What Can You Do With a WordPress Theme?

In a word, a lot. Here you can see two examples created with Thesis, one of the most popular WordPress themes. The one below is currently on the site. The one above is designer Jay Jaro's idea about how to take the same site to the next level. The two have the same content, the same navigation, the same concept, and just about the same color scheme. The client likes his site and didn't want big changes, so Jay maintained the overall look and feel.

And yet the two examples really are quite different. Jay has created a number of new graphics that will fit into the spaces of Thesis and give this client's particular Thesis site a completely different look from the other 27,000 Thesis sites out there.

This is the Studiopress demo for their Allure theme.

And here is our educational blog using Allure. Jay created some of the graphics for this, and Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue did the installation and remaining design work. We do our own updates, including the graphics. When you compare our version with the demo, you can see that we have things in the same places, but our content and color scheme are quite different, so the overall effect is different.

I'm going into detail here because I've seen that many people, when they choose a WordPress theme, find it hard to look past the images or the colors in the theme's demo or example screenshots. When you choose a theme, it's best to look at it as a group of boxes (and often boxes you can move around if you feel like it).

The examples here (and all the WordPress themes we work with) are premium themes on their own domains. You usually have more flexibility with premium themes than with free ones, and the free WordPress.com sites don't allow you to change the CSS (the style). But even free WP themes can often be changed in a variety of ways.

A WordPress site built on a purchased theme is not a custom website, but don't underestimate the flexibility of this approach.

Writing for Pleasure

Most of the things I write here are about strategic communication: how can you increase search rankings and conversion rates, how to increase usability, how to make your blog more effective for your business, stuff like that.

And yet in my own work I'm not always writing carefully calculated paragraphs filled with essential keywords. Much of the time, sure, but I also write things that are intended to be useful and entertaining. This very blog is supposed to do that. My educational blog, too. The blogs I write for most of my clients. The articles and teaching materials I write for other clients. These things are mostly fun.

This morning, I'm writing about the music of the Gulf Coast and a motorcycle rally for women. I enjoy this very much. And when, later today, I revise copy for an employment agency's website, crafting sentences intended to hold as many keywords as possible while still making jobseekers feel that these guys are their best hope, I plan to enjoy that as well.

So I hope that when you have something witty and amusing to say about your company, you put it in your blog. I hope you feel free to make deep philosophical points in your corporate materials, if that's the kind of person you are. I hope you won't hesitate to wax lyrical in the copy for your About Us page.

Just make sure you get your keywords on the home page.

Seriously. Have a good, keyword-rich homepage. Make sure that your blog is strongly enough related to what your company does that the search engines can guess what you do.

Having done those essential things, you can then have as much fun as you want while you write the rest of it.

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? Using Undo at Your Blog

If you write your own blog, you've probably had at least one of those awful moments when you realize that you've done something you didn't want to do.

Maybe you deleted an entire section and now you regret it. Maybe you inadvertently pushed something and ended up with an odd effect that you don't like.

Not to worry! The curvy arrows on the toolbar of many blogging platforms are "undo" and "redo" buttons. They'll take you back a step -- they'll put back that post you accidentally deleted, get rid of the ill-considered change in style, and just generally let you change your mind about actions you've taken.

The arrow going to the left allows you to undo things, or return to the way things were. If you decide against that, you can click on the rightward-facing arrow and get back the thing you just undid.

Blogging for Absolute Beginners

I've been asked by a fellow musician to provide a true beginner's guide to blogging. "What exactly," the saxophonist asked me, "is a blog?"

This is not a guy who wants to know how to craft winning intros for the auto-posts at his main corporate blog. In fact, most of the things that I write about blogs have not been useful to him, because he doesn't know how to get started.

"Blog," then, to start at the real beginning, is short for "weblog." Initially, a blog was a list, or log, of cool sites the author had visited. Pretty quickly, though, it became on online journal. Individuals kept them as diaries, and gradually they grew into communities of related blogs, and then into a modern form of journalism. Now, they're an essential means of communication for businesses as well.

So, if you've never had a blog before, how do you get started? You need to choose a place to put your blog, and make yourself a blog -- sort of like getting a blank book to write your diary into.

Let's start with a Blogger blog. You'll need to create an account, sign in, and create a blog before you can write any posts.

Go to Blogger.com and follow the instructions. Here's a quick slideshow to show you what to expect:


Essentially, you fill in a few boxes and prove you're a human, choose a name and a template for your blog, and Blogger does the rest. Once you've created the blog (which really means that you've allowed Blogger to create a blog for you), you'll be sent to the "new post" screen. If you don't feel like posting right away, you can find your way back to it by clicking on "new post."  Here you can see what the process of posting is like:




Basically, you type into a text box. I've shown you how to get a picture from your computer into your post as well.

That's all there is to it.

