As far as design was concerned we attempted to pull from the heart of Mamou to showcase an area with rich tradition and color. Saint Ann is an older and more traditional Catholic church with a strong Cajun congregation. Our use of color was to provide a sense of depth and a feeling of an ancient connection to the past. We also creatively directed a photo shoot with Jamie Orillion Photography and Design to bring a updated look to the front of the church as well as to develop a collection of stock images for the parish to use throughout the site. Cruce also coordinated the branding of their new logo and identity. Their logo draws from their very recognizable steeple. Our goal was to provide Saint Ann with a solid identity to use in future print media.

See more of their site here: www.saintannmamou.org

1. Find a service that can update your statuses across services.

Finding a service that lets you sync or link all of your various networking services together. HelloTxt is a great service that connects most of the major social sites and provides a mobile website as well when you are on the go!

2. Learn to update all at once and one time a day maximum.

This goes for email too, but pick a time of the day to allow yourself some social networking time. Set an alarm if you need to and say “when the clock strikes 2PM I am done!” This will eliminate the distraction of getting sucked in for hours just checking who did what in Mafia on Facebook (I hate Facebook Apps by the way)

3. Pick one service to be your “home base” and from there feed out.

If you spend more time on MySpace make that the one that you do most of your work on, and connect people through your site to this “home social base”. Having a central location for things can also help when we talk about the last step intergration. Mine is Facebook…MySpace is just too cluttered for me

4. Mention other people often and linkbacks. Retweets are your friend!

Linking is a huge part of social networking. When you retweet some random company’s post they notice. It is a free chance for you name and profile to pop up on someone else’s radar. This is also true about making comments on blog posts. This not only puts your name and website address on someone else’s site it can help to boost your Search Engine rankings. This also rings true to following others. Make sure you keep up-to-date with what other people are saying about your business or your industry in general.

5. Integration is the KEY!

If you use a blog to syndicate content and keep people updated on your business then you have one of the greatest tools to save you time. If you are using WordPress there are countless plugins that allow you to connect your blog directly to your various social networks, I am a fan of Twitter Tools and Wordbook myself. You can also add services like ShareThis to your site to allow your users to post your content to their social networks. Make sure to use your website to also alert people to the various places you network. Don’t be afraid to be bold and say “I DON’T USE MYSPACE! DON’T MESSAGE ME!!”  Just make sure to tell them that you are plugged in and show them all the ways they can find you!

Content Management Systems are a dime a dozen these days. Every PHP designer with any teeth probably has made one or another to prove they can make a kickass CMS! Usually though, these CMSes are horribly difficult to use, are closed box systems, and force people to get locked into their proprietary technology. The BIG reality is that there are only a handful or so that are actually usable for clients. My clients across the board need something that is web based, easy to use, and doesn’t require a Computer Science degree to manage.

I have tried my fair share of open source CMSes and have generally one complaint about all of them, they aren’t user friendly. This is usually tied to the fact that some PHP programmer designed the system and user interface with little to no help from graphic designers.

Enter WordPress.

I couldn’t find a better way to describe it than the main quote from their website.

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.”

I have been using WordPress for all of my sites for about 3 years now and will never look back. It has everything a guy couldn’t want and more! To save you and me time, I am just going to list out the pros and cons. I will let you decide.

Pros

• FREE! FREE! FREE!
• widely used and developed (Ford, Yahoo, eBay, CNN, New York Times)
• highly extensible (thousands of plugins available)
• easy templating & well documented (php based & the WordPress Codex)
• very user friendly (if you can use Microsoft Word you are good to go)
• did I mention FREE! (Open Source)
• you can get a completely free blog to get started (WordPress.com)

Cons

• still makes blogging the main UI focus
• no caching out of the box