News from Two Trees Media

It's Friday, another week has gone by and people everywhere are waiting for 5:00 to roll around. To help speed up the arrival of the weekend, every Friday we'll be posting some of the neatest things from around the web as a way to inspire you in your creative pursuits. We here at Two Trees Media believe inspiration is everywhere, and we love to share it with others. This week's feature is Letterpress Printing.

What is Letterpress?

Letterpress printing is a way of making printed materials where a raised surface is inked and a piece of paper is pressed into the type. This is the way of printed invented by Gutenberg in the mid-15th century. The act of pressing into the paper creates a very crisp image that is excellent for showcasing beautiful typography and simple illustrations.

Today, letterpress printing is considered a craft done by hobbyists or small stationary shops specializing in printed wedding invitations or business cards. In the 1990s, letterpress got loads of attention from Martha Stewart Weddings as an alternative to traditional engraved wedding invitations. A wide range of paper can be used in letterpress printing that you normally wouldn't see in offset printing, such as handmade, high-cotton content, very thick, or tree-free paper.

Beautiful Examples of Letterpress Printing

Jessica Hische - Business Card

Egg Press - Blue Bird Hi! Greeting Card

Boxcar press - Letterpress coasters

Snow & Graham - Imprint Baby Announcement

12fifteen - Ready for Summer Notecards

Hello! Lucky - Cherry Blossom Wedding Invitations

Papered Together - Wedding Invitation and Map

Do you have an idea for some inspiration? Drop us a line and we'll feature it!

In a recent blog post at Ars Technica, they detailed how a cosmetic surgery company got slapped with a fine for paying their employees to post glowing reviews of the company's services. The reviews, of course, were online and anonymous. The company, Lifestyle Lift, also went as far as to pay employees to attack legitimate negative reviews, believing that those negative reviews hurt the company's reputation.

Apparently, Lifestyle Lift's president felt that negative reviews had "significantly hurt the company’s reputation and thought the success of the company hinged on controlling messages posted online." Not only did he order employees to "put on your wig and skirt and tell them about the great experience you had," he also set up entirely new websites—which posed as independent review sites—that hosted numerous rave reviews about Lifestyle Lift based on materials that were crafted internally.

This is called astroturfing and, while technically not illegal, companies that engage in activities can come under scrutiny of the government and action can be taken because it is seen as a deceptive practice. In the case of Lifestyle Lift, they were slapped a $300,000 fine and that was about it - a mere slap on the wrist by the Attorney General of New York.

The lesson here: If your company is going to have any kind of online presence that allows for the public to comment about your product/service, don't start astroturfing in an attempt to control what others say. Word will eventually get out about your practices and your reputation might never recover.

Accept the good comments and reviews and the bad ones. Take the bad ones with a grain of salt (some people will never be pleased), and learn from them. For example, let's say your company ABC Corporation introduces a cool new software program and allows for consumers to write reviews of your program on your website. Now let's pretend there are a few bugs in the program, nothing major but enough of a problem to result in negative reviews, your best course of action would be to address those bugs in your software and even release an updated version where those bugs are fixed.

It's also important to acknowledge the problem with your customers. Responding to negative feedback like this will show consumers that you care about them enough to take their feedback seriously. Your customers will be much more likely to forgive you if they know you are open and honest with them.

Taking your business online can be a great way to reach out to a new customer base. But being online doesn't mean you have to throw your ethics into the trash by hiding behind fake reviews. Stay honest and your customers will thank you by staying loyal to your company.

Just about everybody has a blog these days. Everyone from the teen down the street, to the stay-at-home mom and even politicians can't help but write down there thoughts and views for all to see.

If you run a business, no matter what size, did you know that a blog is not only a great addition to your website, but it can really benefit your business.

Here are three reasons why your business should jump on the blogging bandwagon today:

1. A blog helps you educate the public about your specialty. This adds value to your website, and to your brand. You are giving away valuable information for free. By doing so, you are establishing yourself as an expert and potential customers are more likely to come to you when they need your product or service.

