WordPress

Smart Business Owners Don’t Leave Blog Design to Designers

December 12, 2011 By Des Walsh 1 Comment

Georges Clemenceau

I make no claim to be good, let alone excellent, at blog design or the more general field of web design. And I have great respect for good and great designers.

But what I know is that, as a business owner, the design of my blog or other web site is my responsibility and not one to be passed completely on to others, no matter how brilliant the designers and no matter how many prize-winning sites they have to boast of.

To borrow from the great French statesman, Georges Clemenceau, who is said to have remarked that war is too important to be left to generals, web design is too important to be left to web designers.

I am guessing the smarter designers will agree.

Because surely they will want whatever they design to be not just pleasing to the eye but as effective as possible in terms of their client’s business objectives.

I’ve met too many people over the years who have trustingly handed over many thousands of dollars to web designers and have been seriously disappointed when the resulting site did not bring them commensurate returns.

Almost certainly through no fault of the designers who were probably doing the best they could, but without guidance or challenge from the client.

Business owners and executives who will fuss over the most minute aspects of a print brochure design will often leave the design of their web presence – with arguably much more potential impact for their brand – to designers, who are often basically graphic designers who have re-badged themselves as web designers.

Nothing wrong with that, but caveat emptor applies here as for other purchases of goods or services.

Over the weekend I’ve spent a slab of time looking at a lot of blog designs, seeking insight and inspiration for an imminent makeover of this site.

Some of the best insights and inspiration haves come from a Copyblogger post The Strategy Behind the Copyblogger Redesign and the accompanying interview podcast, which I highly recommend for some educational – and entertaining – listening. The post and podcast have helped confirm the appropriateness of my decision to use the Genesis Framework as the platform for the re-design.

I’ve spent some of the weekend time playing around with the possibilities of that framework and I can see that (ed: with the Enterprise child theme) it can work pretty well for me “out of the box”, with plenty of scope for enhancement as I go along.

Over the next week or so I’m also going to do some serious thinking and probably some pen and paper (remember those?) sketching to get as close as I can to a design and layout that is right for my business objectives.

Frankly I doubt that the end result will win prizes, but if it helps me get new clients and is valued by existing clients and other readers I will be more than happy.

My blog, my responsibility.

In the meantime, any tips or tricks you have to share, for getting the right combination of business purpose and technical aspects of blog design, will be welcome.

Image credit: Georges Clemenceau – public domain

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: blog design, Blogging, Genesis Framework, WordPress

New Look for Site Using WordPress Static Front Page

May 12, 2011 By Des Walsh

I’m pleased to have had some positive comments about the latest new look for this site. I’m hoping the new layout and some changes I’ve made to the content will help me communicate more effectively in terms of my business focus and the services I offer.

Des Walsh dot Com web site The most fundamental change has been to move from the “blog-as-site” model to having a static front page, with the blog as part of the overall site rather than as the front page. This is technically easy to achieve in WordPress (although getting everything to work as I wished, after making that change, presented a few challenges).

I’ve also switched to using the iThemes Builder child theme Ionic Sky, with some layout and style variations which are not too difficult to achieve, even for a non-techie like me, using the iThemes variable layouts and style functions.

My main aim in all of this has been to achieve a clearer presentation of the main services I offer, under the two headings of social media strategy and business coaching.

The new dropdown sub-menu in the navigation bar above will hopefully help with navigating the site.

I would definitely appreciate any feedback on the site re-structure.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Blogging, iThemes, static front page, web site, WordPress

New Global Site for Social Media Consultants & PR 2.0 Specialists

December 31, 2008 By Des Walsh

My friend and colleague Lonnie B. Hodge, who is based in Guangzhou, China, doesn’t just “think outside the square” – he left the square thinkers behind long ago. And he is always coming up with bright ideas and often I find in the morning that he has implemented them overnight. I try to keep up, but I don’t think he sleeps.

Lonnie’s latest idea – or rather, the latest one I know of – is the Social Media Consultants site.

This has been launched to provide a space for social media consultants and PR 2.0 specialists to be more easily found by potential clients and business collaborators, with specific attention to being findable by geographic location and specialization. We also see it as a virtual coffee shop for discussion – via blog posts and comments right now – of matters of common interest.

We’ve started out with a WordPress site, because that was relatively easy to get up and running without a whole lot of configuring and with minimum palaver.

We’ve issued general invitations via Twitter and plan to get the word out as widely as we can. We’re encouraging those responding positively to post about who they are and what they do and to use social media tools, including audio and video, in the process, and to list and link to their Twitter, LinkedIn and other links.

Basic requirements to be able to participate are as simple as we could make them:

You should have an active blog that you update regularly (we too are guilty of not nearly enough updates, but we’d like you to have a presence on the net)
You must have worked in or been active in Social Media or PR 2.0 for at least a year.

Have we worked out all the rules of engagement, moderation, etc? Absolutely not. We are truly making it up as we go along and we know that will bother some and please others.

One thing we do know is that we want it to be truly international. Which means that, among other things, language is going to become an issue at some point.

Along with all the other issues. In the meantime, we are having fun.

And there is no fee – and never will be – for consultants and specialists to list themselves on the site.

If you want to be part of that and meet those couple of criteria above, please contact me via the Contact page here or tweet me on Twitter – @deswalsh – or Lonnie @lonniehodge.