Now that you've got the concept, here are some posts that might be useful:

Where Should You Put Your Blog?
Who Should Be Writing Your Blog?
What Blogging Can Do for Your Website

Making Your Blog Look Good

Blogging is a good idea for most businesses. Your blog provides extra value for your clients, more content for the search engines, and opportunities for linkbuilding. Excellent content is what makes your blog provide these benefits for your company. But how do you make your blog look good?

First, set it up to look good from the beginning.

The blog you're reading right now was styled to match the website it belongs to, by designer Shan Pesaru. Here's another example of his, using Blogger:



Marcel Sendrea did this one, using Wordpress:




Here's one by Jay Jaro, built with BlogEngine.net:



As you can see, a blog can have just as much style and individuality as any other web page.

If you want to do it yourself, you can upload a template, as I did with this blog:



Sources of blog templates include these sites:

• eblogtemplates
• btemplates
• blogfashions

To use them, you download the file and then upload it at your blog platform. If you don't know what that means, save yourself some grief and hire someone to do it for you. You're bright, I know, and you can learn how, but if you just plan to do it once, for your business blog -- well, you have work to do, right?

You can also use the customization options at your blogging platform. Here's a blog at Weebly.com, using one of their templates and their simple directions:



If you happen to find options that fit your company's look pretty well, then you're in luck. If you know a bit of html, you can match the colors and fonts and so forth, and you can often upload your own image, too.

If you're not sure whether blogging is for you, and you want to try it out, this can be a good way to make yourself a free trial. If you do this with Blogger or Wordpress, your web people can bring it into your website later, and match it to your site.

Once it's built, take the trouble to make your posts look good:

• Don't get carried away with the options. Multiple colors and fonts, centering some sections and justifying others, playing with text effects -- all that just makes it hard to read. Simplicity is your friend.
• Do pay attention to the details. Your text should look balanced. Your images should be carefully chosen and placed. Your punctuation should not suggest junior high school note-passing (!!!!!!) Things like margins and spacing make all the difference.
• Choose your images carefully. Your images should be of good quality, connected with your text, and compatible with your company's image. They should fit with the look of the website, too.
  

A good-looking blog won't make up for scanty or poor-quality content, but it will work with your good content to make a great effect.

Keywords in Blogging

A blog can do good things for a business:

• improve search results
• increase traffic, including repeat traffic
• provide a service to your customers

When you're working to increase visibility, you'll want to include your essential keywords in your blog copy. Obviously, if this is your primary focus, you'll be sacrificing both the benefits of having customers come back to read your blog, and of providing a service to your customers.

So how can you include your keywords in your blog posts without compromising on value to your visitors?

• Make sure you've got the right keywords. A new client is setting up a blog. They're a whole foods store, so it makes sense for them to use keywords like "whole foods," "natural foods," and "organic." These terms are very likely to turn up in their blog posts, too -- "Fitting Whole Foods into Your Budget," and "Is Organic Better?" would be very sensible and useful blog posts for them. "Cheap supplements" isn't a natural keyword for them, so they probably won't use it naturally in their blog. The best plan is not to go ahead and stuff "cheap supplements" into the blog in an unnatural way, but to leave "cheap supplements" off their list of keywords.
• Use your keywords consistently. You always have a choice of words. Another new client is a spine rehab center. A primary reason people search for spine rehab centers is for pain relief, and they usually use the word "pain." When I blog for this company, I could use "discomfort," "distress," or "soreness," but in fact I'll be using "pain." In the privacy of their computers, people in need of spine stabilization don't type "discomfort" into the search engines' search boxes. Using the same word instead of a variety of words won't make the blog posts less informative for visitors, and it will increase the chances that those back pain sufferers will find my client.
• Spotlight those keywords. The search engines will, if you do a good job, be able to see what your post is about and offer it to the people who will find it most valuable. But you can make it easy on the robots by using keywords in the title, in anchor text, and in tags and headings. If you blog regularly, you won't need any special tricks, but a new blog can get a little jumpstart by pointing out to the search engines just what is most important.
  

In order to use this advice in a practical way, you need to know what your best keywords are. Here are some previous posts that might be beneficial:
"Choosing Your Keywords"
"Another Way to Look at Keywords"
"Keywords, Marketing, and Your Brain"

Is Regular Blogging Your New Year's Resolution?

Keeping a journal -- with paper or online -- is a new habit people often take up on the first of the year. For your business, blogging is an excellent new habit. A good blog will drive traffic, increase rankings, and give you control over keywords your website couldn't get without a blog.

For most businesses, hiring someone like me to write your blog is the best plan. DIY corporate blogs often don't meet your goals, cost more than hiring a pro (your on-site people are almost certainly going to be slower, and they'll still expect to be paid for their time), and divert staff from mission-critical work.

What's more, they usually don't get posted regularly, so you not only lose the benefits of regular blog posting, but look like you're not keeping up.

If you're determined to write your own blog, resolve not only to post regularly, but to set it up to maximize your chances of success.

