If you want to have a professional-quality successful screencast video, you do not simply hit the record button on your screencasting software and go.

Unless, of course, you want to look like a total idiot.

But if you want to look like a confident pro, a bit of planning is in order.

Planning a screencast is easy when you simply ask the right questions, which I’ve conveniently listed for you below. Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya.

Questions to Ask Before Before Creating a Screencast So You Don’t Look Like a Total Idiot

• What specific task or series of tasks do you intend to demonstrate, or what specific information do you want to communicate?
• Is this going to be a singular screencast or a series?
• How long is the video going to be (or each in a series)?
• What are the specific steps you want viewers to be able to replicate on their own after watching your video? Or, what is the specific action you want viewers to take after watching the video?
• What is the big benefit for viewers if they follow the steps in your video beyond accomplishing the task? Does it address the need viewers have that causes them to want to watch your screencast in the first place?

Let’s break these questions down so you understand why they’re important.

What specific task or series of tasks do you intend to demonstrate, or what specific information do you want to communicate?

If you’re demonstrating software, you need to break down into steps all the actions needed to accomplish the learning objective.

If you’re creating more of a slideshow speech, then what is the informational objective?

Is this going to be a singular screencast or a series?

This has implications for how you time, pace things and do stuff like titles, introductions and conclusions. In a series of videos, for example, you’ll want to remind viewers which part in the series they’re watching and what was in the previous and next parts to the series. But reminding viewers to visit your website or having a long piece of intro music would quickly get very annoying to anyone watching the series. These kind of elements belong only in the first and last videos when part of a series.

How long is the video going to be (or each in a series)?

Many folks who create a lot of video will tell you that shorter is better, and by short they mean less than 5 minutes long. I’m not gonna argue with that: if you can do it, great. But if you can’t contain it to less than 5 minutes, don’t worry about it. There are tons of screencasts that are 30 minutes long or even longer and people will still watch them.

Why?

Because they need what’s in it and they’re very committed and interested in its content.

A single stand-alone video can be much longer than videos in a series. When creating a series, you’ve got to balance out the duration of each video against the number of videos in the series. For example: 5 10-minute-long videos is probably better than 10 5-minute-long videos. Watching 10 videos sounds like way more work than watching only 5 videos regardless of individual video length.

What are the specific steps you want viewers to be able to replicate on their own after watching your video? Or, what is the specific action you want viewers to take after watching the video?

You may have a learning objective: How to do X. But in order to accomplish X, you have to have a series of steps and possibly some preparation work. Think about how the information in recipes is organized:

• Ingredients you need and in what amount.
• Tools you need.
• Preparation, if any.
• Steps to create the dish.
• Steps to serving the dish, if any.

You have to figure out the “recipe” for your screencast: write down the preparation and the steps and number them. That way, in your narration and/or your title you can say: The Six Steps to a Perfect X, Every Time or some such thing.

There’s no need to over-think this, but try not to let your existing knowledge and assumptions get in the way of what beginners have no clue about (this phenomenon is called the curse of knowledge).

If you’re giving what is essentially a speech via PowerPoint, you may not be instructing anyone step-by-step. However, you still want the viewer to take some kind of action after watching the video: you have an objective. What is it? Write it down. You’ll be telling viewers this in your video.

What is the big benefit for viewers if they follow the steps in your video beyond accomplishing the task? Does it address the need viewers have that causes them to want to watch your screencast in the first place?

Don’t assume everyone will want to watch your screencast, even if they’ve already bought your course (if you’re selling one, that is). Each video has to sell itself all over again to remind buyers why they bought your course and what they’re continually getting out of it.

If you’re not selling anything, well, there’s only 500 squiddelymillion other free videos out there competing for attention. Why should anyone watch yours?

This benefit I’m talking about is not accomplishing the learning objective. It’s not “learning X,” it’s what learning X will do for viewers. You need to know this so you can get people to even watch your video, and you’ll want to repeat it within your video at the beginning and the end (sort of a “here’s why you’re watching this,” and “here’s why you watched this” kind of a thing).

Now That You Have Your Questions Answered…

In the next post, we’ll take a look at  Scripting and Recording Screencast Audio,  in which I will teach you steps the pros take that the amateurs don’t. Such as writing a script and recording audio separately from the video. That way, you can sound confident and cause the viewer to have confidence in you as you lead them along, rather than sound like a hesitant, blathering idiot (which, sadly, a lot of people do in their screencasts).

