I’ve been developing a client’s site. In Wordpress. This is my very first commercial project on the platform. And it’s [...]]]> They have been a challenging few weeks. They? It has? With so many punctuation disasters in open play here in the English language, I fear not for this miniscule error or judgement fail on my part.

I’ve been developing a client’s site. In Wordpress. This is my very first commercial project on the platform. And it’s quite the revelation.

I’m from the old school of HTML/DHTML/XHTML/CSS. Dark arts but lovely in context when you get your head around their vaguaries. Having said all that I’m no coding ninja, not by a long way. And now I’m back in the family after some time off from the tags, I’m already bemused by the apparent loveliness of CSS 3 and the new flavour of HTML.

The site is a news one. Or at least that’s part of it.

Since Wordpress and I have been friends a fair while, I decided to look up a theme, find strains of wonderfulness within and customise it to become a magical SEO-wielding temptress for all to savour and indulge upon.

That was my initial plan.

Having spent an ungodly amount of time hunting down the ideal jumping off point; being bewitched at first by the range available, challenged by the realisation that there’s nothing truly startling out there, and finally bemused at the apparent waste of time (although I like to think of it as constructive learning) I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Premium themes, no matter how great, are ok only if you are prepared to settle for something expected, rather than groundbreaking. They’re either too flashy or too simple. I need something effective, with a fast foundation and no bloaty nonsense that doesn’t need to be there. Do people really buy premium themes with ITALICS on header texty images? Really?
   The only exception to this rule, for me, is Mimbo Pro - despite it being roughly as old as Noah (more on him later), gets my vote right now since it ticks the most boxes. But I’ve seen some frankly atrocious customisations of its layout which made me reconsider my options about 175 times.
   And I did consider some of the options from Solostream including the latest, WP-Sublime (props for packing in a superb range of subscription Calls To Action across the sites you develop, Mike), but the collection just didn’t give me the scope I need as a layman in the art to end up with a result that would satisfy both the perfectionist Virgo in me, and the client
2. In-house support for premium themes is sometimes, but not always, a step-up from those offered by freemium theme designers.
3. Frameworks appear to be the way forward for a truly innovate Wordpress solution. I absolutely love the look of Hybrid by Justin Tadlock.
   I also love the feel of Thesis but for a man with my limited abilities and an apparent allergy to ‘action hooks‘ (awesome guide and hacks how-to on the subject, if you’re feeling bold), it feels like it would always look the same as 75,000 other sites. You really have to be a true PHP god if you’re going to actually come out the other end with something that matches your needs.
4. Plugins are inherently evil. Sometimes they break your Wordpress install, sometimes they make it chug to the point where only the toilet-bound would be willing to spend time with your elephant in the corner.
5. You can get round the problems of 4 by building your own custom functions, adding funky code to hooks, etc. But it takes some serious PHP knowledge to do it.
6. There are an indecent amount of websites devoted to Wordpress that are superb in offering designers/developers of all levels the chance to expand their minds.
   But they never seem to have the answers you’re looking for and when you ask, the answers aren’t what you wanted.
   And there are some frankly amazing tutorials that can help you really get to grips with the platform. If you have time, and don’t need to earn money. Yeah, I totally get the ‘learn and earn’ concept. But it doesn’t wash at 2.30am.
7. There is no premium theme that offers (all of the following) a subscribe by email/RSS widget; flexible advertising logo options in the header; a related posts/’subscribe to my RSS feed’ in the footer of each post; a space-economical, horizontally-based listing of new-ish postings on the home page featuring sub-headings (highlights) you can link from to secondary news stories; a ‘list of authors and their latest posts’ page template; an ‘archive starting with the latest 20 posts’ page template.
8. In stark contrast to my balls-out statement in 4., Widget Logic looks like an absolute must-have and the best plugin ever.
   But some other plugin developers are starting to charge for the best ones.
   And everyone’s getting a bit too heated about what GPL really means and whether you can justify making money from a platform that is essentially free.
   But people have been doing that since the Ark. Which was in itself a money-making exercise since Noah had a side business going on selling rhino burgers to the terminally wet.
9. Your eyes hurt at 4am in the morning after a frenzied coding session.
   This is founded in fact and experience. I would much rather be sampling the world’s entire range of bourbon than staring at a screen. Or playing with a funny cat.
10. All said and done, Wordpress is like the cute but bearded woman; you know you shouldn’t love her, but she captivates you with her irrepressible wit and lovely smile. And leaves you with a nasty case of stubble burn.

