder image to the recent projects area, increased the number of listed posts to balance the columns. I also added a background color and indented all the content to line up with “DAVE SEAH”, which helps run the eye right to the bumper text. However, it also unbalances the page as a whole, which disturbs me. I let it go for now.

I also reworked the bumper so it appears above the “creative independence” area and wrote some initial copy. The idea is to immediate set a personal tone to the website. It was painful to write, but I am starting to get a feel for what works (or doesn’t) for me.

One thing that bothers me is that the site is starting to look way too TEXTY. There’s a lot of text. And the list of posts doesn’t really go with the recent projects area, though visually they look related.

This is the kind of design insight I was waiting for based on the actual content. Unlike a project where the content is already known, I was in the position to make anything I wanted. That is paralyzing when it comes to making a finished design, because the content isn’t even spec’d. But having seen what this looks like, I can now decide to make a different kind of content. I’d been working with a slider script called RoyalSlider for another client; perhaps this could be made to work?

Day 21

More fiddling with the top text, adjusting spacing and presentation of the “productivity – creativity – autonomy” blocks, which will become clickable entry points into some kind of “creative independence” subsection that I need to make. I might start by making this into a single page with multiple link anchors, listing pertinent posts. That would be easiest for now. It’s the basis of a very large content nut that I will have to address in the near future.

I also have integrated RoyalSlider, which has many options but many gotchyas, into the project area. It cost me $20 to get the WordPress plugin version, which was new to me. I’m still not sure at this point how to get the look I want with the slider, which makes assumptions about the aspect ratio of the images.

I eventually decide that this area should be a full-width image and fade-in-out. This helps rebalance the page, and becomes a second header.

Looking at this screenshot right now, I see that it probably needs to be a little shorter to match the height of the top header, or be slightly smaller even. However, this is only evident when looking at the page as a whole; this isn’t possible on most monitors because the header and slider areas aren’t completely on the screen at the same time. Still…a smaller slider area will save a few kilobytes of memory

I reworked the bottom part into a slider as well. It turns out that I actually probably wanted what is called an “image carousel”, not an “image slider”, to implement that properly. However, I am already freaking out a bit about the number of scripts that load on my home page, so I let it be.

This is starting to look finished!

A bit more space adjustment, and I decided to use (gasp) centered text on the bottom two sections. I may return to left alignment once I design the actual slides that go into “New & Notable”. Since this section fades-in rather than slides horizontal, I could maintain the left margin. I don’t know. I’m probably done with this for now. On Monday, I want to be ready to get this deployed on the website. There’s plenty of work to be done before April 4, the next Groundhog Day Resolutions Progress day.

Not to mention also that I have to back-fit the changes into the WordPress template in a clean manner. Ugh. Still so much work to do. Sigh.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Here’s a comparison of the current website’s home page and the new design.

I’m too close to this to really tell if it’s an improvement or not. Functionally, I think it will be an improvement; I’ll measure this with click-throughs using web analytics. Will it result in more people engaging with the content? I hope so.

One observation is that I’m still very tight with my whitespace. Part of this is due to the fear that too much content will appear “below the fold”. I think that this applies only if the top page fails to engage people enough to do something, like scroll the page to see more, but we shall see. And I still have been reserving the top-right of the header for some notifications of “what’s hot”, overlapping the image, which is well above the fold.

Yeah, I could stand to inject more whitespace and loosen up the design a tad. But I don’t need to worry about that now.

Wrapping Up

I think I am actually out of the website design woods for now, and in April I can get back to doing the fun stuff: writing and making things!

I almost forgot why I was doing this all in the first place: it’s too make it easier for people to figure out what me and my site is about, providing entry points to the best content I have. It’s also to establish the “Goods & Services” as a primary entry point, so people can actually find things they want to buy. This is what funds all my efforts to write and create, and currently I don’t have any way of showcasing them well. Now, they can be on every page if I want.

I’m not sure that I’ll have every part of the website perfectly converted by April 4, but the new home page is good enough to use now. With the new home page structure, it’s pretty easy to add another stack of content. I may add in the “latest posts” links at the bottom at some point.

In any case, it’s good enough to deploy now and refine later. There’s a lot of work ahead, but now the patterns are set and it should be much easier. Thank God. For the rest of the weekend, I am going to cook and eat a lot of things and get my energy back!

