Often I encounter people who desperately want some version of “work/life” balance. They usually mean they feel like they are working too much and not enjoying life enough. They don’t want to abandon their work, but they want things to “balance” out a bit more, so there is more time for things beyond work.

The challenge is to carve out space for the things that really matter. The problem with this approach, it seems to me, is that it prioritizes the wrong things. Instead of building a life around the things you value most, those things become “rewards” when the real work is done. Going to your kid’s tee-ball game is only possible if you can get the evening off from work. Having a romantic dinner with your significant other is only possible if you can finish the latest project.

Neil Fiore in his book The Now Habit invites us to turn this thinking on it’s head. Instead of squeezin the “stuff that matters” into a work calendar that is already over-scheduled, Neil suggests we reset our calendars and start by blocking out time for what really matters to us. Once we know that we can go to the tee-ball game for our kid and the dinner with our spouse, then our work commitments can fill in around that. The great thing about this approach, in addition to prioritizing what really matters to us, is that it frees us up to be productive within the confines of our own design. It is easier somehow to focus on work when you know you are going to do what matters at it’s appointed time.

Neil calls this the Unschedule, and he defines it for us like this:

The Unschedule is a weekly calendar of committed recreational activities that divides the week into manageable pieces with breaks, meals, scheduled socializing, and play, plus a record of periods of productive work completed. (p. 114)

The bottom line is this. Work/life balance is a myth. Work will consume as much of your life as you let it. Instead, take control of your schedule and your life. Maximize your productivity by focusing on what matters. Work should bring us joy and fulfillment and purpose, but it shouldn’t drive us into the ground and eliminate time for anything else. Make work work for you.

And, by the way, a website can help in this department. We can help you get your business online, so that your website is doing some of the work for you. Contact us now for creative ways we can help you Unschedule your life while increasing your joy and productivity at work.

Often we are approached by clients and potential clients to optimize their sites for search engines. Usually, the person involved is not happy that her business doesn’t appear at the top of a seemingly relevant search engine. The hope is that with a few special lines of code, inserted in the right place, her rankings will improve.

Not too long ago, there was a “bag of tricks” that one could access in order to improve rankings. But such tricks like link farming, meaning creating dummy sites that simply link to your site, and keyword jamming, meaning putting in tons of keywords into your site’s code, have all been undone by Google. Google engineers are always working to make sure the searches on their sites produce accurate and relevant links. To that end, Google has employed tactics to eliminate and in some cases punish sites that rely on “tricks.”

Good site structure and the appropriate use of tags in your code do help you improve your rankings. But the bottom line is that Google, and the other big search engines, are doing everything they can to evaluate your content and relate it to searches. In other words, what’s on your site really matters to Google. Here are some things we know Google is doing:

1. Google will reduce the value or ignore links to your site that appear without any context or on a site that is unrelated to your site. Link farms are effectively irrelevant. Links from other sites to yours are still good – but they have to be meaningful.
2. Google appears to be digging deeper into social networks. If you are not on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, you need to be. The bottom line is that social networks make it easy for people to “like” your site, and Google interprets that as a kind of endorsement.
3. Google will punish you if you use “black hat” tricks. Attempting to game the system or manipulate your rankings in disingenuous ways can result in lower rankings or even removal from Google’s indexes.

Google seems to believe that “content is king.” Keeping your site up to date with relevant and meaningful content is the best tactic to keep your site on top of the rankings. Second to this is working the social networks. Post relevant news and updates to your Facebook page and your Google Plus page. Tweet links to blog posts. Put meaningful comments up on forums and related blog sites.

There is no way to ensure your ranking is high on any search engine. But the higher the quality of your site and the more connections to the world you make through social media and meaningful links, the more important your site will appear to the search engines.

Increasingly, people are using mobile devices – smart phones, tablets, netbooks – to access the internet. The smaller screens of these devices mean that many websites designed primarily to be viewed on a desktop, don’t render well on the go. Sites designed for mobile devices are helpful, but often cumbersome to maintain or dependent on software that doesn’t maintain the look and feel of your primary site.

Responsive Design is a new buzzword for a website that is designed from the get-go to adapt to a user’s screen. Taking advantage of new advances in internet standards, the site itself “responds” to the screen size and makes changes to the presentation of the site so that the site remains easy to use and visually appealing. To create a responsive site, a bit more work is needed both in design and implementation. But the payoff is that your site is ready to adapt to the screens of emerging mobile devices, without the need to maintain a separate mobile site or sacrifice the presentation of your business.

Already, mobile users make up a significant portion of internet traffic. But within a year or two, mobile devices will generate the majority of internet traffic. In other words, most people will be accessing your site from a mobile device of one kind or another. A responsive web site is a great strategy for making sure your site looks great no matter how it is viewed.

Please contact us to discuss building you a responsive website or modifying your current site.

Peace,
Scott and Bryan

When we started offering our clients WordPress powered sites, a lot of folks would say to us, “all WordPress sites look the same.” One of WordPress’s great features is the ability to change the look of a site with a new theme. But the ease with which a theme can be changed meant that a lot of WordPress sites opted to use a few of the good freely-available theme templates out there.

The truth is that we are able to bring any design to WordPress with completely custom designed themes. And we do. Custom designs have the primary advantage of giving your business the precise look you want online.

That said, theme templates are still a good option for many. Templates can be done quickly, and cost a fraction of what a custom site costs, because the bulk of the template work is already done. We offer a few of our own templates, ready to go, but we are also happy to help you install a template you find online at one of the many repositories.

If you have a web project that needs a quick solution at a low price, consider using one of our template products.