Earthman Web & Media

Nova Theme Now Fully Responsive

SyndicatedNews — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:55:29 +0000

As we continue our mission to help prepare your websites for the huge increase in mobile and tablet users on the web, the next theme to be made responsive is Nova. As a responsive design, Nova will now adapt to your visitors screen size in order to best display your content. If your visitors view your website on an iPhone, for example, the design will adapt and re-arrange the content on your page to insure that your visitor will not have to zoom and scroll around to read your page.

The design will also function great on tablets, such as the iPad. Furthermore, the design comes with formats for both portrait and landscape modes for smartphones and tables alike.

Mobile represents a huge shift in the way we consume the internet. I am happy that we can show initiative in getting our customer’s websites ready, and I hope that all of our Nova users enjoy the update! Let us know what you think

7 Suggestions for a Coaching Client Enrolment Process that ROCKS!

SyndicatedNews — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:23:15 +0000

For our clients, working with a coach involves a commitment of time, money and energy – and for some it also takes a great deal of courage. A good enrolment process should leave your client feeling they’ve made a wise choice hiring a coach and that YOU were the right choice.

So when your clients sign-up with you, how do you make your clients feel good about their decision? What do they have to show for it when they sign up? What’s your enrolment process?

Well, here are 7 suggestions for an enrolment process that rocks!:

Make your Client feel Super-Welcome! Specifically tell your client that you’re excited to work with them. A welcome email is a great way to do this AND I would also recommend that you send a physical “Welcome Pack” or similar in the “‘snail mail”. Include a hand-signed welcome letter and make the packet attractive. Include a small gift to surprise and delight them – something relevant to the coaching process is good – some post-its, a pen (I sent a pack of 10 multi-coloured pens), a book, an inspiring fridge magnet. You get the idea.
Get Personal! Personalize your initial client communications – include a quote, tool or exercise that’s relevant to their situation. Show that you’ve seen and heard them and of course, be warm and friendly. Have a newsletter? Why not include an article from your archives that’s relevant to them and their situation?
Tell them what’s going to happen next. In your email and physical welcome letter let them know the next steps: when their first session with you is, how to pay (if they haven’t already), what number to call, that they should call you, to complete and return the coaching agreement if you have one, any actions or homework they may have from a consultation with you and anything else you consider relevant. Spell it out. Make it clear and simple. This will make you look professional – and allay any fears or uncertainty the client may have.
Get them started! Make sure they begin the coaching process right away – keep them in a coaching frame of mind. One way to do this is to give them some homework (I like to call it homefun!). In the “Welcome Pack” include at least one coaching exercise – this could be as little as a simple set of “Powerful Questions” or you could like me also include a “Life Map” and/or “Wheel of Life”. You could also include something specific to their situation for that extra personal touch.
(This one’s for YOU) Standardize as much as possible. Create a checklist for yourself and list the steps you will follow. Create templates for your Welcome Email and Welcome Letter. Then, just like a cover letter when you apply for a job, simply customize for each client with little touches here and there. By creating a template for your communications you save yourself tons of time – and it’s less stress too because you won’t have to think each time what you need to include. TIP: Another thing I did was to print 10 copies of the Coaching Agreement and welcome packet coaching exercises at a time, so when it was time to put a welcome packet together it was much quicker!
Help them to feel good about their financial investment in coaching! Hiring a coach is no small investment – so help your clients feel they’ve spent wisely. Everything we’ve talked about so far will help with this. AND I also suggest you find some way to RATE how your clients are doing ‘out of 10′. You could use a Coaching Goals Sheet (ask how close they are to each goal out of 10) or a Wheel of Life (the scoring system is built into this exercise). Then when you’ve been coaching for a little while, review the scores and you can show them how far they’ve come! (We’ll talk about this a bit more in another article).
Make it easy for them to remember – and refer you. Put your branding on all the materials you include – whether it’s an electronic or paper-based welcome. The great thing about a physical welcome packet is that you can include extra business cards for them to hand to friends and even a voucher for a free session for their friends. TIP: And although I haven’t personally done this – you could also include a referral program where your client gets a reward when a new client they refer signs up with you.
(OK, so it’s 8 suggestions really) Make sure you get their contact details AT ENROLMENT. So, here’s my cautionary tale: After coaching for 8 years it was the first time I didn’t fill out the client info/contact form at enrolment. I thought, “Oh well, I’ll do it at our first session”. Two weeks later, I had an internet and power-cut for 3 days – right before and during our first session. I had no contact details for my client and I couldn’t even look her up online because I didn’t have her home address. It got worse – because I have an ‘internet phone’ – they would have called me and got no answer! Then I remembered that I had set the internet phone to forward to my cellphone in emergencies. Very luckily, this worked. I spoke to her at the appointed time and we rescheduled. But it was nearly disaster – because my cellphone battery was almost flat too! I felt very unprofessional – and learned my lesson…