In the past 24 hours we have heard Microsoft may launch an audacious bid for exclusive access to NewsCorp content, potentially gaining untold advantage over Google. In the same session, BNET [...]]]> Apologies first to them French folk for the tilde bereavement. Or whatever you call that excerpted ‘5′ is you put underneath the c in ca.

In the past 24 hours we have heard Microsoft may launch an audacious bid for exclusive access to NewsCorp content, potentially gaining untold advantage over Google. In the same session, BNET broke the story about iRascible iPhone developers defecting to other platforms.

Taken independently these revelations mean little to the web user. In conjunction, they represent a seismic shift in the way web content and services could be dished out, at first uniquely and latterly, omnidirectionally.

It’s an exceptional news day; but these are exceptional times.

• In SuperTweets (viz Robert Scoble), Twitter may finally have discovered a way to monetise its content aside from loaning its firehose to titans such as Bing and Google.
• Facebook has broken even, for the first time in its history.
• Both Google and Firefox, in Wave and Raindrop respectively, may have developed a successor to email.

What’s next for your business?

Are you ready for the Next Big Thing? Or will you be like the newspaper industry, finally pondering how to wake from its self-induced coma?

Like it or not, change is inevitable. And you need to be ahead of the curve if you are to survive and succeed, big or small.

I have decided to forever close the door on my respect for one of these bastions of journalism and clever communications. Here’s why:

I was taken by [...]]]> I’m always looking for new ways to hone my trade in communications, be it classical or technological. I sometimes take my queue from the true masters, aka the British broadsheets.

I have decided to forever close the door on my respect for one of these bastions of journalism and clever communications. Here’s why:

I was taken by an advert in the G2 section of yesterday’s Guardian. It talked about an SEO class in their Media Academy.

So I punched the URL into my HTC Magic phone and got this:

What the hell's army guy doing there anyway?

Don’t want to face you with facts, Guardian people, but three things are already at play here conspiring to destroy your newspaper:

1. It’s been 15 years since you saw a commercial web browser coming. Yet you have been insistent in your denial of web hacking down the monopoly of traditional media.
2. The New York Times recently reported a circulation dip below 1 million – that’s a first since it, um, went above 1 million, which happened around the birth of Christ. So now newspapers have got the apocalyptic masterstroke of lost revenue and lost circulation to contend with.
3. Hyperlocalisation will probably kill you first. Everyone’s a journalist. Fort Hood aside, citizen reporting is ace. It’s targeted, can be effectively advertising-driven (since revenue-hungry suppliers know how relevant/long tail their merchandising can be/will be) and is happening, right now, in the US. And it won’t be done badly in the UK forever. It’s coming. metblogs.com and cityzombie.com are replicable over this side of the pond in fine style.

And since I am a writer not a counter…

4. Your ignorance of mobile device powerplay is deceitful to your objectives. You want to teach me how to do things on the web? Let me use it first.

In this day and age, it is simply an unacceptable practice to feature content that is inaccessible on the move. Perhaps the citizens of the Grauniad need to go back to school – any courses coming up at the Media Academy on website usability? Jakob Nielsen may be able to give you some pointers…

Fascinating bits of news pinged on to my alerty radar today concerning communications and how it’s being used for the benefit of us all. And I was so entranced that I wanted to take time out to share these contemporary changes with you all.

I’ve long since been the biggest fan ™ of [...]]]>

Bleeding edge communications

Fascinating bits of news pinged on to my alerty radar today concerning communications and how it’s being used for the benefit of us all. And I was so entranced that I wanted to take time out to share these contemporary changes with you all.

