Category Archives: Blog

Can a Blog be used for your Business Website?

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We are always seeking web options for website creation that best fit the needs of our clients: ease of use, breadth of features, flexibility, and security. For many cases, WordPress is a great and quick solution for business websites.

What is WordPress?
While WordPress started in 2003 as a tool for online blogging, years of contributions by developers from around the world, WordPress is much more than a blogging tool.

Here’s what you can do, without any customization:

1. Content-management: A user-friendly password-protected dashboard provides quick and easy web access to manage and update your website content. Techie-type capabilities are available, but if this is not your concern, you never need to worry about it.

Content-management includes:

  • Make Posts. Posts are articles that are displayed on a web page chronologically. These include a headline, author, date and an area to post text as short or as long as you like. In these articles you can add pictures. Similar to the menu options for paragraph, text, and picture formatting in Microsoft Word, a WYSIWYG panel provides similar formatting options. Posts appear chronologically either on your blog home page or a page dedicated to posts.
  • Make Pages. In addition to chronological articles, you can create single page entries that can be edited like a post. Unlike a post each page becomes a new menu item. And, you can create sub-menus for each page.
  • Dashboard. The WordPress dashboard is where you can manage your blog and its content. Included in the dashboard is the ability to install themes, plug-in, and manage widgets. Sounds a bit like a foreign language, but with about an hour consultation or just poking around the dashboard and some googling, you will be able to navigate your dashboard and understand these terms about as well as you can manage a remote control for your television.

2. SEO solution - Search Engine Optimization – meaning you want your site and its content to be found in google searches – is built-in.

Are all WordPress sites created equal?

No, not all blogs are created equal. We say this from experience having had to rescue many WordPress sites that have been hacked and designers who don’t have the programming expertise to properly “skin”/design a WordPress site and customize plugins. The basic blog software is set up with the components listed above. While, this seems like a lot, there is much, much more you can do.

Since August 2011, over 22% of all new websites use WordPress. Developers have contributed over 17,000 plug-ins providing the ability to expand features from galleries, to ecommerce, to event registration, to almost anything you can think of—a developer has thought of or is working on it.

The advantage of these plug-ins is that they are modular components that you can “plug-in” to your website without having to build calendars, event registrations, full e-commerce sites, etc from scratch. You get the power of a database to organize your content that can be assembled and re-assembled when needed.

WordPress Template & Ecommerce

 

 

 

 

 

 

WordPress Full conversion site  (and donation database)

 

 

 

 

 

 

WordPress as blog

Can a fairy-tale teach us about the web-development?

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The mother of the three little pigs did not say “beware of the wolf” before she sent her darlings out to seek their fortunes, but she did tell them that whatever each may do, do it the best that you can.

Each little pig did encounter the big bad wolf and as the story goes, those piggies that tried the quick and cheap route with the houses of straw and sticks got eaten.

As much as he huffed and puffed, the wolf could not blow in the well constructed house of bricks. Even when the wolf tried to get in through the chimney, he fell down into the little pig’s kettle.

In the house made of brick, this little pig invited his mother over for supper that evening.

The web has its share of wolves huffing and puffing blowing down websites left and right. SPAM, identity theft, credit card scams, data hostage-taking occur regularly because websites are poorly built.

A website needs to stand up to high volume and to hackers. Just like a physical building must be structurally sound, the same rules apply to systems architecture on the web: quality of materials, integrity of the contractor, and the skills of the designer and engineer all count if a structure is to remain solid.

This article was inspired by a client who came to us after their website was hacked. They had an online tracking system that worked great and had even won an award. Even better, the website was put behind an encrypted security layer and password-protected. All appeared well, but the house was poorly designed. The systems architecture was faulty: the security layer, albeit comforting, could be (excuse me-was) circumvented because the same password could be used for secured and non-secured areas  and you did not even need a password if you had the skill set of typical 15 year-old hacker.

This is one of many examples of poor systems architecture. You do not even need to have a website with a database to run into trouble, online mail forms get scribbled and hacked all the time.

The story of the Three Little Pigs teaches us important lessons that can be applied to the web. Like the house of straw, most people build their first website based solely on the lowest price offered–quick and cheap.

When disaster strikes, the next website is built in panic mode. Choices made in this state usually fail as well.

By the third time, knowledge and reason have been attained and a robust, secure, scalable website gets launched.

Also, it is important to note, the wolf did not go after the biggest house, he went after ALL the houses. On the web, hackers do not care how big or little your website may be, only that if they can take the house down they will.<

To keep your virtual house and business standing, you may have to pay a little more and take a bit more time getting started.  As our mothers’ have always told us, in the end you will be rewarded for doing it the best that you can.

How to assign value to a job

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One of our team then related the story of a Boiler “tapper” in 17th century Scotland.  To make a major repair to an industrial boiler in those days it first had to be drained through a drilled hole, a process called “tapping.” It was important that the person who did the “tapping” had to be an expert or the boiler could be ruined and forever unusable. One famous 75-year old Boiler “tapper” completed his work at a factory with consummate skill to the customers delighted satisfaction.  He forwarded his bill for payment that succinctly described the skill he had acquired over a lifetime.  It simply said  “For tapping” boiler – one pound. For knowing where to ‘tap’ boiler 100 pounds.”