EvoBloggito

National Assistance Dog Week Website Launched

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jun 29, 2010; Category: Content Management System, WordPress; Tags: Blogsites, CMS, Website Launch, WordPress; No Comments

Visit assistancedogweek.org»

We recently (earlier today) launched another site with a WordPress-based content management system, this one for National Assistance Dog Week. The annual event was created through the efforts of Marcie Davis (workinglikedogs.com) to recognize devoted, hardworking assistance dogs helping individuals mitigate their disability related limitations.

While the site was launched a bit late (the event takes place approximately 6 weeks from launch), the site was built in just 8 days, from design to launch. Of course, like all sites, it’s a work in progress, and content will continue to be added. With WordPress of course, that’s no problem.

Behind the scenes, we’re still working on creating and testing custom post types in anticipation of event listings that will take place nationally. No doubt we’ll learn some interesting things in the process; we’ll report on our experience with that as we complete the work.

It’s Time for “Old Marketing” Types to Come Over to “New Marketing”

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jun 26, 2010; Category: Marketing, Zeitgeist; Tags: Communication, Marketing, New Rules, Zeitgeist; No Comments

Old Marketing used to just be “marketing,” before there was “new marketing” to serve as a comparison. Old marketing—which includes Yellow Pages adverstising, newspaper advertising, and all forms of broadcast advertising—is still valid for a lot of businesses. And an entire industry (advertising) came into being to support that kind of marketing. But it’s no longer the only game in town.

Since the internet became a place in which people could connect, marketing opportunities have sprung up in that space. As you well know if you’ve opened a browser in the last 5 years, all of the marketing on the internet is not being done well. In fact, some of it is pretty awful. But what would we expect of a medium in which the barriers to entry—in terms of cost and expertise—are so low? Often, it’s marketing by the lowest common denominator for the lowest common denominator.

So of course, the new marketing space is often ridiculed (largely an expression of misunderstanding and fear) by people who make their living in old marketing. Those people need to get over it. The internet is a legitimate marketing space for one reason: that’s where a large part of a lot of companies’ markets are spending their time, rather than reading newspapers or the Yellow Pages or listening to the radio or watching television (all declining industries).

Old marketers have some useful skills that could be put to use on the internet, once they take the time and go to the effort of learning the new rules. Once learned, these rules can be broken for specific reasons. Break the rules without understanding what and why they are, and crashing and burning is the likely outcome (Oh! The humanity!). And, of course, that’s what usually happens when old marketing assumptions are brought to the internet.

The opportunities that exist for companies and old marketing types on the internet exist not only because that’s where people are, but also because it’s not often being done very well. Better concepts, better copy, and better images that communicate better would be raise the bar for online marketing.

But I’m not challenging old marketing types to come over because they’re needed on the internet. Frankly, they’re not.

I’m challenging old marketing types to become knowledgeable, competent, and comfortable with internet marketing because if they’re not, they’re doing their clients a disservice. Presenting clients only with old marketing solutions is a little like being a caddy with only a driver and a wedge in the bag. And it’s also a good way to watch your own market shrink.

Why I’m announcing a site redesign, even though I think redesign announcements are lame.

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jun 20, 2010; Category: Content Management System, Design/Development, WordPress; Tags: Design/Development, WordPress, WordPress Themes; One Comment

When I see announcements about website redesign, my reaction is either a yawn or, if I’m feeling more energetic, a quick mental note: “So what?” So it’s more than a little ironic that I’m announcing the redesign of my own website, evowebdev.com. But after all, what are blogs for, if not to tell your readers what’s going on with you, particularly if it may have value for them?

The value for my readers (I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing) is perhaps the realization that WordPress, on which the site is based, is fundamentally a solid, reliable, flexible web design and development platform for business websites. While this is not the first version of this site on WordPress, the redesign was very different. In the past, redesign meant “rebuild” as much as redesign. This time, I was able to focus almost entirely on design and messaging: there was nothing to rebuild (although I did upgrade to WordPress 3.0).

In New Mexico, including Santa Fe and Albuquerque (generally regarded as reasonably sophisticated), developers and designers have been slow to catch on to WordPress as a web development platform. Lots of them have created a blog or two with it, but not many have embraced it as a content management system (CMS) for full-blown websites. I had a difficult time this spring finding other local WordPress developers interested in hosting a WordCamp, so I shelved my hope of having WordCamp Albuquerque as premature (maybe in 2011).