• Choose your blog's home wisely. You can set up a free blog someplace, or you can have your IT guy set it up at your website using blogengine.net or a similar solution. I've written before about the various free blogging platforms , but there are some strong reasons for having your blog live at your website, both for SEO and for your company's image. I have gotten excellent results for clients from free blogs, and can get top rankings and good traffic from them, but even in those cases I always think how much better it would be for those clients if they had the blogs inside their websites.
• Choose a content management system you can grow to love. I work with a lot of different systems, and I don't mind using whatever the client prefers. Still, there are some that require you to fool around with the html in order to get the results you want. There are some that won't let you get the results you want even if you can fool around with html confidently. Right now I'm working with one that requires me to scroll from side to side -- I can't see an entire sentence at one time. I'm paid by the hour, so the way that slows me down is the client's problem, but the frequent need to breathe deeply and get over the frustration of it is my problem. So try out a few before committing yourself, or discuss your options fully with your developer if you're having a custom arrangement done.
• Make a schedule. If you blog when you feel like it, you may end up going weeks between posts, and your blog won't deliver the way you want it to. I recently made a schedule for a client showing the dates, titles, and summaries of posts for the next month. You can do that for yourself. You can also commit to daily blogging, or three days a week -- but be sure to choose three particular days of the week, or it'll always be "tomorrow."

Good luck!

Who Should Be Writing Your Blog?

I've had similar conversations with some new clients recently. "How can you think up new things to say at my blog every day?" they ask dubiously. Or, "I don't think there's enough material for a weekly blog post. I can't think of anything." Or, "It takes me an hour just to think of a topic. Are you sure you can do this?"

A related conversation came up with a long-term client, too. He has staff members post snippets at Basecamp for me to work with. He was disappointed in his staff's literary efforts. "The post you did had so much more depth," he complained. "The developer's posting was shallow."

"I can work with shallow," I assured him. I can't develop custom software. The developer and I have different jobs. My job in that company is to take a casual sentence from the developer and turn it into a thought-provoking (and business-producing) blog post.

And that's the thing about a company blog. Unless you happen to be a writing company, you may not have someone who's really suited to writing your blog. Here are some of the people companies often choose to do their blogging:

• The CEO, because he knows all about the company. I see the thinking here, but the chances of the CEO's having plenty of free time to spend blogging are slim. The CEO may have great communication skills, but blogging is hardly ever the best use of his or her time.
• The secretary, because he can type. I can hardly even bring myself to discuss this one, because the difference between writing and typing are so obvious to me, but it's a very common choice. The secretary probably also knows all about the company, and he or she is probably also very busy.
• The marketing department, because that's what the blog is for. The marketing department is often a very good choice, because they're likely to have some writing skills, and yes the blog is for marketing, in the final analysis. Traditional marketing people, however, may not understand how search engines work, and they may not understand the concept of inbound marketing. In that case, you can end up with a blog that's just a succession of slightly disguised ads, and that's not what the blog is for.
• The intern or the owner's spouse or the security officer, because he has time. If you have a nice person hanging around the office without too much to do, you may be tempted to give him or her the task of blogging. I can see the thinking on this one, too, and I have sympathy for it. Unless the person in question happens to be a skillful writer, it's not a great choice. This person doesn't usually even know all about the company.

I recently read a claim that every company needs a fulltime person to handle social media (blogging, Twittering, sites like Facebook or LinkdIn). I think that's probably not true for small companies. However, you do need someone specialized to take care of that blog for you. Here are some options:

• The person who writes for pleasure. If some staff member keeps a journal or writes short stories as a hobby, then take advantage of that skill set and make that person your blogger. They'll probably be slower than a professional, but they may be willing to do it on their own time as a volunteer.
  
• The photographer. Use a picture and a caption for most blog posts, and just finesse the writing part. Of course, this only works if a) your photography is good and b) your business lends itself to this kind of blogging. It can be excellent for retail. This can be a good time to bring the secretary in -- a poorly written caption with grammar or punctuation errors makes a terrible impression.
  
• A professional. In most cases, a professional blogger like me can do your blog better and more cost effectively than the people on your staff. That's not what you hired your staff for. Sheer speed is enough reason for most companies to hire a pro, since the cost of a fast professional blog post is usually less than the cost of diverting staff to the task.
  

In the conversations I've reported above, the real answer is, "That's why you hired me." I'm good at this. Not everyone is. If your company builds things, or grows things, or sells things, then go on and do what you're good at and let someone like me do your blog. It's the most sensible approach.

When You Don't Want SEO for Your Blog

Blogs are so good for helping people find your business site that I nearly always think of blogs in terms of search. You want to use your keywords, both your regular ones and special seasonal ones that are good for your business. You want to link back to your main website. You want to list your blog in high-quality directories and forward it to your social media accounts...

But maybe you don't.

There are times when you want a private blog.

Right now I'm working on a website for a preschool. They want a blog (we're calling it a Communication Center) where they can post pictures of the kids and their activities for parents to check in on during the day.

