Successful Small Scale E-commerce Websites
We’ve been working with a large-scale e-commerce site lately, and that certainly has challenges, but small e-commerce has its own challenges.
Here’s a website we’re getting ready to launch, a site with 20 products, not thousands of SKUs. This is typical of small-scale e-commerce sites, and it faces some typical challenges:
- How do you keep your online store from looking meager?
- How do you make the shopping experience meet customer expectations when those expectations are based on Amazon and Zappos?
- How can you be found by people looking for your products?
Laying out your store is important, since you can’t dazzle visitors with myriad products. Instead, you need to make your shop very browsable. As with flowers, the more you have the less you depend on design; it takes artistry to make a branch and a couple of flowers look good, but anyone can get a good effect with a couple dozen roses. Equally, if you have half a dozen products, you should plan on a nice layout to make your store look good.
WordPress is fantastic for small e-commerce, since plug-ins do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of development. We generally use WP E-commerce, a free plugin with plenty of upgrade options. Designer Tom Hapgood styled the shop and the checkout options to make this little store look good.
A couple of the nice things:
A click on the item’s image on the Store page makes the image expand nicely. The visitors doesn’t have to click onto another page to see the product more clearly.
When customers do click through to get more information, they can still see their shopping cart as well as the main navigation for the website, and site search is also still available.
When they’re ready to check out, customers can check on shipping before they commit themselves, and they can easily change quantities or remove items — as well as finding their way back if they decide to do some more shopping.
The whole shopping cart is styled to match the website’s design, too.
While the programming for the shopping cart is covered by the plugin, it won’t look this way right out of the box. You need a designer to make it look this good. Tom has styled several websites for us with this plugin, and every store and shopping cart looks completely different.
The key? Think about usability. Walk through the experience yourself and make sure that you would be happy with the way the shopping cart works if you were a customer. Your designer is responsible for making the store look good. Tom is also very conscious of usability, but we know from experience that some designers are not. Know that there are alternatives, remember that your website may be art but it still has to function well, and be as insistent as you need to be.
Being found by people using search engines doesn’t depend on design. You need unique descriptions. Unique products would be even better for a small shop, since Amazon’s millions of pages and millions of backlinks pretty well guarantee that you can’t beat them on searches for products. If you have excellent content, you’ll be found by people looking for what you have, and they’re likely to buy while they’re there. Just be sure that what you have isn’t just a manufacturer’s description shared by you and hundreds or thousands of other websites.
Good design, usability, good content — sounds like a good website, doesn’t it? That’s the good news: the same things that give you a good website can give you a good e-commerce shop, too. Just make sure to apply them. Too many websites feel as though they put all the effort into luring visitors into the shop and don’t care what happens to them once they’re in the cart. This is part of the reason for high shopping cart abandonment rates.
Make the effort all the way through the shopping experience. Success will follow.
You’ve Got a New WordPress Theme: Now What?
We’re working with Kansas City Realtor Ken Jansen on his new website. He’s not quite ready to have a custom site built, but he bought a specialized WordPress theme.
Haden Interactive builds WordPress sites with completely custom themes, and our designers may not agree with what I’m about to say, but I really like the way a good premium theme can provide functionality without bringing in a developer. Ken’s a Realtor, and building the back end functionality that would pull in house listings would not be on my list of fun things to do, so I like the way his theme — Woo Estate — takes care of all that for us.
I don’t like the way it looks right out of the box — you can see it on the right. I’ve written before about installing a WordPress theme . The Myth of WordPress is that you can pick a theme and instantly have a great website. As many people have learned, it’s not quite true. How did we make this example look good till Ken’s ready for a custom design?
Get a good logo.
Jay Jaro, our logo guy, developed a snazzy new logo for Ken. Many WordPress themes, including Estate, give you the option of using a logo or a text line. A good logo is going to make your page look more professional right away.
The logo will make a good starting point for Ken’s custom site, and of course it’ll look good on his print marketing materials for years. Spring for a professionally designed logo — you just won’t get the same results with that generic one from the quickie printer.
Use a static homepage.