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

I’ve been stuck for the past week on actually pushing forward on my “Marketing Push” for March. To me, that means a revamp of the website to accomplish the following for visitors to my website, both first-timers and repeat visitors:

• Easy to tell what I do
• Easy to find something they know is here
• Easy to see what’s new
• Easy to find past topics of interest and explore

The general idea is to increase engagement, and also make it clear that I have a few things for sale. To sell those things, though, I believe I need a modicum of credibility. This I have, if you look at what I’ve written; I know that there are some good blog posts and insights in there. Finding it and making it easy to browse/download/buy is a huge usability concern.

I think of the redesign as “marketing”, or “more effective presentation”. Improving the user experience along these 5 dimensions should lead to improved engagement.

I made relatively rapid progress at the beginning of this session, defining a lot of important high-level conceptual goals and metrics for “Dave Seah” as brand. I know what I want to present. WHere I’m getting stuck is getting low-level and implementing them. There are a couple blockages I can identify:

• I’m very self-conscious when I present myself or make any kind of statement
• I’m not actually sure what the best way to present myself is, which is complicated by the previous statement
• A lack of surety create huge resistance
• I’m impatient, and part of my brain is still in the high-level “boss” mode that mistakes clarity of goals and strategy as being the “hard problem”. The actual implementation is far more difficult and uncertain, and my own judgmental brain is imposing paralysis on the production part that wants to please.
• I don’t particularly like marketing, so that’s another contributor to internal resistance.

So, in other words, I’m kind of being a dick boss to an uncertain employee, and they’re both ME. I don’t intend to be a dick boss, and I am giving myself the time to explore the issues, but I’m also impatient. The uncertain employee part of me, wanting to deliver and prove competence, nevertheless is paralyzed with not knowing how to deliver to that expectation right away.

The above description would be right at home in many of my past work experiences. I have a strong desire to please, and at the same time I have a strong impatient streak. Uncertainty itself is a force that I’ve only recently identified, and I am still learning how to deal with it.

So…the solution? I have a few ideas that I’ve used in the past when stuck in these situations.

Manager mode: Relax, and Talk the Issue Through. When an employee is stuck or paralyzed, it’s probably because I’ve provided too much scope, implied that there’s a lot of expectation riding on it, and work side-by-side with the employee for a bit of time to push through the small issues until he/she gets into a groove.

Employee mode: Relax, put pressure out of my mind, and design in the small first. While I’m aware there’s an enormous amount of work to do to complete this transition, so starting with something really small, almost inconsequentially so, is a way to start. I have a tendency to like architecture and reasoning, which makes me a poor production employee, but for short periods of time I can put all that big stuff out of my head and just draw, say, a button with some text on it and not wonder if it’s the right text, or the right sort of button given the overarching UI design’s intent to sell more X.

Director mode: Balance the needs of the now with Employee Support. Time is a luxury that I can’t exactly afford, as I have to get these systems working and improving revenue as quickly as possible. However, I need to allow that building a new website and all its content takes time. What I can do, however, is bring Manager and Employee into my virtual office and review the progress, identify the positive stuff, get some estimates, and perhaps identify some near-term goals that will deliver results sooner without compromising the development and design process. I guess that is what I am doing right now, by writing this post. However, the reality is that the project seems like it’s “behind” and the longer this lingers, the most likely the company will fail. We want to avoid that!

So, having phrased the situation using a company analogy, specifically, what am I stuck on?

• I’m feeling bad and incompetent at getting my website going. I thought I was better than this.
• I feel this way because it’s March 22nd and nothing is public.
• I also am not energized by doing this kind of work. It feels like I’m doing something that isn’t me. I feel I should be able to get over that, but has never been easy for me.
• I feel I haven’t been using my time wisely or productively.

Overall..NO ENERGY. NO MOTIVATION. DEMORALIZED

What would help? Delivery of something. Anything. A short term burst of focus to deliver something that is tangible, part of the building process, and reusable. That feels like progress.

