Web Teacher

My BlogHer 13 speaking schedule

I'm speaking at BlogHer13

I’m speaking or leading sessions on 3 separate occasions at BlogHer 13 in Chicago. If you will be attending the event, too, come say hello. Here’s what I’ll be doing.

You have two chances to catch me in the geek bar, discussing two-step verification on Twitter and Facebook. Friday morning at 10:30 or Saturday afternoon at 2:30. The geek bar sessions are small and informal and are more of a discussion than a presentation.

Along with Amanda Spann from BRANDSPAN Consulting, Kimberly Bryant from Black Girls Code, and Nelly Yusupova from Webgrrls, I’ll be part of a panel on Girls Coding. The women on this panel are really accomplished and impressive. I’m looking forward to being with them.

Are you going?

Lessons in Online Marketing from the Winners of the Webbys

The Webbys celebrate good Internet content, from personal blogs to social media campaigns. The 2013 winners have vastly different motivations, from bringing awareness to the water shortage in other countries to selling more soda. Still, they all share innovation and a way to bring customers together online, specifically on social media sites. Here is what the winners did right.

Online Campaigns

The winner of the 2013 Webby in the category of Online Campaigns was Adidas, for its “The Biggest Champions League Final of All Time” campaign. The social media part of this campaign integrated a Twitter handle create specifically for the campaign, as well as Facebook videos and banners that were used by players who would be playing in the soccer match being promoted. Users were encouraged to get involved, and “go all in” for their team by taking part in a vote. This campaign teaches business how important it is to encourage engagement, be it by voting or watching a video.

Social Media Campaigns

The winner of the Social Media Campaign award was Water is Life, which created a campaign called “Hashtag Killer.” The campaign sought to use an already popular Twitter hashtag, “#firstworldproblems” to bring awareness to the real issues in third world countries. By tapping into a trend that was already on the minds of social media users, this campaign could easily grab the attention of social media users. The videos associated with the campaign mocked the messages commonly associated with the hashtag #firstworldproblems found on twitter, which allowed Water is Life to relate to their audience.

Mobile and Experience Marketing

FuelBand and Nike teamed up for the campaign that won the 2013 Webby for Mobile and Experience Marketing. The device being promoted filled a real need for Nike’s athletic customers. A wrist band that is able to measure the user’s activity throughout the day lets him know when he has met his activity goals for the day, and the band changes color to reflect how close he is to his goal. By allowing their product to sync to social media, Nike and FuelBand improved both the marketing outreach of their product and the user experience.

Mobile Advertising

Band Aid was awarded the prize for Mobile Advertising. This unique campaign allows users to scan a picture of their Muppets Band Aid with a mobile app, and then watch the bandage turn into a small stage where animated Muppets dance. The campaign was engaging for users, and also allowed Band Aid to promote its brand in a way that was fun for the user and not an explicate, hard sell.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is advertising that appears to be just another news story or video, while it also promotes a product. Pepsi won the Webby in 2013 for this category, by creating buzz by offering to do an hour of people’s chores if they would try their new soda. The bold promise allowed their product to be the subject of many online articles, which were in turn shared on social media. Pepsi was able to leverage a unique customer promise into a lot of social media buzz.

Guest author Jennifer Watts is a retired web designer. She now spends her days blogging about all things web design. Visit WebHostingReviews.ca to find web hosting reviews.

Useful Links: Design Patterns, CSS3 Transforms, Industry Ready, Large Background

HTML5 and ARIA Design Patterns is at .net magazine. It provides design patterns for main elements, navigation elements, sections, details, summaries, and figures and figcaptions. In each design pattern, the appropriate ARIA roles are shown.

The Tower Blog explains how they did the CSS3 transforms in their sidebar in CSS3 Transforms by Example.

How to Teach Industry Ready? is at Unicorn Institute.

Large Background Images in Web Design: Tips and Techniques. Nice summary of the various options.

Style Sheets for Blogs: What’s the Purpose?

If you’re a seasoned blogger, you know about your style sheet and what it’s doing for your blog. But if you’re new at the game, you may not be sure what that style sheet does for you. This post deals with blog style sheets and WYSIWYG tools and how to keep them separate.

When you choose a style (or theme or template) for your blog, you get a set of style rules that determine appearance. Those rules are stored away from your blog posts and live in a document all their own. That’s where you want the style rules to be. Away from your blog post.

The style sheet sets up layout, colors, fonts and a lot more. With all that taken care of, all a blogger has to do is open up a new post window and start to type. You type your post, publish it and you’re done. The style sheet makes it look nice in your published blog. All is right with the world.

Most blogs also have WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) toolbars. Some you need to use to do formatting of text as headings or paragraphs or lists. Others let you change appearance. By changing appearance I mean you change the way something displays, but not the actual content. Maybe you want to change something from black to red. Just once. You can do that with the WYSIWYG toolbar provided above the post entry box. But it’s not a good idea to use those WYSIWYG appearance changing tools.

What happens when you do change a color or alignment as you are writing a post? Your blog software writes new appearance rules right in the blog post. These new rules override the appearance rules in your style sheet. Before you had appearance rules off in the style sheet where they belong. Now you have appearance rules in the blog post – not where they belong.

Why don’t you want style rules in the blog post?

Anything in your content – your blog post – can get picked up to use elsewhere. You want that to be your text and images: the headings, the paragraphs, the lists, the images. Your content.

You don’t want the blog post to contain style rules that could be carried over into unexpected places where they might not work such as mobile devices or other blogs that might quote your content. Appearance rules in those places could have unwanted effects.

Best Practice

The best practice is to choose a look you like as a template or theme and then leave it alone. Don’t use the provided toolbar to change fonts or colors or layout as you type your content into your blog. Use the tools to create headings and lists and blockquotes – that formats content into meaningful page elements – that’s okay. But font size or alignment or color choices are not meaningful. Instead, they deal with appearance. That’s not okay.

Useful LInks: Content Strategy, Image Size, Progressive Enhancement

A brief history of content strategy is from Firehead. It is a perfect introduction to the topic and provides insight into its development and importance. In short, a good reading assignment for web educators to use.

Question of the Week: Image Size and Social Networks. The question was about finding the proper image size for different social networks – not easy to answer with one option. The article also contains tips for images that will apply to any social network.

Progressive Enhancement is Still Important. Find out why.

Is Adobe Creative Cloud a Recipe for Failure?

There’s quite a discussion on a mailing list I belong to about whether or not Adobe is shooting itself in the foot with its new Adobe Creative Cloud subscription-based business model. The folks who argue that Adobe has doomed itself to failure cite several other companies that have tried a similar business model and it proved to be their undoing.

Do you have an opinion about the decision Adobe made? Have you subscribed, or have you decided you will not ever subscribe? Are there stories about other companies that have tried this and failed – or succeeded – that you can share as examples?

Useful links: REM, 3-D Printing, Coding Tools, JS libraries

Easy-peasy REM Conversion with SASS is from Stubbornella.

3-D printing is capable of anything, apparently. What won’t we make with 3-D printing in the future? Now there’s a duck with a new foot thanks to 3-D printing. How about a house? A bus? A person (beam me up, Scotty)?

Coding Tools to Make Life Easier is from Ann Maria’s Blog.

Which JavaScript Library Should I Pick? Here are some tips to help you evaluate the numerous JavaScript libraries that are available now so you can make an intelligent choice.