If your website is a blog, plain and simple, you can have a homepage that just shows your posts. If you have a business, you’ll do better with search and probably also with conversions if you have some well-optimized text and a strong call to action. Estate lists recent posts below the main text, and we’ve also put Ken’s blog in the main navigation, so there’s no loss.
Plan your navigation carefully.
One of the most common problems with out-of-the-box WordPress themes is messy navigation. Ken’s spilled over onto a second line. We fixed it. Limit yourself to 5-7 main navigation items, and keep them short enough to stay on a single line. Lots of options, especially if they overflow and get visually messy, will frustrate your visitors, who want to find their way to their destination quickly and easily.
We also optimized the content, cleaned up the look of the pages, added pictures, and a bunch of other stuff that helps a site look good. These three steps can make a big difference, though. Give them a try at your DIY WordPress website and see.
As Simple as Possible
Albert Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
When it comes to websites, simple is good — to a point. That point should be where you can still branch out to greater complexity if you want to in the future.
I had a couple of meetings today. In one, my interlocutor told me, when I asked him what he envisioned for the future, that telling me that would go against his principles. He didn’t believe in trying to guess the future, he assured me, largely because its magnificence couldn’t be foretold and shouldn’t be limited.
In the other, we scaled down from a grand and elaborate website plan with a Learning Management System and multimedia to a plain five page website. One of the participants referred to his original plan for the site as “daydreams.”
In either case, the key to eventual success is simply planning ahead for the possibility that the magnificence of the future may be as great as your daydreams or even greater. Let your developer know what you might want to do in the future and make sure the possibility of growth is there.
In the case of the simplified website, we can build it on WordPress so we know that we can add more flourishes in the future. Then it will be as simple as possible — but no simpler.
Jetpack for WordPress Sites
We recently helped Chris Drayer of Finch Mktg to move his website from WordPress.com to his own self-hosted site.
Not sure what that means? WordPress.com is a free blogging platform. You can go there and build yourself a blog or have us do it for you, and you’ll have access to lots of free features. For example, right now you can make virtual snow on your blog at WordPress.com. You’ll have free stats and easy ways to push your blog to your social media, security and back up on WordPress.com’s servers, and all kinds of special stuff.
You have to pay fees to use your own domain name, to change the CSS of your blog, to use other themes and widgets and plugins than the ones provided, and indeed to do most things that give you the level of control over your site that a business should have. What’s more, the content you add benefits WordPress.com, not your business domain, though it can of course send you traffic.
WordPress.org is an open source blogging platform that you can install at your own site, hosted by your favorite web host. You can make it look and behave any way you want (assuming you have a good designer) and the content you produce at your site benefits your company website.
People who start a business blog on WordPress.com often realize fairly soon that they need a custom blog on their own domain. When they switch, though, they may miss some of the cool things about WordPress.com — or they may just prefer not to have to learn a whole new set of tools.
Enter Jetpack. It brings a lot of the functionality of WordPress.com over to your self-hosted WordPress site. You can have Jetpack even if you didn’t start with a WordPress.com site, by the way, though you must have (or make) a WordPress.com account. Install Jetpack as a plugin in the usual way. Then connect with your WordPress.com site by pushing the button on following the steps. If you don’t already have an account, you will be prompted to make one.
Now Jetpack will be on your dashboard:
Click on Site Stats and you’ll see a nice, simple layout showing visits to individual posts, referrers, subscriptions, and clicks on your outbound links. It’s the familiar site stats page from WordPress.com, and I can’t show it to you because my attempts to add Jetpack to our lab site (the site that provides all the stats you see on this site) failed. I can show you the screen you’ll see if you click on “Jetpack” though, so you can see all the options it gives you:
Many of the things that Jetpack does can be done with separate WordPress plugins. We had in fact already installed a few at Chris’s site before we got around to hooking up Jetpack for him.
Some of the Jetpack features don’t really give you this option. For example, LaTeX, a plugin which allows you to write mathematical formulae attractively and easily, can be installed as a separate plugin but only if you have other specialized programs (including LaTeX) running on your server as well. Doing it through Jetpack lets everyone have lovely math.