Have a tip you’d like to share? What’s your enrolment process?
We’d love to hear and I’m sure everyone else would too – just comment below!

Calling All Contributors: Community Summit 2012

SyndicatedNews — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:36:46 +0000

Each year, the WordPress core development team meets in person for a week to work together and discuss the vision for WordPress in the coming year. As annual events go, it’s easily my favorite. Don’t get me wrong, I love attending WordCamps and local WordPress meetups (which are awesome and you should try to attend if you are able), but at the core team meetup, the focus on working together and getting things done is unique, as is the experience of every person in the room being so highly qualified. This year, instead of just planning a core team meetup, I’m aiming a little higher and shooting for a full-on contributor/community summit.

Core code isn’t the only way to contribute to the WordPress project. We have an active theme review team, support forum volunteers, people writing documentation, plugin managers, community event organizers, translators, and more. The teams have been siloed for too long, so we’ve recently begun the process of bringing them together by having teams elect representatives to facilitate more communication between the contributor groups. These reps will form the nucleus of the contributor summit now being planned for a long weekend at the end of October in Tybee Island, GA. This is completely different from a WordCamp. It will be a combination of co-working, unconference, and discussions among the project leaders, and participation will be by invitation.

In addition to bringing together the active contributor team reps to work together, I think it’s important to include community members who don’t fall into that category (at least not yet!). Successful WordPress-based business, authors of popular plugins and themes, and people using WordPress in unexpected but intriguing ways should have a place at the table, too. That said, part of the magic of the core team meetup is the small size; it allows every voice not only to be heard, but to engage. Since this is my first attempt at bringing together so many groups and points of view, I want to try and keep it small enough to retain that personal atmosphere while at the same time ensuring that the best possible mix of people and businesses in the WordPress ecosystem is represented. This is where you come in!

Taking a cue from events with limited availability like AdaCamp (attendance) and the jQuery conference (speaker roster), I want you to nominate people and/or WordPress-based businesses to participate in the summit. Yes, you can nominate yourself.* You can nominate up to 10 additional people — be prepared to provide URLs and the reason you think they should participate. You can also nominate up to 10 WordPress-based businesses without naming individual people, so if there’s a theme or hosting company (for example) that you think should be there, you don’t need to go looking for employee names. This nomination process will hopefully ensure that we don’t overlook someone who is making a difference in our community when it comes time to issue invitations.

Nominations will be open for a week, after which the survey will be closed and the process of analyzing the results** will begin. The nominations process will lead to invitations in June, confirmations in July, planning in August and September, and the summit itself in October. Hopefully we can stream and/or record some of the activity to share online at WordPress.tv. Additional invitations may be extended up until the event if there are people/businesses that become more active in the community. If you’re thinking to yourself that maybe now’s the perfect time to start contributing time to the WordPress project, good thinking! In the meantime, if you want to weigh in, fill in the community summit nomination form. Thanks, and wish us luck!

* Nominating yourself: Do nominate yourself if you fall into one of the categories described in the post above, or if you believe that you have a unique point of view. Please do not nominate yourself if you just think it would be cool to hang out with this group. This is a working event, and everyone is expected to bring something special to the table.

