This development begs the question… why are so many people choosing WordPress?

We believe there are several reasons. Perhaps most important is ease-of-use, both for designers and for their clients.

EASY TO USE

During our time as website designers, we have worked with clients to create and maintain sites built with WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, and hands down, WordPress is the easiest to use. It is incredibly intuitive.

With both Joomla and Drupal, we’ve had clients simply throw up their hands, tell us they couldn’t maintain their own sites, and ask us to do it for them. That doesn’t happen with WordPress. We typically spend about an hour or so going over the WordPress CMS with clients, and then they’re off and running.

The WordPress CMS enables clients to make updates to both text and images on their sites with no problem. Images and other media are uploaded and stored in a media library where they accessed as needed, or simply deleted. Edit fields can be set up for each area of the webpage template where text is used. Plus, for more advanced users, they can access the page’s HTML to make formatting changes if they wish to.

Creating a new page is just one click away. When a new page is added, the user chooses which section it goes in, which page it goes under, and which page template it should use. WordPress uses these choices to automatically add the page to the site’s navigation system.

CUSTOM THEME DESIGN

Many people have used the popular WordPress.com website to setup a free blog, but the CMS which designers use to create your website is located at WordPress.org. We use that CMS software to create your website, which can incorporate a blog or not. Blogs are a small part of what WordPress is able to do.

WordPress does provide many pre-designed themes (website look & feel) a user can choose from, but any client concerned with their brand will require a custom theme design. But even though a professional web designer is required to create your custom theme, WordPress does make this an easier task than the other CMS tools, which also no doubt has added to its popularity.

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

If you think you may ever want to incorporate a blog in your site, then WordPress is an obvious CMS choice. It was originally created to be a blogging tool, and it is way ahead of any other CMS when it comes to blogging capabilities and options. And if you don’t want a blog early on, you can easily add it later.

But you may not want a blog at all. Is WordPress still a good choice? You bet. We’ve created as many WordPress sites that don’t have blogs as we have sites that do. In the past year, WordPress has introduced enhancements that make it a truly full-featured CMS that provides a very solid website foundation, which can be expanded significantly through the use of various component plug-ins.

SOME TECHNICAL ADVANTAGES

If you’ve had your website for awhile, you may have been through the process of deciding whether you wanted a CMS-driven website or a static site. Before the advent of open source CMS options (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal), most websites that sported a CMS were custom programmed, and were quite costly to develop. Clients who wanted smaller sites had more limited choices, but there were affordable solutions, such as using Dreamweaver to develop sites that were basically static, but that used library items and include statements to help facilitate site-wide updates. Clients often used programs like Adobe Contribute to maintain their sites. This type of approach actually worked fine for many organizations, but there were a number of built-in limitations.

Adding new pages was difficult because of the various steps involved in building the page into the site’s navigation system. With WordPress, all of this is simply part of the page building process, and is something the client can do without the help of the site developer.

Also, when it comes time to refresh or redesign the site, rather than have to deal with design alterations to all of your website pages (which could be 50 to 100 or in some cases significantly more), the redesign effort is focused on the site’s template collection. So even if you’re using 10 different page templates, that’s still substantially less work, which means less money spent on development and design.

There’s a lot more flexibility in the new WordPress CMS than has ever existed before, which bodes well for both web designers and their clients.

NO CMS IS PERFECT

Every open source CMS has plusses and minuses. Whether your developer chooses WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or some other proprietary CMS, none of them are perfect. You will encounter occasional bugs and limitations… that’s the nature of application development.

But based on our experience, we think WordPress is the best CMS currently available.

SOME SAMPLE WORDPRESS SITES

Here are several WordPress sites we’ve developed. Some incorporate blogs and some don’t.

• Mason Bruce & Girard – features multiple templates to accommodate different information requirements
• Hollywood Farmers Market – uses WordPress’ blogging capability to handle website news updates on its homepage
• Crossroads Christian Church – features extensive use of plug-ins, including a powerful calendar plug-in
• Lantana Group Consulting – features an active blog that’s built into the website

COMPARISON SHOPPING

Here are a couple sites that compare WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

• Google Trends – shows relative use of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and MoveableType
• The Open Sourcery – a WordPress site that offers pros and cons of three main CMS
• Slayerment – a Drupal site that details features of three main CMS

We worked with the Kansas City Area Development Council to design a new advanced energy marketing initiative website — kcadvancedenergy.com. Like most of KCADC’s marketing micro-sites, this one is designed to present the benefits the KC metro can offer businesses. And KCADC’s efforts must be successful, since they were just named one of the top economic development groups in the U.S. by Site Selection magazine.

