I’d like to talk about how I put together the Squidoo Museum. It demonstrates everything I know about graphics, color, fonts, and CSS.

First, I built the content. I knew what I wanted on my lens– a showcase of lenses of the type I want to see more of on Squidoo– so all I had to do is collect and organize it in a semi-logical fashion. I published it once I had the basic facts, ideas, things I wanted to say written out, and a lens logo. That was it.

Then I worked on the writing style. I could see that a plain old lensography didn’t have much draw. Like a Latin or Etymology class, you have to work harder to make dry content come to life. Give it a personality. Show why you love it, and let that passion be contagious.

I love antiquities, and my topics — science, history, geography — reminded me of the Smithsonian. I’d already named the lens the Squidoo Museum. So I had my model: a museum, a World’s Fair, an antiquarian’s collection of curiosities. You could use any sort of conceit — a racetrack, a shopping mall (which has been done to marvelous effect by Margaret Shaut), a library, a playground — to give a lens a cohesive theme.

I invented a fake curator, and pulled a tongue-in-cheek antiquarian style to give the lens personality.

Once I realized that my theme was a sort of Victorian version of the Smithsonian, then I started working on graphics. I mostly searched Wikimedia Commons for images, because they’re almost all public domain, and some Creative Commons. That took a while. I then had to pick one size for all of them, so they’d look cohesive, and shrink/crop all the graphics to the same size.

Last of all, I did a better lens logo. I found myself putting a border on it, mostly because I’d been forced to do a tight crop.

The lens logo dictated the CSS styles of my lens. I saw it was a spare, grayish-blue sort of graphic, so I replicated that throughout the lens. In fact, I replicated the colors precisely.

Since the graphic had a border, the introduction module paragraph next to it needed a border. Try to get the Introduction Module to coordinate graphics and text, since that’s the first thing visitors see. I used the eyedropper in my graphics program to find out the actual color of the border of the graphic, and used that for the color of the paragraph border. I borrowed a few grays and blues from the graphic to color other parts of the lens.

Then I worked a heck of a lot with CSS to get the graphics and text to fit their areas nicely, and for colors to harmonize.

Colors Tip: Look closely at the Introduction Module of the Squidoo Museum (thumbnail above). I painted a colored border on the graphic in Photoshop:
– Use the eyedropper to pick a dark color in the graphic.
– Select All.
– Make a new layer.
– Under the edit menu, pick STROKE to stroke a border around the graphic.
Then I double-clicked the color of that border, COPIED the color code, and used it for the CSS border of the paragraph in the lens. In other words, use the eyedropper in your graphics program to discover color codes of the lens logo, and use those colors for text, borders or paragraphs in the Introduction Module. (In this lens, I picked up the blue of the fireworks for the paragraph border.)

For all my best CSS tricks, see my Advanced CSS Tricks lens. Or learn basic CSS on my CSS Tutorial and Quick Reference lens.

And yes, I need to update the museum again! Or at least the newsletter.

Spam That Has ABSOLUTELY Nothing To Do With This Post

Apologies. I’m testing something SEO-related. I’ll let you know what I’ve learned (if anything) after the experiment is over.

Kithyra Grunderbar Kithyra Grunderbar

Now I’ve reorganized it and made it more dignified (slightly), and added all the tricks I tend to use most on my lenses: rounded corners, background-images for paragraphs, captions under aligned images, drop caps, dramatic numbered lists, and most of all, playing around with the introduction module to make the first thing visitors see look great.

I’ve moved the old lab experiments to page 2. There’s another use for a Page Break!

(My “crazy lab experiments” lens is now ZEE CODE SCRATCHPAD. Once I’ve got things working nicely there, I may move the “finished products” to the AdvancedCSS lens for prime time viewing.)

Also, Google rewards frequently updated content.

These are two separate things, but they go together.

What are your techniques for keeping lenses fresh?

Here’s some of mine.

Quick Fix — do one of the following

• While watching TV, I’ll sort my dashboard by date (click the date column at top), then edit and re-publish. Don’t do all of them on the same day — stagger them so you’re doing 10 or so on different days.
• Check traffic stats. Change the range to 3 months. See any long tail phrases that are getting a lot of hits? Go edit your lens, see if you can have that phrase appear in a module title or image filename or body text without it being intrusive to human readers.
• Edit for clarity. Trim excess verbiage, tighten prose.
• Check your images. Do you have alt-text (or labels) that match your keywords? Do imagenames match your keywords?
• Search Squidoo. See if you can find any good lenses on your topic to feature or lensroll.
• Search Amazon. See if you can find any good products to feature in a sidebar widget.