** I (and/or a helpful community volunteer) will sift through the nominations and compile a shortlist of the most-nominated people/businesses and the most intriguing underdogs. This list will be reviewed by the summit planning committee (made up of team reps) to create the invitation list.

The Award-Winning Wheels of Life now available online!

SyndicatedNews — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:13:39 +0000

Hello Everyone!

The Award-Winning Wheels of Life team have been very busy responding to changes in technology and researching better ways for you to access "The Wheels of Life" from a login/password secure download page.

This means you can instantly access over eight hours of video tutorials, the 13 e-books in the series and all of the tempaltes and case studies. All this for only Australian $165.00 inc GST.

You can read more about this at The Wheels of Life website.

New all digital format of The Wheels of Life

SyndicatedNews — Sat, 12 May 2012 23:51:21 +0000

We've done some big changes with the Award-Winning "The Wheels of Life"! Now you can access everything on line instead of waiting for the data DVD!

The Wheels of Life Team have been busy researching and responding to different technology platforms and needs of our customers and are pleased to announce that we have revamped the programme so that you can now access everything online through a sercure login and password system.

Theme Sneak Peek: Flexible

SyndicatedNews — Thu, 10 May 2012 18:48:50 +0000

Today I have for you a sneak peek of our upcoming theme Flexible. Flexible will be a simple, responsive and versatile portfolio theme that focuses on a clean, modern aesthetic. While we have some great gallery themes already, none of them have the crisp and simplistic design that I would love to see used to showcase an artist’s work. I hope you like the preview! Let us know what you think

Online Coaching Tools

My new one — Thu, 10 May 2012 02:11:23 +0000

JigsawBox • The Online Coaching Tool For Coaches, Consultants …
www.jigsawbox.com
They can complete their online coaching sessions during the evenings, and you can coach them back during the day – this flexibility means you get to choose …

Coach Assistant E-Learning Online Tool
www.coach-assistant.com
Coach Assistant eLearning is a complete out-of-box online tool providing support and stimulating coaching process. Business coaching. Executive coaching.

Online Tools for Professional Coaches
www.professional-coaches.com/…/online-tools-for-professional-coac…
22 Apr 2009 – In recent years, the need for coaches to meet clients face-to-face has largely diminished. There are still many coaches who prefer or even insist …

Rypple: Online feedback & coaching tool for remote managers
www.makeuseof.com/dir/rypple-coaching-tools-for-managers/
13 Feb 2011 – Despite its many advantages, one drawback of working with remote teams is that you aren’t really sure if your feedback to teammates is …

Online Life Coaching Tools & Software for the Professional Coach …
www.onlinesolutionsforcoaches.com/
Enhance your Coaching Business, add powerful Coaching Programs with our Coaching Tools and Software | Receive multiple incomes from coaching.

SoccerROM: The Soccer Coach’s Online Reference
www.soccerrom.com/
SoccerROM helps soccer coaches gain the most from their practice sessions and manage their team information online. … Online Tools for Coaches …

Online soccer coaching tool, soccer skills, youth coaching – Secrets …
www.s2s.net/
S2S is an online coaching tool to support the quality of youth and grassroots soccer coaching and training.

TotalCoaching | Online fitness tools
www.totalcoaching.com/
The most efficient health promotion tool on the web. A tool to get me in shape. Fitness programs animated in 3D; Nutrition and training logs; Online community …

Ten Handy No-Cost Online Tools for Your Coaching Business …
www.prosperouscoachblog.com/ten-handy-nocost-online-tools-for-c…
26 Oct 2010 – Use these ten no-cost online tools to help you stay more organized in your coaching business.

Carmichael Training Systems Transitions Athletes to TrainingPeaks …
peaksware.com/…/carmichael-training-systems-transitions-athletes-to-…
24 Sep 2009 – Carmichael Training Systems, an industry leader in endurance sports coaching, camps, and performance testing, announced that as of today, …

Aggregate Now Fully Responsive

SyndicatedNews — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:52:37 +0000

Continuing our responsive design mission, Aggregate is the next theme to be converted. When we first announced that many of our most popular themes would be revisited and updated with responsive designs, we had a lot of requests for Aggregate to be among those themes. I am happy that we can fulfill that request today

Aggregate’s design will now adapt to various screen sizes to insure that your website is readable and easy to navigate on any device. No longer will your visitors need to zoom and scroll on their phones or tablets in order to read your blog!

