Have a happy new year!

Actually, the whole project gave me a great idea – one that I should probably experiment on in my WordPress designs. Perhaps I can build a featured content box that utilizes custom fields to customize the box.

So far I’ve only built sections that turn on and off conditionally. Perhaps those sections could also have options and conditions within them. It could have a variable background, variable content links, and a variable featured image or text.

It would also be a kickbutt tool for the news business, where fast responses are so vitally important.

Don’t use the robots. You need to be social on social media and can’t rely on scheduled robo-tweets to do that. A Twitter feed needs to have character and needs to be responding to people when they try to contact you.

When you post, think of your tweet as the teaser and not as the slug line. Pose a question, show some personality, or highlight the important part of the story.

Feel free to reply (@) to users or use hashtags (#), but retweet (RT) sparingly. Retweets mean you’re deferring to someone else’s expertise, when you’re supposed to be the expert source. You want to get more fans, not send them to other organizations.

Of all those, I think hashtags are the most useful. It is a way to organize and highlight the topics of our Tweets. If you post a tweet that touches on a popular topic (“#Football” for example) try to work that tag into your sentence. (“Remember that you can watch the #Football game on Tv tonight!”)

Here are the guidelines for using hashtags from Twitter itself:

* If you Tweet with a hashtag on a public account, anyone who does a search for that hashtag may find your Tweet.
* Don’t #spam #with #hashtags. Don’t over-tag a single Tweet. (Best practices recommend using no more than 3 hashtags per Tweet.)
* Use hashtags only on Tweets relevant to the topic.

#BreakingNews is a particularly good one because it indicates the importance of the subject and also because BreakingNews.com, a network-neutral aggregator owned by MSNBC, looks specifically for that hashtag. If they retweet us or even post us on their site, we could expect a big boost of traffic on that story.

Hashtags can be any word, and they don’t have to be officially established by anyone. Just pick your topic word and #it.

The move went smoothly and I’m happy to say that I’ve settled into my new routine well. I’m also enjoying my new city of Colorado Springs.

While my principal tasks have focused on the gathering and editing of content for our website, I’ve also worked on some page design within the confines of our template. Here are three examples that I’m particularly proud of:
11 Breaking Weather Alert is one of our signature positions. In addition to an increased weather portion in our newscasts, I’ve also created a short process for taking over the home page and putting weather front and center. We change our logos, theme colors and add a box containing weather maps, social widgets and a set of the most popular links.

When we go to breaking weather alert mode, we can always expect a traffic spike.

I’m particularly proud of how this project turned out and glad to say it’s been well received.

The next two projects weren’t as creative, but posed an interesting challenge.

Prior to my arrival, many of the station’s pages were built using large image files, even the text of the content was part of the image. In addition to making the pages unsearchable, it was also quite difficult to edit them when we needed to make changes.

To simplify the process, I rebuilt the Advertise page and a page promoting an educational offering called 11 Weather Class using css classes and html text. They look essentially the same as they always did, but they’re now easily editable and