But the content I’m most interested in reading is how (and what) he’s doing in our social media world. I can see that he’s doing it, but I’m curious about how he’s doing it, how it’s working for him, what’s working, what’s not, and how we can learn from it.

Laurie King over at Travel Writers News is also interested as she mentions Lee’s article in her own commentary on apps and the future of journalism. She’s also interested, for her travel writing readers, about how a pro in the industry is doing things. What’s especially interesting about Lee’s write up is that he gives real numbers, real percentages of commissions so we can see first hand what’s going on behind the scenes.

I’ll be curious to see if these posts by both Laurie and Lee get more traffic than a post about, well, travel itself. Stay tuned.

I have been thrilled to be a part Creative Storefront and be able to garner tips, tricks and advice and perspective from all the great talent that has showed up.  However being from a graphic design background I just couldn’t sit back and not contribute to the branding and design of the site. I mean what is “Glow Theme”? So (w/ apologies to Zoey Setiawan) I have done some type / logo studies that I am posting here in hopes that they generate some discussion among our members and players.

These are quick studies in script fonts, scale and emphasis of the operative word. When I think of Creative Storefront I keep coming back to the strip mall, aluminum door and window frames with the templated style signage in front. Think sheet metal, cables and house paint.

The last 4 are using a German utilitarian font Din Schriften. These work the best for me as they are clean, simple, clear and the font treatments lends itself to variety of signage and background treatments.

The very last one works best overall for me. I can see the background treatment being easily extended and/or tweaked to work through out site as headers and buttons.

The San Francisco Adult Municipal Softball League (sfsoftball.com) had a website, regular updates, images, banners, and text. Sounds good, right? The trouble was that the updates were too difficult and time consuming to do. They had to learn a certain program and for those who didn’t know that program, updates were difficult if not impossible.

The Solution

Enter Likoma and WordPress. Likoma, a website design shop here in San Francisco, uses only content management systems to build websites. In fact, they use exclusively WordPress. With WordPress installed, SF Softball can now update their game schedules, rain-outs, score tables, and pretty much anything else on the site with a simple “Microsoft Word-like” interface. Now anyone with an Internet connection can update the site easily, efficiently, and without hours of complex training.

The Benefit

SF Softball’s teams, players, and fans now have much more immediate results on their site. WordPress is free, so they no longer have to pay for any software they used to update the old site. More people in the administration of the league can edit more content on the pages asking fewer people for help. By the way, the site got a new coat of paint and looks slick. Have a look: sfsoftball.com.

Robin Sparks (www.robinsparks.com) couldn’t decide whether to have a professional site for her published writing and a separate personal site for her not-yet published writing or to merge the two. Unless you wouldn’t want an editor to see your non-published/journal/blog writing because it was so different from your published work, merging both the professional and personal can work well for a writer. Your readers can get to know you better through your journal/blog and you can even use it as a means of hunkering down and writing.

Asma Hasan’s site (www.asmahasan.com) is a working warehouse of everything she’s done, is doing, and is going to do. She’s a hot topic on the news shows and reporters can get the information they need quickly and easily from her site. A few extra bells and whistles give her site more life: videos of her news programs, a Q&A section for people to write in with questions (and she responds with answers), and although the site is very professional, she has a few hidden toys in there that she makes you search around for (try to find the Hello Kitty page … ).

Kathryn Abajian (www.kathrynabajian.com) went from no book and no website to book and website and marketing plan and PR kit and events and postcards and business cards and more. The more she used her website, the more she realized it could do. She used it as an event calendar, as a newsletter, as a press kit (and sent magazines and newspapers to the site to gather info about her rather than Kathryn having to send out packets by snail mail), she used the top banner as the background for her business card and postcards. She also said she had a blast doing it as she was in control of the content of her site and didn’t have to bother/contact/pay a designer to add her events and news clippings.