The Myth of Wordpress

I attended and enjoyed WordCamp Fayetteville this weekend. I had the opportunity to hang out with people I often work with only online, I won a fine book, and I learned about some useful Wordpress plug-ins. I plan to volunteer next year.

But I also found the myth of WordPress everywhere.

The myth of WordPress is this: you, or anyone with no particular technical skills, can easily build and/or update your site yourself, if it's a WordPress site.

This is not entirely false. WordPress is designed differently from a typical website. It keeps all the different parts -- the sidebar, the header, the footer, the main content, etc. -- separate. The content lives in a database, and you can use the system of themes and templates and plug-ins to change the look and feel of your site without losing the content. Equally, you can update the content without disturbing the look and feel.

I've been blogging at WordPress for various companies for years, so I can tell you that it's easy to use as a CMS -- about the same, from my point of view, as Blogger or Joomla or any other CMS. I've never met a CMS that I couldn't make friends with.

But let's not pretend that you can actually build and customize exceptional sites with WordPress if you don't have the skills to do it otherwise. All the WordPress sites that I use are custom built. Attendees on the blogger side of the building at WordCamp were asking how to get similar effects at their own blogs. One woman, toward the end of the day, was persistent enough to boil it down to the real question people had been asking all day: "I get that I can go to the editor and tell it what I want. But what do I tell it to make it do the things I want it to do? How can I get it to do the things you're describing?" 

The answer, and the honest answer to all the similar questions we'd been hearing all day: "Learn HTML and CSS, and possibly also php."

And yet we persist in behaving as though WordPress were a completely intuitive tool that everyone can use without any particular skill or training. One of my clients now builds all his clients' sites on WordPress and frequently says things like "Since it's on WordPress, we can all update everything." Our Basecamp is often cluttered with clients begging to be allowed to send Word documents and requests to change things. When I want to change things, I can -- but sometimes I have to go into the files and use FTP -- and I always have to use HTML and CSS. Sometimes I have to poke around in the php, too. Often I break things and have to fix them, and occasionally I have to ask for help from the developers. If that sounds like fun to you, then you'll be fine with WordPress.

Josepha was able to migrate her Blogger blog over to WordPress easily enough after attending WordCamp and getting inspired. She uploaded her custom header and changed her theme around a few times and installed some plug-ins, without ever touching the code.

Then she tried to make it look the way she wanted it to. That's when the complaining started. The cries of "Aargh!" The muttering: "How come they say it's two column and then they just squish everything over into one column?"

Speaker Mitch Canter  probably said it best at WordCamp. When you're using HTML in the usual way to build a site, you can structure it any way you want and put things wherever you like. The more you customize WordPress sites by changing up the code, the less you can mess around with the easy changes -- but the more it looks and works just the way you want it to.

Another attendee, Eric Huber of Blue Zoo Websites, sets clients up quickly and cheaply on WordPress -- and tells them to budget for hiring designers and copywriters and developers in the future. Again, that's honest.

You certainly can use WordPress to do whatever you want -- if you're a developer. You can make it look just the way you want -- if you're a designer as well. You can change the content yourself -- if you're willing to learn HTML or to tolerate being unable to control most aspects of the content.

That's not something wrong with WordPress. It's something wrong with the way we're propagating the myth of WordPress.

What's That Button? HTML at Your Blog

I'm doing a series of posts on the basic dashboards of popular blogging platforms, because I keep discovering that -- however much we may think that blogging is now something Everybody Does --a lot of business bloggers are brand new at it.

Or they've been doing it for a while, but haven't yet gotten past copying things from emails or Word documents and sticking them into the box at the blog.

Naturally, they don't like the way their blogs turn out.

The images at the top show how Blogger (left) and WordPress (right) offer you the option of using HTML. Different blogging platforms use different terms, including things like "raw" and "WYSIWYG," but most will let you get at the HTML if you want to. Many other content management systems give you this option, too. It's worth searching for.

If you're nervous about using your CMS anyway, the basic thing to know about this distinction is that the one headed "HTML" is not the one you want. If you innocently type and paste things in there, it won't behave the way you expect it to.

If you're pretty confident, though, the HTML editor can be your friend. Because sometimes, let's face it, the visual editor isn't. Sometimes it causes your entire paragraph to be a link, or won't put spaces where you want them.

The solution is in the HTML editor.

HTML stands for "hypertext markup language," and it is the language that tells computer browsers how a web page should behave. (There's also CSS, "cascading style sheets" which tell it how it should look, and many other languages which tell it how to do stuff, but leave those aside for the moment). If you're serious about keeping up your own website, you should learn HTML.

