Posts Tagged ‘Wordpress’

I have to admit…I’m in love with Wordpress. I could probably be classified as addicted. Anyway, WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Wordpress has been widely recognized as the best blogging tool for a while.  Great to see it win this award for its CMS capabilities too.

Check it out: http://wordpress.org/development/2009/11/wordpress-wins-cms-award/

Considering a new website for your real estate company? Or any other industry for that matter. Wordpress is an open source application you should definitely check out. Wordpress was originally designed to be a simple blogging tool but it keeps getting better and better. Hundreds of companies are now using Wordpress as a content management system (CMS) to power their entire Website. Some of the awesome benefits of using Wordpress for your blog or as a CMS are its cost (it’s free), ease of use, SEO friendliness, online community support and all the free plugins that allow you to easily customize and add enhancements to your site.

Whether you are a developer of a private community or specialize in general brokerage, there are plenty of great plugins that can really help your Wordpress Website.

Here is a list of 20 plugins we install on many of the sites we design for clients. Try them out and let me know if you have any questions about any of them. Read the rest of this entry »

In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, I remember the days of cold calling companies to offer Web site design.  The question was “do you have a Web site?” Many small businesses did not. Even if they did, many had no clue how to get to their site. If they could actually give me their Web address, I would often find their “site” was a directory listing page they shared with all their local competitors. True story. The call often ended with them telling me they didn’t need a Web site. And maybe they didn’t. Then, anyway.

These days, everybody knows they need a Web site and most companies have one. But they don’t always know how to get the most out of it. In other words they may have a Web site, but it may not work very well. Read the rest of this entry »

After 13 years of involvement with all aspects of marketing and web development, it seems the three-legged stool of Web development is getting a lot less wobbly and consumer habits, client needs and agency services seem to be far more in sync.  Until the last 12-18 months, it always seemed that getting all three of these constituents aligned was difficult because everyone had competing agendas. Agencies wanted portfolio work, consumer habits were still segmented by demographics, and clients were confused.  Enter social media.

Not that social media has fundamentally changed everything but it is a pink elephant in the room that got all three parties staring at the same thing. And if you look at what it has done, it has created two expectations from consumers that have forced the hands of clients and their agencies: transparency and real-time content.

So with the tighter budgets that most marketing managers are facing today, it seems that every call we get leads to a discussion on improving the user functionality, management capability, and ROI of their online efforts.

Here are 5 things that we are doing that clients seem to be responding great to these days. Read the rest of this entry »

For years, my approach to writing for the Web was a lot like other writers who grew up in print advertising. Mostly, it consisted of placing brochure ware on a site. I was happy. Clients were happy. And life went on. But while I wasn’t looking, the Web changed the way we communicate, the way we connect and the way we formulate opinions.

How Different Is Reading for The Web?

To understand how writing for the Web is different, you have to understand how reading the Web is different. Most readers don’t read the Web at all—they scan. How could they not? There is inexhaustible content out there. And studies prove that ink on paper is easier to read than pixels on a screen. So you should write in a way that makes your content “scannable.” Be concise. Use subheads. And consider your tone of voice. Be conversational and informative.

In Some Ways, The Web’s Not So Different.

I’ve always written copy for short attention-span theater, especially for advertising. See the headline. See the logo. You get it right? Great, I’ve done my job. If you read the body copy, hey I’m closing the sale. The Web is similar. See the headline, the subheads—you get it, right?

The difference to me is, with ad copy, I feel as though I’m beguiling the reader. With the Web, the reader has opted in. It’s my job not to lose him or her.

What Isn’t Changing.

It’s tough to read about marketing or even our culture at large without reading how the digital world is changing everything. Obviously, our behavior is changing. But what isn’t changing?

Our human nature.

Our deepest primal desires, the things that have driven our decision-making for thousands of years, continue to drive us today. Bill Bernbach was quoted as saying “It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man.”

Far more recently, in a Wired article entitled, “Is Advertising Dead?” Michael Schrage writes, “time and geography—more than human nature—separates the captive crowds at the Roman Colosseum from user lists on the Internet.”

What this tells me is that we’re not evolving into emotion-less drones seeking only information, facts, tweets and the opinions of our peers online. We can be entertained. We can be engaged. We can even be persuaded.

Online, Are Creativity and Effectiveness Mutually Exclusive?

Of course not. I’m beginning to see more and more Web 2.0 sites that are adept at telling a good story and keeping content fresh and dynamic. But there are still plenty of proponents of Web 2.0 who are convinced otherwise.

This should go without saying but it always seems to get lost in the discussion of Web content: Make the copy interesting (See my last blog). Certainly there are guidelines you should follow when you’re developing content for the Web. But at the end of the day, good writing is good writing.