2. A blog lets you interact with the public. We'll explore this subject in later posts, but marketing in the 21st century is a dialogue, not a speech at your customers. You should always allow comments on other posts and encourage people to comment and start discussions. This not only makes your blog more lively (and keeps readers coming back for more), but it opens the door to new relationships that you might otherwise not have found.

One common argument against opening up your business blog to comments is "What if I get a negative comment or someone criticizes my business?" My answer: So what if someone does? You will have a chance to respond, and if there is a true criticism of your business, be thankful you found out about it on a blog comment and not from some irate customer demanding his money back.

3. A blog will help to promote your business. But warned, shamelessly promoting your business in every post will have the opposite effect and will quickly turn readers away. However, a blog will help your business website get noticed through methods like search engine optimization (SEO), people sharing and linking to your posts and having a steady stream of visitors to your website to read your blog. There's nothing wrong with writing the occasional post about how your business can benefit your customers, or promoting a special discount or deal you have running, but try to give your readers something of real value with a majority of your posts.

There are many more reasons why your business website needs a blog. I only touched on three of them here. What if you have already know the benefits of a blog and have one up and running? I have some Dos and Don'ts for you that will help keep your readers coming back for years to come:

• Do use simple language in your blog posts. If you're business has it's own jargon, throw it out the window when writing on your blog. Use layman's terms. If the average reader doesn't know what the heck you're writing about, you'll lose readers at an astonishing rate.
• Do keep your paragraphs on each post short - only a few sentences each. Most people won't read long, drawn-out prose. Rather, people tend to skim most online content, so make it easy for your readers to understand each post without making them feel like they're reading a doctoral dissertation.
• Do keep your blog open for comments. Part of the appeal to blogging is that "community" aspect it offers. This will keep readers coming back for more.
• Don't neglect your blog and only make sporadic updates. Readers will become frustrated by not seeing new content and will eventually give up. Make a commitment to update your blog on a regular basis - at least a few times a week.
• Don't fill your blog with posts about your personal life. Stay on topic. Remember, your blog is supposed to add value to your website by giving your readers the benefit of your experience and expertise. They don't want to hear about the lousy blind date you went on or all-weekend drinking binge you recently had. Keep those to yourself.

The main idea to keep in mind when starting a blog for your business website is to experiment and have fun with it. Don't get discouraged if your blog isn't getting a thousand hits a day from the very beginning. It will take time to grow. Just be persistent and write good posts.

One of the great features of Wordpress is that you can set up your site to send an email every time a comment needs approval. Drupal doesn't come with this functionality out of the box, but we're going to show you how to do it yourself using the module Workflow-ng and some basic user configurations.

What you'll need

1. A Drupal 5 installation (Drupal 6 can do something similar using the Rules module).
2. The Workflow-ng module uploaded and activated. You only need to enable the "Workflow-ng" and "Workflow-ng UI" components.

The versions used in this tutorial are Drupal 5.15 and Workflow-ng 2.2 if that helps any.

Step-by-step instructions

1. Configure user roles

You'll want to have two separate roles: an anonymous user role who will be posting comments, and the role that will approve the comments. The anonymous user is already created in Drupal, but you'll want to create one more role that will receive the email to approve the comment. I called mine "super admin". Make sure whoever is moderating comments is in that user role.

Go to the Access Control screen (yoursite.com/admin/user/access), and make sure that the "post comments without approval" permission is unchecked. For your moderator role, make sure that the "administer comments" permission is checked. Save your changes.

2. Configure Workflow-ng

Workflow-ng is a powerful little module that lets you set up criteria and trigger actions when those criteria are met. Our rule is to send an email to the comment moderator when an anonymous user submits a comment. Lets translate this into Drupal-speak:

Create a new rule: go to the Workflow-ng admin page (you'll see a link at the bottom of the navigation menu. If you don't, give your account the "administer workflow-ng" permission). Click on the "Add a new rule configuration" tab at the top of the screen. For "Event" select "Comment has been created" from the dropdown. Give your rule a name, and make sure the "this rule is active" box is checked. Click Submit.