Is your existing web designer also a competent blog designer? Did you know it takes special skills to effectively design a business blog? When you’re having a blog created for your website, it may not be in your business’s best interest to use the same web designer that did your original site. I’ve been doing this blog consulting thing for a while, now, and something I see repeatedly is business owners paying good money for outdated site design that does more harm than good.

Blog Design and Hybrid Mechanics

You may have a great relationship with your auto mechanic, but if your mechanic hasn’t taken special training to work with the new gas-electric hybrid vehicles, and you want to buy a new hybrid car, you simply can’t take that car in to your old mechanic.

You know why: he will not be able to help you. If he tried, he might screw things up pretty badly for your new car—limiting your freedom of movement (and costing you extra) while you have to take your car to a more qualified mechanic. It would’ve been wise to seek out a hybrid-qualified mechanic in the first place.

The gulf between “old school” web designers and blog designers is even wider than that. Let me be blunt: if your previous web designer has not been keeping her skills updated, she is of no use to your business. You might be in luck. In the time since your designer created your last site, she may have grown into a fully competent blog designer. But if she hasn’t kept herself up-to-date, then why on earth would you want her to design your new blog? At best, you’d be paying her to learn on your dime, with sub-optimal results that would only minimally help your bottom line. At worst, more harm than good could be the result. You could experience diminishing traffic and fewer sales, rather than more.

Design is not Enough

Why? Because design is not enough.

Time was a web designer wasn’t much more than a graphic or print designer who had learned how to translate their visual designs into web pages. These web pages often used layout methods which have since become deprecated (like depreciation). That is to say, these old methods are no longer acceptable because they do not comply with the updated standards for HTML, CSS, and other technologies as stated by the World Wide Web Consortium, the governing standards body for this sort of thing.

But it’s more than that.

When most laypeople think of web or blog design, they’re of the understanding that “design” means everything. In other words, it’s not just the look of the pages you’re expecting from your designer, but also the placement of the content, the navigational architecture of the site, and nearly every word of copy—not just the design, but the marketing, too.

One cannot design a blog effectively, nowadays, without also understanding concepts such as search engine optimization (SEO), copywriting, conversion design, community-building, social media integration, and marketing. This puts you, the business owner, in the position of having to hire either a multi-person team with breakdowns among the specialties I mentioned, or one person who can do it all.

My Own Story: Pissing Off Web Designers

I never set out to do this, but I keep pissing off web designers who have not kept up, and putting business owners in a position of having to make a tough decision between a valued personal relationship and nothing less than the ultimate success of their business online. I was on a conference call the other day with a PR agent who is using me to create or improve the blogs and websites of his clients, and he asked me what I would do to improve the site of one of his clients. In my normal honest and straightforward fashion, I said that the site had no apparent purpose to visitors, and that it would be nearly impossible for the the site the way it was to receive any relevant search traffic. Basically, the purpose and marketing were completely off-target. The fact that it was already a WordPress blog didn’t even matter in this case, because its conception was wrong-headed to begin with.

I found out later that the original designer of that site was listening in on the conference call. Now, that might make you wince a little bit, but you know what? I care more about the success of my clients than the feelings of a web designer who doesn’t understand marketing or who can’t be bothered to keep his skills updated.

The success of your business is ultimately not related to whether or not you just paid a designer a lot of money for your site. If your site isn’t going to help you attract, engage, and sell to customers, you might as well just pile up all that money on the table… and set it on fire.

Blog Designer Checklist

So how do you know if your designer has the chops? Use this list. If your designer doesn’t do all of these tasks or understand these concepts/disciplines, get people who do. You do not have to understand everything on this list in gory technical detail yourself.