If you're not quite that serious, you can still get some value from the HTML editor. Here's how:

• Find the part of the blog that's not behaving well.
• Compare it closely in the HTML editor to another part of the blog which is behaving as you want it to. 
• Discern the difference. Approach this as though you were proofreading punctuation, if you do that. If not, treat it like looking for an error in an equation.
• Change it to match the part that's behaving well.
• Check and see if it worked.
• If not, repeat the process till it does work.

Often, the problem will be something like a bracketed "/a" in a different place in the misbehaving section than in the well-behaved section. Remember  this for the future. Or, if you can see the area that's causing problems but can't figure out how to change it, you can use an HTML reference to look it up and learn just that one piece of HTML.

Perhaps, after you've learned a few things, you'll feel like learning it all. If not, revel in your strengths, accept this weakness, and hire somebody to do these things for you.

What's That Button For? Blockquotes

If you use a content management system (CMS) to post your blog or update your website,  there are probably buttons you're very familiar with -- and maybe also some things you haven't taken the time to figure out.

Today, let's get to know the block quote. This function is usually represented by a pair of large quotation marks. On Blogger, they're the third button from the right on your "Compose" screen. For WordPress, they're the fifth from the left -- toward the middle, actually -- of your "Visual" editor.

One of the keys to making your web content readable is breaking it up visually. The post above is written much like a printed page, with nothing but paragraph divisions to break it up.

The same text in the post below has used the blockquote button to call out the quotations in the text. The style of this site uses an indented line with a pale gray background. You (or your designer) can style your blockquotes any way you like. Usually, they'll be indented and perhaps have some text decoration like this.

We're not talking here about making something scannable for those first few seconds visitors spend on your homepage before deciding whether to stay or go. We're in the midst of a blog post here, and we can assume that people who've made it this far are probably committed to reading. Not as committed as they are when they've got a book in their hands, though. Reading from a computer screen is harder on the eyes, and often done in a less comfortable position than reading books.Clicking away to something else is easier, too. So the blockquotes, when they make sense for the content, can help your visitor read your text.

We'd use blockquotes only for lengthy quotations in a book: a paragraph or so. Here, it makes sense to use them for smaller sections because we're suggesting using them for a classroom activity -- and because we know that making some visual distinction helps our readers.It'll be easy for readers to go back and find these when they're ready to try out the recommended activity, too.

As with any of the decorative effects your CMS offers you, don't get carried away. A page full of blockquotes, or even just a couple of blockquotes when it doesn't fit the meaning of the passage, can be irritating. Use them when they make sense, though. It's much better than trying to get a similar effect with tabs or indentation.

First Thoughts on Typography for Your Website

The subject of typography at your website is a large one, and I'm not trying to cover it. I'm assuming here that you're not doing the design work yourself, and that what you need is enough information to recognize whether you have a problem, to choose a designer who has the skills you need, or to keep the updates you do yourself from making your site look bad.

Let's start with a good example and a bad one. The example above, from the work of Jay Jaro, shows basic things to look for in good typography:

• The left margin is even, and it's large enough.
• The decoration at the margin is balanced; the proportions are pleasing.
• The right margin, while ragged, is not excessively or distractingly ragged.
• The spacing in between letters and words is smooth
• The spacing between lines is enough for easy reading.
• The spacing between graphic headings and text headings and the main text is well proportioned.
• The decorative headings are still search-friendly text.
• When there is an uneven line, it's intentional and part of the design (in this case, the titles use a fun font that looks hand-drawn, and the title curves like a tiger's tail when it says "Take the Tiger by the tail").
• The differences in colors and fonts are enough to be interesting but not enough to interfere with reading.
• The design is appealing and in keeping with the goal of the page.

The second example, from someone who will remain nameless, has not succeeded in meeting that standard. The right edge is way too ragged, and the words are very crowded (note the top left corner of the sample piece -- sometimes there are no spaces between words at all, and there's a line containing just one word.

The graphic headings cut the columns in half. The spacing between the graphic headings, the text headings, and the words are unbalanced. The use of color and line is uninspired. And the graphic headings are images, so we lose some search advantages, too.

If you see this sort of problem at your website, don't despair. It just means that you need a designer. Find someone whose work is more like the first example than like the second one, and ask him or her to take the text and redesign it.

But what if you use a content management system, and you add content yourself?

Here's another bad example. We're fixing up this website -- not a redesign, since the owner likes the look, but a fix of content and usability, with some updates to the code and the look. This is an example where we're seeing some problems in the part the client does himself.

