My company has a lot of blogs for the various businesses that I’m starting - 52 to be exact. Most of them are run on Wordpress, which I really like, one is run on an old install of TypePad (which is clunky, but might be because I need to update), and one is run on Tumblr.

I love Tumblr. I love the user interface, the way that you can post quick snippets of things. Quotes, pictures, text, links…it is fun to use. And the templates are awesome. The Cara Austin blog is on Tumblr, and it’s a delight to update every day.

But there is a fundamental problem with Tumblr that I wasn’t aware of before I started using it - the search engines don’t seem to like it. In the two months since I have been posting (every weekday starting March 13, 123 posts total), the blog has only received 17 visitors from Google. Every one of those visits, except one, had the term “Cara Austin blog” or “Cara Austin Tumblr” as the search term.

This is a major problem for a commercial blog. I have a personal Tumblr that I use for my own things, notes, things I want to remember - and I don’t care if no one ever comes to that site. But for Cara Austin, a musician who needs to get her name out there and needs to sell albums, this is a big issue.

I didn’t know this about Tumblr. I didn’t know that the pages wouldn’t be indexed well (or show up high) on Google. I knew that Tumblr doesn’t have comments. And I knew that Tumblr didn’t have a search engine built in. These things I decided to live with.

But I didn’t know that Tumblr had a search engine optimization (SEO) problem.

I could no longer ignore the fact after I launched another new blog on Wordpress on April 23, put up a few posts, and that blog starting receiving more traffic, from a wider variety of search terms, in a much shorter time period.

Here’s a little chart to illustrate:

And so I’m leaving Tumblr. I’m leaving with a tear in my eye, but I’m leaving nonetheless.

Photo by Jaye_Elle

This may seem like a beginner tip to many of you long-time WordPress bloggers, but the first time that I tried to embed a YouTube video into my WordPress blog, I couldn’t figure it out. (If you don’t want the back story, just skip to the end of this post for the how to.)

Here’s what I did. I am sure that many first-time video posters can relate. I went to YouTube, found the video that I wanted to include, pulled the code from the “embed” area, switched to “code” from “visual” mode in the WordPress editor, and pasted the code. This didn’t work. It displayed an empty box where the video should be, with the broken link x.

I then proceeded to search through the WordPress manual and help forums for about an hour and still had no luck. I finally found this site, which provided me with the answer.

HOW TO EMBED A YOUTUBE VIDEO INTO YOUR WORDPRESS BLOG:

1. Click on the “Users” link in the Admin area of your WordPress blog.
2. If you have multiple users, click “edit” next to your profile.
3. Turn off the “Use the visual rich editor when writing” feature.
4. Write your post. You’ll see that the options for “visual” and “code” are gone. You can now paste the YouTube embed code into the post and it will display perfectly.

One word of caution - you can’t switch back to using the visual rich editor after you paste the YouTube code or you’ll have the same problem. You need to publish your post before switching back to the visual editor.

Just for fun, here’s a video about blogging that I found thanks to Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist blog.

Last week, I started a series of blog articles about Web design with the post A bad Web design could kill your business, and then I never finished the series. Shame on me. I am back to the topic again this week, and there will be more posts. And with the Future of Web Design conference coming up (Nov. 7-8)  in NYC, it probably makes more sense for the series to happen now, anyway, so I’ll chalk my delays up to kizmet or good timing or at least convenient procrastination.

This conference looks like it is going to be a really good one, with sessions on topics including finding inspiration, designing for moble devices, using illustration on the Web, and AJAX and design, along with a group of speakers who really know their stuff. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the Web sites of some of the experts who are speaking at the event to see if it might be possible to glean some insight into the future of Web design by examining their Web designs. Here’s what I found:

Jina Bolton - Her site is a blog (as were many of the designers’ sites), and the design looks more like a Web site design than a traditional blog. Advances in blog design will definitely be a continuing trend as blog tools are getting better, and more and more people are catching on to the fact that blog platforms, such as WordPress and Moveable Type, are the new content management systems, making publishing to the Web easier than ever.

Jeffrey Kalmikoff- Kalmikoff works for skinnyCorp, the company that founded Threadless, a t-shirt design community that is now a multi-million dollar business that sells more than 90,000 t-shirts per month. The site has a unique design that matches up with the company’s fun and off-beat brand. You’ll see that there are sections on the site for both podcasts and videos, and this is a Web design trend for the future, as firms move toward including audio and video content on their sites as part of their overall designs.

Ryan Sims- Sims is the lead designer for Virb Inc., and as is evident from the site’s design, his company is clearly focused on community. Web designs that foster community are a trend that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, as social networking grows and grows and grows.

Josh Williams- When landing on the Firewheel Design site, you’ll be greated with a message: “Firewheel Design has bolted the studio doors. We have taken an oath of secrecy. We are working on something new. If you want the skinny on our top secret project, we simply ask for your email address.” If this doesn’t make you want to submit your email address immediately, nothing will. This practice of designing a site in order to optimize audience building is a Web design and online marketing trend that will continue to gain in popularity.