We’ve developed many WordPress themes for clients for specific projects. I was looking for a 3 column theme with a variable middle column and a vertical menu. (I don’t know why there are so few vertical menus for WordPress.) Anyway, I couldn’t find a theme I liked, so I wrote my own. Feel free to take a look and use it! It’s under GPL license so there’s no charge. If you like it, I would appreciate it if you keep the credit link in the footer.
With such head-starts, the five figure medium-sized website cost quickly becomes four. The four figure small business website cost becomes three. The home-grown sideline business goes from three figures to two (many premium WordPress themes designs are available for only $50). You can even get a WordPress website on their sister site for free. Buy a domain name for it and you’re in business for just $10.
To the short-sighted web developer or designer it’s the end of days. To the business owner it should be the start of getting the website they always thought they were going to get, but never quite did, for a price they can justify, and that everyone can use. via – WordPress The Quiet Revolution
I found this quote on a website for web developers and I think that the implications of this trend are fantastic. In the old day of web development, any organization had to throw their hopes over the webmaster wall and hope for the best. They were dependent upon the webmaster for every part of the website including the design and getting the content just right.
The result was that websites were expensive, cumbersome and really didn’t help an organization deliver their message.
In my experience in developing many sites, I’ve actually found that the most challenging part of the process is defining the organization’s message. I actually believe that developing a website is the best thing that any organization can do because if forces a reflection on what the organization is all about.
I’ve worked with several organizations to refine their organizational message – their elevator speech that describes what they do in less than 30 seconds. Let’s look at an example. I recently completed a project with Taproot to help a small non-profit redo their website. The technical work to redo the site took less than 40% of the calendar time; the bulk of the calendar time was helping this non-profit define who they are.
Stagebridge helps older people fully express themselves and live life to the fullest. Their old site made it difficult to quickly understand what the organization was all about. Studies show that most people take around five seconds to decide if they’re going to stick around on a site before moving on. These five seconds are important to let someone know who you are ans what you’re all about.
After several brainstorming sessions we quickly narrowed all their work down into four overall categories. These categories not only helped Stagebridge refine their elevator speech, it formed the foundation for the organization of the new website.
The new site uses few words and some rotating slides to convey the message. It shows the possibilities of healthy aging and how Stagebridge’s offerings help older people live life to the fullest!
So, yes, I’m glad that the days of expensive unresponsive website design are numbered. I’m excited about the possibilities of using a new website as a catalyst to refine any organization’s message!
It’s ironic – I spend many hours during my days in the WordPress admin app. Almost daily I’m entering text or html into pages or posts for myself or clients.
I find the default size for text entry area to be a bit small. In the past, I’ve used the full screen option to make the box bigger, but many times that was overkill. Also, I use custom fields often the the default entry area for custom fields is really small. One of the things I use custom fields for is to enter customized text in a sidebar on a specific page.
Spending so much time in WordPress you would think that I’d know all the little secrets. Well, today I found a new feature that I’ve been really needing. These text entry areas are resizeable!!! Just look for the resize thingie (that’s a very technical term!) in the lower right corner and drag it to resize the area. Simple huh?
I guess I should keep my eyes open more!
WordPress 3.2 is scheduled for the end of June. This new version promises many new features but also has changed some of the system requirements.
First the enhancements (from the WordPress Blog)!
Now the new requirements (again from the WP Blog):
If Tekpals is hosting your site, all is good. We’re already meeting the new requirements. If your site is hosted elsewhere, please check with your web host to ensure that you meet the requirements. WordPress does not support old versions, so any security issues are fixed in the latest version only. It’s always best to stay current.
A special note about IE6 support… The WP team will no longer support IE6 for the admin panels. This means that if you still use IE6, the admin screens may no longer work correctly. Unless specifically requested, Tekpals hasn’t supported IE6 in over a year. With this release of WordPress, we can no longer ensure compatibility for IE6 on any client site. IE6 is rarely used anymore (it’s currently less then 4% of the world wide market) if you receive comments that your site is broken, first ask if the person is using IE6 and suggest that they upgrade. The upgrade is free. If you have a special situation that requires IE6 support please let us know and we’ll show you some options.
