I’m looking forward to embarking on a new adventure as a corporate tweeter. As such, I’ve taken a good deal of time accumulating best practices for corporate accounts. Many of these are the same as I would recommend for anyone operating a business Twitter account for themselves:

1. Have a mission/message in mind before you post your first tweet.
2. Your message should also consider your target audience.
3. Twitter directories are a good way to gain some followers initially, but there is no get followers quick solution.
4. Be selective in following. There is no need to follow everyone who follows you.
5. Be careful of your language. This is even more important for corporations than for individuals.
6. Your posts are 100% public. Remember that bad news travels faster than good news and anything your shareholders wouldn’t like will travel out of the Twitterverse and onto TV screens and into newspapers.
7. Corporations need to select a voice. It’s best if one person, or a couple of people, man the account, for consistency, and to be sure there’s no redundancy. Most corporations invoke the royal ‘we.’  Other more customer-service oriented Twitter accounts have used an individual speaking from the first person.
8. A regular stream of content is important to any Twitter feed to maintain followers. Appropriate corporate topics include:

• • respond to follower/customer inquiries
  • retweet satisfied customer tweets
  • link to updated/interesting information on corporate websites/blogs
  • retweet updates from affiliated Twitter accounts
  • Twitter contests
  • advance notice of corporate news
  • Twitter discount codes
  • stimulate Twitter discussions with product-related questions
  • product-related trivia
  • run online surveys
  • photos of corporate events

Have some other ideas? Please share in the comments!

Bird art by Triax Mills.

Designing a website takes a lot of hard work, a lot of thought, and in my case, a lot of blood, sweat and tears, quite literally. I’ve already gotten numerous paper cuts and they make me cry.

If you’re asking why I’m getting paper cuts for a website, then you obviously are not working hard enough on yours. Things need to be written down and considered, scribbled out and written sideways, then typed out or designed and printed out, only to be scribbled out again. But the following websites have provided me with some great information to kickstart my site, and I think they would help just about anyone.

1. WordPress: Planning Session – Even if you’re not creating a blog, this page asks some very important questions about your website. It will help you create your Mission Plan for your site, and without that, you have no idea where you’re going.
2. Smashing Magazine: Web Design Trends 2009 – Before you go and create a great-looking site, have you seen how wonderful the web looks these days? Many of us are stuck in a groove, visiting the same old sites over and over again. Take a look at what’s new right now and find some inspiration.
3. Site Map – Sketch one out. Even if it’s just for you. Even if you only have three pages on your site. It will help for file organization, and that is very handy down the road.
4. Kuler - Choose your color palette. If you’re working with Adobe tools, you can download a plugin that puts these colors right into your software. Awesome. If not, just browse around and snap a screenshot when you see some colors that work for you. More inspiration. You might want to find the web-safe versions of these colors and jot those codes down.
5. CSS Zen Garden – See what CSS stylesheets can do for you. This site lets you browse through a variety of CSS stylesheets as applied to a single web page. Again, inspiration, with the CSS sheets readily available, at no cost to you.
6. Webdesigner Depot – I recommend you read this site on a regular basis. (During your site design process.) It’s full of all kinds of tips and solutions for designers at all levels.
7. ProBlogger – When it comes time to put some content in your site, there are some handy tips here on what constitutes a blog-worthy post and how to promote your blog or website.
8. The Slot – I make my living as a writer. Therefore, I get bothered when I see bad grammar online. This blog is about copy editing, that last look at the content to be certain all is well. Trust me, your content — and your expertise — will be much better received if your copy is correct.

There’s a lot more inspiration and resources out there, but these sites have been key for me so far, and I’m getting close to my site relaunch. I hope you’ll be back to see the new me. And I hope these help you out in your endeavors!

UPDATE: Bonus sites! Check these out too:

• A List Apart: For People Who Make Websites
• COLOURlovers: Color Trends + Palettes

I hate to show my age. I REALLY hate to. But truth be told, I was on the Internet in 1993, dialing into my college system (which meant free service) so I could get onto the few social BBS and chat sites that existed at that time. Back then, if you wanted to know what someone looked like, they told you — by typing you their description. (NOT very reliable.) Almost everything I saw on the Internet was multiple choice. No photos or design, except for those folks who had that one new browser called Mosaic, which confused the hell out of me.

Things got better. We got mouses. Cell phones were invented. Dial-up Internet service went the way of the 8-track. Okay, enough of the war stories.

I’ve helped create a few websites since then. For myself, for companies, for clients, for family members and friends. And now just about anyone can go to a site like where I’m typing this — Blogger — or Wordpress — and just click here, there, and over there and then you’ve got yourself a website.

Much like a recent video I saw featuring Louis CK, I am amazed at how wonderful things are these days.

But just because you can click yourself a site doesn’t mean you’re clicking yourself a wonderful site. To create a really OUTSTANDING website, you need to consider:

• Structure
• Design
• Usability
• Branding

If you’ve been following along, you can tell I’ve really been getting a lot out of my web design class, from my instructor and from my classmates who are all doing interesting things with their own sites. Here’s some more resources for those of you with your own website projects. If you’ve got some of your own resource links to share, please post them in the comments. It’s a tough world out there, and collaboration is the best way we can help each other improve!

Usability: useit.com
Design: webdesignerdepot.com
Structure/Planning: wordpress.org

P.S. All this means I’m another step closer to redesigning this site. Thanks again for your patience!

For more on this topic, check out:
dcgrrl | 8-sites-to-help-you-with-your-site

Check it out – the New York Times finally took notice of Squidoo. If you can’t figure out how Squidoo fits into the internet puzzle, this is a good breakdown.
NY Times story

And don’t forget to check out my Squidoo pages, starting with my hottest one, How to Meet a Celebrity

Today I ended up on a site called inBubbleWrap thanks to a post on Seth Godin’s blog. The inBubbleWrap online survey asked a couple of simple questions, one of which was, “What would I have to do to get you to tell 10 friends about inBubbleWrap?”

It turns out, all they had to do was make me think. Because that question about telling 10 friends equals, What does an organization have to do to generate word-of-mouth marketing, and is a very important question.

For me, the answer is pretty simple. I just need to be entertained, or tell me something I’ll really remember, and apply.

Word-of-mouth marketing is considered by some to be the most powerful form of marketing – and it indisputably has the best return on investment, since it’s free.

Inciting that buzz, planting the virus, getting the word going, and pushing it along, is hard for companies to control. Providing useful answers, and even useful questions, as inBubbleWrap did, are good ways to do it. Kudos to them. I remembered their question, and I’m sure I’ll apply the answer in my own marketing business, so I’m telling at least 10 friends here.