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WordCamp Seattle – Kelli Wise is presenting

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If you’re planning on attending WordCamp Seattle next month, you’ll have an opportunity to see just how short I am. You’l also get a chance to hear me speak on

Using WordPress as Your Company’s Website

How to setup and use WordPress as a static website and content management system for small business. Includes setup, theme considerations, giving access to employees.

This is a 30 minute presentation with 10 minutes of Q&A. While it won’t be as in depth as the 12 Weeks to A Website That Works course, it will go over the basics on using WordPress as your company’s Content Management System.

If you’re there, stop me in the hall and say HI! I’d love to meet you.

Brand New eBook – Your Website is Ugly

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Hot off the presses – I have a brand new eBook ready to help you make your website even better.

In this book, there are 10 easy things you can do to make your website even better (or maybe less awful, I’ll let you decide). I launched this to my email list early this morning and the response has been off the charts!

Feedback:

… I’m only 4 pages in and I’ve learned 3 things and laughed so hard I spit my drink out. – Allissa Haines, Writing A Blue Streak

Don’t wait, Get your free copy now.

Columbia River Institute – Branded Package

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This is where we get to celebrate the launching of a new website, complete with breaking champagne bottles on the bow, marching bands, cutting ribbons, and party hats. It’s also where I get to share a little peek under the covers of why I made the choices and ended up with the final website design.

Announcing: Columbia River Institute of Massage Therapy

This is a new massage therapy school based in Wenatchee, WA (the dry side of the state where the cherries and the wine come from). The client, Annie LeCroix, had a very clear idea of what she wanted and was able to articulate it.

The end result is a great example of what is possible with a Branded Package.

Design Requirements: clean & green

The design brief started with the customer’s logo and color scheme of green and dark gray, keeping the layout clean.

The logo image, which is combines a drawing of the human body with a sense of movement and fun, was incorporated into the header:

Columbia River Institute logo & header

Repeated element:

I liked the logo so much, I decided to use it as a watermark for the body of the page, which was done in green. To keep this from looking cluttered, the watermark is not repeated.

Sidebars:

[tooltip content=”You might call these “columns” – they are the small columns along the side of a website.” url=”” ]Sidebars [/tooltip]on the right were left white and all text was dark gray. We thought this looked a little flat, so an accent color of a complementary burnt orange was added for some contrast. Social media icons, in dark gray, were chsoen from A Life in Pixels Icons.

[tooltip content=”This looks like the item is hovering above the surface and the shadow is dropped below the item” url=”” ]Drop shadows[/tooltip] and inset shadows were added to the main body and sidebars, respectively, to give the appearance of depth. The [tooltip content=”This is the stuff along the bottom, or foot, of the page” url=”” ]footer[/tooltip] was left white.

The final site, Columbia River Institute of Massage Therapy:

 

Why WordPress?

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One question I get asked by potential clients is: why do you use WordPress to build websites? There are 4 reasons I use WordPress to power your website.

#1 – WordPress has a large installed base

  • There are over 40 Million websites using WordPress. In fact, 13% of the top websites in the world are built on WordPress. (these statistics come from WordPress.com)
  • There are over 900 books listed in Amazon on WordPress, including WordPress for Dummies (a pretty good text for most users), Teach Yourself WordPress, Beginning WordPress, WordPress 24 hour trainer, and others geared for the beginner to the Uber-Geek.
  • WordPress is open source and free to use. It has thousands of code warriors writing, testing, and documenting the latest updates.
  • Even though WordPress does not generate any income for the developers (they make their money in other ways), they have spent many thousands of dollars on usability studies to make sure that the user interface is intuitive enough that novices can get comfortable with it rather quickly.
  • Because it has been widely adopted and heavily documented, the number of people competent in providing ongoing support is huge. In other words: if I were to win the lottery (I don’t play, so no worries there) and immediately retire to a beach in the Carribean, you could easily find someone to come in and take over your WordPress website. (I’d probably head to New Zealand first because I’ve never been there but the pictures sure look nice)

#2: Search Results

Google loves to see fresh content. It also loves to see quality content (changing your banner image every week is not an SEO strategy). Google also loves to see order in websites, good tags, semantically written code, and a lot of other terms that make no sense to you. Just know this: WordPress delivers the code in a format that is Google (and Bing and Yahoo) friendly.

WordPress also allows you to create new, meaty content on a regular basis which gives the search engines a reason to come back on a regular basis. My other blog, Massage Therapy World, is indexed almost daily and my posts will show up in the top 2 search results less than 5 minutes after posting. A static site just won’t achieve those kinds of results.

#3: Empowerment

One of the other reasons I chose WordPress: it allows the client to make updates and edits without needing to contact me. Over and over, I hear from clients that they can’t get their web designer to return their calls (thanks for all the new business, guys!) or that the firm is too busy to put up the client’s holiday specials and take them down.

What if the client could do that himself? No more $80 maintenance charges. No more scheduling your updates months in advance. Have a handful of last year’s product sitting in the back room you don’t want to inventory next week? Post a a quick blurb about a clearance sale that day, take it down next week. You can do that on your own without having to contact your web designer.

It’s not Rocket Surgery

It has always made me a little crazy when technical experts hold their secrets close to the vest so they can remain ‘the smartest person in the room’. This is usually a misguided attempt at getting job security or ego stroking. It’s your website and you should be able to update it on your own. At the same time, if the client breaks something, I’m here to put it back together. Or, if they’re are simply too busy, I provide the manpower to add new content.

And this brings us to item 4:

#4: Cost

Because I’m not developing custom websites from scratch, and because I’m starting from a template or framework, I can shave months and thousands of dollars off of the average website project. We’re not staffed to do custom work; all of our time goes into quick, cheap websites for businesses on a tight budget.

While WordPress, or templated, sites is not the right solution for every business. For the micro-business, kitchen table business, pint sized business, solopreneur, or whatever you want to call your small business, it can be the best solution to getting your business on the web when you don’t have a big budget.