I hope I sound enthusiastic about Jetpack. It’s definitely cool (even though it won’t provide virtual snow). The LaTeX feature would make me use it if I did much advanced math here. However, it slowed this site down significantly when I tried it here, and merely installing it at our lab site, FreshPlans, gave me a “memory exhausted” message before I even attempted to try out its features. It clearly uses up a lot of resources. This is not a problem at Chris’s site, but sites like ours that have lots of posts and media will need to think about their allocation of resources before jumping in. It seems to me that most of its features are available elsewhere. If the particular collection is exactly what you need — or you’re used to WordPress.com and want the familiarity — then this could be just the thing for you.
Post Types Column Editor: New WP Plugin Review
Pippin Wiliiamson’s newest plugin for WordPress has the rather opaque title “Post Columns Type Editor.” Look at what it does, though, and I think you’ll see that it has potential to make your WordPress life easier.
When you go into the Admin section of your WordPress site or blog, you can look at all your posts at once. Every theme has its own look on this page, and many plugins alter it, but this is a standard Posts page:
You can see the Title, Author, Categories, Tags, and Dates of your posts. You can click on the title and go in to edit the post, or use Quick Edit to change posts’ categories in order to alter your featured posts for your homepage. You can see whether you or your blogger has been keeping up with posts properly, see whether posts have been scheduled for the future, and find out who has been posting.
But maybe you don’t need to do those things. Maybe your needs are different. Maybe the plugins you use have cluttered up your Posts page with columns you don’t need to see when you work with your Posts page.
Post Columns Type Editor fixes this issue. Go to Pippin’s Plugins and download the plugin. It’s free!
Install the plugin in the usual way and you’ll see a new option in your admin sidebar, circled on the screen shot below. Click on “Column Editor” from the Dashboard and you’ll see the screen below:
Now you can mess around with the various elements. For example, I’m often the only author at blogs, so the Author column is not useful information. With one click, I can remove the Author. I also added a new column. Under “Add New Column” above, you find an easy place to type in the name of your column, and a drop down list that lets you say what type of information you want to include there. I added the thumbnail and called the new column “Image.”
Now, when I go to the Posts page in my WordPress CMS for this site, I’m not wasting space on the Author column, which I don’t need, but I can see at a glance what images are in use, and which posts are missing images.
Any elements you use can be displayed. You can show custom taxonomies, meta tags, excerpts, comments — whatever you want.
You can set up columns for any custom post types you use, as well. I once wrote posts for a website that used a real estate theme for e-commerce. The columns for “Listings” included “location,” “description,” “features,” and various other things that made no sense for what we were selling. Pippins plugin would allow this site to create columns with titles that make sense — and to remove the things that we didn’t use.
Unfortunately, as with any plugin, there can be issues of compatibility. This plugin is incompatible with the Featured Content Gallery plugin which we use for a lot of our websites. Here’s how FreshPlans looks:
Here’s how it looks with the plugin:
The gallery simply disappears. In our experience, galleries are often touchy and inclined toward incompatibility issues. If you install a plugin and your site behaves oddly, just uninstall it and let the developer know. They may try to make updates to fix the problem — or you may just have to choose between the plugin and whatever it doesn’t get along with.
We tried this plugin with several different themes and found no other problems. Often a plugin will be incompatible with a given theme, or will make some widgets stop working. Read our post on WordPress Troubleshooting if you think you may be having this problem.
Check out Pippin’s video tutorial for more detail on the Post Columns Type Editor. Check out Pippin’s blog, too.
WordPress Troubleshooting
You’ve got your WordPress site up and running and all is well — until it isn’t. Recently, we’ve seen WordPress sites with all kinds of little issues: overlapping text, sliders that won’t slide, disappearing dashboards, posts that won’t post, and plugins that won’t activate. It seems like one day they’re fine and the next day they’ve got the collywobbles.
What’s the solution? Ask yourself some simple questions before you panic.
First, is the problem in one spot or many? We had a problem at one site that looked initially like an issue with an image on the homepage. Further research showed that it was actually affecting all the h3 headers — the interaction of the header with an image on the homepage deceived us. If it’s a problem in one place, chances are you’ve done something wrong in your HTML and you can go fix it. A site-wide issue or a functional issue? Keep reading.