Imagine having a website that’s so popular that people subscribe to it. They get automatically notified when there’s a new update. This, in essence, is a blog feed. Blog feeds, often called RSS feeds, allow any web owner to regularly publish updates by text, graphics, audio or video.
RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication) is a solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows readers to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites they are interested in. You can save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly. The good news for site owners is that WordPress, because of its blog background, is easy to start an RSS feed. All you pretty much need to do is create a new post and it’s included in your feed.
We like RSS feeds used along with newsletters and social networking to make it simple to get your message out to many!
I’ve been trying to set up a shared iTunes library for our entire home using one of my servers. Sharing music works well, but I was running into some problems sharing video files. I did what I usually do in these situations and search for the problem I’m having and I’m usually able to find an answer that works. (There’s also a lot of junk I have to filter through, but that’s a different post (ref).
I started with Google and searched for ‘itunes shared video’ and was surprised that many of the results were from older versions of iTunes. Many of the results referred to iTunes 6 and 7. The current version (as of when I encountered this problem) is 10! I wondered why Google wasn’t emphasizing links discussing more current versions of iTunes.
After digging through the results, It turns out there is an issue with iTunes sharing video files over Windows. iTunes is really picky about the way the video is encoded and I’m going to have to re-encode the videos.
Bing, is better than Google, but not perfect. Not surprisingly it gave me a few results talking about using a Zune with iTunes!
I do wish that the search engines are aware of the current version of software when searching for software problems.
We just completed a design project where the client was wanting to use fonts beyond the standard web safe fonts. Web safe fonts are those fonts that are found on most computers. Unlike other tools (primarily Adobe’s pdf format) the web doesn’t embed the fonts in a document; rather the browser will get an appropriate font from a font family that the web developer specifies in the document.
Most of the time this works well; however, there are cases when the current state of web fonts is clearly broken. HTML 5 will address many of these shortcomings, but for now there are a few solutions.
The common solution was to use the desired font in a graphic image. This works for small parts of a page but is unwieldy for entire pages. This method also severely impact search engine optimization.
Google has launched a web font service that will embed a number of public domain or free fonts into a web page. Unfortunately Google doesn’t include a font similar to what this client wanted.
I found MyFonts, a service that offers licensed fonts for both print and web. They did have the exact font my client desired – and it was even FREE. Yea! Getting the font loaded in the WordPress site was relatively easy – assuming that you’re comfortable editing WordPress template files. The desired font (Museo Sans) was loaded and the page was displayed with the new font!
The newfound happiness wasn’t long lived though. We quickly found that, in certain sizes, the font looked jagged in all versions of Windows across all browers. The problem appears to be the way that Windows renders these fonts. They looked good on a Mac but Windows, even with ClearFont on, wasn’t consistent. I also heard anecdotal reports of similar issues on Linux, but wasn’t able to test on a Linux machine.
Ultimately we went with the font graphic route. The fonts were to be used with page headers only and since the site was an internal company site, search engine optimization wasn’t much of a concern.
For many businesses your website is your primary marketing tool. At the same time, many businesses use a variety of tool to reach new and existing customers. You site then becomes your portal into you different communication channels. Let’s take a look at how your site can be an effective portal.
Email newsletters have been around a long time. Newsletters are a great way to stay in contact with your customers or those interested in your business. In most cases, email newsletters aren’t very effective to reach new customers. However, the cost of getting a new customer is much higher than retaining existing customers. We’ll talk about reaching new customers in another post, but don’t forget the importance of staying in contact with your existing customers.
