In the last post I talked about exactly what WordPress is – a tool that makes updating your website a lot easier. This time around, I wanted to talk about the basic essentials you should use on top of WordPress to make life easier. If you think of WordPress as a car you’re rolling off…
Monthly Archives: November 2009
How WebSites Work, Part 3: HTML, CSS and frameworks
Now you know about servers and IP addresses and domain names, it’s time to talk about the building blocks of websites: HTML, CSS and more advanced dynamic website tools like WordPress. The Infamous Whiteboard is back, but I took the filming inside (away from the car noises and cicadas), so it’s much more readable. Did…
Vital Question #3: What problem do you solve?
If you’ve answered the earlier questions you know who your customer is, and what your customer wants from your website. Now we need to define what you provide. photo credit: rachaelvoorhees If you’ve spent more than 2.7 seconds near a marketer, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “Sell benefits not products”. This is a truism in…
Remember when you used to suck?
Copywriting has a number of potential pitfalls. One of the biggest is this: “Oh my god, I must be really getting good at this… the training has started boring the shit out of me!” – Me photo credit: left-hand Yeah, you know what I mean. Becoming an expert means that more and more topics become…
Vital Question #2: What does your customer want?
In Vital Question #1 we identified and described your ideal customer and created a persona as a useful shorthand and visualisation tool. Now we’ll put that persona to work, answering questions about your website. photo credit: AMagill Are there any technical needs or limitations your persona would have? Refer back to the first list you…
How Websites Work, Part 2: Domain names
Last time I talked about servers and IP addresses, and this time we build on that to include how domain names come into the picture. I was wrestling with a few problems while shooting this video: I’m still really new to this process and it’s still terrifying My camera kept turning itself off every 50…
Vital Question #1: Who is your customer?
This is part one of a series that will help you to understand and describe your needs for a website. The exercise will take you about 5 minutes to complete. photo credit: geoftheref For the love of all that is awesome DO NOT SKIP THIS EXERCISE. If you don’t have clarity on these questions you…
What Is This WordPress You Speak Of, Earthling?
The first thing I wanted to talk about here is WordPress. Because the name is going to come up a few times talking about other related stuff, so it’s worth explaining. WordPress’ own website describes it as a blog tool and publishing platform. Fundamentally, that means that it makes putting a website together easier. More…
How to choose a good domain name
I woke up this morning and decided that I want to buy a lawn implement so I went to Google and searched for “lawn implements”. I got these results: How do I know which site is the one I want? There are a couple of clues (we’ll talk about metatags another day), but one is…
How to choose a web hosting provider
To have a website, you need a web server somewhere to host it. (Not sure how that works? You might find Part 1 of How Websites Work helpful.) Web hosting has become very commoditised over the last few years, and there are a lot of hosting companies that provide essentially the same service. There are…