There's Something About Harry

It is Tuesday, two days after WordCamp Birmingham and I am finally getting back to myself.  Last week was a marathon of hard work, sleep deprivation and good times.  Well the good times were all saved up at the end with WordCamp. 

This was my second year at WordCamp in Bimingham and my good friend Andre Natta did a bang up job putting on a terrific show.  You may recall that Andre and I went to New York City for Affiliate Summit back in August.  This was also my second time presenting.  This year I taught a great little session teaching people how to make their first wordpress theme and I have to thank everyone for the great feedback I received afterwards.  Definitely made my weekend to hear that I had helped a lot of people!

This time, I was the one driving to Birmingham instead of Andre driving to Charlotte.  While I was there I saw a lot of my friends from past southeastern social media events such as BarCamp Chattanooga and WordCamp Birmingham 2008.  The Memphis contingent was present and stronger than ever.

This year in addition to @dougal the Atlanta contingent came out in force as well.  Plus, they had good news to report as they will be putting on a WordCamp in Atlanta this January (I think its slated for January 15 – 16th. That’s right before Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, so I might really have my hands full if I try to make both shows, which I would like to do.) 

I met a lot of new friends as well and if I get five minutes to breathe as I recover, I’m going to come back to this post and add a long list of names, but I don’t get much of a breather because I’m leaving for IzeaFest tomorrow, packing up the whole family and driving to Orlando for a 4 day show at SeaWorld where I’ll be moderating a panel on What Advertisers Want. 

So as usually, I’m likely to be a little behind on things for a few more days.  But stop back soon, because I have another cool announcement to make about Blogworld.

Here’s some articles from some great people I met this weekend

• WordCamp Birmingham – The First of Several
• Yikes!! Overkill! – WordCamp Birmingham
• WordCamp Birmingham 2009 is a Success
• BuckDaddy who’s running wild through IzeaFest and BlogWorld and even more events than I am this month!
• WordCamp Birmingham Favorite Moment # 5

And then some cool people that I met also (the people with the articles were cool too, just not double listing to avoid redundancy)

• Mike Schinkel
• Kira Fonteneau
• Andrew Jones (I’m not sure if I actually met Andrew, no official introduction, but the second day of WordCamp was at ShiftWorkSpace which I think Andrew runs.
• Todd McCalla who runs Cool Springs, a great site for Cool Springs Tennessee that uses one of my favorite StudioPress themes.
• @The_Jerri_Ann who spoke at wordcamp on migrating a site to WordPress, but I found that she’s also a master at marketing her blog publications to large corporations.  She’s doing some pretty amazing things.  It wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn that she has become a talent agent or professional publicist promoting bloggers 5 years from now.
• Christopher Spencer
• Emory Rowland

This week I’m working on several projects including the launch of a new site for the Peoria Lawn Maintenance Team.  Its a new site for an old company.  In fact the company is well known to me as I used to work for it years back. 

My father, Steve Bumeter runs it and I’m helping him build out his web presence a bit more as he works to grow and fill out service in more of the corners and niches of the tri-county area surrounding Peoria, Il. 

The site is designed to be very very simple and run with a color scheme that relates to the Cub Cadet equipment that my father prefers to use these days. 

Generally, when I work on sites of this nature, the first step is to make sure that the site gets listed well at a local level.  In some markets this can be accomplished relatively quickly and in others it can take some more time and effort.

In addition to the initial website, we also have to walk through the basics, new vehicle signs, business cards, flyers, t-shirts for employees and more.

This week I’m going to start hosting what I’m currently calling a Lab on the Lake, a hands on tutorial/mentored training program for people in the Greater Charlotte area that are interested in learning web design, WordPress and a number of other items (more details to follow).

Well the first thing we had to do, was add seating and tables for more laptops.  We made a start of it yesterday but still have more to do.

So next month I have a crazy couple of days scheduled.  On June 12th, my wife and I are going to the Nine Inch Nails / Jane’s Addiction concert in Charlotte.  After the concert, I’m dropping my wife off at home and driving up to Raleigh for WordCamp RDU, where I will be speaking that afternoon on using WordPress as a CMS.  I volunteered to cover Custom WordPress Theme design too.  Actually, I offered that one first, I was asked if I could cover CMS instead, so I said sure. 

So I will be up pretty much all night long after the concert and hanging with some great WordPress enthusiasts in Raleigh.  Trying to figure out how to maybe open up the speech, maybe with a little music from the concert . . . .

Brett Bumeter Speaking at WordCamp RDU 2009

Brett Bumeter of Softduit Media will be speaking at WordCamp RDU (Raleigh Durham) 2009 on June 13th.  He will be covering an advanced topic on utilizing WordPress as a CMS for businesses.

Softduit Media has worked for several years to help both bloggers and small companies harness the power of WordPress as a CMS not only in the Charlotte area, but in Atlanta, and around the world. 

The SEO powers of WordPress that deliver traffic to a site combined with the super easy administration panel of the WordPress system make it very easy for companies to take control of their own websites handing the keys to the business users of the sites and freeing up expenses and resources from long term web consultants.   Brett has led the charge in Softduit to provide affordable websites that almost anyone in an organization can manage regardless of their experience in web design.

Brett will also be speaking at WordCamp Birmingham in September.

For other WordCamp events in the South or SouthEast you might also consider checking out WordCampHSV (Huntsville) & WordCamp Dallas, which looks like it will be an excellent event.  WordCamp CLT (Charlotte) will be later next winter in either November or December.

