October 23rd, 2009
My website isn’t very clean, and it’s a bit confusing. How can I clean that up using Wordpress?
- sales training
Wordpress is an open source blogging software package that you can use to create a website with a lot of functionality and stability. When Silver Square determines that the best route for one of our clients is to use an existing piece of blogging software, Wordpress is the one we use.
The problem you describe seems to be a design issue with the site. The strength of Wordpress is giving you a robust system for updating the content of your site, whether you are doing a traditional blog or using Wordpress as a de facto content management system. The design of your site still falls under the umbrella of your designer, who creates your site to be both an extension of your brand and a useful business tool to engage your visitors.
Now once you have a good design in place, the structure of Wordpress can make it easier to make changes to the content of your site without “breaking” it. A site might be great when it first created, but as the months roll on different bits of information (tradeshow appearances, new products or services, etc.) get tacked on to a design that wasn’t created with the idea of adding new information. Since Wordpress by its very nature is built on the premise that you will continually add information to your site, it can help a good website design remain good even while the content of the site is changing.
Tags: blogs, content management, graphic design
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September 25th, 2009
This is one of those questions that seems minor to me, put as it turns out is a big deal to some of our team members, so want to get a professional opinion.
Scenario: We have some logoed shirts. We have a new shirt order being made by various people within the firm. The shirts are in good taste, look professional, etc. All will have our logo. Controversy – all sorts of styles (all professional) and colors are being requested – a navy polo, a white long sleeve, a pink whatever. So, what is appropriate?
a) Company apparel with uniform colors (ie, company colors); various styles ok, but uniform colors?
b) Company apparel on whatever colors (they will match of course); various styles ok?
c) Something else? Sorry to bother you with this, but I need some support to back up my decision, whichever way it may be.
- CPA Partner
This is one that you may not like my answer, but it’s what I’ve seen time and time again, and my personal management style matches up to this, so here goes. This is classic employee relations FIRST, brand second. What you’re discussing, like you mentioned, is minor. It’s not making or breaking your company. Losing an employee or keeping one happy, is far more important than if someone wants a pink shirt with a white logo.
So let them get what they want. Let pink go on pink, let white go on pink, let anything go that stays under a professional looking umbrella. Color, in this instance, is just not as important.
Tags: branding, graphic design
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August 31st, 2009
Someone told me it isn’t good to re-use a blog post. Is this true and if so, why?
- process guru
The answer to this depends entirely on how you are planning to re-use your blog post.
At Silver Square we are big believers in the idea of repurposing your content. If youv’e gone through the trouble to research, create, and put some polish on something valuable there’s no reason to use it once and then forget about it. The key is to find other channels where you can share this information.
So suppose you give a speech to you local chamber of commerce about what the next 6 months are going to look like in your industry. The speech is well received and everyone thanks you for your time. Are you done? No way. Take the notes from your speech and turn them into a blog post. Write an article for your newsletter. Shoot a simple video where you cover the key points from the speech and put it up on YouTube.
In each case, you’ll need to tweak the message a little to fit your audience in each of those venues.
Now back to the idea of re-using blog posts. Some unsavory characters have attempted to get rich on the web by scraping the content off of other sites and publishing it on their own. Google and other search engines don’t want to respond to search queries with a long list of the exact same article on ten different sites. So they have complicated algorithms that attempt to determine which site is the authoritative source of the content. That’s the one that shows up in search results.
The other sites don’t appear. If this kind of things happens on enough of their pages, they start looking really suspect in the eyes of the search engines. (You probably don’t want your site to look fishy to Google.) This phenomenon is known in the search industry as penalizing duplicate content.
If you want your post to appear in two different blogs, I would advise rewriting it. You can use the same ideas, but don’t copy and paste the post word for word.
Sound too difficult? Well, the two blogs probably have a slightly different audience or tone even if they cover similar topics. Think about how you need to present your ideas differently to that audience, and the minor rewrite will come easily.
Tags: blogs, search engine optimization, seo
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