Specifically, what would that be? This morning I actually figured out how to implement the new changes on my current website by reconfiguring it to use a “front page”; that way I can put anything I want on it without recreating the main blog index. The question now is what to put on it. I’ve been stuck because the devteam is ready to move forward with HTML/PHP/WordPress implementation, but the content and marketing team are still battling each other trying to come up with wording, telling the design department to just “make something up” for now that they can fill-in later. That should sound familiar to any web developer / project manager / designer. If you can imagine all these groups talking to each other asking when X is going to be ready and why Y hasn’t been delivered with, you have classic organizational stuckness, where the messaging overhead makes it difficult for anyone to make any production at all.

Well, I can’t have that in my fake company.

Recovering

One thing I have been missing this month is the clarity of the Product-a-Day challenge in February. It was wonderful to wake up every day and know that I could just make something and post it. AWESOME, in fact. The reason I’m not doing it this month is because having a ton of products that people never see is not a formula for success. The marketing push this month is to create the platform so I can showcase all the stuff I’m doing and writing about, so people see it. That means building themed collections, packaging insights, and so forth. It’s like I’m turning a private collection of interesting artifacts into a museum-quality experience, with a really nice gift shop.

I can’t continue to try to think and handle everything at the same time. Sometimes it’s come in handy, but when it comes to processing the raw ore of possibility into highly-refined experience, I just need to keep an eye on that very limited scope.

I think I should do a creative reboot and just play for the next few days with regards to the dave seah marketing effort. Make it fun. It’s like the playfulness of the product-a-day challenge, except it will be copy, photos, etc. I’ll spend a little bit of time on that this evening and over the weekend. The mistake I have made is to try to be in the production mindset and be creative at the same time. It really doesn’t work. Happy Bubble Time is required!

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

This post is a review of the past 10 days as a sanity check.

What Got Done

It’s usually around the two- or three-week mark that I feel fatigue on a project, and need to take some time to assess. I don’t particularly like marketing myself either; it’s hard work and draining. However, it’s also necessary work, so I am trying to have a good attitude about it. Like any difficult work, it is worthwhile from a growth perspective!

Here’s what I’ve got done so far on the Marketing push:

• Day 01-03: Defining an Audience and Myself
• Day 04-05: Defining Entry Points into a Website, and by extension Myself
• Day 06-09: First Pass Visual Layout
• Day 10-11: Break from Visual Layout; Content Development Begins

If I were to guess, I’ve spent around an hour per day on average. The biggest chunk of time was spent on the first-pass visual layout, which ate around 4-5 hours. The other days saw anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes total; these were mostly writing days.

Am I On the Right Track?

As I mentioned, I’m finding the work difficult. That doesn’t mean I’m losing hope or stuck. It’s just hard work because I’m defining a lot of goals in the absence of certainty. This means that the processes I’m applying are exploratory ones that may not pay off. It’s an exercise in maintaining good attitude and keeping mentally energized. I’ve been taking a lot of power naps to refresh my brain, much as Edison apparently did.

In hindsight, I think I’ve done some important foundational work, but I have to ask myself whether there’s something I can do right now with the current website to improve usability. It occurs to me that yes, there is. I can build a better browsing experience right now based on the existing template, and update the PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS or ABOUT THE SITE section.

Going to brainstorm quickly in this post now:

What’s the Problem?

People come to my website and can’t find anything, and don’t know what the website is about. There is a lot of hidden stuff, particularly around forms and some articles, that are difficult to find. I can rearrange them to solve PROBLEMS, not just be categories. This way, I can also promote some of the things I have for sale, and increase revenue (that’s the whole point of this).

What is a Solution?

It’s a big category page, loosely mirroring my Visual Tag Cloud, but much more focused on delivering a download or chunk of knowledge. And also highlighting stuff for sale.

What Can I Implement Right Away?

I have the ability to code custom template pages, so it’s that easy. I have to figure out what the categories are, and how to present them. That’s maybe 15 minutes of writing to get clear on it, and then some visual design to make it happen.

…

So that’s what I’ll do sometime later today. Although I describe this as a change in course, it really is an extension of the content creation cycle; I would have had to tackle this topic eventually. It’s a mix of Information Architecture, Layout, and Coding.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

The above graphic shows the progression from the first ugly step (A) just getting some image and text down. Compared to the original thumbnail sketch (which itself is a bit vague), there are some differences, but the general idea is the same:

• There’s a BIG IMAGE at the top, which will be “responsive” in that it always fills the space from edge-to-edge in a browser. The image is a placeholder; ideally it will be an image that visually supports what I’m about.
• There’s a DAVE IDENTITY somewhere within that image, or next to it. Since it’s near this big image, I don’t have to lead with my face/name alone. Maybe this is a cop-out, but it is personal preference.

