Long story short, in March 2010, I launched my first Headway site. I have never looked back. When you have worked with complex programs like Dreamweaver and I ran sites for Wausau Whitewater and Kiwanis with Dreamweaver before we set up my site in it, you fully appreciate it.

Headway 3.0

Blown Away? Here’s the best part:

On November 25, the Headway Themes team is launching Headway 3.0. I just watched the video and was blown away. What incredible changes! It was easy to use before and a delight to work with before but just wait.

And on November 25, Headway will be sold via an annual license.  However, if you buy it now, you will never have to renew; so you will be able to enjoy Headway and all that great tech support!

I have set up Headway from the moment it is installed on WordPress and it couldn’t be easier. Though designed with bloggers in mind, Headway can easily be a website without a blog though I don’t know why you would do that.

Right now you can pay the same price as I did two years ago and experience the same fun designing sites to promote your business, your job search, your consulting expertise, and more.

Headway revolutionized my business and brought me new clients from around the world.

Watch the video and then if you too want to enjoy creating with an amazing product, go here!

Photo by Ed Yourdon

I already posted today but I have been noticing things on my wanderings on the web.

If you are a blogger or a wanna-be blogger, there are lots of resources on the web for great advice. This post is just my personal advice list and a bit of a rant.

I know some really great writers whose blog posts are not getting either traction or comments.

Here are some fixes:

If you write great content and no one seems to be reading it, are you making it visible and easy to comment on?

1. Are you tweeting it or Facebooking it or posting it on LinkedIn? On its own, your wonderful writing is competing with multiple great writers who know the clues to getting read. No one hears you unless you tell them. Once a day is not enough either.
2. Are you building community on Facebook and Twitter so people share your posts?
3. Are you making it easy for others to tweet for you? I use the Tweetmeme button because I can see how many times a given post is tweeted. If you don’t use this plug-in, or you don’t know how to install the plug-in, engage the services of Kim Woodbridge (my WordPress Expert) or Corey Freeman (the 17 year-old Headway designer and tutor.) Jim Connolly alternates between Tweetmeme and Topsy.You don’t have to have the button if you are very visible on Twitter but it just makes it easier. Danny Brown is using the Digg-Digg plug-in which floats down the page with you as you scroll down and saves the reader from having to go back to the top when he or she wants to share your post.
4. This is a Headway blog / site. Headway was created by Clay Griffiths and is marketed by the Co-Founder, who is also his father, Grant Griffiths and  Headway won me over very early in the game. Custom themes and hosted platforms make a blog more eye-appealing and easier to work with and change. When you try to stay on a free platform, you limit your choices. With the changes in themes like Headway and Thesis, you can have a powerful blog that doubles as your website, thus optimizing your online time.
5. Make it easy to comment. Everyone is afraid of spam but they wonder why no one comments on their blogs. If I have to subscribe, jump through hoops with a third-party application, or wait for days until you approve my comment, I’m going to visit blogs that make it easy to talk to the blogger and express my opinion.
6. Talk back to your commentors. If you allow comments but don’t build community or selectively only talk to the people who you think could take you the furthest or build the most business, you are missing the chance to engage with some very fun and bright people.
7. Think about using the CommentLuv plug-in. The CommentLuv Plug-in lets your commentors have an identity. Their last posts titles are recorded when they comment. People like visiting blogs with CommentLuv.

Enough said…

This is your bonus post of the day. If you are a job seeker thinking about blogging, read this carefully before you start and have someone help you start off right. If you are a job seeker thinking about changing careers, read the rest of my blog carefully to see how to get your job search off right and call me to schedule an appointment to get going.

I’m not a stranger to web design software either. I taught myself and worked in Dreamweaver for several years while maintaining Wausau Whitewater’s site and I had an expert build the template for my old site for Design Resumes.

My old site launched in January 2009 even though my business (Design Resumes) is much older. I hired Kim Woodbridge to move the blog over for me from my blog’s former wordpress.com site to the old site to have everything in one place but I couldn’t make some of the changes I wanted to make.

My whole journey in social media has been one of watching the masters. When I saw Jim Connolly and others make the move to Headway and sound so happy with the change, I couldn’t help but starting thinking, that’s what I need to do.

The Headway difference?