He's chosen light text on a dark background, which is fine unless you think you might have some older customers or visitors with limited vision. He's also chosen justified margins. That means that the program automatically adjust the spacing to make the margins even -- but look at the size of the spaces between the words!

You can only pick justified margins if you're willing to fool around with your wording and font sizing and so on to make it look good. In general, you're better off just choosing left-justified, where the words line up on the left.

If you really want to use justified margins, do as Josepha has done and keep an eye on it -- if it doesn't look good when you put it on the page, go back and change your words to make it look nice.

Finally, resist the temptation to have lots of variety. This example has trouble with spacing and margins as well, but much of the daunting effect of the page is the result of the variety of colors, fonts, sizes, and borders. There's nothing wrong with a little bit of variety, but the rule of thumb should be only to use something different if you have a reason to do so.

In the example at the top of this post, the main text is in a simple, easy-to-read font, black on a light background color. The designer then used another color in the text headings: bold, in a darker shade of the background color. The decorative titles at the top of the page are completely different; they, and the whole color scheme of the page, are based on the major illustration. In the bad example just above, we have different colors all over the page with no apparent plan or intention. There is no illustration, and no color scheme.

New Free Tool

I've written before about content management systems, and specifically about whether you want them in your website or not. There are good points on both sides.

One of the undoubted benefits to a CMS, however, is the ease with which you can add graphics. Say you want to add a special image to your website for the holidays. You use Blogger or Wordpress, you just push a couple of buttons and your graphic is just where you want it to be. If not, then it's more complex. You have to have skills.

Clevertech is offering a neat little tool that lets you just copy and paste, and your graphic appears on your webpage just as easily as -- no, actually, more easily than -- it does on your blog. You can try the Copy/Paste tool out at the demo page, and you can read the details . Once you've done that, grab the code at the demo page and add it to your page so you'll always be able to copy and paste a graphic whenever you feel like it.

Website Maintenance: the Least You Can Get Away With

At a meeting once I was talking casually with a businesswoman. She told me, as people often do, that her website just didn't do anything at all for her. I've never seen her website, but she told me that she had access to it -- that is, she could update it herself.

"Updating it regularly could really make a difference," I said. "Keeping your content fresh encourages people to come visit you more often. Since you have a CMS, you can maintain it in about 15 minutes."

"I don't have 15 minutes," she shot back grimly. Her nostrils flared. She spoke very fast for a Southerner. Her eyes had a far-away yet steely gaze, as though she were thinking about all the reasons she didn't have 15 minutes.

I didn't press it. In fact, I think I refreshed her drink for her and left her in peace.

Obviously, she's not a client of mine. But maybe you aren't either, and maybe you sometimes feel the way that woman did -- or the way the runner in the picture does. At times like that, keeping your website up to date may be the last thing on your mind.

Here's the thing: your customers are going to go to your website. Even if they heard about you on the radio and are going to walk into your place of business, they're going to look at your website first.

If your website is in a mess, it says something about your business. It says, "We're not detail oriented." "We're not up to date." "We don't really care what you think of us." "Maybe we've gone out of business, leaving our website here like the Mary Celeste. Don't bother coming to see us."

Take the 15 minutes. Here's the least you can do and still have your website presenting a good face to the world:

• Make sure it's up and running. I used to be surprised when people called to discuss how badly their websites performed and I had to tell them, "Um... it's not online. That's part of the problem." I'm not surprised any more, because it happens a lot.
• Check your analytics. Whatever you have in the way of site stats, glance at them occasionally to see whether you're getting a steady increase in targeted traffic, and to find out what your visitors seem to be looking for.
• Make sure your basic information is correct. That outdated phone number or list of staff members who no longer work for you is a problem. Change those things on your website when they change in the physical world. If that's impossible, then at least look for outdated info on your regular visits to your website. (You do make regular visits, right?)
  
• Check your links. It's helpful to provide links to your visitors, and it can even lead people to use your website as a portal to other places they want to go on the web. Having dead links defeats that purpose and makes it look as though no one lives there any more.
• Update the things that are most important in your particular industry. If you're a web designer, then your website has to be cutting-edge fresh inside and out. If you're a musician, your sound clips better be good and accessible at all times. If you're a restaurant, keep that menu current. Let other things slide, but the most important items for your brand have to be right.

If you'll do these things every week or so, you can otherwise let your website do its job on its own for quite a while before you need to pay it any special attention. And of course, if you need help, you know where to find me.


Stumble It!

