Web content that shows me what you can do for me

Monday, 19 July 2010 10:05

I was reading a discussion today about online forms and how invasive they are.

Imagine a store where the owner stood by the door and told you they had the most amazing shoes ever inside.

But to get in and have a look, you have to give him your name, address and shoe size!

You'd walk away, right?

6 reasons why you should update your website all the time

Friday, 28 May 2010 10:03

There are very good reasons why you should update your website on a regular basis.

Here's six of them.

Wordpress as a CMS

Sunday, 06 September 2009 08:22

Just completed new site for a client using Wordpress as a CMS. Wordpress is effective and well supported. Stable and the search engines love it because it is fundamentally (ie designed to be) optimised for search. There is ample community support should you run into problems, although like always you have to be able to weed out the opinions of the real experts from the self-styled ones (no pun intended).

We used Wordpress rather than our other preferred CMS, Joomla!, as this is a small site (11 pages) and Joomla! was deemed overkill.

Getting content from clients

Wednesday, 08 July 2009 23:15

An article on A List Apart about Content Templates elicited an "OMG - yes...". Even the most focused and decision-friendly client can present a massive challenge when it comes to getting them to actually provide the content.

Problems range far and wide:

• Topic experts are generally not writers
• It's not in their job description and there is no incentive for them to do it
• They think providing it to you as a scanned copy of some other document is OK
• They think reusing their brochure content is OK
• They think having a website launch with content 'to be provided' or blank pages is OK
• They think plagiarism is OK too.  And so is infringing copyright laws.
• They want you to write it.  Which is actually OK if they are prepared to pay for a copy writer (which may or may not be you)

I'll be adding content templates to my list of 1001 things-to-do-before Monday. Underneath the item 'write a guide on providing good content'.