Just Released!

This amazing deal on premium web design assets brought to you by Impressto.com.  This bundle is priced at only $30 and available for a limited time.  It includes tumblr and wordpress themes, UI packs, vector packs, typefaces and some really cool goodies.

Some of the contributors included are Grooveshark, Wijmo, Chris Spooner, Nick Pettit, Galen Gidman, Derek Bender and Mike Rogers.

3 months FREE to Grooveshark

Premium WordPress Theme by Chris Spooner

Tumblr Theme and Food Vector Pack by Derek Bender

FREE download of the must have book Running Lean

and sooo much more!

They even were nominated for a CSS award for the creative use of web fonts and new CSS elements.

Get it while you can!  http://bundle.impressto.com

We even got some premium freebies to give away {see below}.  Just shoot us an email or share this post!

As a way to give back to the industry and introduce the game changing creative storefront community, impressto has decided to get together with some amazing web designers, developers and companies to offer a killer web design bundle. They will be giving it away for FREE to one lucky person every week until the launch on June 6th. Just sign up and tweet the page to enter.

The bundle will include wordpress themes, tumblr themes, icon packs, vector art, typefaces an ebook and some crazy coupons.

Some of the contributors included will be Nick Pettit from Carsonified, Derek Bender of Videroo, Onur Oztaskiran, Umar Irshad, Mike Rogers and much more!
Jump on early and take advantage of this cool deal!

Impressto.com is planning their launch at The Front End Design Conference in Tampa, FL on July 22nd.

I get this question from people of all the time. If you are just starting a business, wanting to have an identity online or just looking to find an easy way to manage your own website.

My favorite solution is the wonderful WordPress.  I’m sure if you are reading this you have heard of it and want to know some easy tips to get started.

1) Purchase a domain name.

My advice with this can go a few ways.  It really depends on what you are looking to achieve with the site.  Is it is for a business? Purchase a domain similar to your business name.  If it is for a personal brand? Try to get a domain with your name in it.  For personal brands don’t forget the growing top level extension .me!  Remember, buying a domain name is like buying your real estate online.

Places to buy domain names (I may or may not be an affiliate of some of these)

1&1 domains

Domain Sale! $7.49 .com at GoDaddy

2) Hosting.  This is the place where you control the storage of file, manage email accounts and much more around the domain name.  These companies provide space on a server for you to easily manage your web content.

Check out:

Hostmonster.com Only $5.95 per month

$1.99 Web Hosting at Godaddy

Rackspace.com

I use webfaction and love them!  But it has a more difficult control panel and I wouldn’t suggest it if you are new to setting up a website.

3) Install WordPress.  WordPress.org is the official url for the web software.  There you can download the latest program, read and ask questions in the forum and find out about new features and updates being worked on.  I strongly suggest that you use a hosting company like bluehost.com or godaddy.com because they have made this extremely easy. All you have to do is login and go to your Control Panel all the way down and click in on the WordPress logo.  It will ask you where you want to install it and I suggest installing it to the root.  Which is your main domain.  Not /blog or anything else.  This will allow you to control the content on the actual domain you just purchased. If you do not use one of these easy hosting companies, you will have to create a database on your hosting as well as a MySQL user to have access and privileges.  Things just get confusing from there.

Once you have installed wordpress.  Your hosting company will give you a username and password.  Usually by default it is username: admin password: letters and numbers.  The way you access this is by going to your wordpress admin path.

If you installed it on your root domain it will be www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin.  If you installed it on any sub paths it will be located where ever you installed it plus /wp-admin.

This will take you to your control panel for the entire wordpress site.  NOW YOUR READY TO GO!

4) Set Up.  Looking at the screen you will see a navigation on the left.  It will be dashboard, posts, appearance, plugins…etc.  This will be how you navigate through the different sections of your control panel. I suggest trying to create a “new post” first just to become familiar with the pages and how things work.  It’s really similar to Microsoft Word if you are trying to edit your posts.  WordPress has made it very easy.  You can embed videos, images and even music by just clicking the icons.

5) Appearance.  This is where you can adjust the look of your wordpress page.  Click on theme.  They give you a couple default themes to start with which are basic.  To find different ones you can click the tab “install themes”.  Then type the some preferences and search through the different styles.  Also,  if you want some really cool themes and would like to get a bit more in depth check out woothemes.com, themeforest.net.  Here is a link from Smashing Magazine to find cool free wordpress themes Click Here.  To install these third party themes you simply click upload and select the zip file of the theme on your computer.

Ok.  Now you have a good start.  I hope this helps answer some questions.  If I didn’t answer your question, please feel free to reach out to me at derek[at]makemealive.com or @makemealive_dk

Everyday is a chance to learn something new!

Do you know a young entrepreneur that eats, sleeps, and breathes business? We’ve put together a holiday gift guide for these workaholics that’s sure to put a smile on their faces!

Smarter, Faster, Cheaper

For the bookworms like me. Every businessperson is constantly striving to get a leg up on the competition. There’s no better way than continuing to learn, especially from those that have been successful in their endeavors.

Tickets to a Business Conference

Conferences are some of the best places to meet like-minded business mentors. However, some of these conferences can be pretty pricey!

Magazine Subscriptions

Who doesn’t love a good magazine. This also goes hand-in-hand with staying ahead of the competition. These are some of our favorites.

Apple’s iPad

This is such a great product for those business people that always on the go.

Action Method

Entrepreneurs are constantly juggling multiple projects and wearing many different hats within a busy. Help them stay organized with Behance’s fool proof organization system.

A Loan!