• They have their own self-hosted WordPress blog, which has been updated recently (DUH! Seriously, without this, don’t even bother!)
• Understand table-less CSS layouts using floated divs
• Knows how to configure blog settings optimally, such as for permalinks and feeds
• Works with you to incorporate conversion goals into the design and content
• Knows exactly what plugins to install and how to configure them for SEO and social media engagement
• Understands at least basic on-page SEO factors—and provides a way for your blog’s authors to learn about this as well, since they’ll need to know it in order to create successful blog content

Tough Love

Are you willing to risk your business failing because you make the wrong decision about your site’s designer? The best thing you can do is get all the hosting, FTP, and blog (if you already have a blog) logins and passwords from your old designer (you should have them anyway). Create new users and passwords and delete the old accounts (your new blog designer can do this or an interim tech-savvy virtual assistant). Then, simply begin working with your new designer. If you haven’t opened discussions with your old designer, then there’s nothing for them to do; you will simply have ceased to call on him. He may not even notice, because the only time he pays attention to you is when you have a job for him to do.

If you have opened up discussions with your previous designer, then you owe it to her to let her know that you’ll be working with someone else. I know that’s tough, but I doubt it would be the toughest thing you’ve ever done. You might be doing her a huge favor by waking her up.

A Compromise

If you value your relationship with your designer enough, here’s an alternative: let them do your new blog for you and let them learn on your dime and update their skills and knowledge. But… at a reduced rate. This way, you’re both doing each other a favor (although you’re likely granting the larger favor, but hey, relationships are important and so is “paying it forward”). I mentioned above that doing this could lead to less than optimal results. You’re in danger of that, but if you feel it’s worth the risk, then go for it. Be dedicated to learning as quickly as possible from mistakes and setbacks. Keep a keen eye on your analytics, search engine rankings, and conversion rates.

The Headway theme for WordPress is probably the easiest time you’ll ever have designing a blog. In this video, you can watch me modify the layout of my blog consulting services page in a matter of minutes. Professional blog designers will appreciate the Headway Layout Editor because it completely slashes design times while creating valid XHTML strict code. Non-coders will appreciate it because you only need to know a modicum of HTML to create custom content boxes called “leafs” in Headway. Leafs can be dragged around, resized by dragging, and easily rearranged and configured (check out this post if you want to learn more about Headway’s features).

If I had forever-and-a-day to get shit done I could’ve coded this by hand, but why on earth would anyone want to do that? To have something that’s great for both designers and non-designers? That’s a game-changing double-win. Headway is way more than a blog theme. It’s a design environment, a blog design tool. I think people are starting to pick up on this, and that’s why the buzz around headway is building. It’s a whole new class. (A few days ago I saw a sneak peek of the next version… two words: jaw-dropping. You think I exaggerate? You’ll see. Get Headway now and snag the free upgrade when it hits.)

In this video you can see how easy it is to use the Headway theme for WordPress. What you’re looking at is me, redesigning this blog, right before your eyes. And, get this: this is only about the second time I’ve really used Headway (first time was a private beta, and I didn’t do much with it). I recorded about a 38-minute chunk of time and edited out the screen-staring bits.

In other words, what you see here at the end was accomplished in about 38 minutes of me figuring out how Headway works as I design. During none of this did I consult any documentation or get any help (not that there’s a shortage of that, but I think it’s worth noting how intuitive I found it to use). There are still a few things here and there, but the bulk of the work was done over last weekend (and was done around moving servers and changing domains, to boot).

I’ll have a couple more videos to show you as soon as I’ve edited them and put them on the YouTubes.

I don’t think you’ll ever need to buy another premium WordPress theme again, once you have Headway. It’s way more than just a blog theme: it’s a blog designer.

Here’s a previous post: Meet Headway, the Next Evolution in WordPress Themes.

For Non-Designers

Headway gives you:

• A modular page design system called “leafs” (like leafs in a table, not leaves on a tree) you can drag and drop and set as various types of content (more on this in a moment). Basically, this means you don’t have to know a bunch of crazy code to design your blog–you can do it yourself.
• Choose fonts for anything on the page–look, Ma, no CSS!
• Built-in color-pickers let you choose font colors, element background colors, link colors, and more, instead of writing CSS code in a text editor.
• Bring in RSS feeds from any source and put them anywhere.
• Create a “super footer” with anything you want in it using WordPress widgets.
• Have any kind of sidebars in how leafs are arranged.
• Magazine-style layouts are a snap.
• Complete SEO features at the blog and post level, including separate fields for noindexing the page and nofollowing links within the post.
• Custom header images are super-easy to upload.
• Makes you a sandwich and gets you a latte (just want to see if you’re paying attention).
• Reuse existing blog content any place else as a page element (such as a sign up form). Be careful with this one, you might end up going back in time or something (which would suck, because then you’d have to use Blogger or be eaten by a dinosaur).
• Twitter integration is built into Headway–no plugins needed, just enter your Twitter info and go.
• Content and image rotators are built in: animated transitions between written content or images (testimonials, ads, lead story photos, images from your portfolio, whatever you want).
• I’m sure I’m forgetting a thing or three, but this list looks pretty solid already.

