Tag Archives: websites

Not Online? Not A Real Brand.

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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.

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WordPress 3.0 Beta 1

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WordPress Logo 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.

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The Three C’s of Web Strategy

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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.

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Googlebot Timing

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I’ve heard zenni_googlebot 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.)