Work with the Whole Wide Web
Lisa Vollrath
Founder, Ten Two Studios
Euless, Texas
Squidoo: How did you decide what to make your lenses about?
Lisa: I'm an artist and writer, and I run a business that helps people who do the type of art I do. I produce how-to books, image collections for artists and various products that can be used in the creation of mixed-media artwork. For me, choosing the topics for my lenses was simply a matter of doing a search on topics I've written about and finding there wasn't a lens on that subject. I was able to put six lenses together rather quickly by dropping in links to my own articles and artwork, then going back and adding in RSS feeds from my Bloglines page and links from my bookmarks.
S: Do you maintain a web site or blog otherwise?
L: Oh yeah! I have a massive web site. Then I have a personal blog at LiveJournal and a blog of all the links I've sent to the subscribers of my weekly newsletter. I also run a mail art project called Postcards 4 Peace through a blog. In the past, I've run sites at About, WebSeed and Bella Online. I'm a busy girl...
S: Wow! What have you done with your lenses that you can't do one of those sites?
L: I tend not to do off-site linking on my web site because it's so large that maintainence would be a nightmare. Lenses are small and self-contained, so it seemed to be ideal to create focused lists of links. I also put written content in one section of my site and galleries in another -- on a lens, the whole package appears on the same page.
I like that lenses are almost research pages -- everything you want to know about something, gathered in one place, very tight and self-contained. I think if I put this stuff in a blog, it would be too chopped up. And lord knows I don't need to go start another web site! There's always an advantage in working within a network of content sites, so doing something on Squidoo appealed to me more than starting up another blog or web site.
S: Have you taken any cues from other lenses so far?
L: I've surfed through the other lenses in the mixed-media art topics and tried to learn from them. I've already started to cut my links lists up into smaller chunks to keep them from turning into one, long, daunting to pick through list. I've tried to break my content modules up with images, since everything I'm writing about is a visual medium. Having a network of lenses to look at has made the building process go very fast for me.
S: What advice or ideas would you offer other lensmasters?
L: I'm still new to this process, but already, I've fallen into a little routine. In the evening, I sit down and surf a little, and I'm using the Bookmark Tool to add one or two links to each lens. I'm not out to add every link -- just one or two a day. That keeps the content fresh, and the workload managable. I've also tried to make sure that there are modules in each lens that provide content that refreshes itself -- Flickr photos and RSS feeds.