Or just a donation. Many people are bootstrapping their businesses and could always use a little more capital! Crowd sourcing financing has been extremely successful for many companies. Find one that you’d like to help on IndieGoGo.com.

A Flip Video

The easiest way to document and share, the trials and tribulations of staring a business.

A Vacation!

Although they probably won’t take one, getting away from work and clearing your head for a few days is a great way to recharge your batteries.

Through the major downtime and outage of Tumblr yesterday we learned a lot about Tumblr’s dedication.  Meaning that, through out the entire process they utilized other social outlets to update, apologize and remain in contact with the user base.  The average user does not relate, care or understand a database cluster outage.  They understand words like growing pains and assurance that they are working diligently to remedy the issue.  Tumblr remained transparent and did a good job to explain to the users that they value them.

Being down for an entire day is no small issue.  That is a long downtime and could really crush the development of most projects.  Tumblr came out on the other side seeing how much people really care about there platform and how loyal there user base truly is.

Late yesterday, Founder David Karp posted on the Tumblr staff blog.  “We can’t apologize enough, nor can we thank you enough for putting up with these growing pains. We know how impossibly frustrating it is to see your work offline. But please always know that we truly care about your work as much as you do, and we have an incredibly capable team working incredibly hard to take good care of it. Sorry we let you down today.”

Tumblr is growing at an extremely fast pace and scaling issues are bound to happen.  I believe this issue will better prepare them for future issues and there user base is going to stay loyal.

What do you think?

Tumblr is down for now about 15 hours and counting. When you go to tumblr.com the above image is displayed. This poses as a major problem for all those people who apparently live on the site.
The outrage has been taken to twitter where hashtags like #givememytumblrbackPLEASE are pouring out. I have always been a fan and believed that tumblr was on to something great. I truly didn’t realize how much they have gained ground over the past year. But apparently have some major growing pains. The site being down this long is not small issue.
Some people are loving the blackout. WhenTumblrIsDown.com is poking at the outage and making some money off of it as well by posting google adwords to the landing page.  Good for you.

Why do you think that tumblr is experiencing that long outage?  Do you feel it will effect its growth?

Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work on our latest joint venture with Digital Propaganda… TheMiniPrinter.com! Today all of the hard work paid off, as we finally launched the new site!

We met with Bobby Bharwani, the owner of Digital Propaganda, a few months back to discuss ways to increase DP’s online presence. While the DP e-commerce site was being developed, we decided to start developing niche printing websites to target specific demographics. The first of which would be TheMiniPrinter.com. All of us had noticed an increasing demand in smaller “profile” or mini business cards. This trend was especially big in the Creative Industry, including Designers, Photographers, and Marketing Reps that want to stand out.

After deciding on the first few products we would roll out, we focused our attention on the marketing for the company. We knew that we wanted to have the community involved in developing the brand and create a grass roots following. To get the Creative community involved we created a Design a Mini Tee Contest. The idea for this contest was to allow designers to create and upload their Mini Printer T-Shirt designs. After they submitted their designs, they would have their friends vote for their shirt. This way the designers would help drive traffic to TheMiniPrinter and increase brand awareness. At the end of the contest, the two shirts with the most votes would be printed in a limited edition run and available for sale. The winners would receive a free shirt with their design on it. We love T-shirts and like to think of them as walking billboards!

Next we decided to create a Social Media contest and thought Twitter would be the perfect place to gain immediate recognition. We knew we had to give some incentive to get people to promote the brand. So we came up with the idea of running a Twitter hash tag contest and giving away a FREE AppleTV to one lucky winner. In order to increase or followers, participants had to follow @theminiprinter and send out a Tweet using #theminiprinter. We installed a widget by TweetGrid to populate all tweets containing #theminiprinter on the Twitter Contest page.

As I’m writing this, I was just informed that #theminiprinter is a trending topic in Orlando, Fl! Woohoo.. it’s working! Stay tuned for more updates!

Download the latest FREE texture pack from Impressto.com!

We only usually cover internet videos when they are relative to marketing and used to catapult a project, idea or business.

But I couldn’t pass the opportunity to share this.  Zach Galifianakis lights up a joint during a conversation about the legalization of marajuana on Bill Maher Show.  This could potentially fall under our viral video category for the sole fact that this appearance, while plugging Zach’s new movie “Due Date” is amazing timing.

To confirm it was real conservative Republican Margaret Hoover smells it. Priceless!

Flavors.me launched early this year and has felt positive growth instantly.  The site was developed by HiiDef Inc. which is an incubator startup for a few other creative web projects and founded by former Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and David Marcus.

The majority of users utilizing the internet these days, as a social platform, have multiple profiles from various sites.  The issue is that, to manage and stay relevant to the users, they have to go to the different services to update and stay connected.  Flavors.me is a solution and the ultimate goal in the social platform to create one internet presence, which spans and pulls together all the social services.

So how has Flavors.me positioned themselves for instant success?  Simple,  they solved a common problem and created a solution for potentially millions of people.  The site is extremely simple and a user can create a beautiful presence in 10 min. “CODE FREE!”  They are not adding to the problem with more social platforms.  They are simply utilizing existing API’s to create an organized social presence for any user, without the constraints of not knowing HTML/ CSS.

Of coarse there are plenty of other sites out there that pull your web presence to one place. But nothing this slick and simple and your end result is really cool.  Unlike other similar services out there, Flavors has created a platform that is scalable to cover the complete other side of the social profile management issue.  Hint, sites like threadsy.com

Flavors.me launched early this year and has felt positive growth instantly.  The site was developed by HiiDef Inc. which is an incubator startup for a few other creative web projects and founded by Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and David Marcus.

Find my Flavors… http://flavors.me/derekkohn