The big takeaway from many of these benefits is that you don’t have to be an expert to use Headway. You don’t have to use hooks and custom CSS. But, if you’re a pro…

For Professional WordPress Theme Designers

If you are a developer/designer, with Headway you can slash design times. Headway was originally created for that very purpose: faster turnaround times on blog design projects, which means happier clients (and, freelancers, we all know what that leads to). Here’s a rundown of benefits for the pros:

• The leaf system is incredibly fast to use. When you go watch the demo videos at the Headway site, you’re watching Headway’s creator working in realtime: sophisticated page layouts get created in a matter of minutes!
• For extra power, there is a hooks system and the ability to have a custom CSS file.
• Because Headway brings so much flexibility to the table, you can make design changes with lightning speed–and without dragging out a project because of design tweaks.
• You can place your affiliate code in the footer link.
• There is a developer license for Headway.

Take the Next Step in WordPress Theme Evolution: Make Headway with Your Blog

You can learn more about Headway at the site. I recommend you watch the demo videos so you can see for yourself what Headway does, and just how easily it does it.

Visit the Headway site.

Also, check out this video on how I used Headway to redesign Remarkablogger.

Research by Pew Internet showed people didn’t know a blog from any other kind of website. Alarmingly, when they were told a site was a blog, they grew irritated, as though a trick had been played on them.

Here you are, all ga-ga over blogging and social media–all excited about the prospect of having that Conversation (capital C) you read about. But you forgot something… your customers don’t read blogs. They don’t use Twitter or StumbleUpon. They get their news from television, not the internet. All they know is email and AOL.

You have a problem. The tool you want to use to reach your customers is one they don’t know or care about. What should you do? Well, you could always not have a blog. Coming from me, you’d think that would be blasphemy, I know. But I will be the first to say that blogs are not the answer to everything. Sorry, but they’re just not.

Before you brush that blog dust off your shoulder, however, let’s take a look at three winning approaches to using blogs for people who don’t read blogs.

1. Blog as a CMS

CMS stands for content management system. It’s how websites are done, nowadays. A CMS lets you create and edit web pages and content almost as easily as writing an email. WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging software, doubles as a CMS. You don’t have write blog posts at all, just create pages. Sure, it seems a little weird to me to use blog software to create a website that is pointedly not a blog, but it works. It works great. This creates a website that looks like an old-fashioned site, but it doesn’t behave or update like an old-fashioned site (and that’s a good thing). With some customization to remove anything even slightly “bloggy”, your readers will not know it’s a blog. It will look, act, and feel like a “normal” website to them.

2. Magazine-style Site

With the explosion of magazine-style WordPress themes, they are a classy option for a site with a lot of content that needs updating on a regular (but not necessarily frequent) basis. Think about the home page of MSN or CNN. Most magazine themes have a featured post area, which would be like feature articles in a magazine. Emphasis is placed on categories. Magazine themes often feature more space for pictures in the articles and design. After customizing it somewhat to remove blog-specific elements from the design, your perfectly normal, non-bloggy content-rich website is ready to rock.

3. News Update Site

I mentioned CNN above because its design (as of October 2008) resembles many of the magazine themes available for WordPress. But if you really want a new site, some customization to a the normal code of a WordPress blog can give you something that is meant for rapidfire updating. This is an awful lot like blogging, but the word “blog” need never enter into it–news alert or latest news will do just fine.

4. Debloggification

Debloggification is my made-up word for removing those elements from the design of a blog that give it away as a blog. These are things that people who “don’t read blogs” don’t want and don’t need:

• Comments
• Social media sharing buttons
• Prominent RSS icons (I’m not saying don’t use RSS feeds, I’m saying keep the icons very discreet)
• Blogrolls
• Post times (depends on what kind of site)

5. Oldschoolification

Since I’m making up words, let me make one up for what happens when you substitute your bloggy features with old school features: oldschoolification. For people who don’t read blogs, try these:

• Email-a-friend capability
• Email newsletter (use Aweber to send blog posts by email plus much more)
• “Bookmark this” links
• “Print this page” links

Tell me again why I need a blog?