Have you updated, added, or activated a plugin recently? Our h3 header issue was a cool new gallery plugin that wasn’t compatible with our theme. There are multiple plugins that do the same job, so you can usually find another if one makes your site mess up. Sometimes you don’t catch this because it works for a few days — until it doesn’t.We find that free themes have this problem more often than premium or custom themes, but it happens a lot. And the plugin needn’t have any connection with the area that’s showing the problem. Remove them one at a time, most recent first, before you start worrying about anything else.
What’s in your widgets? Nonstandard code in a banner ad made a rotating image gallery slider stop moving. Check your text widgets, too. For both widgets and plugins, Otto told us to go with the simplest. You might think that having one that does three things would be less trouble than having three, each of which does one thing, but that’s not the case. Simple is better.
Have you checked the Codex? Some people find it hard to read, we’re told, so you might start with the support site for your theme or with Google, but there’s a large and helpful community looking after WordPress. Chances are, someone else has had the same problem you’ve had. Check your plugins and widgets first, though — it’s the equivalent of unplugging the computer and plugging it back in again.
Do You Love Your Horrible Website?
At left, you can see a screenshot from our newest website, a site for a dental office in Kansas City.
Often, our clients can see that their old websites are unattractive and in need of an update. Crossover Dentistry, a dental practice in a wonderful old building in a downtown art district, didn’t feel that way about their site.
They had lots of Flash, lots of jazzy stuff, special 3-D renderings of their space, and a Virtual Gallery of their artworks that rotated and displayed the pieces in playful ways. It was a cool site.
It was not, however, a usable site. The office manager wanted patients to be able to book their appointments online, to download insurance forms to fill out, and to see clearly all the procedures the office does. At the very least, she wanted people to realize they were looking at a dentist’s office, not to leave because they figured they were at an art gallery’s site.
Our usability testers hated the site. We chose them for their artistic tastes, but they got angry and disgusted when they tried to figure out the website. It had a lot of dead ends and pages that didn’t work, and finding basic information was just too difficult. You can see a screenshot from the old site at right. Imagine trying to find out whether they would accept your insurance.
As for the search engines, they didn’t even offer the site at the top of the page for the name of the clinic when people in the neighborhood searched for it. Instead, a clinic with the same name in another state got that place.
Like so many of our clients, Crossover Dentistry had already invested a lot of money in their website, and they had a limited budget for a new site. Still, they realized that they were losing patients every day they had a non-functional website online.
The challenge for us was to create a new site with the painterly feel of the old one, on a tight budget — but a site which actually worked.
We began by sorting out the site and coming up with an architecture that would really work for what they needed as a business. We took their content and optimized it, added more content where it was needed, and found a premium theme and plugins that would provide much of the functionality they wanted, plus the dash and flash the old site had — without the use of Flash.
We asked designer Tom Hapgood to work with us on the project. He was skeptical about using a theme rather than starting from scratch. However, when he saw the old site and heard what the site owners wanted the new site to do, he could see that a completely custom site would never fit in their budget.
Tom customized the theme, using his artist’s eye to create something special and beautiful with the code that was already in the theme and the images supplied by the dentist’s office. With the new, optimized content and a basic linkbuilding campaign, the new website ought to provide a good marketing vehicle for the site owners.
Compare the old page at right with Tom’s new inner page, above left. The overall shape is similar, but Tom’s page is more sophisticated. The old page has flash navigation that romps around when you hover over it, while Tom’s has simple, highly usable navigation — but also a translucent overlay that provides style without interfering with usability.
The homepage has multiple panels — you can see one at the top of this post — which tumble about in some very cool ways. Not having to code that special gallery shaved many hours off the job of building the site, yet the way Tom has implemented it, and the images the site owners chose, will make it unique.
The key to keeping what you like about your horrible website lies in identifying what you like about it. Previous attempts to keep parts of the Crossroads Dentistry website while fixing the problems had failed. Instead, we recognized the characteristics that they liked and brought them into a new, practical design that will look good — and also do its job.
How to be Stupid with Your CMS
A content management system allows you to update your site yourself. You can go in through a dashboard and make some changes, though perhaps not everything you want to do, without having to contact your IT department or your webmaster.