Content Management Systems, Your Website, and You

My schedule this week includes three meetings with clients who are having brand new custom websites built. This is exciting: it's like having a house built for you, though of course far less expensive. As copywriter, my conversations with these clients and their designers begin with decisions about what pages they need, what kind of navigation will work best for them, their goals, and the user journey they expect for their clients.

One of the particular questions that inevitably arises is this: will they need a content management system? A content management system, or CMS, is a way for clients to make changes to their websites directly, without going through their webmasters. For example, if you have a blog here at Blogger, you can change it whenever you want. Depending what skills you have, you might need help to make it look the way you want, but you have full access to it.

So in one meeting, with the staff of a church, we were discussing the options for the pages they want for their programs. The youth minister said, "We'll be wanting to change our page all the time." The children's program director said, "Can we put announcements for the parents up? Maybe as PDF files to download?" The pastor said, "There'll be training for how to do this without screwing it up, right?"

The two developers I work with most have exactly opposite positions on whether a CMS is a good idea or not. As I've been meeting with and planning for this week's clients, I've been thinking a lot about their respective arguments, and I've reached a conclusion.

They're both right.

Fargo web designer Joe Sandin believes that a CMS is generally a good idea. Here are his reasons:

• You save money in the long run. If your developer spends four hours building a CMS into your website, and it keeps you from paying him or her to make changes for fours hours every month, then your CMS will pay for itself in the first month you're online. Do the math; this is a strong argument.
• You have greater control. I work with a lot of webmasters on behalf of various clients, and I can attest to the fact that it can be very arduous to get changes made. Kevin, who has served as webmaster for two of my clients, once took six months to make an address change. That's six months during which a brick and mortar store had the wrong address on its website while I begged Kevin to make the change. (He lives in another state; if he'd have been local I'd have dropped by his office with cake and refused to leave till it was changed.) When you do the math here, you should consider the cost of having customers go to the former place of business instead of to the new shop.
• Dynamic content is good. Without concerns about access and cost, you may freshen up your website more often. Search engines will visit you, your customers will drop by to see what's new, and you can even end up with more pages indexed.
  

Pretty well persuaded that you should have a CMS on your website? Fayetteville web designer Shan Pesaru has equally good counterarguments.

• DIY can be expensive. We've worked with plenty of clients who've had a secretary spending an entire morning getting more and more frustrated as she tried to do a website update that would take a professional ten minutes. Whatever you're paying your staff, there's no way that can be a cost-effective move compared with hiring it done.
• You have greater responsibility. Along with the control that allows you to make changes you want, you may also end up with control that allows you to make changes you don't want. Accidentally removing your header, introducing punctuation errors into your nice optimized copy, or making lots of little changes that add up to spoil the proportions of your design can affect your SEO even if you don't mind the effect.
• Stress is not good. CMS can make life difficult. You have to train any member of the staff who will be using it, you have to find time to do it -- a news page that you start with high hopes and good intentions looks pitiful when it's months out of date -- and chances are good that it won't look the way you wanted it to. After all, if you were a web expert, you wouldn't be in the business you're in, right? Small businesses are often better off having a professional take care of their website so they can concentrate on what they do best.

As I say, I have after careful thought decided that I agree with both Joe and Shan. Here are some things to consider for your own site:

• Think about the future implications. I reminded the church staff that the website might outlast them. If one of them is promoted or changes jobs, do they expect their successors to have to have the same level of technical skill they have? If your business is just starting up and you expect to have plenty of time for upkeep of your own website, are you sure you'll have the same flexibility a few months from now?
• Consider some compromises. I have access to my own website -- within reason. There are parts of the code which are in red, which means, "Rebecca, don't touch this." This is comfortable for me, though it might be stressful or excessively tempting for others. We also do some sites with integrated blogs, so the clients can play all they want with that section without worrying about inadvertently causing themselves problems in the rest of their pages.
• Think about your resources. Is your webmaster responsive about changes or a pain to work with? If Kevin were my webmaster, I'd want full access, fond of him though I am. If your business has no tech-savvy employees, or no workers with any downtime, a CMS wouldn't be a good plan for you.
  
• Get that training. Some clients feel as though being able to handle Facebook means you can handle your own website. Others are afraid to go into the admin section for fear of causing their computers to explode. Get enough training that you are comfortable doing all the things you need to be able to do to make effective use of your CMS, if you decide to have one.
  

For the church, I recommended a compromise: an integrated blog which everyone can add to, training to use it, and the option of calling me when I'm needed. Shan came up with a way to do this at no extra cost, and everyone's happy.

Your website might be better off with a CMS and a professional to use it for you. You might want full service, or you might want full access. Consider all the factors before making your decision, and you'll be happy, too.