Terry O’Reilly writes:

A strong sign of television’s slow fall from media supremacy came in 2005, when I was honoured to represent Canada on the first-ever Radio Lions jury. There we were told of two interesting trends: that entries in the TV ad category were down and that entries for the “Cyber Lions” category–that’s for online marketing–were up. To put this in perspective, the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival was founded on television and film in 1959, and those two media have been the flagships ever since. Until now.

Continue Reading →

I’ve just upgraded my test blog to WordPress 3.0 Beta 1, with the new default Twenty Ten Theme. It’s yet another beautiful evolution for my favorite CMS, WordPress. That’s right, I didn’t say “blogging engine”.

I’ve been using WordPress as a CMS for a while already, and no, there’s no reason a WordPress site has to look like a blog, or that it even needs to look particularly “WordPress-y,” though a lot of them tend to. The giveaway is often in the post comments area, which a great many themes do not bother to customize very extensively, though they should. (Mine is customized to a degree, even if not extensively.) I had read someplace that in 3.0 it would be easier to customize this part of a theme, but I haven’t dug that deeply. In any event, a theme developer with a modicum of php-chops should be able to hack out a custom look for it even in the old system.

Ten years ago I was educating people about what they might expect from their websites. For many medium and small businesses, it was their first website, and they wanted to know how it was going to make them money. Nowadays, a web presence has become a part of almost every business’ “price of admission”. Ten years ago, you weren’t credible without a business card and a Yellow Pages listing, and people were already seeing that before long a website would become a part of the minimum credibility standard.

I’ve heard good things about Zenni Optical, but what a bad time for the Googlebot to attempt to crawl the site. If your business depends on website uptime, you need to have a complete duplicate of the site on a separate server and a separate development environment (sometimes these can be the same, so two copies instead of three). The whole point is to minimize downtime during maintenance windows. Bad luck for Zenni. (Click to enlarge, etc.)