I just finished updating www.Screenwriter-to-Screenwriter.com and had a lot of fun creating a home for Monica Partridge’s excellent discussions on writing for film.

• Theme: I searched out an easy-to-use theme Atahualpa, the same theme I use for mini-branding. This is a clean, malleable Wordpress theme that has a wonderfully easy user interface for changing header images, column layout, size and style of text, favicon, everything.

The Final Blog Design - click for full view.

Comments on the Design - click for full view.

• Header: Monica charged me with creating a collage of dialogue snippets for her header in Courier, the font screenplays are most often written in. She loved the final header, even though I think it’s a little busy.

• Readability: The line-height and font size were increased for maximum viewing, especially on a site where one can spend hours reading and learning.

• Email Capture: In order to capture your audience and create products for them in the future, use an email service program like Constant Contact, AWeber or iContact. Once you join, you can create an email signup box and enter the code in a side widget.

• Top Nav Drop-Down: Look for a theme with a drop-down nav at the top that is generated by pages. This leaves the right and left side of your blog available for more content and is the usual place people go to look for standard items such as “About Me” and “Contact” info.

• Social Network Widgets: Add your social networking widgets if you want to give your blog a timely, in-the-moment feel. These are created in each platform, and the HTML code is copied into a text box in your WP Widgets panel.

• Don’t Forget Categories: When you write, give your post categories for quick searches and also to give a new visitor an idea of your topics. In Monica’s blog, I love being able to look at all her posts just on Beat Sheets, for instance.

• Use Permalinks: These are an option in your WP settings that change page IDs to real-world words for each post and page URL.

In general, think about your market when you start adding design elements to your blog. Is your audience older, needing more white space between headers and copy? What are they looking for first when they come to your blog? What’s the easiest way to give them the info they are looking for while at the same time enticing new visitors to sign up and receive some extra goodies?

What are some design ideas you have tried with success on your or your clients’ blogs? Feel free to leave a comment and your URL below!

Your brand is not your logo, your color scheme, your PR or even your product. Your brand is the feeling people have when they think of you.

I had a boss who worked at the happiest place on earth, and always mentioned that the coffee shops on Main Street would place vanilla extract in warming trays and blow it through their vents and out to the street to entice people in. One of my favorite places to meet up in Santa Fe is at the Sage Bakehouse because of their open-air bakery; I just need that intense smell of bread baking every once in a while. (Tip: try the current scones; they melt in your mouth.)

Odor information is easily stored in long-term memory and has strong connections to emotional memory. This is possibly due to the olfactory system’s close anatomical ties to the limbic system and hippocampus, areas of the brain that have long been known to be involved in emotion and place memory, respectively.

If I were to ask you, “What does your business smell like?”, how would you respond? Remember, a bad smell does not always have a negative connotation. Does money have a pleasant smell? Maybe not, but who wouldn’t want the smell of money in their nose?

I used to go on web checks for my publishing work back when the web was a physical machine half a block long. The first time I went “on press”, I walked into the noisy pressroom somewhere in southern Illinois and smelled ink on paper running through a machine at breakneck speed. They were printing the cover of Indian Artist magazine with Sherman Alexie’s face and long black hair visible from where I walked in, high above the press floor. That memory comes back clearly to me whenever I open a magazine “hot off the presses” and I catch a whiff of the first pressroom I was ever in.

Translating that smell to an emotion takes a little mapping. Emotionally, I feel a combination of sadness/longing and excitement. Sad because those days are gone; it’s rare that a magazine would send their art director on press, the economy being what it is. But the memory of the smell reminds me of the work itself, being in charge of a fast-paced critique of color, density, and registration. I made split-second decisions with alacrity; it was fun and energizing.

Do you remember mimeographs? The blurry purple type that bled into the paper on the homework your second-grade teacher handed out on a crisp autumn day at school? Did you feel special? That you received something just for you, like a gift? What if, in the future, kids are given iPhones as easily as we received mimeographs? How special, included and important would that make them feel?

HOMEWORK: Spend some time playing with the idea of your company’s scent. What memory do you want to instill in your next customer?

In Part 2 of MinBranding, we’ll work on Brand Story and practice writing one!

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You can receive MiniBranding consulting from Whitespace Creative in person or online. Visit www.whitespacecreative.com or email mel [at] whitespacecreative.com.

Above photoo is a file from the Wikimedia Commons.