Add a Condition: Since we only want to get notified when anonymous users post comments, we need to have the system check to this condition before sending. Click the "Add a condition" link on the next page. From the dropdown, select "user has role(s)", and click Add.

On the next screen, make sure the "User to test" dropdown is set to "created comment author", and select "anonymous user" as the role. Click Submit to save.

Add the action: Now we need to specify that we want to send an email once the user makes a comment. Click on the "Add an action" link, and from the dropdown select "Send mail to all users of a role" and click Add.

On the next screen, check the box next to the role who should receive the email. Give your email a subject line, and write a snappy message. I included information on the comment and where to approve it to make it easy for the moderator. Workflow-ng gives you a list of dynamic tags that you can use in your email to give the moderator additional info on the comment. Click Submit.

3. Test the crap out of everything!

The #1 rule of web development is test, test, test. Log out of your site and go to your blog (or any other post that is open for comments). Leave a comment (don't worry, you can delete it later). Check your email, and you should have some email love in your inbox. You got your email? Good.

Now you'll want to test as a logged-in user to make sure you're not getting emails for comments that are already approved. Log back into your site, and go back and post another comment. Did you get an email? No? Cool, then everything is working right!

And you're done! Congratulations on rocking your first Workflow-ng rule.

Being a small business owner means you are busy and you frequently have to wear many hats. If you're an iPhone owner, then you can relax, because there is relief.

When Apple opened up the iPhone and iPod Touch to third-party developers, the utility of the device went off the charts (let's face it, the iPhone was useful even before the app store became available). Now there are thousands of tools available to help you manage your business.

The only problem is, with so many choices, how do you decide which apps to take a chance on?

Please allow us to make a few recommendations. We use our iPhones on a daily basis and they help keep our business running lean and clean. Here are a couple of apps we found particularly useful:

Jobs: If you have a job or client that requires you to track your billable hours, this app is a must have. It can track several projects and features an easy-to-use interface. Simply tap once to start the clock, and tap again to stop. It allows you to edit time that has already been tracked, and add notes as needed. As of this writing, the app is on sale at $1.99.

Smart Recorder: When you're on the run (i.e. driving down the freeway) it's not always possible to jot down important ideas. This simple voice recording app allows you to record for just a few seconds to get that idea recorded, or an entire interview. Each recording is saved by date and time – allowing easy access to past notes. When you no longer need a recording, it's easy to delete it. The sound quality is excellent and the interface is very intuitive. $.99.

ToodleDo: Get organized with this app. It offers tons of flexibility and is easy to use. The best feature, however, is the app can be synced to to an account you set up on the Toodledo website. The app description also says it can be synced to other sites and even Outlook, but I have not tried this. As of this writing, the ToodleDo app weighs in at $2.99. However, given its functionality and syncing abilities, it's worth every penny of the price tag.

SplashID: Who out there doesn't have hundreds of passwords to remember? SplashID lets you securely organize all your passwords and carry them with you wherever you go in your iPhone. This app lets you sync your information with the SplashID Desktop software to make sure everything is backed up and secure. The full version $9.99, but there is a free Lite version with a 15 record limit.

Flight Control: While not a productivity app, we found this highly addictive game very useful for relieving stress and clearing out the brain cobwebs. The game is easy to get the hang of (use your finger to draw a path for the planes to land). Newer updates allows you to chose among different airports and now you can even play with a friend/business partner!

The above are just a sampling of apps that we have used on our iPhones to help us organize our business and get stuff done. There are many, many more apps out there and it all comes down to finding what works well for you.

...k-i-s-s-i-n-g! Well, at least according to this article over at TechCrunch. Flickr now allows users to link their account with their Twitter accounts through the new Flickr2Twitter feature.

How it works: Once you authorize your Flickr account, you're given a "shiny new" Flickr2Twitter email address. When you post photos via this address, a tweet is simultaneously made with a link back to the photo on Flickr. The subject line of your email is used as the tweet content.

Its insanely easy to use, and in fact about 10 seconds after I sent in my photo, there was my tweet:

And clicking through takes me right to my picture:

Pretty, easy, huh? That was a picture I took of Beadnicks in Wicker Park a while ago. No wonder iPhones are about to overtake the Canon Rebel XTi as the most used camera on Flickr.