Also within the header are opportunities for additional supporting links. Right now I have a “what’s new” and “what is creative independence”. The image area might become a slider that cycles through several backgrounds, or there might be a small menu on the right.

Below the header are the content areas, which I will be constraining to 960 pixels wide centered in the frame. As this is the front page, the content areas will be stacked on top of each other and then divided horizontally according to whatever grid system makes sense.

I’m trying to get away from my current blog design, which is constrained in a white rectangle. I’ve admired some other website designs that have a more open feel by eliminating the edges, instead implying them through alignment. The result is a layout that feels more open, which is how I want to feel.

I’m thinking that the stacked content areas will give me some flexibility in design. As the content area is 960 pixels wide, this divides cleanly into halves, thirds, or quarters. It also isn’t a bad basis, from what I can tell, for a responsive design that crunches down to fit any screen. I’m not planning on making the design responsive, however. Perhaps in the future, but not right now.

Anyway, I’m thinking there will be at most two stacked content areas. The top one will be a slider that covers the three or four main features on the website using mostly graphics and large type, serving as a lead-in to inner pages. The bottom one will be more text-y, showing recent stories and whatever. This is what I have to design next.

Also in the queue, after the content areas are done to a rough pass, will be to design the inner pages: the blog templates, page templates, and shopping templates. Next week I’ll have to think about the minimum I need to launch with new content areas + shopping areas. I’m thinking I’ll be VERY lucky if I can get this all done by April 4.

For the rest of this week I’ll be quite busy so I don’t know if I’ll make much progress, but I can at least do the daily 15M on this to keep it fresh in my mind.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

• 30 seconds – rereading Day 5′s raw notes (see bottom of page for the raw text)
• 2 minutes of sketching
• 1 minute of being aghast at how difficult this was
• Doing a second sketch until the timer alarm went off

I’d started by first sketching the three main things that I thought needed to be present:

• DAVE SEAH + HEADSHOT
• CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE SECTION
• MAKER SECTION

When I tried sketching these into place like blocks, I quickly ran into a feeling of “wrongness”. What seemed clear in the abstract seemed very difficult to express. In the photo to the right, which is a half-sheet of paper, I wrote my name at the top and immediately hated it. I drew an oval to represent my head and hated it more! Then I started drawing rectangles below as smaller thumbnails, and realized I was hitting a major unexpected barrier. This was all in the space of about two minutes.

Stepping back, I analyzed the negative feelings.

• I didn’t like the idea of just starting with my identity and head, and them proclaiming CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE and MAKER. This seemed too forward, too much like TELL instead of SHOW. And I tend to not like to draw the limelight to myself; creating a more Dave-focused home page is something I am forcing myself to do. I like to SHARE information, but I don’t really like putting myself forward as a GURU or EXPERT. At the same time, I need to promote myself.

• Furthermore, I hadn’t really thought-through how the Dave identity (name, headshot) and CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE are related in a page-narrative sense. MAKER is more relatable to Dave Identity, but as I’m a noobie maker I am a little embarrassed to proclaim this as a major section.

My immediate negative reaction, it seemed, was just about proclaiming myself to be more than I thought I really was. The desire was to hide. Which actually suggested an approach!

In the second sketch (shown above) I stacked the sections. The top section is an IMAGE HEADER (which I like anyway) with a side menu of some sort that lists important cues to the site. Immediately below it is my tag, and the below that is a “content slider” of four different aspects: creative independence, process, making, and recent posts. Below that is the footer. I can optionally create an ABOUT DAVE between the footer and the content slider.

What I like about this is that I get to hide under the content. If I were to rationalize this, it feels better because the content is first, and then I am second. The image area can establish the tone and purpose of the website before my name/photo appears, which is probably the way it should be. This serves the audience first and helps them orient. I’m still visible on the site, but more like a host than the central attraction. Which is fine with me.