I’ve long since been the biggest fan ™ of aggregating content to give people the best possible news service, when they want it.

• Google News has recently introduced a feature that lets you bring together all your Google Alerts into one ’stream’ as Custom Content.
• Talking of streams, but bigger ones, CNet now offers a ‘river’ of content mashed from a range of interesting and factual sources. It describes it thus: The CNET River offers a different view on CNET, blending the latest blogs, photo galleries, videos, and tweets from CNET editors. We think of it as a fresh starting point. With your feedback, we plan to add more content streams and other features to the River.
• In actual fact this isn’t ‘new’ news because one of the founding fathers of the ‘river’ concept was actually an advertising company. And not a very big one at that – which just goes to show you don’t need scale to be successful. Let me reference Crispin Porter + Bogusky. I’ve tagged this as one of my mostinspirational sites with Delicious because it’s just the essence of every good thing the web has given us, all rolled up into a lovely neat package. The CP+B site combines Twitter feeds, news channels, YouTube footage and served content to create The World According to Them. Punchy, impactful, incisive webmongery at its best. And I don’t own shares.
  

I’m not even going to go into what Twitter and Facebook sharing their respective firehoses of content could unlock for us all. The grail may be holy, but it’s now accessible as well.

But knowing how the web has evolved from dishing out pages to become a real-time stream of information courtesy of social tools like Twitter, it comes as little surprise to hear from across the pond that within 5 years television and radio will be webiquitous. I just manufactured that word but I think it resonates with us all. Especially podcasting types like myself.

I declare a very firm interest in this one – and so should you. As a small business the opportunities to generate a very unique and exciting message about your company are already manifest, but the relative costs are going to fall like the Lehman Brothers.

Time indeed to be harnessed to the wonders of the world wide web.

Haven’t heard of Camping Cheque? It’s a company that dishes out, well, cheques that you can exchange for a pitch and electricity at [...]]]> Handcuffs to Camping Cheque today for spoiling what was supposedly an ingenius present for my folks to get them on their big European campervan adventure with a little help from their devoted son.

Haven’t heard of Camping Cheque? It’s a company that dishes out, well, cheques that you can exchange for a pitch and electricity at a range of campsites across Europe. You can use these cheques off-season to enjoy discounts on standard pitch and ‘leccy fees.

If you’re rich and eccentric you can buy a gold card that gets you a magazine sometimes and a way of receiving your cheques electronically, which can be dished out via the beauty of a gold microchip on the card.

This is all great, and I doff my cap to the boys and girls at alanrogers.com who make Camping Cheque possible for UK caravanners, campists and that, because in principle it’s an awesome idea.

It costs me £13.95 for a Camping Cheque. I’m happy with that.

But it doesn’t stop there. Oh no. In addition to the cost of the cheque you have a choice of administration charges:

• £6.50 when you buy them on the internet
• £7.50 when you phone them

I’m quite understanding of the premium model for buying over the phone; it’s business sense to look for cost reductions (but at the same time if noone books on the phone what does the kid with the headset do with their time, apart from see how much admin costs have been made this month?). But I’m ever so antsy about such a high cost of funding the business.

It would seem like sage advice to absorb the admin costs into the cost of the cheques. Or perhaps elaborate on why we have to pay such a massive levy.

As a small business you have to make sure you cover all your bases, and optimise your communications. When I queried the admin costs I got an email back, perhaps from a French woman, that regurgitated the exact same spiel I got in my first email. As if to underscore the nonplussedness of the staffer, the familiar font and colour aberrations you get when you copy and paste were there for all to see.

I’m sure you’re bursting to hear more about this whole sorry scenario: I decided to buy a top box for the van instead.

Apologies if you have a crap RSS reader since you may not have been fortuitous enough to have digested the visual pun. In a nutshell it’s an SEO software vendor spelling ‘website’ wrong which has replicated in its Google search results.

As you’ll now understand, it wasn’t that funny, anyway. More… ironic. I think [...]]]>

Apologies if you have a crap RSS reader since you may not have been fortuitous enough to have digested the visual pun. In a nutshell it’s an SEO software vendor spelling ‘website’ wrong which has replicated in its Google search results.