This new feature is excellent news for those small business owners out there that promote their businesses through photography - it takes one step out of the process of uploading photos of products and telling the world about them. It's even better since uploading can be done anywhere you can send an email.

We hope this feature really catches on. After all, a picture's worth a thousand words, but you can only fit 140 characters in a tweet!

HTML emails are a great way for businesses to stay in contact with their customers - they look great, get results, and are cheap and easy to send. However, with the release of Office 2007, coding HTML emails took a major step backwards.

See, Microsoft decided to use Word as the rendering engine for email in Outlook. Word is word processing software, not a web browser; it doesn't interpret HTML code the same way Internet Explorer would. As a result email designers are hamstrung in what they can do with emails. They have to design and code for the lowest common denominator, Outlook, and its #$(@# broken display engine.

For businesses to comply with the standards for Outlook compatibility means that they have to produce clunky, image-heavy, inaccessible emails. Content that is in images can be lost when programs block images, leading to ineffective campaigns and wasted time and money.

The email developer community was hopeful that Microsoft was going to fix the email display problem in Office 2010. Despite 22,997 tweets from the Twitter community and hundreds of comments on their blog, the developers at Microsoft have come out and declared that The Outlook Problem will not be fixed in Office 2010.

Booo to Microsoft for ignoring their customers and saying "take a hike" to email developers. Read more about what you can do at the Email Standards Project, or tweet your support of the Fix Outlook project.

There's a ton of companies that will print pretty much any design on just about anything you can think of. There are some really creative ideas out there for self-promotion. Here's a roundup of a few of our favorites.

Moo MiniCards

Moo MiniCards are like business cards, but the great thing about these puppies is you can print up to 100 vibrant full-color designs in one order. We've seen lots of creative people print contact information on one side and examples of their work on the other. MiniCards (1.1" x 2.75") are a slightly different size than regular business cards (2.5" x 3") but their color matte laminate finish more than makes up for it.  $19.99 for 100 cards.

Scout Book from Pinball Publishing

Pinball Publishing's motto is "Printing Made Fun." I totally believe they have fun with their work from looking at their newest product, Scout Books. These 3.5" x 5" notebooks let you upload a design to print on the chipboard cover. You can pick from 20 ink colors and 3 interior page styles (blank, lines, or grid). Minimum orders are 50 notebooks for $150, but I'm sure you won't run out of people to give them to. They have free samples too.

Sigg Bottles from Cafe Press

Plastic water bottles take 700 years to decompose. Save a few of them from going into landfills by sporting a cool customized Sigg aluminum water bottle with your company's logo from Cafe Press. Although the price is kind of steep at $28 each, you'll get a lot of use out of it and people will see your brand for years to come.

Customized Bottle of Jones Soda

Jones soda is known for 1. their yummy pure cane sugar pop flavors, and 2. the user-submitted photos on their labels. They've taken their greatness one step further by letting you customize your own labels. You choose a flavor, upload the image and text of your choice, and 2 weeks later you'll have a 12-pack of tasty Jones Soda for just $29.99.

Zazzle Buttons

Everybody loves putting buttons on stuff: the backpacks, cubicle walls, jackets, whatever. So what better way to keep your name in front of your customers than making a button with your brand on it? Zazzle lets you do just that. They make it easy to upload any image, and at $51.50 for 50 buttons, this is a totally fun and affordable tchotchke for all types of businesses.

We here at Two Trees media are big fans of Drupal, an über-powerful open source content management system. But it's really more than a CMS; it can be configured as an e-commerce platform, blog back-end, project collaboration tool, social networking software, or pretty much anything you can hope a website can do.

The power in Drupal is in its active developer community who has made all sorts of free add-on modules that let website owners brew up their own custom blend of functionality for their corner of the net. Modules are fairly easy to install and configure, all you need to build a fairly powerful site is FTP software and a working knowledge of coding for the interwebs.