Meanwhile, nationally, WordPress is catching on like wildfire as a development platform. Even major companies use it. WordPress has emerged as a leading CMS; in terms of numbers of websites and developers supporting it, it has achieved critical mass that allows companies to have confidence that it’s a stable and solid platform.

And, of course, it’s famously easy for WordPress website owners to update their own sites.

If your website is still static, it’s time to think about moving to WordPress. But don’t think about it too long, or you’ll be behind the crowd.

Evo Launches Energy4me Website on WordPress

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jun 12, 2010; Category: WordPress; Tags: Design/Development, Information Architecture, WordPress; No Comments

Visit energy4me.org»

Evo recently launched Energy4me.org, the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ education outreach website, on WordPress. It’s a pretty big site, content-wise, and it required us to grow as WordPress developers (that’s our favorite kind of website) to accomplish some of the functions that were needed.

Our clients, SPE’s Darci Ramirez and Margaret Watson, were wonderful to work with. These are people who do things on schedule and do them well. People who ask your advice and value it enough to incorporate most of it (whatever, in their judgment, makes sense). People who respect your experience and knowledge. People who pay invoices on time. Dream clients, in other words.

“Evolution Web Development surpassed our website strategy and design expectations,” said Margaret Watson, Senior Manager, PR/Communication. “Evo is the only website design firm, large or small, that offered us a creative, out-of-the-box solution that truly addressed our business objectives to help us achieve our goals.”

The website’s audience is primarily elementary and secondary-level teachers, providing information about various energy sources and careers, as well as lesson plans and educational materials. Secondarily, the site provides resources for SPE members in support of their education outreach efforts, including school presentations, career events, and scholarships. Because SPE is an international organization, some information is provided on the website in six languages: Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, in addition to English.

Ecommerce was implemented, but then pulled back just prior to launch when there was an issue with FedEx furnishing negotiated rates to FoxyCart, the shopping cart, to add appropriate shipping costs. Hopefully, that will soon be ironed out and we can turn the switch back on for online purchases of the Oil & Natural Gas book and the Energy4me Kit.

At any rate, this was a great site to have an opportunity to work on. Most people who’ve seen it “get” that WordPress is more than a blog platform.

Help from a LinkedIn Group: Ordering WordPress Custom Field Items

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: May 21, 2010; Category: Design/Development; Tags: LinkedIn, WordPress; No Comments

In general, I’m not as thrilled with LinkedIn as I had hoped I’d be. Like a lot of social media platforms, it draws its share of spammers, shills, and snake-oil salespeople. However, one LinkedIn group I belong to has proven itself to be of benefit time and again: the WordPress group. I’ve gotten useful answers for several WordPress issues I’ve faced over the last several months. There are some really capable and helpful people in the group. I was once given a solution to a problem by Mike Little, who I recognized only later is the guy who, with Matt Mullenweg, started the WordPress project.

Most recently, I needed a way to order WordPress custom fields easily (easily enough that it made sense to clients who would have to maintain their site). By default, custom field items are displayed in the order in which they are created. This is a problem if you want to add a new item and display it at the top of the list.

Mike Schinkel, a web marketing strategist from Atlanta, stepped in with a solution. (How cool is that? I can get coding assistance from someone several hundred miles away!) Mike Schinkel is one of the more active and helpful folks on the LinkedIn WordPress group, and he’s worth connecting with and following. He runs a WordPress business conference (among other conferences) and is Executive Director of Startup Atlanta. I’d guess he’s fairly busy, but he takes time help people like me with limited coding skills.

His solution is so clean and simple I wanted to share it here. One of the beauties of it is that, not only does it organize the custom field items on the page in the order you want, but it also organizes the items in order in the page admin area, taking advantage of WordPress’ default alpha organization.

Essentially, you create custom field items with names like so: item-1, item-2, item-3, etc. As you might guess, item-1 is meant to show first on the custom field listing. Want to make item-1 show second? Change the custom field name to item-2, then rename the other items to complete the reorganization (you can’t have more than one value for each name in this scenario).

On the page template, the code to call the items in order looks like this:

<?php
     for($i=1; true; $i++) {
     $item = get_post_meta($post->ID, "item-$i", true);
     if (empty($item))
     break;
     echo '<div class="itemdiv">'.$item.'</div>';
    }
?>

I used this to display thumbnails and a short description for artwork on a recently launched artist’s website. As she adds new pieces, or if she decides to emphasize different pieces on a category page, she can easily rename the existing custom fields to reorganize items.

One of the caveats of this solution is that the custom field names must start with -1 and be sequential. Going from "item-1" to "item-3", with no "item-2", breaks it.