Wordpress+Theme = Presentable Site with Capable CMS

After multiple false starts I decided to use Wordpress for this site. I found a customisable theme that offered the mix of pages and posts I was looking for and started tweaking. A month later I can report Wordpress is proving an able, affordable and low cost site building and content management system.

The current site is barely version 1.0 but Wordpress offers the flexibility to take us to 2.0 and well beyond.

If you are looking for an easily managed website consider getting your web developer/designer to modify a Wordpress theme. If you know what CSS* stands for, consider doing it yourself . The key to success is finding a theme that will suit your needs.

A Presentable Small Business Site Shouldn’t Cost You Your Entire Marketing Budget

The days when a getting a presentable small site required an investment of thousands of dollars are past. Options now abound when it comes to building a small site like this. Indeed, there are almost too many of them with most web hosts offering some sort of site building facility and multiple software options to download or install…

I know. I’ve tried a few (which I might revisit here). I found they either:

• required too much effort,
• offered too little flexibility in templates,
• lacked functionality options
• or failed the search engine friendliness test.

In short: the end result ended up looking amateurish or required too much customisation.

I didn’t want to spend any more than was absolutely necessary. What to do?

The Wordpress Option

I had used Wordpress to blog but a couple of things made me consider it more seriously for the blog-site combination I was after:

1. My long time employer/client Netconcepts adopted a Wordpress platform for its site.
2. I read a series of articles about an experiment with launching a ecommerce store using a modified Wordpress theme

It took a while to get to the point where the site is live — life’s competing priorities, etc. — but after reading the series of articles I decided Wordpress was my best site option.

Choosing a Theme and Making it Mine

As I write this I realise I have much more to say than I have time to say it…

I’ll expand on the process of choosing and customising a Wordpress theme — think “website template” — in the article I am now planning. But, long story short, a long search for a free theme that fitted the bill ended up with many options but nothing that really felt right.

Then I came across a theme that had the sort of mixture of functionality and layout I was seeking. The increasingly popular Revolution Theme cost me US$75 but considering what a bespoke site with comparable functionality would have cost…

It has lived up to its “ïnsanely customizable” billing as I have fiddled to take it from here:

To here:

There is much to do — all sorts of things I would point out to a website benchmarking & review client populate a growing “Not doing as I say” list… A website is never optimised!

I’m pretty happy though. And the last month has shown Wordpress’s worth as a content and site management tool.

Bottom line:
Working with Wordpress is probably easier if you have a level of understanding of CSS and HTML. But the right theme and host will minimise the need to delve too deeply into the PHP code & MYSQL database that makes it all work. And you are more than likely to find a theme that suits your needs without customisation, if you are less fussy than me.

*CSS stands for cascading style sheets a way of determining how your site looks and feels via one file rather than having to modify individual page files.

99designs.com: A New Logo From Romania

My 99designs.com logo contest has finished and I’m happy with the result. My NZ based, US hosted site now boasts some Romanian design.

Over the week the contest ran 104 designs were submitted with some designers revising their submission multiple times on the basis of feedback.

Some of the later submissions were way off target — frustrating when the brief, previous submissions and feedback I had offered gave a pretty clear idea what was needed. But overall the quality of submitted designs was pretty good.

Bottom line: I ended up with a design that fitted the bill.

A need to send money to Romania before I had the design files prompted a bit of concern and a call from PayPal about “activity on my account”. But I’ve had a lot more trouble getting people a lot closer to deliver promised work.

New & Noteworthy in Internet Marketing

Some comment-worthy stuff in the inbox & reader this morning:

• Cuil is the new Google challenger: the original search engine commentator, Danny Sullivan assesses the strength of the challenge in detail. Lots of buzz about this but no time to assess it today. The three column approach to displaying results is interesting, as is the use of images in results. Three column shoulds should help sites and searchers with more chance to win clicks. I’ll revisit this when the buzz dies down.
• Sound advice on writing with keywords from Karon Thackston of Marketing Words Copywriting Blog. Describing what you are not is a particularly good technique to remember — although I’ve often found people object to even the smell use of the word “cheap” adds to their copy. For me, the best guide is whether your copy sounds clunky as you read it aloud. If it does, you are overdoing the keyword repetition.
• I challenge you to read, social media expert, Chris Brogran’s 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice without being better informed about social media considerations. For me, the first one is always who is going to do the socialising and how much time do they have. No point even starting if you can’t sustain a target momentum*.

I kinda like Cuil’s three column results page but many are saying the results that fill the columns don’t match hyped relevance levels.
* Hmmm… not sure I am sustaining my target momentum with this blog. Very much a case of “do as I say not as I do.”

Flash For Search Engines

It is one of the maxims of search engine optimisation: if you’ve put it in Flash it might look good but you’ve pretty much hidden it from search engines.

But maybe the maxim doesn’t apply any more.

Google, Yahoo! and Adobe have got together to figure out a way to offer the big name search engines access to content in Flash file formats (SWF). According to Ecommerce Times:

“The two search companies will use an optimized version of Adobe’s Flash Player technology to improve their engines’ abilities to index the Flash file format (SWF) and scan information contained within the files.

This, according to Adobe, will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content powered by Adobe Flash Player and which would otherwise remain outside the scope of traditional Web searches.”

There are already some things you can do to get content in Flash indexed. Things like, most basically, “noscript” content and ensuring that SWF file meta data is keyword rich. This, though, is an interesting development.

A kinda “duh” development, though. S’pose Adobe weren’t too concerned that Flash movies couldn’t be found via the way people find things online, search engines. That didn’t stop Flash being popular with advertising creatives, gamers, etc. or widely used. But taking 12 years to take some steps to cater to search engines…

Indeed, its not clear who approached who. Maybe the impetus came for the search engines’ endless quest to deliver good results. That definitely the feeling I’m getting from what Google has said on its Webmaster Central Blog and Googleblog:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

Bottomline: I wouldn’t be rushing to redo your navigation in your site in Flash. It will be a long time before “no flash please if you’re looking to get traffic via search engines” drops out of SEO-client conversation. Best bet is still href text links — modify it all you like via css but offer the simple links.

After thought: Will be interesting to see what impact this has. The heavily designed sort of sites that make use of flash aren’t generally put together in a keyword savvy way either. (Think of big brand sites put together by big ad agencies — Adidas isn’t to worried about using running shoes a lot in website content, for instance.)

The question is whether the text content in Flash files will actually help search engines understand what the content is about.

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