Websitetology

Learn everything you need to know about how Google sends customers your way- and how to get to that first page without using any Search Engine Optimization voodoo. If you think you need to know HTML to build an effective website- and have avoided it, this seminar is for you.

We teach how the web has changed thanks to search and building new web 2.0 sites using open source content management systems like Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal- so that anyone who has access to the internet and a browser can build and maintain their own site.

Don’t pay a “web developer” crazy money to get the site you need- take the Websitetology seminar and be up and running in no time.

Sign up online: http://www.websitetology.com/?page_id=247

We’re scheduled to hold the seminar at The Next Wave, 100 Bonner Street Dyaton Oh 45410, but, we move when we need a bigger room due to popularity of the seminar. We begin at 8:30 sharp- break for lunch around noon- and reconvene at 1:30. The afternoon is focused on using the easiest of the content management systems- Wordpress. We’ll show you how to quote other content online, build links and relationships with other high value sites- and make your site the best investment your business has ever made.

We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday, Aug 25th 2009. Please sign up now, so we can verify room arrangements.

Some clients can’t understand the value of HTML- and still want pretty pictures of their PDFs. This little tutorial is the ticket if you want to actually display a PDF in your post:

These are the steps to embed PDF files into a page or post for clients, enabling a visitor to read the PDF document right from the page. The process of embedding PDF files into a WordPress post is fairly simple, assuming your using a WordPress version later than 2.6.- click the following link to see the full instructions

via Embed PDF in WordPress.

You can also make a stock icon- like the Adobe Acrobat document icon, store it in your media library- and then link to the image, which should allow faster page views.

Websitetology  is a seminar about using the web for successfully making new business connections. We teach how the web works, how search works, and how to use open source content management systems like WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal to help you make a successful home on the web.

Conventional advertising and branding is suffering from the effects of over-exposure and fragmentation. The key is to find a community and build relationships. This story of how a small winery employed social media to grow their business is a perfect example of what we teach:

Stormhoek was a tiny South African winery when the company began working with UK blogger Hugh MacLeod to develop a social media strategy. MacLeod started working with Stormhoek in May of 2005, and by the end of the year, the winery’s sales had doubled. Besides dipping its toes in the blogging waters, in 2005, Stormhoek also launched an interesting campaign where it gave away 100 free bottles of wine to 100 bloggers in the UK, Ireland, and France. The bloggers were under no obligation to write about the wine or Stormhoek, but many did both, and the company’s awareness among bloggers skyrocketed.

In 2006, Stormhoek expanded on the ‘give wine away to bloggers’ idea, by setting up ‘Geek Dinners’, where bloggers around the United States throw their own parties, with Stormhoek providing the wine for free. This idea just further raised Stormhoek’s presence in the blogosphere.

So what’s the end result from all this for Stormhoek? Hugh MacLeod, speaking at last year’s South by Southwest festival, stated that before Stormhoek started blogging and involving bloggers in its marketing efforts, that the winery sold around 40,000 cases of wine a year. When MacLeod spoke at SXSW in March of 2007, he stated that the company was at that point selling 40,000 cases of wine a WEEK.

via So Does Blogging Really Work? Here’s the Proof. – Search Engine Guide Blog.

Although we still believe in empowering clients to do their own blogging (who knows your business better than you) we can help get you started.

This post would have been a lot more interesting if all the sites using WordPress were linked-but, I believe that the list is probably right. My only question is why haven’t any of these government agencies hired The Next Wave to do their sites- since we are an SDVOB and HUBzone?

Here is a list (probably not all-inclusive) of United States government agencies or organizations using WordPress (whether privately or publicly):

* Air Force

* Army

* Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

* Coast Guard

* Defense Intelligence Agency

* Department of Energy

* Department of Homeland Security

* Department of State

* Department of Treasury

* Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)

* Marine Corps

* Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

* National Geospatial Intelligence Agency

* National Reconnaissance Agency

* National Security Agency (NSA)

* Navy

This list was revealed at WordCamp San Francisco, 2008.

U.S. Government Agencies Using WordPress « Mark on WordPress.