As you’ll now understand, it wasn’t that funny, anyway. More… ironic. I think the world needs a little more irony. And copper – have you seen the prices these days? Bandstands the world over are having to content themselves with a rather putrid but eminently more cost-effective concoction of steel and whelks to refit their roofs.

Someone was asking me the other day why we have this problem with roofs and hooves. You see, if you start with a singular of either, said word ends in an f. But when you duplicate the roof or the hoof, you enter into the murkiest of grey areas uncontestable by even the most erudite of English professors. Roofs and hooves.

I feel a book coming on.

Which reminds me of a short monologue from Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani on one of my favourite podcasts about her new book on Google Wave which you can read in chunks for free. She was eulogising about this ‘organic, living’ model for 21st century educational books espoused by her latest. When you publish on dead wood, you have no way to update. Publish an electronic version that lives (probably in the cloud) and it’s an ever-growing, ever-giving thing of beauty beholden.

I quite agree. I’ll be following the Trapani treatment myself in coming months. I have a great idea, an altruistic statement on behalf of Word And Mouth. It’ll benefit you all. And me. Catharsis for a writer, soup for the business soul.

Amen!

PS for those lucky web denizens who have got this far, consider this quote of epiphany, also carved from the majesty that is TWIT.tv’s This Week in Google: Do what you do best, link to the rest.

He was bemoaning the shortening of people’s attention spans and the subsequent necessity to write for a less focused audience.

Yes, it does change things. Yes, this [...]]]> First thing today I got a Google News Alert from a fellow copywriter – he of the advertising persuasion – clearly discomfited by the pace of change in today’s marketplace.

He was bemoaning the shortening of people’s attention spans and the subsequent necessity to write for a less focused audience.

Yes, it does change things. Yes, this is perhaps not what you entered the industry to address. But the simple fact of life is that everything moves on.

We move on as workers. Thankfully with change comes challenge. And anyone in the creative industries should be by the very nature of the discipline, in a state of high alert and positively responsive to flux.

We covered the necessities of 21st century advertising in a recent WAM post.

I’ve repeated my words of compassion (and a brutal reality check so it’s a balanced response!) below.

Let me know what you think. Are you a classical copywriter with contemporary issues, or have things worked out for you a treat?

Jaded, despondent and disillusioned – the clarion call of a classical copywriter in this modern maelstrom of life.

While I indubitably concur that progress renders much of yesterday’s strategy for copywriting excellence redundant, I find the pace of change incredibly inspiring, challenging and refreshing.

I strive to stretch my creativity and thirst for versatility any which way to sate client and consumer impartially. This ‘evolution’ towards a constant craving for the quick hit sometimes takes me way beyond my comfort zone and into new realms of creativity unmatched by copywriting efforts in days of yore.

Much better to seize the bull’s horns than to lament the passing of days of yore.

If you haven’t come across this mightily impressive website/service yet, you’re in for a treat. Word And Mouth says it, so it must be true…

Simply, gigadial creates a ’station’ of your favourite podcasts.

There are six of the best on the Word And Mouth Gigadial channel:

But today it doesn’t need to – and shouldn’t – be this way.

Ask anyone in the media where they’re prioritising efforts in coming months and they’ll tell you [...]]]> It’s no wonder the giants of commerce get the most eyeballs when it comes to marketing and advertising. Their scale and huge budgets dictate where your attention goes.

But today it doesn’t need to – and shouldn’t – be this way.

Ask anyone in the media where they’re prioritising efforts in coming months and they’ll tell you it’s all about ‘hyperlocalisation’.

Hyperlocalisation is all about interacting with individual communities at the community level. It’s a humanistic version of the message conveyed in Chris Anderson’s ‘The Long Tail’, a seminal homage to 21st century micro-marketing.

Hyperlocalisation is about being at the heart of humankind, proacting and reacting at a moment’s notice.

So if we’re focused on the man in your street, who do you think holds the ace card? Hint: it’s not the titan of enterprise.

