This week saw the launch of our new look website at work Adnams.co.uk. A proud moment for me as it was the culmination of 6 months of work involving many different people within the company. It was also based on a vision of allowing customers to easily move from one sector of the business to another online. Exposing parts of the business to them that they may not necessarily have been aware of. Allowing them to communicate with the company easily and through many touch points. Using images, video and the written word to express the essence of the company.
Internally it was to also give employees a voice, allowing them to highlight their experiences, express their passion and present their opinion. Of course there is commercial intent but it is more than that, it is an attempt at creating an experience that extends beyond the visit to the local pub, a trip to Southwold or the act of purchasing wine in one of our shops.
Did we succeed? Maybe, time will tell, but it’s not the technology that is going to get us there. WordPress was the base of the site. It was heavily themed and customised with plugins of various types to allow us to structure content the way we wanted, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter integrated to bring content from other channels. And it will be the content that drives the success; structure and design can only provide so much.
A lot of the reason I write this blog is to remind myself how important content is. How difficult it can be to produce, to maintain consistency and quality. Often we run off to build the next Google only to realise that without the content Google is just a logo and a search box on the screen.
In my next video guide to the non-technical way of setting up a WordPress blog I introduce you to installing WordPress plugins. The three I have chosen for this demonstration enable you to install Google Analytics, create Google XML site maps and further improve the Search Engine Optimisation of your blog.
When starting out a blog there is nothing more disheartening than to think you have just received lots of comments on your last blog post only to find that most of them are spam!
Although it takes time to build traffic to your new blog for some reason spammers have no trouble finding it at all. In the following tutorial I take you through the process of setting up the Akismet plugin that helps prevent spam comments. It comes already installed with WordPress and takes only a few minutes to configure, but will save you lots of wasted time later on managing spam comments.
If you have any comments or questions on this video please feel free to leave them below.
Last time I showed you how to easily install WordPress in under 3 minutes, in the following video I will guide you through 5 basic steps for configuring your blog. These steps ensure your WordPress install is upto date, that important information is visible and that your blog is ready to be found in the search engines.
As with all my guides no technical knowledge is required, perfect for SME’s. If you have any questions or comments please leave a note below.
In my last post I talked through why I believe every small business should have a blog, today I will demonstrate how easy it is to setup your own WordPress blog without any technical knowledge. In the following video I take you through the WordPress installation process step by step:
Please see the notes below for more information on points mentioned in the video, if these don’t answer your queries please ask questions by commenting on this post:
Sometimes in business we know what is the right thing to do but still overlook it or do something else instead. This is never more true than when it comes to using the web to promote a small businesses. Little thought or planning is given to a new web site, copy and graphics are usually the same as those used for printed media and 2 months later the business owner is asking why they are not number 1 in Google for “eating out in London”.
Yet launching online is as crucial a part of a small businesses overall strategy as is competitor analysis.
Which probably explains why people so surprised at the success of Facebook & Twitter and all of the businesses that have grown on the back of them. The principles of these two applications, and the web itself, are perfectly natural to human beings. The desire for knowledge and to communicate, which these provide.
It’s because of this natural tendency I firmly believe that every small business should have a blog. A blogging platform allows you to publish information and enables communication in a very easy and cost effective way, plus it can interact seamlessly with Facebook & Twitter. A blog is a natural extension of you and your business online, it acts as the central point around which lead generation and sales can be won, or lost. It defines your area and level of expertise and allows you to present your product or service to the end user/customer without commitment. There are a few more technical reasons why a blog is the right platform but these will be covered in a future post.
In the coming weeks I will show you how to:
Set up hosting
Launch your blog
Create content – not just copy
Promote your business
Reach new customers
And to assure you, you will need no technical knowledge or copywriting skills to do this. The fact that you already run a business and happen to be reading this are all the skills required.
WordPress just gets better with every release and the recent major update, version 2.9 is no exception.
This release now includes a solution for what has been for me one of the most trying parts of a content management system, image editing. No matter how simple a web site is to update, for those with no technical knowledge, image manipulation and uploading can still prove a challenge. I have seen many client sites over the years suffer because of poor image management. Let’s face it, it’s a skill in it’s own right.
The Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images. WordPress say this is the first of many media-handling improvements to come.
As if that wasn’t enough WordPress now supports video embedding straight out if the box. Up to this point you would need a plugin or to copy and paste the embed code to include video from 3rd party sites such as YouTube.
Now you can just copy and paste the video URL straight into your blog post, WordPress will then replace it with the appropriate code to display the video. The list of supported video sites is extensive and includes YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv with more sites to be announced in future releases.
With video becoming increasingly popular with bloggers I am sure we’ll see further enhancements to this functionality. We’ve used it here to display the WordPress 2.9 update video from WordPress.tv.
There are many more great features in the 2.9 update, pop over to WordPress for more details. Be sure to upgrade your blog soon.
For those of you that know me you will know that I won’t hesitate to recommend WordPress to any business looking to build a new website. It’s design flexibility through Themes, built-in content management and multitude of plugins, not to mention the fact it’s free, should put it high on the list for consideration.
With choice and flexibility sometimes comes procrastination. Deciding what the site should look like and which plugins you need, or think you need, can leave you looking for the perfect set-up rather than launching your blog and promoting your business.
My list of 5 essential plugins will ensure you have all you need to get started:
This plugin actually comes pre-loaded by default. It’s purpose is to minimise comment spam. No matter how hard you find it to get traffic to your site, the spammers seem to find it within days. A shiny new blog is is like a magnet for them and once they find you they’ll bombard your site with spam comments. Askimet will filter most of these for you automatically, register at WordPress.com to get an API key to activate the plugin.
Allows you to easily add Google Analytics tracking to your blog so you can get comprehensive visitor statstics. Just create an Analytics account at Google and copy the unique code for your site into the Analyticator plugin and the rest is taken care of. In the latest version you can even see the latest stats on your WordPress Admin Dashboard.
An XML sitemap makes life easier for search engines such as Google to crawl new content on your site and is an essential component for Search Engine Optimisation. This plugin will generate an XML sitemap not only for Goolge but also for Yahoo, ASK and MSN – then submits it to these sites every time you add a post or update.
WordPress is search engine friendly straight out of the box but this plug-in performs some enhancements and also allows you to further tweak your onsite SEO as you gain more experience.
With a blog it is not necessary for people to visit your site every time they want to read new content. If they have subscribed to your RSS feed they will receive updates via their feedreader, this also means you won’t know they are reading your content from your analytics. By using this plugin along with FeedBurner, now run by Google, you will be able to track the number of subscribers you have to your RSS feed and a bunch of other stats too.
With these plugins in place you can now get on with the important job of producing content. You can always add other plugins as you find you need them.
This week saw the launch of our new look website at work Adnams.co.uk. A proud moment for me as it was the culmination of 6 months of work involving many different people within the company. It was also based on a vision of allowing customers to easily move from one sector of the business to another online. Exposing parts of the business to them that they may not necessarily have been aware of. Allowing them to communicate with the company easily and through many touch points. Using images, video and the written word to express the essence of the company.