Blogs are super-easy to administer and create content for once they have been created. Using “static” web pages and no CMS doesn’t scale very well, nor is it easy. Other CMSs besides those for blogs (especially WordPress) are much more complicated than blogs. This makes blog software the ideal tool for a site that most people would never read if they knew it was a blog.

SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT

Men With Pens will redesign. Their Drive-by Shootings are unchecked. Time to do for them what they’ve done for many. The Men With Pens blog design? Take it out as only you can.

Hmm. Had to act fast. No time for elaborate planning. This was going to be fast, dirty, and silent. An improvised mission they would never see coming. Remarkablogger, posting on a Saturday? Bucking the long-standing tradition of drive-by shootings by slipping in with nothing but a single knife in the dark? Yeah, that would work.

I fired up the Jeep and headed out to the Canadian wilderness to the MwP compound. In a black special ops pack beside me in the passenger seat was a minimum of get-in-get-out gear. My knife, an Interceptor 911 TiCN, was strapped to my thigh. My left thigh. One more thing they wouldn’t expect: a southpaw. Heh. I couldn’t help but smile as I made my approach. I killed the headlights and put the nightvision goggles on. Everything went green.

The Men had made the mistake of leaving a window cracked open to let in some cool night air. I slipped in silently.

On a lonely monitor in the dark was the Men With Pens site. I set to work.

"Let’s see," I said out loud to myself, "The number one issue I see here is an identity crisis. It’s not that they don’t know who they are, it’s that we don’t know who they really are. The title tag says ‘Copywriting and Web Design’ but the banner says otherwise: ‘Shooting from the hip’ which says nothing substantive and ‘Web Business Tips for Writers, Freelancers, and Online Entrepreneurs’ which isn’t really text at all, since it’s in an image. Will the real tagline please stand up? What’s the unique value proposition, here? I don’t see it.

"Arial? Why do people insist on using Arial for body text? Don’t they know it predates the web and is one of the least readable fonts onscreen? Verdana, guys, Verdana. It’s at least 25% more readable onscreen than Arial is. Arial’s good for one thing only: headlines. Speaking of headlines, I like to see more than just one font in a design: one for headlines, one for body text.

"The logo. Good work, but it needs to be better. Changing this would change the entire design, though. You know what I think? Instead of a shooting metaphor, I’d rather see a "pen is mightier than the sword" idea. Pens criss-crossed like swashbuckler swords. A hint of daring-do in the overall design. Earthier colors instead of all the black and red.

"The business. Where is it? I bet more business comes in through the contact page than the Hired Guns page. What exactly do these guys offer? I can’t tell on the home page. And frankly, if I can’t see it and understand in only few precious seconds upon landing, they’ve already lost business. Would you open a store and then try to hide the entrance?

"The business and services pages are too difficult to navigate. Needs a more unified front. A listing of services does not convey benefit. The clients page is a bit of a mess. I want screenshots, descriptions of the goals and deliverables, I want testimonials. I want to see how you work with clients, because that’s how I know how you’ll work with me if I was thinking about hiring you. I want to hear from clients in their own words why I should hire you."

Suddenly the lights came on! Harry held what looked like a Smith & Wesson SW1911, pointed right at me. James sat at a table. Before him lay some nice sharp cheddar, a bottle of Syrah, and three wine glasses. It was a setup, a trap!

James looked at the big knife strapped to my leg and chuckled. "They’re called drive-by shootings for a reason," he said, "You thought you were clever, bringing a knife to a gunfight. How does that thing do with cheddar?"

"Great," I said, "so sharp that even a well-aged cheddar doesn’t crumble." I slipped the knife from its sheath–slowly–I didn’t want to make Harry nervous. It is a little-known fact that military combat knives are great at slicing cheese.

"You can put that away," I said to Harry. "I didn’t come for you, only for the design. Let’s pour a glass and raise a toast to the new design–whatever it will be."