There are advantages and disadvantages to a CMS. Still, let’s say that you have a content management system of one kind or another. You can be stupid with it, and here are five top ways to accomplish that:
- Don’t learn how to use your CMS. If you have a CMS at your website because all the cool kids have them and aren’t willing to learn how to use it, you will end up with a messed-up website. You may not need a CMS, or you may have one only to make it faster and cheaper for your web pros to make your changes. In that case, you don’t have to learn it. Otherwise, not knowing how to use the CMS defeats the purpose.
- Don’t give anyone access to the CMS. Who should have access to your website is a thorny question. However, when you have only one person who can access your site, you’re back to the same problem people have with no CMS: you have to wait for someone to make changes. It might feel a little better to you when you’re the one making the changes. However, assuming that you ever go home, go on vacation, or otherwise occupy your time, it makes sense to have at least one other person who can access the website. If a client notices a typo, a price changes, or there’s a recall on a product you sell, someone needs to be able to get into the site quickly. Do you really want it always to be you?
- Ignore the structure of the site. Go ahead and use Pages to make blog posts. Put your products into the gallery instead of the store. Stick pictures in any way you want. It won’t matter, right? Well, actually, it will. Computer languages often have multiple ways of doing things which look as though they do the same thing — except that if you do it wrong they don’t work on mobile devices, slow down your page load, or make it impossible to do a quick update.
- Change things constantly. Change is good, and certainly it’s good at websites. However, changing things on a whim every day makes it impossible to tell what’s working for you and what isn’t. Often, it also makes your site less usable for your returning visitors and plays havoc with branding. A new blog post every day is good; a new theme every day is not. New products every day are fine; new navigation every day is not. Even if you’re not sure that something is working for you, give it time to amass some data so you can decide on a sound basis, not on a whim.
- Decide it doesn’t matter what you do, since it’s easy to change. If you think of your CMS as an easy way to change things, you may think of your content as temporary. The poorly written information, the pirated images, the inaccurate information can be here today and gone tomorrow. Once they’re up, though, they may be seen by a lot of people, cached, copied, and discussed. We also see pages that go up temporarily with the intention of fixing them — and stay up for years.
Now that WordPress has become a practical CMS for all kinds of sites, there’s no longer an automatic higher cost for a site with a CMS, but it still makes sense to make the best use possible of your CMS.
Anatomy of a New Website
We work mostly with established websites that need to get better results, but there’s something exciting about a brand new website. The first time ever website of Coco McAtee, a sex education speaker and educator, has just launched.
This is a WordPress site designed by Suzanne Hurtig and built by TitusD. Haden Interactive did the text. The homepage features a slider gallery and dynamic recent posts. There are lots of other snazzy things going on, including a PDF brochure to download, videos on many pages, and an events calendar with a couple of different views.
WordPress sites allow this level of complexity without the kind of expense a traditional site would require. However, the factors that make Coco’s site a good one would be true for a traditional site as well.
Let’s look closely:
Coco has just seven main items in the navigation of the site. Each one is clear, and there are drop-down menus under each for more detail. This lets visitors find their way to what they really want without confusion or effort.
Coco’s site has her favorite tagline, “Telling the truth about bodies,” as an image in a panel where it won’t confuse the search engines. A clear statement of just what she offers and how to get it is in the upper left “look at me” space where both the humans and the search engines can see it right away.
Since the main thing Coco wants her visitors to do is to call and sign up for classes, the contact information has to be very clear and accessible. This is a good thing for all business websites, actually. Even if you don’t really want people to call you, providing contact info looks more trustworthy.
There’s also a nice, clear “Book Coco” button on every page.
Below the fold where you can’t see it, there’s lots more optimized text with plenty of information for people who like to read a lot, and for the search engines. The amount of text you can see would simply not be enough, but putting plenty below the fold does the job without spoiling the design.
Coco’s new site has the information people need to understand what she does and decide whether to hire her. It has resources that make it a good choice for search engines to offer people looking for information about her subject as well as for people who are ready to make a decision on hiring a speaker or taking a class. It has a bright, positive feel that accurately reflects Coco’s persona and product. It’s a great example of how to get your business online.