What a wonderful idea! It's great for parents to be able to check in, and it'll add value to the preschool in their eyes.

They don't want their children to be visible to the world.

Fortunately, this is easy to arrange. You can make a password-protected section in a website, if you have a custom blog. Just ask your webmaster or designer to set that up for you.

If you use Blogger (that's the platform we're on right now), you can do it yourself. Just go to your dashboard, click on "Settings," and you'll see a button labeled "Permissions." It's the farthest on the right. Click it and you'll get a window asking who can read the blog.



Right now, while we're working on the site, I've set it up so that only the authors -- that's me and the designer -- can see it. Once it launches, we'll switch to the "Only people I choose" option.




The owners of the preschool can invite 100 people -- the parents of the kids -- to be readers of the blog. They'll sign in with their email addresses to be able to see the blog.

Chances are, whichever platform your blog is set up on has a similar system with similar options.

Ways to Collaborate with Your Professional Blogger

Here's one way to collaborate with your professional blogger: meet on the balcony with a nice bottle of wine and a couple of notebooks.

This is so rare, you wouldn't believe it. However, there are lots of practical methods for having a writer keep your company blog up to date:

• Give your blogger access to your blog and leave it to the pro. This method works best when your blogger already knows something about your field, or has worked with you for a while. Settle on a posting schedule (three times a week, for example), let your blogger know any special preferences you have (time of day to post, word counts, etc.), and relax.
• One client, when I told him we could do it that way, said, "I'm not that relaxed." I assured him that he didn't have to relax if he didn't want to. He has his staff post all the interesting things they hear during their workdays at Basecamp, and I pull stuff from that for his blog, Twitter, and newsletter. This works very well when your blogger doesn't have direct experience with the industry.
• Give your blogger topics as assignments, and have posts either sent to you or posted as drafts for your approval before they're published. Frankly, this tends to result in a blog that isn't posted regularly. Let's face it, if you had the time and inclination to come up with topics and edit the posts, you wouldn't need to hire a blogger. However, I sometimes begin with this set-up and then shift to the first style once the client feels completely confident.
  
• Have posts done in bulk and sent to you. I have a couple of clients who prefer to work this way. I'll send ten or twenty posts, and they can post them on their preferred schedule. In some cases, they save these for days when they don't have time to do their own posts. Not only does this allow you a high level of control without excessive time commitment, but it can be a very economical approach, too. I charge by the hour, but bulk blogging is so efficient that the cost-per-word can be half as much as for weekly posts.
• Have your staff write blog posts and let your blogger edit them. This is a good method when you want full control over the content, but still want a professional quality blog. This method can result in your paying far less to your blogger -- I can edit a post, even a really badly written one, in five or ten minutes. However, you still have to pay whoever's doing that bad post in the first place, and they probably can't do it as fast as a pro. This works best when you have staff with special knowledge and free time you're already paying for. Put your blogger on retainer, too, if you take this approach. No one is going to be willing to bill you in five or ten minute chunks.

The marketing value of a blog is incontestable at this point, but blogging regularly is rarely the best use of your time.Collaboration with a professional writer is the solution. Any of these approaches can make it a simple and stress-free process.
Stumble It!

Dynamic Content Without a Blog?

By "dynamic" here I don't mean "exciting." I mean changing. When people come to visit your site on Monday, it has something different from when they visited on Friday.

Search engines like new content. People do, too. People who idly drop by to see what's new will, when someday they need services like yours, think of you and drop by purposefully. Occasional customers who find your content useful will become regular customers. It increases your value to your visitors and makes your site more interesting.

The obvious way to do this is with a blog. What if a blog just isn't for you?

(You might want to check the comments at "Does Every Website Need a Blog?" before you decide, though.)

Anyway, if you decide against a blog, there are still ways to arrange for dynamic content at your website.

• Change your website often. Onsharp and SharpHue do this: they add new pages, drop in a video, expand the portfolio. They are both web firms, so it's easy for them. But you can do it, too, if you have a content management system, or if you have someone like me to make updates for you. Still, this is probably the hardest option.
• Share your knowledge. FileReplicationPro has a "Knowledgebase" full of highly detailed technical information. If you have questions about memory allocation for file replication, you know where to go. They've set this up as a wiki, so people can discuss and update it, and they can add to it whenever they have time. An easier option is to have articles, as Midwest Medical Billing does. You can prepare them with your word processor and email them to your webmaster to be uploaded.
  
• Host a discussion. The Stage Hypnosis Center has a lively discussion forum. People hang out there the way they do at Facebook. They pay for the privilege, which is a nice perk you can obtain after your forum becomes successful. You'll need to plan a forum application or bulletin board with your web designer, and you do need to nurture the conversation to begin with. In fact, I see want ads for people to initiate discussions at new discussion boards, but you can also just dragoon your friends and family into helping you out till you gain some momentum. At that point, you can keep things rolling with limited time and effort.
  
