In the past few months, I’ve been working a lot in Joomla and WordPress content management systems for various clients. I’m not quite ready to call myself an expert (yet), but it’s getting to be that way. Recently, a couple of my clients have either a) asked me to convert their current sites to...
What's on Your Home Page?
Your Home page is the most important page of your Web site, and not just because it’s by far the most visited. It’s where first impressions are formed (the oft-quoted “where am I and what can I do here?“). It must highlight your business goals, address customer needs, be interesting, have SEO content, and...
Your Life, Online (and some extra stuff on the side)
You have to have been living under a rock to not realize that more and more of our life and work is happening online — online bill paying and banking, online socializing and networking, online radio and TV, online applications like Google docs. All within a Web browser, I can edit videos — my...
Redesigning Outside the Box
In a social networking world, where your presence on MySpace and Facebook is almost as important as your own Web site, any redesign project needs to think outside the box. Granted, offsite factors have always been part of the business marketing mix. In case you can’t afford a few Super Bowl ads, online advertising...
Usable Checklist — Ten Ways to Fix Your Web Site
When people visit your site, they need to know where am I, what can I do here, and what’s in it for me? These tips can help. 1. Branding Your logo and tagline should be easily found on your site. Just from looking at the logo and tagline, I should have a clue what...
Personalize Your Site
A while back, a friend of mine pointed out that his Web site (which is very basic) gets a fair amount of new business for his family-owned printing company. The secret: there’s a snapshot photo of him and his wife on the Home Page, and many new customers comment that they saw their photo...
Steps in the Process
One of the crucial things I cover in my Web 101 for Business seminars is an overview of the development process for building a Web site from scratch. (Those of you used to project management life cycles will recognize the basic Plan > Develop > Test > Implement > Evaluate project cycle.) In the...
What Happened to the Webmaster? (And other misleading titles)
Someone asked me the other day if I was a “Webmaster.” Ah, the flood of memories that invoked. Way back when I started working on the “Information Superhighway” (circa 1994, or as archaeologists might one day refer to it, “the Netscape Era”), the term Webmaster was in common use. At first it referred to...
Who Says a Web Site Has to Be a Pyramid? (Part Two)
If you haven’t already done so, you might read Part One of this topic. As we’ve seen, the pyramid site model might be a good place to start, but it breaks down pretty fast. Some other circumstances in which the traditional pyramid doesn’t work: Syndicated content: advanced Web content tools (such as this blog)...
Who Says a Web Site Has to Be a Pyramid? (Part One)
Traditional Web site organization is like a pyramid: the Home Page is the top point of entry, and the Home Page links to the next level down (main category navigation), and each main category page links to the next level down, and so on depending on how deep the site is. And the granularity...