It started out kind of slow compared to wicked, but finally picked up enough to be engrossing about half way through the book, I’m talking about Son of a Witch that is.  I got the impression that after the author’s ten year hiatus from Wicked, it just took a while for him to get orientated in the land of Oz again, but once he was there, he was determined to make it work.

So last night I stayed up until 5 in the morning finishing the book after I finished work around 1 am. 

This week, I’ve been planning out a trip to Las Vegas next week.  I’m making a trek to Vegas and Laughlin actually to catch up with my business partner Joe Klein of New Media Creative.  We are locking down some very interesting plans for the year.  I’m also hoping to maybe stop in and see everyone in the Las Vegas meetup group again.  Haven’t hung out with that crowd since Las Vegas WordCamp.   Vegas has a very vibrant and strong WordPress group, and after hanging with the local Charlotte group, I’m interested to see what ideas and practices might cross pollenate.

Today, I was spending a little time catching up with some bloggers at Blogexplosion.  I came across a new blogger I hadn’t met before that runs a blog called Snarke.net.  Long story short, I noticed a recent tweet from them about how their current WP design wasn’t really doing it for her.

So I thought I’d jump into my favorite design platform for wordpress themes and see just how fast I could whip something together using a couple pictures from her own flickr account.

Here’s the before (or current I should say)

Here’s my 5 minute design after (I’m sure I could do better with a little guidance and feedback, but I just felt like a little random act of design kindness might help me get some focus on my next project for this evening. 

The original theme isn’t really that bad, and most of those widgets would import nicely into this them.  I just kind of thought the blog needed a slightly more personal feel, but maybe that isn’t Snarkey enough. 

Snarke, whomever you are , if you are out there and come across this, you are welcome to the theme btw.  Just leave a comment or email me or something.

Alternatively, if you want to try your hand at the design thing yourself, check out my theme design video at Softduit.

These pictures are from the party from Saturday, but well, hey its Tuesday. 

Besides this picture is more Willy Wonka-ish than it is Ir-ish.

Fortunately, my daughter makes up for my weirdness with this picture of her holding an Irish flag.

Anyway, I’m cutting this post short.  I’ve been up all night long working on a new marketing campaign and some websites (after working the previous week on my income taxes).  I really need to go and get some sleep.

In the meantime, my favorite WordPress Theme Design software, Artisteer, just came out with its 2.0 version.  This software rocks and it is the same program I used to design this site and many others.

You can literally design a site with valid html/xhtml and css in minutes.  If you want to test drive it they do offer a free trial download.  I paid about $100 for version 1.0 last fall and have made 2-3 dozen wordpress themes since. 

This site here is just a blog, but this is powerful stuff.  You can design some terrific Content Management System driven sites such as a site that I created earlier this month for some clients of mine that are environmental engineers.  They do a number of things from environmental property assessments to Phase I & Phase II Environmental assessments.  In general they help to monitor landfills, property and underground storage tanks to help keep the environment clean or to create the plan to clean it up.

Their site is about 125 – 135 pages, all driven by a CMS, using a dynamic drop down menu system.

Easy navigation, Easy Site management for the site owners, and great results in the SERPs running on the best CMS in the world.    

I’ve been working on a site upgrade all day for a client.  Part of the project has me copying and pasting html tables and republishing them into a content management system.  To do this, I have to make slight adjustments to the table settings, and I also have to do a lot of clicks and hovers with drop down menus.

I’m turning into a zombie doing this stufffff! 

So I took the opportunity while getting caught up in a small little conversation in a discussion forum to see if I might emulate a blog design that caught my eye from one of the participants in the forum.

Before

After

Now, I didn’t have the actual color scheme for the original site, and I was just kind of eye-balling stuff because I needed to play.   Plus, I can’t show this live (after the upload so the sidebars are different) and I’d probably make the sidebars wider if I had some dimensions to work off of, but hey it was fun.

This was not my site, so I’m not going to offer up the theme to anyone (other than the site owner if they want a free theme or something).  I just needed to play and get out of the copy past doldrums for 20 minutes. 

Today, I gave myself a Valentine’s Day gift and upgraded my blog theme. 

All in all I’m very happy with the way it turned out, and I haven’t noticed any glitches yet, but I’m sure there’s something somewhere. 

In addition to a new logo, that actually has an apostrophe, I upgraded the entire site, new color scheme, new menus, new sidebar boxes, even a new footer.

UPDATE

My brother, Troy Bumeter, established a new website for his business.  I helped with the setup of the domain, the site installation and the design of the site.  He did a great job, writing the copy (after some brief SEO lessons and tips from myself), and rounding out the site with some relevant images.

The Result – Number 1 in Google in 36 Hours!

Within 36 hours the site had moved into the top position on Google for keywords

The Peoria Handyman & Peoria Handyman

The site was indexed in less than 12 hours and number 1 temporarily on the peoria handyman in 24 hours, bounced out for the next 24 hours, then after the copy updates my Troy created it was back and dominant.  Next up, we have to do some work to secure a position for the keywords handyman Peoria, but that won’t be too difficult.

Original Post is below.  You can see that the original site was a little rough, but looking at the site above or visiting it in person, it came together in a polished and professional manner very quickly. 

Original Post

Tonight I spent a little time helping my brother with a new company website called The Peoria Handyman.  Things are still a little rough around the edges tonight, but our primary goal is to get the fundamentals launched and we’ll then update and refine things more soon.

So far we are off to a decent start, but need to clean up and clean out some of the widgets yet.

The Peoria Handyman | Handymen Serving Peoria, IL, Peoria County, Woodford county, Tazwell County. Call Today for an estimate – (309)-222-0351!