Another site we just completed was the complete redesign of Kansas City SmartPort’s website. Lisa designed several unique features when building this site, including the use of a translucent window placed above a panoramic photo on the site’s homepage. She also expanded the site’s interactive capabilities with the development of an interactive real estate presentation. In addition to its corporate site, we worked with KC SmartPort to design a new site for one of its industry initiatives: TradeDataExchange.com. This site promotes the development of a data-sharing approach to cargo shipping.

Not all of our work was web-related. We worked with the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute to package and promote its annual dinner and research symposium events. This project included the design of branding, mailers, promotional ads, programs and meeting collateral, event signage, and the publishing of all event information on the web.

In addition to our Kansas City work, we designed a new website for the CDA Academy. This site presents information on the Academy’s classes and curriculum supporting HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and Continuity of Care Document (CCD) training. CDA Academy is a new organization that has been created to serve the needs of the evolving medical records industry.

One additional fun effort was the incorporation of a custom video player into the NextAmericanDream.com website that pulls a customized video playlist from a YouTube channel.

We’ve still got additional work lined up, but it feels good to have completed this much already this year.

We just completed a quick turn-around website project — CDA Academy. CDA Academy is a training organization that brings medical and technical specialists up to speed on the latest developments in CDA (Clinical Document Architecture) and CCD (Continuity of Care Documents). Our design challenge was to create a university-type look and feel that is reflective of the serious technical quality of the subject matter. We also provided a simple ecommerce solution that allows users to register and pay for CDA Academy classes online.

We’ve just begun working with the Hollywood Farmers Market to design and develop their new website. The Hollywood Farmers Market is one of Portland’s vibrant neighborhood farmers markets, which operates on Saturday’s in Northeast Portland just off Sandy Blvd. Our goal is to get this market’s website up and running prior to the start of this year’s market season. The site, which will incorporate a blog, will be built using WordPress tools.

We’re working with long-term clients Kansas City Area Development Council and Kansas City SmartPort to develop and/or refresh a series of websites that promote the Kansas City region’s economic development assets. We’ll have more to say about these sites once they launch later this month.

Content has been solidfied and we’ve reached the design concept stage on a new website for new client Crossroads Christian Church. Also a WordPress site, this one will be a large and fairly complex site that provides extensive capabilities to its users. We should be able to share quite a lot about WordPress site construction techniques once this project is complete.

Outside the web arena, Lisa is finalizing the collateral and signage for the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute’s annual dinner and symposium events.

All this and Lisa is spending a week in Austin at this year’s SXSW Interactive! Life is good!

But what gets less electronic ink is the question of voice. What does your website sound like? Who are you speaking to? How do you think they feel about what you’re saying and how you’re saying it?

Voice is a content issue, and it’s one of the most important questions to answer during your site development process. We spent a lot of time on this issue with PAE Consulting Engineers.

PAE is not your typical mechanical/electrical engineering company. PAE is all about sustainability, innovation, quality and fun. They want people to know this above all else. And they want other people who care about those things to come and work with them. Communicating this message clearly was our most important objective on this project.

To accomplish our objectives, we focused on several things. First, we gave the site’s content the personality of the people in the firm. It’s professional, but it also is relaxed. It showcases how much the firm cares about its employees… how it understands that the staff is the firm. And the staff tends to be young, involved and innovative. The copy reflects these facts and makes a case to other like-minded, team-focused individuals.

The site’s content architecture also was created in a way that allows PAE to create a web-based presence in the world of sustainable design. The Sustainable Design Center allows PAE to feature its work, knowledge and relationships within the sustainability movement. At launch, the Center offers a good foundation of information, but the strength of the approach lies in its ability to continue to expand over time.

So, I guess the message is: tools are important, but please take your time with your content. Take stock of who you are as an organization, then try your best to capture that within the words you use on your website.

Search engine algorithms (the internal logic search engines use to make search decisions) are always changing as the conditions on the Web change. So, if your site has been out there for awhile, it is likely that between your launch date and now, the search engines have changed somewhat. Plus, new companies continually come online, so the competition has increased. In order to always keep up with search engines you should plan to periodically refresh the way your site is optimized for searches, which now needs to be very, very specific.