The Unplanned Website
Designer Tom Hapgood and I sat down yesterday to plan a new site we’re doing for a dentist who practices in an art gallery. Pretty cool, eh?
The doctor has a website right now, and Tom and I were sort of marveling at it. It begins with a flash page showing a variety of renderings of the office, which you can see in the photo at left. The images are reminiscent of video games and really don’t suggest dentistry at all.
There are words below the show, and when we clicked on them yesterday most were broken and we couldn’t get in at all.
When we were able to get in, we found a wide variety of things, from a very snazzy toy that shows pictures from the gallery in a wide variety of ways to pages in the main navigation which announced that we didn’t have access. Most of the pages do something interesting, and the site is a lot of fun to play with. Here’s a little gallery of some of the pages of this site:
This is the “before” site and it may no longer exist by the time you get around to reading this, but I think this sampling will show you the problems that can arise when a site just grows organically without a real plan:
- It’s not findable. This very special and intriguing office isn’t at the top of searches for the name of the doctor or the name of the practice when you search in the town where it’s located. More general searches don’t find it at all.
- It’s not usable. I enjoyed browsing around this site very much, but if I had been looking for a dentist who accepts my insurance, or trying to find the office hours or something, I would have given up and chosen another dentist. Chances are, lots of people do just that.
- It’s not navigable. While there is a page that allows you to move a sort of artsy pinwheel around in space and you can on several pages mouseover different things to cause an assortment of interesting navigation options to peek out and then scurry away, the site includes so many dead ends that it basically doesn’t work.
You’ve heard it said that a camel is a horse put together by a committee. Your website can suffer the same fate if there’s no clear site architecture planned. We’re going to build a new site that meets the functional goals of the practice, while still keeping the snazzy feel of the current site. A WordPress platform will allow us to incorporate a lot of fancy effects in an economical way (less time coding!) and will also let the office staff update easily.
Here are some questions you should answer before your web folks begin work:
- What are you offering? In our example, the site owners are offering both art and dentistry, and that’s fine. It’s an interesting creative challenge, something we love. But if you aren’t quite sure what your company does, you’re not ready for a website. (Our colleague Shan calls that “having a fluid business plan.”) It’s the same as writing a paper or an article: you have to know your main point before you start writing, or you’ll end up with a mess.
- What do you want your visitors to do? Our new client wants new patients to contact the practice, they want established patients to book appointments and get answers to their questions, and they also want their website visitors to be exposed to local art. Tom will make sure that the site has the artistic look and feel of the gallery, and I’ll make sure visitors can get their veneers scheduled and paid for.
- What do you need the site to do? Modern websites don’t have to be like an electric brochure. There may be many things that your website can help out with. The owners of the site we’re discussing here want to be able to send emails and collect the addresses for that purpose, to arrange for bookings, to provide electronic and PDF versions of patient forms, and also to have lots of information about the staff, the artists, and the community. Knowing these things ahead of time, we’ll be able to structure the site correctly to accommodate and — when appropriate — showcase these elements.
With this information, your web people can design a good site architecture for your website, and it won’t remind anyone of a camel.
10 Things I Learned at WordCamp Fayetteville
We spent the weekend at WordCamp Fayetteville, and it was downright fun. This is our hometown, so of course it was a time to reconnect with friends, and we also met some great new people.
Here’s what I learned:
- From Eric Huber of Blue Zoo Creative I learned that people click on orange buttons most, and that the most blatant self-promotion is charming if done with wit and bananas.
- From Collin Condray of Blue Zoo Creative I learned about Benford’s Law. I’m afraid I no longer remember what this has to do with WordPress, but it might be related to the strength of weak ties, a concept over which Josepha can get quite emotional. Your social network, according to the seminal work by Mark Granovetter, centers around your strongest ties: the family, friends, and colleagues who are most important to you. However, that close circle overlaps with the closest circles of all those people, and their circles are likely to contain people who can help you and whom you can help.