"Hear, hear," Harry said as he took a chair. James poured and we all clinked our raised glasses together. The conversation went on long into the early morning.  I got up to take my leave and headed for the window by which I had slipped in earlier.

"You can go out the front door, you know," said James.

"Uh… yeah, I knew that," I said, "See you guys later." I left them to craft their design plans and headed back to my secret compound deep in the Green Mountains of Vermont. I stowed my gear, brewed up a fresh French press of strong coffee, and messaged headquarters:

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

——————————————————–

Harry and James are good friends. They really are redesigning, and they really are asking for your input. Why don’t you head on over and offer your suggestions?

Blog as Business Website: The Concept

Used to be a website was a collection of html documents for which the code was written or generated in a development/design environment such as Dreamweaver. Then someone got the bright idea of putting all the information into a database and using a programming language on the webserver to pull data out, format it as html, and send finished web pages to the browser. These kinds of web pages, sometimes called dynamic web pages, are assembled on the fly the moment they are requested (by clicking on a link).

The interface and information needed to create and edit pages in a dynamic website was also stored in the database and presented through a programming language running on the server. You could log into an admin area and then write or edit content. This whole shebang is known as a content management system, or CMS. And it has fundamentally changed the way we do everything on the web.

Now, there are CMSs, and then there are C… M… Ss… (imagine loud, dramatic music).

Some of these CMSs, like Drupal or Joomla (they all have goofy names… don’t ask) are crazy complicated. They are used for monstrous sites that need functionality way beyond a simple blog.

But a blog is also a CMS. A much, much simpler and easier CMS to use, design for, and work within. The WordPress CMS in particular has become popular for more than just blogs. It can be a light CMS for a “normal” (imagine me making bunny ears with my fingers for quotes) website that may not even have a blog. More and more, small businesses and freelancers are using WordPress in this way.

Is this a good idea? It depends, of course. Let’s take a look at some pros and cons and we can decide for ourselves.

Pros

• Stoo-pud-ly easy to create and manage site content. How easy? If you can write an email, you can do it.
• Blog and site look the same, because they ARE the same.
• Same SEO (search engine optimization) benefits are accrued by WordPress pages that posts enjoy.
• WordPress pages can have “parents.” That is, a parent page is like a section that has sub-pages in it.
• Tons of plugins that extend and enhance the functionality of WordPress. Other larger CMSs have something similar, but again, WordPress is so easy a decapitated cockroach could work with it (well, for up to 10 days anyways, which is how long cockroaches can live without their heads–not that you really wanted to know that).

Cons

• You could easily outgrow it if your needs grow beyond what WordPress can do.
• Not the most secure CMS out there.
• Not great for ecommerce.
• Not great for very large amounts (hundreds or thousands) of page (rather than post) content.
• Not great for in-depth learning or ebook type content.

Overall, I Say Go for It

Small businesses and freelancers especially would do well to use WordPress as a light CMS. It does so much so easily. Because of plugins, a WordPress blog can morph into an online magazine, a news site, a gallery, and even a limited ecommerce site. Beginning this way is beneficial, because you won’t have to duct-tape the blog onto an existing site later. A site using WordPress as a CMS need not look the least bit “bloggy” if it’s not called for. In my experience of taking client’s websites and “blogifying” them, WordPress is a great solution that balances nicely between no CMS and an overblown, over-featured CMS that may be too much for your needs.

Any other pros or cons you can think of? Add them in the comments!

1. Home theater systems
2. Home servers
3. Home storage/organization
4. Home life/schedule/time management
5. Home canning/preserving/food storage
6. Home kitchen gadgets
7. Seasonal home decorating
8. Building and managing a home wine cellar
9. Home office management/equipment/remodeling/organization
10. New modern prefab homes
11. Alternative home construction
12. Alternative home energy
13. Home-based churches and worship
14. Home-based business franchise reviews
15. Home cleaning tips, hacks, products
16. Unusual, strange, or extreme homes
17. Vacation home reviews and travel tips
18. House sitting or care-taking tips and resources
19. Semi-pro garage planning, equipment, and maintainence
20. Houseboat living

1. What is your blog about?
2. Who are you?
3. Why should we trust you?

These are 3 questions your blog should answer within the first 5 seconds of a visitor’s arrival by its design and content.