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WordPress is a content management system that has been on the scene for a while, but it’s really catching on with more and more people lately. It’s not hard to see why.

First of all, it’s easy to use and easy to implement. Most larger hosting companies offer one-click free installs of WordPress. Once installed, the software even upgrades itself. Users can manage their own backups! It’s a great technological achievement, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about why you should convert your existing site to WordPress, and there’s one enormous reason why you should.

Because it makes editing your website and keeping it fresh easy to do. It’s just like using a word processing application.

Gone are the days when you would hire someone like me at $100 per hour to edit your web site every time you need to make a change. Many businesses who previously had an in-house web designer can cheerfully pat those people on the back and send them out into the world, saving a pile of money in the process.

It’s true that you still need to spend some money getting a good design together, and it still costs money to get someone like me to make that design into a WordPress site, but once that’s done you can log in and update your blog yourself, forever, and all it costs you is time. You can even do the updating via email without ever having to log in. You can add pictures, sound, movies, you name it.

If you don’t mind having a site that isn’t entirely custom made, you can buy a premium WordPress template for around $150 and use that, and there are some really great looking ones out there that would be ideal for most businesses. There are even thousands of free templates that look really good. It’s amazing.

Maybe you are busy running your business and you don’t even have the ten minutes a day it would take to update your page yourself. You can have someone else do it! Have someone sitting around your office waiting for the phone to ring? Turn them into a reporter and have them update your site with the fresh news every day.

Content is king, and having new, fresh content every day raises your search visibility, keeps people in touch and in tune with your story, and keeps people coming back to find out about your message.

Call me, Jim Hodgson right now and let’s get started!
404.492.9692

Our friends at Microsoft are at it again with a re-branding of their Live Search engine, now to be called “Bing”. The only reason I know about it is because they have a hot girl smiling about it in almost every Hulu ad of late.

I haven’t used it yet, so I have no idea if it’s better or worse than Google, but I do know that the whole reason that Google is so popular is that they came along with a better mousetrap and better customer relations in a climate that was begging for it, and it’s going to be hard to dislodge people.

For all those years we had to deal with Microsoft abusing us as consumers. They sold to businesses, so they had little use for style, design, or reliability. It was a little like allowing IBM to pick your wardrobe.

Of course, you could go and get yourself a Macintosh, but at the time Macs were in sort of an adolescent phase and had long hair, not to mention earrings in strange places. You could get away with that stuff in the art or creative worlds, but not in an insurance office.

It was very frustrating to me personally. There was really no good option.

Then the internet came along and everyone went bananas. They’re still pretty much going bananas but we’re starting to get our heads around it, I think.

All of a sudden, everyone had a voice and they all started shouting to one another at once. It was cacophony. How in the world would we find anything amidst all this clutter? Well, there was Yahoo and AskJeeves and Lycos, but they really just kinda listed all the chaos. They helped some.

Then some folks calling themselves Google came along and made a search engine that ranked results based on how relevant they were. I mean, all the other guys did that too, but the Google system really worked. It was so amazing.

At first, only nerds used Google. I whipped it out once in front of two of my clients sometime in 2001 and one said “What’s Google?”.

“Hacker search engine,” the other said, knowingly.

So, in a sea of formless chaos and search indexes that didn’t work worth anything at all, Google invented one that did. And what’s more, their pages were not cluttered with blinking banner ads and popups. They respected their users. What a concept… a better mousetrap, delivered by someone who actually gave a damn.

Needless to say, everyone fell in love with Google, and the hits just kept on coming. They did the same trick with Gmail. Yahoo mail and Hotmail didn’t know what hit them. The big boys got burned again by not bothering to respect the consumer or deliver a reliable product.

So here we are years later, still getting abused by Microsoft with Xbox360s with a 30% failure rate, browsers that don’t properly render HTML, and somehow they think they can challenge Google, the people who have always treated us like gold.

The nerve!

Anything is possible, and Microsoft certainly has the money to develop good products. They just don’t really seem to be innovators. Maybe the climate will force them to change. It’d be nice.

For now it’s really nice to watch them feeling the sting from being jerks for so long.

Wow, I just found the coolest little application for MacOSX. It’s called On the Job, and it’s making my life really easy.

It allows you to define different clients and projects, and then gives you a play button for use when you want to start or stop billing time. It’s easy to understand and use, and it even does invoicing.

I’m blown away. Love it, love it.. love it!

Reading Seth Godin’s blog as usual this morning, and he’s reminded me of the importance of pictures.

In January I was having a chat with Ken Wilson, Director of Professional Development at NAMM, about his selection process for some of the companies involved. NAMM is a huge organization for music merchandisers, and they put on two trade shows a year. One in Anaheim, CA and one in Nashville, TN.

Ken’s job basically is to make sure all of that works, and I’m thankful I’ve gotten to know him a bit through my friends Jen Lowe and Alan Friedman and through giving some talks in NAMM’s Idea Center.

I was talking about how important I think pictures are on a company web site in terms of allowing people who only know you electronically to make a connection with you and praising Friedman Kannenberg for doing this very thing. Ken said he picked a company to come and talk at NAMM over their competitors because they had photos on their site and he could see the people he was going to be working with.

It’s so important, people. Yes, your work is important. Yes, your reputation is important. But for people who don’t know you personally yet, that little photo on your site could be make or break. Humans are designed to tell a lot about one another through their faces. That’s why mysterious people wear masks. If you let people see you smiling and looking professional and awesome, they will connect with you personally a lot faster than if your site just has your pertinent info.

So come on, good lookin’! Take a photo and put it up on that web site!

I find introductions on content to be so very annoying sometimes.

One of my greatest pet peeves is the splash page on a web site, or flash intro. Why would you ever want to put an extra step between a visitor to your site and the information you are providing there?

When I taught web design I told my students that I would count off for intros of any kind. I never had to actually do it because they never attempted an intro page.

What purpose does the intro to a web site serve that the header of your website cannot serve in a more concise and less annoying manner?

I also lump in with flash intros and splash pages the instructions on how to leave a voicemail message on people’s voicemail systems. I think pretty much everyone knows how to leave a voicemail message, and if they don’t, it’s not critical if they mess it up once or twice before they get the hang of it. Phone goes beep, start talking.

There is a very popular web site called Failblog.org out there which features images and videos of people doing dumb stuff and making mistakes. It’s pretty funny. I check it from time to time.

Recently they’ve started putting a five second title screen on each of their videos and adding title info into the video with white type on a black background silent movie style. They used to just have a watermark in the corner of the video. It’s fine if you watch one or two videos at a time, but if you want to watch ten 30 second clips of people doing goofy stuff, the extra fluff is just extra fluff.

It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who shouts their name before every sentence. Saying it a lot can be a funny gimmick (Charlie Murphy!) but to start each sentence with it would get tiresome, even for a funny guy like him.

This is a similar progression that killed myspace and is about to kill Facebook if they aren’t careful.

In stage one, People hit on an idea for a web site that is so good that people jump on board and start helping add content. In stage two, the site becomes really popular and “tips” due to the massive amount of good free content. In stage three, the site owners cash in on the good free content by crowding advertisements around it.

This is the critical stage because if too many advertisements get crowded around, people go elsewhere. That’s why everyone left MySpace for Facebook, and it doesn’t appear that Facebook has learned their lesson.

We will see, though!