Slightly Longer Fix

• Jot down the purpose of your lens on a post-it or something (Goals #1, 2, 3). Read your lens module by module. Does each part satisfy a goal? Or is there stuff in your lens that doesn’t satisfy the lens goal? Why is it there?
• Look for any graphics that could be improved. Search for Creative Commons, clip art or stock photos to make it look better.
• Skim the answer deck. See any ideas that catch your eye? Read a “tips and techniques” lens, and apply it to yours.
• Search the web for your topic. See any useful information or sites you could link to? Maybe get some new ideas.
• Search YouTube for related videos.
• Search Vimeo, Veoh, and OTHER video sites for related videos. We always forget those!
• Search Twitter for tweets related to your lens topic. The Tweets themselves won’t give you anything new, but they might point you at (a) news, products, or content you could add to your lens or (b) what people interested in your topic are talking about.

All right, your turn! What do you do to keep lenses updated?

So I should share more of my tips on graphics and webpage design. Here’s a few!

First, I just posted a lens on Squidoo’s themes and text colors, giving all the HTML color codes for each Squidoo theme (themes, not co-brands — I need to do co-brands too, don’t I?)

Second, I like jeffreyv’s tip to drag this Find Stock Photos link into your toolbar (or bookmark it) to use Yahoo to search for stock photos. In fact, I like it so much that I may have to hack the code to add my own favorite ways to search for images. For a first try, here’s a Google Creative Commons search, which doesn’t just search Flickr (unlike the default Creative Commons website), but searches for ALL images with Creative Commons licenses. More on this later.

Third, if you haven’t gone there already, go to my Free Web Graphics: Where to Find them (Legally)! lens. It really is possible to find good graphics without breaking copyright, but it helps to know where to look!

And fourth: did you know you can change the color of black boxes, and even add a background-image? It looks gorgeous. It also makes a great frame for Allposters.com ads, but you’ll need to trim it severely.

Here’s how. First, get a Static Link to a single poster. Change it to “Large Image”, and choose “No” on every single radio button that you can.

Buy at AllPosters.com

Second, take the code that they give you, and trim what’s not essential so that you can fit within the Black Box’s 500 character limit. Red parts can be deleted:

<a href=“http://affiliates.allposters.com/link/redirect.asp?item=390463&AID=1192828929&PSTID=1&LTID=2&lang=1“ target=”_blank” title=”Tourn&#233;e du Chat Noir, c.1896″><img src=“http://imagecache6.allposters.com//LRG//\20\2032\9IE4D00Z.jpg” alt=”Tourn&#233;e du Chat Noir, c.1896″ border=”0″ height=“450“ width=“332“></a>
<img src=“http://tracking.allposters.com/allposters.gif?AID=1192828929&PSTID=1&LTID=2&lang=1“ border=”0″ height=“1” width=“1“>
<BR>
<span style=”font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica;font-size:10;” >

<a href=“http://affiliates.allposters.com/link/redirect.asp?item=390463&AID=1192828929&PSTID=1&LTID=2&lang=1“ target=”_blank” title=”Tourn&#233;e du Chat Noir, c.1896″>Buy  at AllPosters.com</a><BR>
</span>

You don’t have to delete all of that, but watch your character count and delete until you’ve gotten under the 500 character limit. The black box will then make a dramatic and sharp-looking frame for your poster, something like this (only with rounded corners, which WordPress isn’t letting me do, #@$!):

Here, Kitty, Kitty

Buy at AllPosters.com

• iTunes – earn commission, feature iTunes tracks
• My Lenses – show your lenses filed under a certain category or topic.
• RSS Mashup – show recent posts from several RSS or blog feeds.

Click links above to see them demonstrated on my “Secret Squidoo Modules” lens!

NOTE: All of these have NoFollow links, so “My Lenses” isn’t the best way to get link juice from a lensography. But the content is crawled/indexed/seen by search engines.

Also, did you know? The Netflix module is commission-earning too!

I’ve been adding and updating my complete list of all Squidoo modules, so you might want to stop by and browse the list or download a new, updated version.

Here’s the steps I took to make this effective lens.

1) Find a controversial subject LOTS of people are talking about, and/or notice something in current news/buzz that people may look up.

I follow space news, and heard there were some new cool photos of moon landing sites. When I searched for them on the web, I ran into a whole pile of people claiming the moon landings are a hoax! (This would be news to my Mom’s friend Neil Armstrong.) A number of people were asking why there were no photos of moon landers from space. Aha! A question that can be answered with a Squidoo lens! Juicy debate and controversy! Perfect for getting traffic. Now, how to target it…

2) Find popular keyword searches for that topic.