So the next step is to spend some time doing a Photoshop mockup in the main areas, then back that into InDesign or Illustration for the typography work. That’ll probably be the focus for this week.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

There are three main elements that together describe who I am. In detail:

DAVE SEAH – Eccentric Creative – Emphasis on Values and Joy

“Eccentric Creative” is expressed by the jumble of candy-like interests that will be organized across the website. I would like to use my headshot here somehow to drive home the personal nature of my site. Rather than list joys and values, I want to use short phrases and words that have an association with that; joyful-sounding text and imagery, not saying “I am joy. Rah.” An example of SHOW NOT TELL. Tell is weak, and smacks of insincerity. The same applies to “values”; they will be implicit in how I talk/write on the website. My personal voice and values come through everywhere, which is already the de-facto style I have.

CREATIVE SELF-IMPROVER and CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE – My Passion – My Personal and Professional Focus

“My Passion”, again, will be shown. Creativity, as broken into three parts (process, productivity, independence) in themselves form a new and significant subsection on the home page. The content here expresses itself as a structured subarea with its own sub-identity under the Dave Seah Value and Joy umbrella. Each of the three aspects could be a mini-site with its own leading essay and reading list.

MAKER – My Projects

This is a section that is a “work in progress” area. Projects that I’m working on, or have recently worked on, would be showcased here. These are the end results of applying my creative powers, which brings me joy. This area has its own identity too, but it is closely tied with the other two main elements. All together, they create the supporting triad of what the David Seah website (and by extension, me) is all about.

Next, there are secondary elements on the website that act in a supporting role. They aren’t main focii, but instead express values or interests that visitors find appealing. The idea is to establish that there is a certain KIND of content and a certain type of CULTURE that is at work here.

STORIES – This is the content from the past 7 years

The articles I’ve written are structured like little stories that end with some kind of takeaway insight, example, or nugget of understanding. Sometimes you get to download something for free.

The stream of stories is an important part of the website, but the current 2005-style blog format I’m using makes it difficult to make room for the three main elements I want to stand out. People should see that there is Commentary on creativity/productivity/independence, news from elsewhere, and practical experiences I’m sharing related to my skills and hobbies as a perpetual stream of content under the context of creating and making.

COMMUNITY – Making connections with people

Rather than creating community support through forums and stuff, I instead am creating a beacon that indicates that I’m part of a certain tribe. That tribe is comprised of people who find what I am doing interesting.

The ABOUT DAVE and CONTACT links are technically part of community in this way, inviting people to connect. Previously, I’d thought that these were about brand identity, but that is now expressed through the three main elements: “Dave is an Eccentric Creative, A Creative Self Improver Seeking Creative Independence, A Maker of Things”. Adding “That shares a LOT of stuff” is the community add-on, which itself is an extension of the associated value statement.

Finally there are the THINGS FOR SALE and THINGS TO DOWNLOAD. This is the transactional part of the website, and the primary vehicle for supporting myself through my work. This is a significant area, and I’ll have to do a lot of thinking about how to design this sub site so it supports ecommerce and casual browsing. Quite a conundrum.

FREEBIES – Create the semblance of value and treasure, a taste, a preview

Productivity forms! Collections of Forms! These are the things that people will link to, come back for, and pique interest. In terms of commerce, they provide the free sample with no obligation. They also serve to spread the creative / productive / independence messaging along with my statement. They are examples of me putting my money where my mouth is.

THINGS TO BUY – Products, eBooks, Etc

Because I need to live, and want to do it through my website-promoted work, I have some things for sale. These will be tasteful, similarly-styled elements that appear at natural endpoints on the website. There may be a free takeaway, a nugget of wisdom, and nearby will be a direct buy link in a STORE area that collects everything in one place. That’s a NEW challenge, I just realized. It’s probably what I really need to work on next.