The first step to produce an email newsletter is to collect email addresses of your customers or prospects. We recommend having an easy to find place on your homepage for new people to signup for your newsletter. Offer your existing newsletters the ability to see your existing newsletters or offer a nice, free benefit in exchange for their email address.
You can maintain the email newsletter list yourself, but it’s really difficult. If you have an email list of over 30 to 50 people, you’ll quickly outgrow the ability of sending the emails yourself. You’ll also need an automated way for people to subscribe and unsubscribe from your list. There are several great services we recommend – Constant Contact and MailChimp come to mind.
There are also open source (free) options to manage your email lists. Phplist is probably the best known open source option. One thing to keep in mind with the commercial services when compared with the open source options is delivery. Both Constant Contact and MailChimp ensure that you comply with anti-spam regulations and help ensure that your important content actually gets delivered rather than get hung up in spam filters.
The content of your email is important. Of course you have a marketing message; however, most people aren’t interested in reading marketing messages. We recommend that you write something of interest to your target market and wrap your marketing content in that message. Interesting content is important. Not only will interesting content get people to subscribe to your newsletter, but it will also help your email get opened! Think about it – how many marketing emails do you get that you don’t even open. Write your email so your subscriber can’t wait to open it.
The commercial services all give you data so that you can see how many emails were sent, how many were opened and how many were actually clicked. This data is key to help you understand what happens with your messages once you send them out. Stay on top of your open and click thru rate.
The final thing to pay attention to in email marketing is frequency. How often do you send your messages? What is the boundary between engaging your customers and nagging them? If you over-saturate your customers you’ll just get them to unsubscribe to your list. If you don’t send out regularly enough, they’ll forget about you.
We don’t believe that there’s a hard and fast rule – different audiences have different frequency thresholds. But pay attention to how often you send out your emails.
Of course there’s much more about email marketing and this just covers the highlights, but email newsletters can be a great way to stay in contact with your customers.
One important area for new WordPress site owners is the difference between pages and posts. Let’s try to clear that up.
Posts are entries usually listed in reverse chronological order on your site. There are some ordering exceptions, but the common element of posts is that they appear in some predefined order. Think of posts like posts in a journal or diary. They are not necessarily related but tell a story (sometimes) over time. Generally posts are categorized and tagged so that they may be found easily. It would be very unusual for individual posts to appear on your menus.
Posts are most often associated with a blog. Readers can subscribe to your blog and any new or changed pages will be pushed out to them. These subscription feeds make it really easy for others to keep up on your content without having to visit your site for any updates. Rather than coming to your site for updates, the updates are automatically pushed to them!
Pages
Pages are static (they stand by themselves and don’t change much) and are not listed by date. Pages do not use tags or categories. Pages are usually linked to your menu. When a reader clicks on a menu they are taken to a page. An About page is the classic example of a page.
Pages and posts cannot be interchanged. In other words you can’t transform a post into a page or vice versa. Of course, you can cut and past content between a page and a post to move content from one type to the other.
It’s extremely important to develop websites that work across browsers currently in use. I spent a better part of this morning fixing a problem with a site that wasn’t rendering properly in Internet Explorer 7. I found myself venting at unknown people who still use IE7 – it was released in October 2006. Then more rational thought prevailed and I realized that it’s my job to design for all current browsers, so I just make it work.
IE7 is still about 10% of the market (as of December 2010) http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php – go figure. The problem with this site is fixed but it got me thinking about when we cut off older browsers. Of course IE6 comes to mind.IE6 is notoriously not compliant with standards yet it’s still used by 5% of the market! It’s quite time consuming and limiting to design for every browser ever on the market – at some point you have to make a decision on what you’ll support. This client agreed that supporting IE6 wasn’t worth the cost.
However, if this client was targeting people who were on the trailing edge of technology or very uncomfortable with technology there may have been sound business reasons for supporting such an old and problematic browser. So one of the issues to be aware of when developing a site is not only the the target market but that market’s comfort with technology balanced with features you want in your site.