While the seasoned WP person can usually tell if a site is done in WP or not- some rookies can’t tell. An easy way to find out is just try adding /wp-admin after the primary URL and see if it takes you to the login panel.

As professional web developers of both the Joomla! and Wordpress Content Management Systems (CMS) we come across many different surveys and comparisons of the two. Water and Stone poses the question “What is the most popular open source content management system?” and actually uses statistics to provide an unbiased report.

If you’ve ever wondered if Wordpress and Joomla! truly are the best pieces of software that we could be using, then take a look at this survey. In the first few pages you’ll read “that three systems have come to dominate the present market: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.” But don’t just take that as proof, look at some of the stats that are given throughout the 51 page paper.

Search Engine Visibility

The Next Wave’s core competency compared to other web hosting and design firms in the Dayton area is that we focus on getting our clients on the front page of Google. Sure, you can have a great looking website, but if no one can see it what’s the point? So, one of the first thing we looked for in this survey was any information on search engine ranking for Wordpress and Joomla!.

Joomla! comes out on top with more than 1 million inbound searched links at the time of the survey, with Wordpress right behind with 403,000. Notice phpnuke and MediaWiki with more than a million links as well, however these are “black hat” search engine optimization techniques that were implemented to create and keep inbound links permanent to skew search.

Do a search for “Content Management System”, and Joomla! comes up second in Google. A search for “Blog Software” (or a variant of that) and Wordpress is right up there on top. This just shows that the websites that provide these two are strong in search engine optimization and Google loves to read from them. If you have a website powered by them, Google will love your site too (provided you continually update).

You can also see what people are searching for on Google, and the results that turn up for those searches. The top two systems? You guessed it, Wordpress and Joomla! with a huge margin of difference from the third CMS on the list Drupal.

Ratings

OpenSourceCMS.com has a list of all of these and allows visitors to rate and comment on the various ones that are in use. For ratings, Wordpress comes out on top with a rating of 4.4 out of 5. Joomla!’s up there too, with 4.2 out of 5.

Brand Strategy

“The open source CMS market is maturing and, with the increase in competition, the competitive landscape is changing. The historical leaders have been supplanted by new names. The data collected in this portion of the survey shows that in almost every way the mind share in today’s market is dominated by just three brands: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.”

Wordpress and Joomla! are at the top of everything in this survey. Their branding is superb and still growing, their ranks and ratings are high above the rest of the pack, and both have HUGE community groups that help to make the two CMS’s more stable, more flexible, and even better for web development than other systems. The next time someone says that Joomla! and Wordpress aren’t good for web design, tell them otherwise. The facts are there, leading edge developers realize these systemsenable amazing work for clients in at minimum- half the time as building a website from scratch.

Read this, read it again if you want to. Print it out and pass it to your co-workers or show it to your boss so that he/she will let you start using Wordpress or Joomla!. And if you’re interested in learning more about the systems, come to our next Websitetology seminar and we’ll give you the crash course that will set your business on top.

Download: Open Source CMS Survey

Once your site gets popular, the next problem is comment spam. It’s all Google’s fault for giving points to inbound links- no mater what the connection (give or take). Spammers will say the stupidist things just to get a link back to their site- or even something innocuous like “Nice site, I’ll be back” or some other compliment that adds nothing to the conversation. These suck- because if you have people subscribed to comments- they all get these stupid messages as well.

Spam Karma 2 is still the mac daddy of all spam killers in our book- but, it’s lead developer, Dr. Dave has decided to throw in the towel- which is really too bad. Too many WordPress updates were making his life a living hell. It’s too bad the core dev team believes it’s their way or the highway- because his spam killer works better than Akismet (from the developers of WordPress, which has a funky license- it’s not quite free).

Mollom is in Beta- and my friend D’Arcy Norman is giving it a test run. So far, it’s not SK2- but, remember- that’s what Beta means. Here’s what they say on the Mollom site:

The web is changing. User contribution is now what makes or breaks a site. Allowing users to react, participate and contribute while still keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop comment and contact form spam. When moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your web community. Mollom is currently in public beta.