So, without further ado, here's the official top 10 list of our favorite Drupal modules (in no particular order):

1. Content Construction Kit

Out of the box, Drupal comes with several basic types of content: Blog, Page, Story, and Book. Using Views (see below), there's some pretty nifty things you can do with just these. But to really rock your site, CCK (as it's known to its friends) lets you define custom content types and specify associated fields. For example, on 2trees-media.com we've defined a Portfolio Item content type that lets us associate a client name, date completed, URL, and a screenshot. You can pretty much create any item type (content), and associate different properties (fields) with it. Using views, you can create some pretty powerful pages and layouts.

2. Views

If CCK lets you make custom content types, Views lets you customize, well, the view of your content. It's almost as if you are building a database query on your content that you can format however you want. You can specify which fields to show, how to show them, and criteria for including nodes. On this website, our main blog page is an example of a view. We've shown the blog post's title, date posted, content, and comment count. We've specified that only published items are shown, and they should be sorted descending (from newest to oldest). Views lets us do this all through an easy-to-use web-based interface.

3. Panels

Fitting nicely in with the customize your site theme of this article, Panels lets you show multiple views on one page. This is especially helpful for building hub pages with lots of different content types. It has a drag-n-drop interface that lets administrators build layouts, then populate layouts with content. Panels accepts parameters, which means you can pass criteria into your pages. We've found Panels to be especially great in building product pages for e-commerce sites, where you want multiple views shown in separate buckets on the same page.

4. Pathauto

We know from paying attention during our SEO classes that user-friendly URLs get better search rankings than those with querystrings (like mysite.com/?n=123). Drupal lets you customize paths when you create a node, but who wants to enter a path every time you put new content on your site? Pathauto lets you automate the generate of those paths using whatever pattern you specify through a nifty web-based interface. You can use "tokens" in your paths, such as date created, author, category, or content type.

5. Path Redirect

Say you ported a Typepad Blog to Drupal, and your URL path structure changed. How are you going to tell search engines where your new pages are? Path Redirect lets you do this with ease. It provides an interface to create 301 redirects, which tell search engines a page has been moved and its new location. The redirect for users is seamless, there is no pause or disabling of the back button that sometimes occurs with JavaScript. This module is a must-have for those concerned about SEO!

6. XML Sitemap

Many sites live or die based on their search engine rankings. Having an XML Sitemap ensures that search engines are aware of your content and can spider it accordingly. The XML Sitemap module automates the creation and submission of sitemaps by adding nodes to the sitemap as you create them. No need to create a page then mess with adding it to your sitemap and FTPing it to your server then telling Google you've updated it. XML Sitemap will do all that for you! Well, with the exception of writing your content. You're still stuck doing that (unless you hire Two Tress Media to do the dirty work for you).

7. FCKeditor

Having a website doesn't mean you have to know how to program HTML. A rich text editor lets you enter your content without having to know a lick of programming. FCKeditor is our WYSIWYG editor of choice for Drupal. It is easy to configure and lets administrators decide which functionality to show based on user role, from no rich text editor all the way to uploading and managing files. Appealing to the code monkey in us, it outputs the cleanest HTML code we've seen in a rich text editor. Although installation is a little bit tricky (make sure a read the readme.txt file before enabling the module), you'll be up and running in no time.

8. Organic Groups

At its simplest level, Organic Groups (OG) "enable[s] users to create and manage their own 'groups'." What this means for site administrators is you can control access to a content at the individual user level. Say you are setting up your Drupal site and you want to have one section walled off from the public to be used to collaborate on projects. OG lets you do that by only allowing the users you grant access to view, edit, or comment on particular nodes. We've found this to be most handy for project-management type situations, and in fact, 2trees-media.com relies extensively on Organic Groups for its client project section. Depending on configuration, users can also be entitled to create their own groups allowing for a nice level of web 2.0 community for your site.

9. Webform

Out of the box, Drupal comes with a Contact module that lets admins set up a site-wide "contact us" form that users can use to send basic information to a specified email address. But what if there are more fields you want to collect from the submission than just name, email address, and comment? Webform lets site admins build custom forms that send emails to whoever you specify. On 2trees-media.com, we use Webform as our Contact Us form, which let us specify a field for project timeframe and customize the labels on the other fields. This module would be very helpful for sites that need to collect more detailed user information with their submissions.