And note that if you are a startup or the provider of an established social media platform you are welcome also to contact us about listing some informative information (as distinct from a pitch).

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Consultants, PR 2.0, Social Media, social media platform, startup, Twitter, WordPress

Social Media Show Re-boot with Francois Planque Interview

October 5, 2008 By Des Walsh

It’s nearly a year now since I was inspired to set up a podcast site focusing on social media and nearly nine months since I actually set it up as the Social Media Show and did my first interview.

Being at BlogWorld & New Media Expo the other week motivated me to get the site moving again, which I’ve done by way of an interview with Francois Planque of b2evolution.

It was a surprise to me to learn that the b2evolution blogging platform and WordPress are forks of the same open source platform b2.

I was interested particularly in what Francois had to say about the usefulness of b2 evolution for those of us who have more than one blog and also for its multi-lingual capability.

It’s one platform I have not used and, curious as I am, right now I just don’t see myself having the time to experiment. If you use it or have used it, or know someone who has and you would care to comment, that would be great.

Filed Under: Blogging, Podcasting Tagged With: b2, b2 evolution, blogging platforms, Francois Planque, multi-lingual blogs, multiple blogs, WordPress

Search Tip: The Why and How of ALT Attributes for Images

January 3, 2008 By Des Walsh

This post might look a bit geeky, but the subject matter is important for usability of websites and blogs, and for its search implications. In other words, the information here can help your search engine ranking. And the core information comes from the horse’s mouth – via a key Google operative.

I have a working knowledge of Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML, the publishing language of the World Wide Web. Enough to do basic modifications and updates on websites and blogs. I know that using ALT attributes for image tags is a Good Thing, not least for reasons of accessibility – a blind person or one with a visual disability is going to be frustrated in reading a page, say via Braille, if there is no ALT attribute for an image. This is especially important if the image is crucial for understanding the website page or blog post.

The ALT attribute is also useful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

In addition, the ALT attribute also serves when, for whatever reason, the browser cannot display the image, or images have been turned off. The text – “ALT”=”alternative” – is then displayed on the viewer’s screen.

Watching a short video just now (thanks to John Jantsch for the link), where Matt Cutts from Google explains the why and how of using ALT attributes, was a good prompt for me on all this. Not least because it reminded me that if I want Google (or any other search engine) to include my images in its search activities, I need to make it easier for the search engine to discover just what the image is about. And it seems that having a title for the image, while good, does not serve the same function or have the same value as the ALT attribute.

In the days when I hand-coded most of the image inserts in web pages, I used to be very assiduous in adding ALT attribute. More recently, using a variety of offline and online blog editing tools, which do not universally provide a prompt to insert an ALT attribute, I’ve been slack. For example, I’m composing this post on Microsoft’s excellent (and free) Windows Live Writer and if I want insert an image I click on an icon in the tool bar, then get a screen where I can either upload the image or enter a web address (URL) for one. But if I want an ALT attribute I have to switch to the HTML view and insert the code manually.

LiveWriter editing screen image insert

Although I regard LiveWriter as a superior editing too, on the ALT attribute score the editing tool in WordPress is more helpful.

When I want to insert an image, using the WordPress WYSIWYG tool, I click on the image icon in the toolbar and get a box for inserting the necessary details. Included is a field for “Image description” – which is in fact, the space for me to insert the ALT attribute:

WordPress editing tool insert image box

As in the next image:

WordPress editing tool insert image box, with text

Whichever editing tool I use, once I have inserted the image I will see it displayed in the draft, for example:

Floral display with Olympics logo, Temple of Heaven, Beijing

What the search engine and the person who is not visually able will be able to read is the wording in the ALT attribute, in this case “Floral display Olympics logo, Temple of Heaven, Beijing”. (Note that I could also put some “Title” coding in the HTML or a title under the image, but I don’t want to complicate the issue more than necessary.)

So now, with the three images above, because I’m composing in LiveWriter, I need to insert the ALT code manually. That will be true whether I do that here in LiveWriter or wait till I have sent the draft to my WordPress site. The alternative is to not insert the images here but wait till the text is in WordPress and then insert the images using the WordPress tool.

I prefer to do as much of the editing as I can in LiveWriter, including the insertion of images. For the person who wants to use LiveWriter or another offline editing tool but does not want to be fussed with the code, it is a sensible option to not insert the image until the text is ported to WordPress. That way you still have the sense of security that your text has been saved on your computer hard drive (provided you make sure to use the Save Local Draft option in LiveWriter) and is not at the mercy of a mid-drafting outage, always a risk in composing online (especially if, as happens from time to time where I live, a storm or other incident takes out your power and Internet connection).

I trust this post is helpful to readers wanting to make sure their images count in the search engines’ ranking. I welcome any technical corrections needed and practical suggestions for doing all this better.

I do hope a future update of LiveWriter will have something like the WordPress editing tool’s capacity for entering image-related details in a the “Normal” mode, so that it is not necessary to fiddle with the code (it’s so easy for me to mess up the code doing that and then have to laboriously sort it all out). I met some of the LiveWriter development team at BlogWorld Expo and was very impressed by their enthusiasm and keenness to have the product deliver as well as possible and will of course make sure they see this post .