And one last thought: how would someone summarize the website as I describe it here? Maybe something like:

Dave Seah’s website is for creative people who love learning and like him, are continually pushing themselves to improve. It’s a wonderful place to find ideas and tools that are inspiring.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

I reformatted yesterday’s overlapping interest thoughts into four main groups that seemed related. Not sure HOW they are related exactly, but this is what my intuition is saying, so let me start with this and see what I think after I see it all in one place:

1. Creative Independence

• Maintaining the means to support one’s creativity through creative works
• Happiness through Creative Process: Explore, Learn, Build, Share
• Happiness through Directed Action: Seeking Inspiration, Developing Mastery, Creating Opportunity … creativity
• Happiness through Shared Values: optimism, personal growth, connecting with like-minded individuals

2. Being a Maker, a Creative

• Putting what one makes out into the world
• Happiness through Connection: Sharing, Creating Opportunity

3. Tools, Techniques and Stories

• on Originality / Cleverness
• on Quality
• on Independence
• on Productivity
• on Excellence
• on Creative Process
• on Directed Action
• on Shared Values

4. Dave Seah

• Who is this mysterious, somehow compelling person?
• How is he doing what he says he’s doing?
• What can I take away from him?

5. Shared Joy

• in Creative process
• in Directed action
• in Creating, itself
• in Creators, themselves
• Supporting one’s self in the way one must
• Knowing you’re part of this small community

At this point, I need to make a visual map and think about it. This mapping I’m doing is outside the 15-minutes I spent this morning, incidentally, thinking about it.

Where are the Entry Points?

Taking a few moments to look at this. I think the message is CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE, BEING A MAKER. That’s the common goal. The specific offerings are tools, techniques, and stories. The bridging elements that provide context are myself as the conduit for stories and maintainer of the CREATIVE INDEPENDENCE vision as I see and share it. Underlying it all is the JOY of it, the part that drives the passion.

So the outward-facing mission statement might be:

• Spread the message of joy
• Define creative independence as my particular version of joy
• Establish myself as the host of this website and my vision as an accessible dude
• Guide people to tools, techniques, stories in the context of creative independence

It occurs to me that the entry points actually look like this to a first-time visitor:

This is pretty awful.

To arrange, label, enhance these entry points so the CONTENTS are apparent and desirable…that’s the next stage of thinking!

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

YESTERDAY, I got more specific about what people might want to see. In other words: what is their frame of mind? What do they desire? Do they want solutions? Patterns? To relate? Something to follow? Then, I started to get more specific about my values. To be clear, my “marketing month” IS NOT about changing my activities to meet other people’s desires, though this is a perfectly fine marketing approach. Instead, I want to create clear AREAS OF OVERLAPPING INTEREST between the audience that’s here and my values/activities. That is a meeting of interests.

So what are these “overlapping interests”? How do they relate to defining a viable market? Hm. Maybe the following:

• The OI can be succinctly labeled, and recognized as desirable by people who desire such things
• The OI, labeled, is a clear, tangible or visceral benefit that is desirable.
• The OI benefit can be quantified or qualified as being better or part of the road to being better.
• The OI benefit is transactionable, acquirable, or actionable.
• The transaction strengthens the bond between buyer and seller.

I had a list of personal values. Reversing them gives me some characteristics of the people who would also be attracted to my values, which forms the foundation of overlapping interest:

• People who want to succeed through excellence, originality, and putting things in the world.
• People who wish their work to reflect themselves.
• People who like optimism, enthusiasm, and desire to connect with like-minded people.
• People who practice “explore, learn, build, share” and the related “seek inspiration, develop mastery, create opportunity” activity structure.
• People who appreciate good knowledge and want to share it
• People who seek creative independence like myself

Converting the above into a set of benefits/artifacts/desires (sort of a jumble)

• The highest quality
• Originality
• Impact the world by putting things into it…a “maker” or “creative”
• Work reflects values: optimism, active personal growth and development, community of like-minded people
• A well-defined creative process
• High quality supporting knowledge and tools
• Creative Independence

Let me reprocess that into something more compact:

• Creative Process
• Creative Independence
• The Tools
• Technique and Know-How
• Happiness through Making: Exploring, learning, building sharing
• Happiness through Impact: Seeking Inspiration, Developing Mastery, Creating Opportunity

And let me try to distill that one more time:

Creative Independence

• Happiness through Creative Process: Explore, Learn, Build, Share … it’s the stages of creativity
• Happiness through Connection: Sharing, Creating Opportunity
• Happiness through Shared Values: optimism, personal growth, connecting with like-minded individuals

Being a Maker, a Creative

• Happiness through Directed Action: Seeking Inspiration, Developing Mastery, Creating Opportunity … creativity
• Cultivating a set of purpose
• Putting things into the world