From Mitch Cantor I learned a little more about custom post types. I’m working on a site in which custom post types are quite important, and I learned a bit about them at WCKC from Jonathon Wondrusch. Now I think I know enough to realize that we’re not making the best possible use of them at the new site.- From Andy Crofford I learned about Blogger Linkup and My Blog Guest, places where bloggers can connect with potential guest bloggers or places for guest blogging. Sometimes I want to write about something for which I don’t currently have a good writing venue (like my guest post at Wordstream) and I’ve found that guest blogging can be very good for traffic and linkbuilding.
- From Tom Hapgood I learned that it’s time to learn HTML5 and CSS3. Tom shared some snazzy tools: CSSEdit, Colorzilla and their Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator, CSS PIE for greater flexibility with IE6-8, and Randy’s CSS3 Generator. Get a cup of coffee before you get started on these, because you’ll want to play with them.
From Tom I also learned the word “octothorpe.” I hardly ever get to learn a new word, so this was a bit of a thrill.- From Justin Kopepasah I learned that CSS3 is a misnomer, but it does some very cool stuff. Check it out at Justin’s WCFay site — try it in some different browsers, and then look at his code. Rosie’s excited about how lean and clean this will make code.
- From Jane Wells I learned about Courseware, a learning management system for WordPress that could rescue us from Blackboard. I’ve always felt that the fact that educational software is consistently inferior to business software says something about our culture — not something good. Courseware uses the social aspects of BuddyPress and the flexibility of custom post types to power the LMS, and I’m pretty excited about that. It could let us get our trainings online here, even if I couldn’t persuade the college where I teach.
From Shelley Keith I learned about Gravity Forms. Lots of people are very excited about this form plugin and Mitch mentioned it several times, too. Sometimes that’s just fashion, but sometimes it really means the plugin is awesome.- From Angela Belford I learned — okay, I didn’t learn anything. I couldn’t even get to her session, because there was such a plethora of good stuff going on. But we had a lot of fun planning a Google Police public information campaign. We think that we can go door to door in our Google caps and tell people firmly that they have to update their browsers. We’ll say, “Google sent me. Where’s your computer?” and upgrade them all by force, thus solving a whole lot of web development problems in one fell swoop.
Angela and I were able to think of a lot of other things people would let us do if we claimed that Google said they had to, and I was beginning to think it would make a good reality show. Admittedly, this was at the after party, but I believe it was Hemingway who said that a plan that still seems good the next day is a good plan.
When Your New WordPress Site is Not a Blog…
WordPress was a blogging platform to begin with, but now we use it as a content management system for a lot of our sites. 
We’re launching a new one for Vertz and Company, a manufacturer’s representative for industrial flow control solutions. At the moment, they don’t have a blog.
We’re still going to show them how to use the admin section of their new site. Here are some of the things they may want to do — and which you may also want to learn to do with your new WP site, if it’s not a blog:
- Add new users. You should probably let your web people maintain access. Chances are they won’t be popping in all the time, unless you’re paying them to do so, but if you have a problem and they have access, you can get your problem solved fast. You may also want to allow other people in your organization to have access. Giving different people their own user accounts lets you see who has made which changes. This lets you assign blame accurately if someone breaks something, but it also leaves a trail if questions arise about where information came from, or if you need to fix a broken link in future. It also lets you remove access when someone leaves the company. Here’s where to find the form for adding new users, on the left side of your admin screen:
- Add new pages. All things being equal, a larger, more frequently updated site is going to perform better with search. When you have something new to say, a new product or service, a new case study, a new branch office — well, you can make a new page. If you’re signed in, you can add a page from the admin bar on your website, using the drop-down menu called “add new.” See how it looks below:
- Update information. While we don’t encourage you to update your homepage yourself (though designer Tom Hapgood fixed the new Vertz and Company site with Pods to allow the guys at Vertz to make updates without messing up the design, and you can ask your web people to do that for you, too), you’ll appreciate being able to change small things whenever you want to. Getting in to a page to update product information, add a name on the Contact page, or change your store hours can save you time and money, compared with having to get your web people to do it for you.
If you don’t want to bother with these things, you can certainly have your web pros take care of them for you. We can get in and make changes for you more quickly with WP — and more quickly means more cheaply. If you want to maintain your site yourself, though, these are some things worth exploring.