As a small business, you have competitive advantage for the future. The time is now to perfect your advertising techniques to grasp the opportunities that hyperlocalisation offers.

The best news for you is that local advertising to date has been patchy at best, downright appalling at worst. Follow a few of the following tips to make your advertising sing, and you can be ahead of the pack when it comes to steering your business forward in the public eye:

• Keep it short. When you’re scribing the copy for an advert it’s easy to succumb to temptation and try to tell your audience everything. Don’t. You need to create an eye-catching piece of visual media – not recount the bible.
• Keep it simple. Don’t use trade or technical language (unless you’re selling to a trade or technical user base). Studies say the best adverts are understood and have the capability to sell to a seven year-old kid.
• Use technology. Why wouldn’t you tease your advertising campaign in social media? It’s free, targeted and, therefore, why not. Maybe your advert would translate well on to the Facebook platform. Now’s the time to test Facebook Ads; it’s still relatively cheap and you have so much control over exactly the kind of people you can reach using the website. Which brings us nicely on to…
• Know your customer. Make it your goal to find out more about your best customers, every day. Why do they do business with you? What is it that you do so well that keeps them coming back, time and again?
• Be clear.
• Look for symbiosis: Words and pictures in perfect harmony. This is where it’s great to be a pro ad director – you have the budget, you have the snapper and the copywriter arguing it out for the perfect pitch. But as the company owner/creative starlet, you work within your means. The one golden rule is to make your tagline sing the same tune as the pictures on the page. If you’re playing with a pun or an abstract literary theme, the picture absolutely has to illustrate the service or product in more real terms.
• Be random. Get everyone in the company to input into the advertising campaign with a few words or suggestions about the product or service. Talk to your customers and ask them why they like you. This will provide some critical steer on the things about your company that should be highlighted in ads, and all marketing materials, for that matter. If you haven’t found a killer headline or some really smooth visual content for your ad, ask around and brainstorm til you do. It’s eye candy and a catchy phrase that suckers in the buyer every time. Seriously.
• Create urgency. Action words like ‘now’ work well in convincing your prospective customers to do business with you. Be smart and think which words would work best on you if you were your customer.
• Create intrigue. Trailers for launches of products or services are a potent way of reeling people in. Three or four micro adverts before the big bang are sufficient to stimulate a crazy rush of excitement when you’re ready for the big reveal.
• Know your business inside out. You’re addicted to success, which means you know the inner machinations of your enterprise. If someone asked you 100 questions about what you do, you could answer each one with an thesis worthy of a Masters degree. So when you’re brainstorming your ad, you must draw on this encyclopaedic knowledge to make sure that you don’t miss the most important product or service feature from the proposition.
• Read the copy. Often the seed of a fantastic advert headline is lurking within the ‘body text’, that is, the main chunk of text sitting on the page underneath your main event, the headline.
• Tease the emotions. The cornerstone for any effective advert is sparking a positive feeling (or sometimes negative, if you’re looking for sympathy or support). If you have a lovely chocolate bar you want to evoke a warm, fuzzy emotion; if you’re selling a truck you want youraudience to go ‘roar, I’m a MAN!’ or suchforth. A bit like when you used to play with your Tonka truck. Or the first time you caressed the steering wheel of your flash new car.
• Check and check again. There is nothing worse in the eye of a client than to see you abuse their eyeballs with a grammatical atrocity. If you’re going to write the copy yourself, please be sure to have mastery of punctuation. Read, re-read and re-re-read it once done – and have others do the same before publishing the piece.
• Location, location. Where should you advertise? If you want to sell bricks to builders, find a bus shelter outside a cafe or advertise in the Builder’s Bugle. If you want to sell pedometers to geeks, launch a competition to win a barrowload on Twitter. Be sensitive to the environment in which you merchandise the majority of your products and services and be there. All the time.
• Use free! Aside from the obvious advertising channels don’t lose sight of free press release distribution services like 24-7 Press Release, ClickPress and PR Log where you stand to gain valuable column inches – online and in print – for the price of a session at your keyboard.