Website overhauls often cause a rousing and lively discussion leading to long meetings, lists of lists to be collected, strategic decision-maker input, and sometimes even talking to the end users about the site. And it seems inevitable that all of these goals and ideas need to be wrapped in a cleaner and newer interface design with a dash of the latest marketing trends. And it has to be better than your competitors (or other departments). Then the technology questions hit.
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OK, it seems that about once a year the ‘next great social media tool’ emerges. This year, it seems to be Twitter. Last year, it was Facebook. A couple of years ago, LinkedIn was all the rage. That leads me to a couple of burning questions:
- At what point is it acceptable to abandon or ignore a social media tool?
- When does it make sense to include a new social media tool as part of your social marketing strategy? Read the rest of this entry »
WordPress, especially 2.7, can do a lot for small sites and blogs once you’ve got the basic install up and running. And let’s face it, with so many hosts providing one-click installs of WP and Plugins available via direct downloadable updates now, administration is much easier.
Further, the revamped user interface is a huge boon to finding what an author needs quickly. And on the design side, being able to easily select templates to apply to a page now is a wonderful improvement and helps separate the setup and design part of the site from authors’ needs.
However, it’s not a quick solution for any content management system (CMS) problem. There are many sites which just won’t quite work on WordPress. For example, recently a client was discussing whether WordPress could handle their many thousands of pages as they migrated from static hand-linked html. (It was good that they wanted to move to some modern CMS.) However, the site isn’t really designed to center around blog entries, and their static page count is huge. Both of these factors work again WordPress, despite it’s recent advances.
All we had to show them was how long the single page selection menu would be in the administration to give a good example of some of the shortcomings still inherent in WordPress as a full-fledged CMS. Even with plugins such as Page-mash, there’s only so much effort that’s been put into general site control that you would normally expect in a modern CMS. So while we’re certainly very happy with the changes that have come out in WordPress, it’s still not everything for everyone.
Do you own the compelling content on your web site? One of the key things that you want to make sure of when developing a site is that the most interesting information on your site lives on your site. That is, don’t have lots of links from your site to other sites. Chances are that you’ll never get them back to your site once they leave.
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In “Before the Law” (Vor dem Gesetz), Kafka’s protagonist stands helpless in front of a gate. He can’t move forward or back, and he doesn’t know the rules for getting the gate opened. These days, it’s Google who offers us such frustrations.
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Why Searchers Don’t Go Past the First Page. Or the first half of the first page.
We’ve seen lots of data about how searchers process search pages. The current rule of thumb is that 50% look at the second page of search results, and 25% at the third page. And almost no one looks at any other pages.
This is probably true, as far as it goes. I believe, however, that there are two kinds of searchers, one of whom is not usually discussed.
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The Web is everywhere now. And it’s replacing the role of print. So, is print important anymore?
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Back in November of last year, I considered whether To Print or Not to Print. At that time, I allowed that print has a role in a well-integrated communications strategy. Today, I’m wondering how viable the medium is.
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