• Let people play. Brass Music Online has music samples to listen to, which are updated regularly. Offer free samples and change your offers frequently.
• Have featured products. Your local grocery store uses this trick. It used to amaze me when I saw grocery store flyers shouting "Canned tuna! 99 cents!" when 99 cents was the regular price. Why, I wondered, would people be deceived by this? It really isn't deceitful, though. Some customers may assume that featured items are on sale, but many are simply reminded of them. "Ah, tuna!" they think. "I haven't had that in a while," and they buy some. A Plus Educational has new featured products every couple of weeks and shoppers come to see what's new or just new to them. Since I make a point of also featuring those products in blog and lesson plan posts, the featured items tend to sell briskly, too.
  

I hope you're inspired by one or more of these options to consider how you might freshen up your website.

Stumble It!

Sending Your Blog on Vacation

Blogs work best when they're updated frequently. If people drop by a few times and see no new content, they're likely to quit dropping by. If subscribers see nothing new for weeks on end, they're likely to unsubscribe.

If your blog has good result in the search engines, you're still likely to have visitors to your older posts through search, but it's generally good blogging practice to keep those posts coming regularly.

What if you're going on vacation, though? I taught my last class of the spring semester today. Since that's something I do on the side, that doesn't by any means imply that I get a vacation. But some people get vacations.

How can you keep your blog going while you're gone?

• Stockpile. I have some clients for whom I write a whole bunch of posts at once, and they can post them at their leisure. This is an economical approach to getting professional posts, but you can also do it yourself, writing things when you have time and posting them hastily when your mind is on other things. Just leave them as drafts in your blogging platform, or as text documents. Remember, though, if you cut and paste from MSWord or another word processing program, you'll need to check your posts in all the browsers your visitors use, to make sure they look right. Cut and paste into Notepad first to clean them up instead, if you prefer.
• Find a guest blogger. Ask someone in your field to fill in for you while you're gone. Or, if you'd rather, someone in an adjacent field. For example, your furniture store blog could have a guest blogger from an interior design service. Your lawn care blog could have a guest from a nursery or garden center. It can be a good opportunity for promotion for the guest blogger, and it can be good for you, too. Offer to return the favor some day for maximum benefits to both parties.
• Share your vacation. if your blog isn't too serious, you could post holiday snaps with captions. "Here I am in Waikiki," you could write, "looking for great new bargains for the store!" or whatever the case might be. Check with your accountant to see whether this makes your trip tax-deductible. Either way, it gets your blog done almost as fast as reading your email.

If you're not going on vacation, but just having trouble getting blog updating into your schedule, you can hire someone like me to take care of it for you, or check out my post on how to make time for blogging.

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.

Make Time for Blogging

In a client meeting yesterday, the idea of including a blog in the website arose.

Blogging can do wonderful things for your business. It can get you on the front page of Google for lots of long-tail keywords, it can bring people back to your website repeatedly (so they'll think of you when they need your services), it can bring search engines back to your site repeatedly, and it can provide a useful service for your customers while also demonstrating your expertise.

This particular client has a business that relies on personal knowledge, produces photogenic results, and uses a variety of popular keywords. In many ways, blogging would be a natural.

But we'd talked with the client long enough for me to think that I had better give an important reminder: "Blogs are great, but don't start it if you're not going to post regularly."

A blog with sporadic posting is worse than no blog at all. Instead of bringing people back to your website, it makes them think, "Hmm. Nothing happening here." Instead of showing off your knowledge, it suggests that you're a bit flaky.

Really, you may just be busy. Who isn't?

How can you fit a blog into your busy schedule?

• Post brief and frequent updates. If I were writing this post for a client who wanted an economical blog, I could have divided it into three posts instead of three bullet points. I'd save them all at the blog, and the client could publish them on consecutive days. You can do the same for yourself. We have a big game hunter client. People don't just decide spontaneously to go on safari -- they plan and save for months or years. This is a situation in which blogging is perfect marketing. He can post a picture a day, add a quick note -- "Sunrise over the Kalahari" -- and have a blog post for his customers to dream over.
• Write about things you know. I blog for all kinds of businesses, and one of my strengths is my ability to research and write about all kinds of topics without handholding. But it does take me a bit longer to write about keeping Xsans in sync or the minutiae of the new stimulus package than to write about writing. When you have a time crunch, write about things you know well enough for off-the-top-of-your-head writing.
• Hire it done. Sometimes, especially if you're more a Flaubert than a Spillane (Flaubert was famous for writing a paragraph or less a day, while Spillane claimed that he could write his best-sellers in two weeks), it makes sense to recognise the opportunity cost of doing it yourself and just hire somebody to do it for you. When blogging is a good marketing plan for you, you should have a blog. You should also have a good blog. But that doesn't mean that you personally should devote hours to it each day -- or even three times a week.
  

What if you just can't keep up a blog? Does that mean that you have to give up the benefits of good content?