Headway is a blog theme created by Clay Griffiths but with features that let you run a whole website. You are reading my blog post but by using Headway’s pages on the rest of the site, I can change my navigation so easily, adding or subtracting pages in a flash to create new multiple pages and drop-down menus.

Formatting is easy too. With the Visual Editor, I can select a specific area, using the Design Editor and even call the element out if I am not sure what it is called and then make custom font or color changes with a click of a button.

I’ve always loved blue so when I set up the colors for the new site, I knew I was going to use blue as my primary color. But which one? Again, Headway made that so simple, calling out elements, letting me play with a look and applying it to the specific area I wanted.

I spent 10 years waffling about how to put my first site up until I finally launched it. With Headway, I asked Kim to help me with exports and plug-ins and we worked together setting up structure and moving content and in less than a week while running my business and while Kim was working on other projects, we launched.

The transition was a little different for me than other Headway users because I had an existing full website with PayPal codes to move and sample resumes to set up. Kim installed the NextGEN gallery plug-in to manage my samples and with Headway’s easy page additions and editing, I found myself adding more samples and being able to talk about the strategy behind the resume.

The former site’s sample page was hard to track but because Headway is a WordPress theme, the WordPress stats monitors every page and post on my site. The samples get considerable traffic.

If I were starting a new site today, I would not hesitate to use Headway.

The Headway team is constantly improving the product and I have no doubt that my experience with Headway will only get better in the future. I became an affiliate of Headway because of how impressed I was with the product.

I am always encouraging clients and business owners who want to take control of their blog and get great, professional results (without having to learn code or complex programs like Dreamweaver), to look at all the advantages of using Headway. Is your website making Headway?

Photo by Vern Hart

You may have noticed that the face of this blog and my entire website has changed.

Kim Woodbridge played a huge role in making it happen!

I determined that I wanted to move the site to Headway, after seeing the blogs of people like Jim Connolly, Danny Brown, John Haydon, and hearing them explain how easy it is to work with Headway.

I’ve had a website forever. My first one was created by the son of a neighbor in the early days of computers. I never took it down. You can still see it here. You can tell how old it is by the software I listed. I didn’t really market it or use it after the initial few years.

My second site took forever to create (think 10 years) because I couldn’t get my head around what I wanted to say. I bought the domain and just kept renewing it. Even after I hired a local designer to set up the template, I couldn’t write the content. Finally, January 2009 with a push from a friend, I wrote the content and my designer launched the site on a server in Texas.

I had started my blog in October 2008 on a separate WordPress platform. In April 2009, I asked Kim if she could move the blog to the site and hired her for the first time. She got it ready to go but the export wasn’t working with my server so we ended up moving the whole site and blog to Hostgator. Everything was going well but that site was created in Dreamweaver and though I could work in it, it was, well… work.

Again, reading the positive comments about Headway made me very curious. I wouldn’t make a change though without support. Exporting your blog or website to a new site takes someone who understands the nuances of moving data and someone who can be trusted to troubleshoot for you.

Once again, I turned to Kim. She had not worked with Headway yet but that didn’t worry me because I know how quickly she learns. I asked her on Monday morning if I could hire her again and by Tuesday, she had a template ready to go. Kim and I talk by e-mail and Twitter DMs and we created this whole new site together that way.

I’m very hands-on. I knew what I wanted so after she told me it was up, I started playing. I changed colors using the easy to use Visual Editor and created new navigation. We communicated back and forth so we wouldn’t wipe out each others changes.

Kim transferred some of my content but then I rewrote it and decided to transfer the rest myself since it was essentially a cut and paste. I had to re-tweak some things and put the PayPal code back in but I had done all that in Dreamweaver myself so I knew I could do it again. Editing a page in Headway is like editing a blog post. In Dreamweaver, it was doable but more work.

Kim worked on the final details and we determined that we could go live on Saturday morning. Mind you, Kim and I were both working on other projects all week long. She had my project and others and I had my clients in addition to this site change. Still, in less than a week, we designed the new site and moved the old site and blog, and let it go live. I am sure there will be little things to fix because any big project does have a few issues to iron out but I know that I have help when I need it.

What I love about Headway is that I know that I can continue to tweak easily or even change all the colors etc. The site doesn’t have to go stale and wait until I have someone design a new template.

What I love about Kim is that I have a partner that let me have a role in creation of the site and yet was there to handhold me.

So… the Thank YOU goes to Kim!