10. Ubercart

Ubercart is "an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal." It pretty much lets you do all sorts of e-commerce stuff on your website without a lot of programming knowledge. The best part about this module for small businesses is that you can start accepting online orders with a minimal amount of back-end configuration. Ubercart is fully integrated with Paypal, so startups don't have to worry about signing up for a credit card merchant account. Ubercart is so so powerful, but so very easy to use.

Do you have any other Drupal modules you just can't live without? Please leave them in the comments!

Typography can be a tricky beast to master. It has a history going back to Gutenberg and his letterpress, and has more complications and established conventions than the IRS. Choosing the proper type face (or font) can make graphic work come alive and communicate its message, or doom it to the hell that is the draft pile.

Starting in the mid-'90s, Microsoft started releasing quirky fonts with Windows and Office. Small business owners everywhere rejoiced in that they had fonts to make their own logos, signage, brochures, and other promotional materials. However, people have a bad habit of using whatever fonts come pre-installed on their computers, no matter how inappropriate for the context they are. In this ongoing series, we're going to examine these default fonts and suggest free alternatives that will give your designs the proper voice they need to communicate your message.

Papyrus is one of the fonts that has been heavily abused. Its over-use has striped away all mean it can convey. It has been used for everything from book covers, iPhone apps, bakery menus, apartment signs, video game covers, and more. Even McDonald's has succumbed to the inappropriate use of Papyrus. There is an entire Flickr photo pool devoted to real-life examples where this font has been used and abused. It seems that with the recent "green" movement, Papyrus has been the de-facto font for all thing natural or earthy.

But people, it doesn't have to be this way. There are many sites out there that have oodles of free fonts available for download. I've searched high and low, and found some great free fonts to use as a substitute for Papyrus.

Bodini Hand

Bodini Hand is a take on an old typewriter that's seen its share of wear and tear. This slab serif type face has a weathered look and uneven strokes. This would be the perfect type face for something that needs to look vintage, but still natural and substantial.

Clerica

Clerica is a little bit fancier, with its swooshes on some caps and the ascenders of the lower case letters. This one would be perfect in situations where a bit of down-to-earth elegance is needed, such as menus for a high-end natural foods restaurant.

Film Cryptic

Film Cryptic and Licinia Aged (below) are the closest you can get to Papyrus without actually taking the leap into boring overuse. It has a bit of a playful feel with the curved descenders on the Ys and Gs, and has some handwriting characteristics with the slighty curvy Ls. This would be a nice font substitutions for the more casual settings of Papyrus.

1543 Humane Jensen

1543 Humane Jensen is a beautiful serif font with nice text figure numbers. People who love typography often say ampersands are their favorite character, and Jensen has a nicely distressed one.

Licinia Aged

As I said above, along with Film Cryptic, Licinia Aged is the closet you can get to Papyrus without actually using it. It has a bit of a calligraphic feel to it, with the hard strokes on the start of letters, and a lovely semi-double barrel lowercase G. This typeface could use a little reduction in the letter spacing to make it really nice.

Old Rubber Stamp

Old Rubber Stamp lives up to its name in that it looks like it was a big "PAID" stamp made by an old man wearing an accountant's visor while doing bookkeeping. The letters are very worn and distressed, giving it a very natural feel. I can picture this one fitting right in on brown paper bag packaging.

Poma

Poma has the feel as if it was written with a Sharpie (my writing instrument of choice!). It has very nice attention to line weights on the up and down strokes. The only downside to this font is it is all capital letters which somewhat limits its use. I can see this one on outdoor signs where readability is a must.

LL Rubber Grotesque

Despite its name, LL Rubber Grotesque is anything but. It is a nice condensed sans-serif font with a slightly distressed look. It looks slightly like it came from a rubber stamp, which the wide letter spacing reinforces.

Do you have any other great fonts you like to use in your designs to convey nature, earthy things, or in ancient contexts? Leave more suggestions in the comments.