Not at all. Add white papers or articles to your website. Post articles or press releases off your website, with links back. Add a PDF file e-book. That kind of content can stay up and continue to bring visitors without ever making you write, "I know I haven't been keeping up with my blog lately, but I've been busy..."

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Bullets and Other Scary Things

This morning I read a post at someone's personal blog about fear of bullets in blog posts. Bullets are those lists people make:

• They have a little symbol next to them, which is called a "bullet."
• They are likely to catch the eye of skimming readers
• They help people get the main points quickly.

I use bullets a lot in blog posts. They're a courtesy to the reader, actually. We writers like to think that people are reading our entire posts, hanging breathlessly upon the deathless prose we're polished up for them like so many jewels... Yes, well, actually most people reading online -- particularly at business websites, which is probably what yours is -- skim through the stuff immediately visible to them and click away to something else. Bullets help such readers find the stuff they really want to know.

The idea is to make the bullet points useful enough either to give the skimmers the info they need without their having to read more, or to encourage them to read the rest of the post. So, even if they do have a scary name, I'm in favor of them.

However, there is something else that's scary, and related to bullets, that also came up this morning: namely, code showing on the public parts of your blog.

This came up because I was blogging for a client in a new-to-me content management system, and planning to use the post for some other stuff for this client, so I wrote it in MSWord and then cut and pasted.

This is usually a bad idea, but I previewed it and it looked fine, and I was in a hurry, so I let it go.

This bad decision on my part led to an email this morning saying "That last blog post has code in the bulleted lists." This means that html code (or, as you might think of it, "that stuff with all the pointy brackets in it") was visible to readers of the blog.

That's worse than showing your bra strap. And it's one of the things that keeps people from using bulleted lists in their blog posts, too. Bulleted lists are one of the most common places for that errant code to show up. They also may look wrong in other ways: different from other bulleted lists in other posts, for example.

In my case, it was the result of my failing to check how the post looked in Internet Explorer.

By now, some of my readers are thinking, "Oh, good point -- I'd better go check on that" and some are thinking, "I thought this was supposed to be in English." If you are in the former group, then you're through here. You won't be learning anything new. You're welcome to stick around, of course.

However, if you're thinking that yes, you've noticed that sometimes your bullets don't do what you wanted them to, you should read on, because I have a solution for you.

Time for a bulleted list:

• Don't write things in your word processing program and then paste them into your blogging text box, unless you're quite sure it'll work. It usually doesn't work perfectly.
  
• If you simply have to do this -- and I know people who feel that way -- then save your document as a "Web page, filtered." You'll find this setting in the "Save as" dialogue box. Or save it in Notepad and then cut and paste from there.
  
• Once you've posted something, check it in different browsers to see how it looks. That is, open the page using Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and whatever other browsers people use to visit your website. You can find out what browsers people are using at Google Analytics.

So what if you check and discover that your bullets don't look right? If you know html, you can go into the html editor and fix them up. That's what I do, and it's worth learning some basic html if you do this sort of thing a lot. If not, then you will often find that this will work:

• Highlight all the text that's supposed to be a bulleted list.
  
• Tell the visual editor that you don't want this to be a bulleted list.
• Tell it that now you do want it to be a bulleted list.

This works most of the time, in the same way that many hardware problems can be fixed by turning everything off, unplugging it for 30 seconds, and starting it up again.

I put a dragon at the beginning of this post because dragons are somewhat scary. I mean, if you ran into a real, full-sized, fire breathing dragon, you might step back a bit, right? However, dragons are also cool. If you have found bulleted lists intimidating or frustrating or for other reasons have chosen to avoid them, you'll find that these suggestions will move them right over to the "cool" side rather than the "scary" side.

Where Should You Put Your Blog?

In yesterday's post, I talked about setting up a blog ahead of your new website's launch date. Doing this helps you boost awareness of the website, gets your customers and clients in the habit of visiting, and can give additional value to the link from your blog to your website.

Basically, though, you can only do this if your blog is separate from your main site.

If you use Blogger, you can upload your blog to the site once it's up. "Put Your Blogger Blog On Your Website" gives you step by step instructions for doing so. You can also have it on its own domain and link it up nicely. If you prefer Wordpress, you can install it into your website.

If you start your blog at some other place, then you can still copy and paste it into your website later, but I don't see any reason to do so. There are lots of nice places for personal blogs and webpages. Here are my entirely subjective views on the main choices of free blogging platforms for personal use:

• Hardest to use if you don't write html: bravenet and zerocatch
• Coolest: weebly and spruz
• Most elegant pre-made themes: edublogs and squarespaces
• Worst pre-made themes: zerocatch and wikispaces
• Best wizards: tripod and edublogs
• Easiest to get started: terapad and xanga
• Most irritating to use: blogspot and livejournal

This has nothing to do with making a blog for your business, though. We're not talking here about fun. Serious work-related blogging pretty much has to be Blogger or Wordpress.