Tools & Techniques

Imbuing the pursuit for Creative Independence with

• Originality
• Quality
• Independence
• Productivity
• Excellence

And that’s as far as I got before the timer went off. Still not at the point where this is feeling like a distinct statement or focusing point. Tomorrow I’ll try to achieve that.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

I realized that I don’t think mission statements are very effective when used as part of PR. They’re ALWAYS weaker, because they’re examples of TELLING over SHOWING. Telling is almost always BS until it’s backed up. What I need is more like a “framing” statement, something that helps people make sense of what they’re looking at. What I want to lead with is SHOWING things that are already appealing to an audience, and then give them a way to mentally compartmentalize it with a love they already have. Then, the next step is to feed the impulse to browse, participate, and buy. That’s engagement.

So I first looked at my list of people visiting the site already, and then started to build between what people liked versus what I liked. I’m part of the audience too, ya know, and it’s the intersection between me and visitors that will create the most satisfying connection. But then there’s the intersection between what I do (as opposed to “me”) and what people want (a solution, not a new buddy) that is also an opportunity; it’s those people who represent a market for goods.

• People looking for solutions: Market for goods! Make it easy for them to find, assess, then select.

• Subscribers who like what I’m building: They are looking for more than just goods that work. They want something that appeals to their inner sense of quality. Probably process or word-based people? People who learn in a particular way? They also need to be able to find-assess, select based on a DEEPER level than “this does this. download me!”

• Subscribers who like to see HOW I’m building: They are interested in process, the story, a bit more of the in-depth. They may be looking for examples to follow, and they recognize that this site has something they want to know more about. The HOW is part of my writing and presentation. It’s implicit. Does this need to be made more explicit?

• Subscribers who like to read what I’m THINKING: Process-oriented, empathic, compassionate people? Some people have said that what I write is what is in their head, given shape in the form of words. Also implicit in what I do.

• People who check in occasionally: They have come, or used to come, because of something I’ve done that they found interesting. I’ve been filed into a category of, “that guy who”, but it’s not really close enough to their everyday existence to come visit. Positive thoughts toward my work and website, but not relevant to their life in general. Curiosity sometimes.

From the above, I see that there’s a few windows and some implicit attributes of my so-called brand experience:

• collections of tools, processes, thoughts – These are locations on the website
• attributes of how, process, thinking deeply – These are common attributes of everything in the collection, and part of the appeal I think. Not for everyone, but for many.

Next there’s MY VALUES, the reason I want to get out of bed in the morning. How do I reframe this for people?

The easy first pass is to reverse:

• People who want to succeed through excellence, originality, and putting things in the world.
• People who have strong values and wish their work to reflect them. The above statement are my values.
• People who like optimism, enthusiasm, and are open to connect with like-minded people.
• People who like “explore, learn, build, share” and the related “seek inspiration, develop mastery, create opportunity”
• People who appreciate good knowledge, or the intent to spread it
• People who seek creative independence like myself

And that’s how far I got in 15 minutes. It took another 18 minutes to rewrite it into a blog post.

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.

First I defined what it was: making my website easier to use for particular audiences, which I described as:

• People who are looking for solutions. They arrive through Google.
• People who are subscribed, because they like to see what new tools I have.
• People who are subscribed, because they like to see HOW I’m building tools.
• People who are subscribed, because they like to READ about what I’m THINKING about.

There are also the following personal requirements that I think should be reflected in the website.

• I am standing for a set of values: the “Dave Seah Way” and “Creative Independence”
• I have a mission statement: I want to succeed by becoming as excellent as I can be, producing original works and seeding the world with them to see what comes back. To create, and connect, at the highest level I can.
• I want to extend optimism and enthusiasm to as many people as I can, because I want to be around people like that. Be a beacon!
• I want to celebrate creative independence as I find examples of it.

Then there’s the sundry necessities:

• I need to sell my digital and physical goods and make some money to sustain what I’m doing.

That’s as far as I got in the writing. More definition will follow tomorrow!

This is part of a series about improving my website, thinking about it for 15 minutes a day first-thing in the morning. You can see the raw 15-minute text here. These posts are collected on The March 2013 Challenge Page.