Here is what you should do right now if you want to improve your search engine standing:

1. For selected pages of your website, you should optimize each page to match a specific search phrase. For example, if you are an engineering firm located in North Carolina that designs wastewater treatment facilities, let’s consider a page that talks about your “Wastewater Treatment Services”. If most people are searching for “wastewater treatment North Carolina” then this specific page should be optimized to match that search phrase. This means that the Page Title (at the top of the browser), the Meta Keywords (in the code), the Meta Description (in the code), the Alt Tags (under the photos), the headline text, and the body text should incorporate the search terms “wastewater treatment North Carolina” in a reasonable format. Once that is done, the page is optimized for that search phrase. So, what you need to consider is what is the ideal search phrase for all of the key pages of your website. Then the pages need to be optimized for those terms. This means you will not come up if people search on a different phrase, but that’s the way the competition works… so you need to take the search phrases seriously and research them.

2. Google’s Webmaster Tools, which are available to all web developers online, should be used to create a “site map” that is then submitted to Google. This should be done after all of your pages have been optimized for the desired search phrases.

3. Having your site cross-linked to other industry or other business sites also improves your search standing. This means that if your firm is listed in the online directories of industry organizations, or actually any other online business directory, it is to your benefit in terms of searching. So, another example relating to the wastewater industry, if your firm is listed in the APWA website listing for wastewater in North Carolina, it helps you.

4. A relatively new factor in influencing search results is the use of social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. For example, if your employees are using LinkedIn and your website is linked to from each of your employees’ LinkedIn page, that helps you in terms of being linked to. Also, many companies have a LinkedIn page, or a Twitter account. In fact, the use of social media as a part of your marketing strategy is becoming a big business. At any rate, because of the emerging impact of social media, search engines appear to be giving added weight to those media when they generate search results.

As you can see, the strategic approach and implementation of true search engine optimization can be fairly complex. That’s why many businesses spend quite a bit of money on Search Engine Optimization (usually referred to as SEO). Also, you have to be patient because changes made today can take months to show up in search engines. And then, once you begin to improve, to hang on to your improvement it’s a good idea to update your optimization to keep up with changes in the search environment.

What About SEM?
Businesses also spend quite a bit of money on Search Engine Marketing (usually referred to as SEM). SEM is different from SEO in a similar way that PR is different from advertising. In PR, you put information out there and try to influence people’s thinking with information and strategy. In advertising, you create an ad and pay for space and try to influence people that way. In SEM, people use tools like Google AdWords to buy advertising space on search pages. When you do a search on Google, there are listings that appear at the top and on the right side of the search results page that are paid ads. That is one way to make sure your company comes up when someone types in a specific search phrase. What you do is pay to have your listing come up when that specific phrase is typed in. Obviously, SEM can be much more involved than that… this is a basic explanation because this article is really about SEO and the “organic” search results for which we all are trying to optimize. It is the organic search results that users typically click on anyway.

Give Us a Call
We hope you find this helpful. If you would like to discuss SEO more, or if you would like for us to help you optimize your site to improve your search results, we’d be happy to. Give us a call at 503.977.5130.

Establish a Solid Foundation

Make sure your website looks good and includes all basic information about your firm and its capabilities. Everyone sees your website. When they see it, they form an opinion of you. Your site should accurately reflect your firm. It should portray the level of quality you offer your clients.

From a basic content standpoint, as a minimum your site should provide information about your firm’s services, capabilities, experience, people and culture. And don’t hide your contact information.

Make Sure Your Site Can Be Found

Your site needs to be optimized for search engines. This process is somewhat complex, but the individual page set-up is fairly straightforward though time consuming. It involves coordinating your page titles, text and content tags, and getting cross-linked as effectively as you can. The process can, however, be a bit more challenging if you have a Flash site. If your site was built well originally, it may already be optimized. If not, you’ll benefit from getting it done.

Provide Content Useful to Your Clients

Your clients hire you for your information, insights and solutions. Your website should be an extention of this type of thinking. Look for opportunities to add value to your site by including content your clients will find useful.

Traditional value-added content includes technical papers, white papers, presentations or similar demonstrations of expertise. These features are still effective and should not be discounted.

A simple way to provide quality information is to highlight the challenges and solutions for your projects. This sounds simple, but if you take the time to distill useful information from your site’s existing content, you will increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.

You also can provide value through the use of interactive content elements that allow site visitors to study a subject in their own way. This can be a very effective tool, especially if the subject matter is somewhat complex.

If you’ve been considering a blog, you may want to go ahead and add it. Blogs provide an informal means of keeping clients up-to-date on developments of all types… economic, regulatory, technical, whatever. You can avoid creating too much of a writing burden by having multiple principals or technical professionals provide content.