Home | Mollom.

There are different philosophies on comment moderation- we tend to recommend that you let spam filtered comments post automatically- as soon as they’ve been screened by your filter- no human intervention. Every once in a while something gets through- but, in general, the speed of conversation gets your network going faster than waiting for you to moderate.

Many corporations are scared to let the unmoderated comments post- but, that’s bunk. If they want to say something crappy about your brand- they’ll either say it on your site, or elsewhere- where you may not be able to respond or correct it.

Over at the WordPress Codex you will find an overview of WordPress 2.7’s (potentially) upcoming features.

A number of additions to this new version will be good news to the people who develop WordPress themes and WordPress plugins, but we discovered several notable entries that will be of interest to users and administrators.

1. The ability for readers to subscribe to a post’s comments is now part of the core, and does not require the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin (a plugin we install on every one of our client’s sites!).
2. Sitemaps, a file format developed by Google, is a very powerful tool for informing search engines (not just Google) about where your content is, what it is, and how frequently it’s updated. Currently, in WordPress 2.6, a plugin is needed to automate this process; WordPress 2.7 will apparently make this part of the core. We can only speculate if the same level of functionality will be present in the core implementation versus the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin that we use.
3. In WordPress 2.6 and below, comments on posts have no heirarchy, and how one reader “responds” to another reader is not dealt with in any officially sanctioned manner – it’s basically a flat listing of comments. The Codex entry hints at “comment threading”, which potentially means comments can be nested, like a message board. This might be a dream come true for sites with large, active communities.
4. Geotagging is growing in popularity, and it gets a mention in the Codex. How this will be implemented is currently an unknown, but for some bloggers, especially those who use their WordPress site to organize events, could really benefit from a unified way to introduce geodata into their posts.
5. Lastly, we see “versioning of template edits”. We surmise that this means template editing from the Dashboard will have some form of version control, like Posts do in 2.6, and ultimately, it implies enhanced theme editing abilities in the Design section of the Dashboard. For people like us who do frequently template wrangling, this might be one of the best things to happen to WordPress since its original conception!

We will keep posting as we learn more about WordPress 2.7.

If you’re interested in how you can leverage WordPress/blogging to increase your online visibility, we humbly suggest you take our inexpensive, informative, one day seminar – Websitetology.

We just found the new WordPress statistics plugin Cystats, and have fallen in love with it. This is a powerful little tool that we found  searching through the 83  statistics plugins listed in the Wordpress directory. It’s so powerful that it even has stuff that Google Web Analytics doesn’t have- and displays it all, in your dashboard to help you analyze your Wordpress site.

Cystats plugin is easy to install and set up;upload the files to your wp-content/plugins directory, and then activate it in the backend. You’ll immediately be able to see the most commented and visited pages and posts, as well as start recording visitor trending, searchbot visits, search strings, top referrers and more. There’s even a way to see the screen resolution and web browser that your visitors are using to view your website (mobile views should be going up too).

You can download Cystats by clicking the link below. Here’s a screenshot :

Cystats Plugin Download

It was the inagural event, so of course, the details on how to share your presentation (as required) weren’t made clear to the presenters, nor is there a directory of them on the PodCampOhio site.

Here is the presentation from Google Love- if you were there, it’ll help you remember the 50 minutes of non-stop Web 2.0 action. It was really nice to get all the positive feedback from people in my session. If you weren’t able to make it- we do the whole day thing at least monthly in Dayton, or can come to your town to speak to your group.

I’m used to having spell as you type provided by Firefox. It’s had it since Firefox 2.0- and because of that, I’ve never used the Spell Check built into Wordpress.

Well, I’ve noticed that while Firefox’s spell check works fine in Gmail and on other websites, it’s not working in Wordpress 2.5.1. I’m going to check it out on a few other machines, but on my MacBook running 10.5.3, I have to manually check spelling with the WordPress spell check when I’m posting.

This will take some getting used to.

If you are also having the same problem with Firefox 3 not spellchecking in WordPress- please leave a comment with your version of Wordpress and your operating system. It will help me gather info for a bug report.