First I looked at news posts, blog posts and especially the comments to see what words and phrases people were using to discuss the topic. I paid special attention to questions people were asking in comments, because when people ask questions, they often search the web for answers! I wrote these words, phrases and questions down, then checked their popularity in Google Adwords and Wordtracker to see what people were searching most often.  Finally, I Googled for “allinurl: <keywords>” and “allintitle: <keywords>” to figure out which of these phrases didn’t have too much competition (other webpages optimized to target those keywods).

Remember the golden rule of SEO: find popular search phrases for which there isn’t too much competition!

3) Weave keywords into page title, URL, lens photo’s filename, links, and a few module headers — this is standard Squidoo SEO practice.

My title is actually long– ideally it should be 4-5 words long  — but it’s covering several different popular search phrases.

4) Write entertaining copy that answers the exact questions people were asking.

For example, I noticed some folks asking about photos of the American flag on the moon, so I found a photo that showed it it. I noticed that some critics were complaining about the bright white spots on some of the moon lander photos, caused by major sun glare, so I found a video that illustrates exactly that.

5) Provide LOTS of clickthrough links.

Clickouts are key. Getting visitors to a webpage is step 1. Step 2 is to get them to DO something once they arrive — click links, buy products, view videos, vote in polls, etc. I included links right in the introduction that Mr. Five Second Attention Span might click on, then useful links — again related to the questions people asked on the topic — throughout.  Clickthroughs boost lensrank, and are a vital part of second tier lenses!

6) Get good, free, LEGAL graphics and videos to illustrate the webpage.

NASA images are very handy: since NASA is a US government agency, most of its images are available to the general public for reuse! Check permissions on NASA pages to make sure. This means that space-related topics are a gold mine for Squidoo lenses, since there’s lots of free photos available. See my Free Web Graphics lens for other sources of free images. For ideas about new lenses, you might take the unusual step of collecting interesting images, then writing a lens on that topic!

7. Interactivity (polls, guestbook, etc).

Interactivity increases reader interest in a lens, and the clicks may boost lensrank.

When you find a lens you like, ask yourself: WHY do you like it? You can get insights about building good lenses, articles, and blog posts by jotting down what on that lens worked for you, what didn’t. Don’t copy their content (please!), but learn approaches to presenting your own content in more effective ways.

Here is EditorDave’s Guam: Where America’s Day Begins lens.

What I Liked About This Lens

What I love most about this lens is the personal, unique content.

So much of the web is just regurgitating content someone else wrote, or providing bare-bones information that has no personal stamp. Dave’s writing about a topic he knows: where he lives! He gives his lens lots of life with his own experiences, his own photographs. That makes his page very different from a standard tourism lens, even though he may give less information about hotels, transportation and local attractions (instead, he links to sites on those).

Little details like typhoon-proof (or not so proof) architecture, the plants in his back yard, the “critters”, things to look for in old grade B movies filmed on Guam — make his Guam a real place. This is a first-person story.

Dave also mentions his other lenses on Guam without doing a ton of promotion for them. His writing is good enough, and his content is interesting enough, that I may really want to read more!

I also like his mix of his own photos and using Allposters.com to provide beautiful images to illustrate his content (rather than his content only being there to sell the posters).

Something That Works Here That Might Not On Another Lens

One thing EditorDave does NOT do is provide a Fancy Table of Contents. (Sorry.) That is, there’s no road map to tell us how long his lens is, what topics it’s going to cover, or where he’s going to take us while we’re visiting his lens. His writing is good enough that we don’t need it. I enjoyed browsing and being a tourist on his page.  On other lenses of this length, I’d probably want a road map.

Quibbles/Areas for Improvement

Dave could probably capture more clickthroughs— which boost lensrank and thus sales— by making some of the words in his lens clickable links. He mentioned a page about sea cucumbers at one point, but forgot to include the link. People can ignore links in your text if they want to, but don’t be shy about including links to related pages now and then, as long as you don’t go overboard with it— you never know when a visitor might turn out to be a huge sea slug fan!

There’s a number of links to dead auctions –probably an artifact of this being an old lens.

The one thing that didn’t work for me is the Ebay and Amazon modules. The lists were long, I didn’t get the impression that Dave actually had picked out the products in them, and I didn’t feel like clicking on them. I just wanted to get back to Dave’s own writing. Then again, I’m not thinking of going to Guam, so I’m not a target customer for those products.

I think my experience — quickly scrolling past a long list of products to get to the “next part of the page” — is fairly typical of user behavior. You may have more success with fewer products, more closely integreated into the content, using Amazon Spotlight or some other method to draw attention to them. It also helps when you include your own comments about books or products, so we know you picked them out yourself and have at least some reason for recommending them. But let’s face it — only a small percentage of visitors to any web page buy from it or click the sales module links.