Bring People to Your Site

Now that you’ve done the work and made your site as good as you can get it, you need to market it.

Put your web address on everything. Make sure your key staff are using networking tools like LinkedIn, commenting on blogs, participating in online discussions, and generally taking advantage of as many opportunities as possible to network and reach out electronically. Start sending out your eNews on a regular basis.

You don’t want your electronic newsletters to be self-contained. You want them to bring people to your website. Make them short and link them back to the latest bit of value-added content you just posted.

Never underestimate the value of your website.

When we moved our business from Kansas City to Portland, we knew we were moving to one of America’s most ardent centers for sustainable living… from agriculture to recycling to LEED buildings. What we didn’t know was how deep sustainability’s roots go here. Every client we have worked with in Portland has touched on the subject of sustainability.

Reclaiming Neighborhoods || Located in Southeast Portland, Roots Realty works to find homes for people who love Portland and its many colorful neighborhoods. As we worked with Roots to develop their website, we learned how dedicated they are to reclaiming older homes and rebuilding inner city neighborhoods. Their own offices reflect this dedication with an extensive laundry list of sustainable attributes, which include retrofitting an oil furnace to heat their building using B99 Biodiesel which is over 99 percent renewable plant based oil, specifically non-GMO canola oil grown in Eastern Oregon. Their system even uses a locally made recycled steel fuel storage tank.

Finding Beauty in Nature || We also developed a website for Marsh & Fear Garden Solutions, a landscape design firm located in Portland’s John’s Landing neighborhood on the western bank of the Willamette River. Anne Marsh and Gary Fear are dedicated gardeners who work to bring their love of gardening and the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest to homes in the Portland region. Their knowledge of native plants is immense, which we learned first hand when they took us hiking in the Columbia River Gorge and pointed out all of the native species – from rhodies to bleeding hearts – that have always made their home in Oregon.

Reducing Your Footprint || Clearly, the most direct involvement we’ve had with sustainability came from our effort to develop and design a presentation on Portland’s green building leadership. We worked with PAE Engineers, Portland State University and the Portland chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council to prepare the supporting media for a talk PAE and PSU representatives gave at the international GreenBuild Conference in Chicago which told the story behind PSU’s LEED buildings (four currently and more in the works).

Sustainable systems are important to us. And we’re happy to be a part of what’s happening here in sustainable Portland.

It was 1993 when Lisa and I began work on our first interactive CD program. I was a director of marketing for a national architecture/engineering firm, and Lisa was an art director for a graphic design firm.

Our initial program incorporated text, graphics, video, audio, animation and photography, and was set up to operate on a touch-screen kiosk at a transportation engineering tradeshow. I planned and wrote the content and produced and directed the audio and video programming. Lisa designed the user interface and programmed the interactivity. She also designed the tradeshow booth where the kiosk was located.

It was exciting to work on that first project, and over the next four or five years we produced another ten or fifteen more CDs.

We didn’t develop our first website until 1995 (the year Netscape went public), but by the turn of the century, with a few notable exceptions, our web work had almost completely supplanted our work on interactive CDs.

Everyone wanted to be on the web, and the web just couldn’t support rich media interactivity. So we were forced to wait for the day the two technologies merged. Well, that day has arrived, and multimedia interactivity is back.

Hitting the Target || The new ThinkKC.com website is a multi-faceted tool that KCADC uses to communicate with its vastly varied audiences. The different sections of the site provide information targeted to KCADC’s primary target audiences, which include site location specialists, the local investor community, career seekers and the media.

The site, which we developed working in tandem with a separate back-end programming group, incorporates a variety of Flash modules, extensive databases, a robust calendar application, an on-the-fly PDF file generator, RSS feeds and a content management system.

Making Flash Work Harder || A good example of how this functionality supports a recognized target audience can be found in the map of the cities and counties comprising the KC metro area. On the metro map, users can click on a city or county, and a Flash script pulls some sample data from KCADC’s city and county database into a snapshot window. Then if the user want more information, they can click to a dynamically generated page that lists the full dataset for that municipality.

Finding a Practical Solution || Another unique solution was found for the data profiles of the metro. Since the research that provides the data comes from so many different sources and exists in so many different formats, it wasn’t practical to try to put it in a database. Instead, each section of the various profiles was referenced, and a PDF generator was used to create downloadable PDF documents from the profile elements a user selects.

And one of the most interesting aspects of this project is that this site is at the very beginning of its ultimate evolution. The site’s foundation has been built in a manner that will make it easy to build on as new technologies emerge and resources become available.