Since I blog for lots of people all over the web, I've used many different blogging platforms. Some are more to my taste than others, but all of them work. What I always say is, "Wordpress, Notepad, Blogger, Word, Dreamweaver, pointy sticks on clay tablets.... it's all the same to me."

You might be more exacting than I am.

Therefore, I went around the web to see what the more discriminating bloggers had to say about the difference between Blogger and Wordpress.

The first thing you have to know is that people who are making serious, well-researched comparisons between the two are always comparing Blogger with the paid version of Wordpress.

Given that, the comparisons boil down to this:

• When you blog at Blogger, Google owns your content.
• Blogger is easier if you don't have much tech training.
• Wordpress is more flexible if you don't have much tech training.
• Wordpress has higher prestige if you do.

I therefore have two suggestions for you if you're trying to decide between the two:

• Set up a free account at each and see how you personally like it. I find that I have to spend a lot of time in the html editor at Blogger to get it to do just what I want, but many people find that surprising. I was surprised to find that Wordpress is considered hard to use. Much of this is personal preference.
• Visit the links in the third paragraph above and read the instructions for putting each into your website and see which sounds easier to you.

If you've already arranged for your blog to be integrated into your website, then you'll probably have to wait till it goes live before you can do much blogging.

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Who's Wearing the Underwear?

I read this yesterday: "It's really like the person who is wearing the underwear... who is controlling the game? " I didn't add the ellipsis, by the way. That's exactly what the fellow, described as "an online wine guru," said.

Now, either that is a stunningly bad metaphor, or I'm just not going to the right parties. I don't know of any games that are controlled by the person who's wearing the underwear. But the post was actually about self-disclosure in blogging.

The current thinking about company blogs is that they should be filled with personal information and bold stands on controversial topics. This makes your company more real, more human, and therefore more trustworthy.

I blog for a number of companies. Some of the blogs are more personal than others. Some are not personal at all. None involves underwear, though one had a picture of the staff in their jammies. That's one of the more informal and personal ones, naturally.

If you blog for your company website, though, you might be wondering what level of self-disclosure is right for your company. If it's true that showing your foibles and making yourself open and real and vulnerable and human (though the whole language and opposable thumbs for the keyboard thing should be a clue) is the way to successful marketing, then maybe it's time to be the one wearing the underwear.

Hmmm. Still not really getting that metaphor.

Anyway, here are some things to consider when deciding what level of self-disclosure is most appropriate for your company's blog:

• Some industries look better in their underwear than others. While I might shop with someone who seems fun and playful, and I might want to read books written by someone who shares his or her vulnerable side, I don't really want to think of my banker as a fallible human with insecurities and pet peeves. I don't want a pharmacist who's an unpredictable party guy. For some jobs, warm is good but so is discreet and competent.
• Look into the future -- or at least remember the past. Things continue to be available on the internet for a long time. Will your future plans, or the future plans of your company, accommodate extremes of self-disclosure now? If revealing your foibles, flaws, and the breadth of your vocabulary of four letter words on the company blog turns out to be a passing fad, will you want an archive of that stuff to follow you around? I worked as an artist's model when I was a student, for photographers and drawing classes -- it paid much better than the campus library did, and there's nothing wrong with the job. But I can tell you I'm now glad that Facebook wasn't around at the time.
• Keep it real. Sometimes a more reserved approach is more honest. I live in Northwest Arkansas, where total strangers share information that I would save for my doctor. By local standards I'm reserved, almost aloof. Back home, I was considered pretty friendly. Some of the folks I blog for are much more private than I am. If that's the reality, then faking a more personal tone for the sake of fashion isn't really self-disclosure at all.

Thinking of these things should make it easier to decide the level of informality and self-disclosure you're comfortable with in your company blog. The one thing I'd add would be this: make sure that any secrets you reveal are your own.

Thought Leadership

I was talking with a new blogging client yesterday. I'm excited about working on his blog: it's a very cool one, with a focus that's new and different for me, and I am all about new and different.

Naturally, I asked about his goal for his blog. I figured it was intended to drive traffic to his main website.

Blogs are great for that. One of the things I especially like about blogs for my clients is that they can end up on the front page of the search engine results for all kinds of things, including those useful seasonal keywords that can make such a difference in a seasonal business.

The goal of the blog in question? "Thought leadership." That is, presenting and advocating for new ideas within a particular business community.

It's not a new concept. I can think of many examples of this from the blogs that I write for. I'm not going to claim a position of leadership for this rather new blog you're reading now, but I had a nice email yesterday telling me, "I recently fell in love with your blog! It is hard to find a quality blog about this sort of thing where the writer actually knows what she/he is talking about. Looks like I've found that with yours." There was further blush-causing kind stuff, but it certainly is my goal to make authentic search marketing information accessible to non-specialists who need it, and it is certainly gratifying to know that I met that goal, at least for that reader. I know from my own experience that nonspecialists truly do need that information, if only in order to be able to choose the right professional SEO service for their circumstances, and it is hard to find. I often hear the frustration of businesspeople who want knowledge and ideas about using the power of the internet, and feel shut out from it.