I hope that you enjoy the update. Let us know what you think!

Our Baby’s All Grown Up!

SyndicatedNews — Sat, 05 May 2012 02:08:39 +0000

Perhaps you recall Ceph, the open source file system designed to manage exabytes of data across thousands of servers? No? Allow me to refresh your memory.

There is this thing called Ceph. It’s an open source file system designed to manage exabytes of data across thousands of servers. Now do you remember?

A few years ago Ceph was but a glimmer in the eye of DreamHost co-founder Sage Weil, and today it has grown into an enormous open-source project with contributors spanning the globe. Ceph has been integrated into the Linux kernel and even plays nice with OpenStack – the massively scalable open source cloud operating system.

As a software project, Ceph has really grown up in recent months. So much so that this ol’ logo…

…wasn’t really doin’ it for us anymore. So, this week, we changed it.

There’s still the hint of a squid there, but I think you’ll agree that this is much cleaner!

We didn’t just stop there, though. As of this week, ceph.com is all new.

But wait – there’s more!

This week DreamHost did something we’ve never done before.

We launched a spinoff company.

We’re calling it Inktank.

Squids have ink! Get it?

As Ceph’s technology has matured over the past year or so, the Ceph team has found themselves fielding more and more inquiries from companies and researchers who want to deploy Ceph within their organizations – but either aren’t sure where to start or aren’t sure how best to use Ceph for their particular applications.

It became clear to our team that Ceph would have its best chance at success if it had some kind of support structure behind it. Ceph is free! It’ll always be free. And now it has a clear path for support, powered by many of the same engineers committing changes to its codebase every day.

Inktank is a completely separate company with its own budget and its own org chart. The only things that DreamHost and Inktank employees share are friendship, office space (for now,) and a love of open source software. Also, soap in the bathroom. Maybe some other things.

Inktank.com launched this week, and it more than likely answers most of the questions sitting in your brain right now!

We DreamHosters get on well with the Ceph team. But you don’t have to take my word for it…here’s a video that shows all of us working together in perfect harmony!

If you’ve got any questions about this new endeavor of ours, please don’t hesitate to post them in the comments! Inktankers are watching and waiting to get you the answers you need.

New Theme: Trim

SyndicatedNews — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:43:57 +0000

Trim is simple, professional, versatile and fast. We have had a lot of requests for a less stylistic, lightweight design, and that is exactly what we created with this latest theme. Trim might be simple, but with that simplicity comes a sense of balance and crispness that I find quite refreshing. Coupled with a bunch of great features, I am confident that Trim will prove useful for a variety of our users.

Live Demo Features Info

Fully Responsive Design

Trim features a fully responsive design. This means that the theme will adapt to various screen sizes to insure that your content is readable on any device. The theme will display beautifully on your desktop computer, as well as your mobile phone. The theme even includes different designs for portrait and landscape modes.

The theme will also adapt to tablet displays. Your website will display beautifully and readable on your iPad. No longer will your visitors need to zoom and scroll around to read or navigate your website.

Lightweight and Super-Fast!

Trim is called “trim” for a reason. It is stripped down and optimized to be fast loading and lightweight. I put my graphic-heavy style on a diet and slimmed this theme into shape. We used CSS3 wherever possible to avoid using too many images. In fact, the entire theme only contains a few tiny graphics!

Tons of Customization Options

Trim comes packaged with our CSS control panel, allowing you to easily adjust your website’s colors and fonts. You can adjust your background using any possible color, choose from our many pre-made textures, or even upload your own custom background image. Choose from dozens of fonts and adjust your body and heading color with a click on your mouse.

I hope that everyone puts the theme to good use! Please leave a comment and let us know what you think