If you’re considering starting up a blog, planning in advance is essential. One of the joys of blogging is that it can take any direction which you want it to – perhaps even directions which you hadn’t anticipated. This can be governed by your audience or customers and ideas from other people as well as your own imagination and ideas. However, it’ll be quite a while before you have enough content for your blog to be well established. Here are 3 important tips for start-up bloggers:

• Decide which site you’re going to use. There are a number of popular options around which won’t cost very much at all. Blogs can be available free but you won’t be able to choose your own domain name so it’s probably worth paying for your own.
• Make a decision about the overall tone of your blog. What kind of topics will it cover? What kind of language will reflect these topics well? Once you’ve chosen your tone, stick to it.
• Have a list of topics in mind. You’ll come up with plenty more as you get into it but it’s important to have a good starting point so that you don’t get stuck after a few posts.

It may seem like a strange concept, to ignore the fact that you have an end user. But ignoring the fact this is eventually going to be used by a human can allow you to see the development of the website in a new light.

Ignoring the end user works as a thought experiment. Without an end user to worry about you and your development team can ask questions such as:

• Do we like how this looks, in our opinion? To our personal standards?
• Does this fit with other websites we’ve designed and if not, how can we make it fit in with their styles?
• What else can we put into the website that we like?
• What could other potential end users make of the website and how might they receive it?

Of course, ignoring the end user as a default business plan is not going to allow you to do the job you are being paid for. But nevertheless it can yield some useful creative ideas.

A web design project can be a long and strenuous process. From the planning stage to execution, a project can quickly become an immense undertaking. Then there is the fact that you are dealing with an end user in mind. Your client.

First and foremost, the client is a human being. This is an obvious statement but it can’t be stressed enough. Its all to easy to forget that the client you are working for has emotions and ideas of their own. These may seem like trivial things, but taking them into account can make a huge difference in the way you approach web design projects.

Considering the client as variable human being from the get-go will relieve some of the inevitable headaches that are sure to occur when creating their website. After all they want the project to go well in the same way as you do.

Internet memes have become a sort of indie music of the internet. Like indie music, internet memes are usually misplaced and hard to look at, but some are legendary and amazing, securing a place in our memories and culture.

It’s because of the all or nothing nature of memes that makes them so hard to use in blogs. It is possible, but to take a meme out of its context is to take a fish out of water. It just doesn’t work.

But if you are going to do it the best way is to use light references. Those that get the reference will appreciate it and those that don’t won’t even realise it. Going too heavy on light references can be bad though. It’s best to only do it if you really feel it adds to the content you already have. Definitely don’t write blog content about memes, you are asking for trouble.