So the idea of having thought leadership as a goal for a blog is appealing. Does your blog, or your website in general, accomplish this goal?

• Do you provide useful information? It's surprising to me how much of the commercial writing on the internet is virtually content-free. It shouldn't be surprising, because I teach freshman comp, so I see lots of papers full of words with no particular point beyond filling up the page, but still it surprises me. I'd like to put some website content into the reviewing pane and cross most of it out, saying, "What does that mean? What's that supposed to do for your reader? Didn't you just say this in your previous three paragraphs? This is all about you! Where's the value for your reader?" Not that I'm ever that harsh with my students, but I think we should be that harsh when we look at our own content.
• Do you present new ideas? There may not be many entirely new ideas, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to find ideas that will be new to our readers, or at least ideas that will encourage our readers to look at things in a new way. I review a lot of business books for various companies, and I've come to value those that make me see things in a different way after I've read them. If I notice design issues that hadn't struck me before, increase my efficiency in a routine process, or am able to approach a meeting in a better way, then my time with that book was well spent. Will your readers feel that their time with you was well spent?
• Do you offer leadership? The first half of thought leadership is about thought. But having highly valuable thoughts doesn't provide leadership if you keep them to yourself. One of my clients is a champion of excellence and integrity in his field. I hope I'm a champion of excellence and integrity in my own field, but there are times, when I'm working with this individual, when I feel as though I should brush up on the standards. When he carries his ideas out into the community, this client causes his competitors to clean up their acts in sheer self-defence. Your ideas may lead your company toward better collaboration, your department toward increased profitability, or your organization toward environmental responsibility. But only if you state those ideas boldly, follow through on them in your actions, and share them freely.

So look at your own blog, website, or articles with a fresh eye and see whether thought leadership could -- or perhaps should -- be one of your goals.

My new client? I'm definitely on board with helping him provide thought leadership for his professional community. I also plan to drive traffic to his website.

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Refresh Your Blog

We've talked before about the good things your blog can do for your business. It can bring you traffic, give you links, provide a valuable service to your customers and clients, and increase return visits to your website. A good blog is a lot like the interactions you have with the people who visit your physical place of business.

Not every blog will do these things, though. Some blogs are better at these jobs than others. So what if your business has a blog, but it's not doing what you need it to do?

A little refreshment is in order.

I've been freshening up a client's old blog while her new website is being built.

The blog was written by a worker who has now left the company, so it needs an update to reflect the new people who will be writing it. It also had some problems from a business standpoint, and needed a little work for that reason, too. In this kind of case, your first thought might be just to start a completely new blog.

However, it has been in at least a tenuous existence for years. There are pictures of clients there, and descriptions of happy times at the organization. There are things worth saving.

There are also advantages to having an established blog. People who visit a blog and see only a post or two are less likely to return. Blog catalogs and webrings may not list an obviously new blog.

The best choice in a case like this is to freshen the blog up a bit.

Here's a bit of a page from the old blog. We can see that there are some negatives here. For one thing, there are only a couple of posts a month.

We can see that, while this blog has been here for years, it hasn't been being posted to regularly during that time.

We can also see that there is some sloppy content. In this example, there's html showing on the page -- not desirable. Other posts have spelling and punctuation errors, random font variation from having cut and pasted things, and even some stuff that has been taken from other sources without attribution.

There are some technical trouble too: pictures missing and broken links.

So how do we fix all this?

• Freshen the whole blog up by getting in and editing the posts. Some should probably be deleted, but all should be proofread and have any bad links or other problems fixed. Remember, both search engines and humans consider you more trustworthy when you have clean copy. This may not be fair -- I'm not aware of any studies proving that bad spellers are bad people -- but it's the reality.


• Use your keywords. While you're cleaning up past entries, make sure to include your keywords. As we've discussed before, if you've chosen your keywords correctly, it should be natural to include them when you're writing about your business and your own field of expertise. Using the same keywords in your blog as at other pages in your website will help the search engines realize that they should offer your blog to people searching for your services. Don't forget the alt tags!


• Fill in the blanks. If posting has been sporadic in the past, you'll need to fill in with some new posts. Don't think this is dishonest in any way. Your organization had news during all those months that should have been posted. Comb your files for news stories, press releases, pictures, and information from the past. It's important to do this for the SEO benefits of having an established blog, and also so that visitors can browse through your archives and see what your company is like. Just think of it as finishing up an unfinished task.


• Make the blog match the website, or the rest of the website. Many of us use handy free blogging services, and this client was one who did so. But the blog is completely different in look and in web address from the website. There wasn't even a good link back to the company's main website. The organization is having the blog styled to match their main site (this blog that you're reading has had that done, too, by the clever people at Sharp Hue). At the very least, choose colors that match your main site, and make yourself a good link back to your home page.

Now go celebrate the fact that your old blog with its flaws can rise again as a fresh, new blog that will do your business good.

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