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Getting started: Making your site dynamic.

by on January 15, 2011

So, you’ve created a great website for your business and sent an email out to friends and family letting them know you’re up and running. You’re all done… Just sit back and let the traffic come to you, right?

Not quite.

Your website is only the starting point for building your reputation, creating a community, or expanding your reach. You need to get your message out to and participate in the communities you want to reach, but if you’re not a digital native, this task can be quite daunting.

But, I have a blog (that I actually post to). Isn’t that enough?

Do you offer RSS and email subscriptions? Are you using Feedburner to optimize/publicize/monitize your feed? Are you keeping track of analytics for your feed? Are you using automated services like Twitterfeed (Twitter) or Involver (Facebook) to push your feed to Twitter or Facebook? For corporate types, have you connected your WordPress blog with your LinkedIn profile?

AAAAAAAA!!!!!

Although the list of services can seem overwhelming, the good news is that most of them require just a little bit of initial setup and then you’re done – you focus on creating content for your blog and let these services spread it the web.

A few tips…

  • Start with Feedburner. “Burn” your feed and set it up for email subscriptions.
  • Change the default feed on your website to your Feedburner feed.
    • There are several plugins available for WordPress that will handle this for you, or if you’re using WordPress+Thesis, you can set this up from the Dashboard –> Thesis –> Site Options –> Syndication/Feed URL.
  • Once your feed is setup and you’re ready to expand, I’d recommend starting with a Twitterfeed hookup to Twitter.
    • If you’re new to Twitter, make sure you spend some time familiarizing yourself with the community and general rules of posting etiquette.
    • Wendy Kier has some good advice about giving your Twitter a facelift (I especially liked #4 – Make your Tweets Rare) and you can learn all you ever wanted to know about Twitter (and then some!) from the awesome folks at Pistachio Consulting.

You can, of course, continue the process with Facebook and LinkedIn and, depending on your business, you even may want to get involved in location-based services like Google Places, Foursquare, or Gowalla, or review sites like Yelp.

Still confused? Contact us for help.

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From Wiki to WordPress

by on February 15, 2010

Peg board set
Image via Wikipedia

Here’s some history and background before you get started.

I’m working with a non-profit to develop and implement a platform for their members that will make it easier for them to organize, coordinate, and communicate with each other. We’ve been testing a couple of wiki solutions, but have run into three basic scenarios:

  • Hosted + good support + high cost ($6-10/mo/user). Hmm, 500+ members * $10/mo…. Yeah, not sustainable.
  • Hosted + no support + no cost. Ok, it’s not really *no* support, it’s forum/community support which means that someone (typically me) has to dig around to find the answers. And, in this specific case, the company may be shutting down this product altogether to focus on their enterprise products (i.e., they want to get paid and make money. I understand.)
  • Not hosted + no support + no cost. I’m the most technical person in the organization and getting one of these setup (not to mention maintaining it) makes my head hurt.

So, if we need a hosted, web-based, editable platform to help us organize, coordinate, and communicate, where does that leave us?

WordPressMU

Logo for WordPress MUWordPressMU is the multi-user version of WordPress.org. It’s what WordPress.com runs on. It does everything WordPress does, plus scales to millions of pageviews, allows unlimited users and blogs, and allows different permissions on different blogs. All for free.

Ok. Not really free. You do have to host it somewhere, but the software itself *is* free.

Instead of wiki “pages”, we can have blog “posts” and web “pages”. The site remains editable, but with flexible permissioning and the ability to take the whole site private (by requiring visitors to be logged in). And, since a core function of blogging software is to publish/push content to its readers, we don’t have to find a kludge-y way (like we did with the wiki) to update the non-profit’s members. Once blogs and feeds are established, readers can subscribe to RSS or choose to receive email updates.

I’ve only been playing around with WPMU for a few days, but I love it already! Now if I can just get it working with BuddyPress (and possibly Thesis), I’ll be set…

What are your experiences with wikis? Have you considered (or ruled out) blogging software for your organization?

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The power of simple

October 7, 2009

When faced with an unfamiliar task, we’re often presented with either an obsessively detailed checklist or a hopelessly vague idea – both of which inspire a distinct feeling of dread and almost always cause preventable delays.

What are you doing to find the middle ground?

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Email versus bookmarklet blogging – a comparison of Tumblr and Posterous

July 8, 2009

Now that I’ve moved to grown-up blogging software (thank you, Wordpress!) I’ve been doing some tech-gardening to centralize my content, make sure all my URLs point to the right place and that my profiles are at least somewhat consistent (yeah, still working on this one.) And as part of this process, I’ve been reexamining some of the tools in my collection (arsenal?) to decide if I should use it or lose it. Since blogging’s on my mind, I’m going to start with this question – if my blog platform of choice is Wordpress, then where does that leave Tumblr and Posterous?

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