Tag Archives: WordPress

Websites: Fast, easy, inexpensive

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A couple of weeks ago I got a call from one of the guys in our Minnesota office. He wanted a website to serve the advertisers of one of our networks. Said he didn’t really have a budget and he’d like to have it by the first home game, to be played in a brand new stadium (just over a week away). They were going to have lots of photos and didn’t have a good way to share them with fans and sponsors.

I purchased a WordPress theme (from Studio Press) for $65 and paid another hundred or so to have it customized (thank you, Rebecca). Ten days later the site was up and running (still adding content, obviously).

I’ve been at this long enough to be amazed that I could give the guy a credible website for $200 in a week-and-a-half. AND because it’s WordPress, he –or one of his interns– can update this site thorughout the season. I remember when this would have taken months and cost thousands of dollars.

Tag cloud

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We (yes, there IS a mouse in my pocket) migrated one of our websites over to WordPress this week. As near as we can determine, more than 46,000 stories were imported. My role in this has been modest but I did spend a good bit of time working with the categories, keywords, tags and other meta data used to organize all of those news and sports stories.

There are less than 5,000 posts to this blog but it would be impossible (okay, very difficult) to find anything without a good tagging scheme. One of the more common approaches to displaying those tags is the “tag cloud.” I have one on the right side of this page, near the bottom. And here’s the tag cloud for my flickr account.

tag-cloud-flickr

My friend Scott doesn’t like how tag clouds use different size text to indicate the most and least common topics. He thinks it looks “sloppy.” I find the visual cue very intuitive and easy to use. (I can see I have some clean-up to do)

Strangely, tagging is a bit like curling your tongue. Some people can do it and some just can’t. I’m getting better at it.

A new website for under $60.00

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On Thursday of this past week one of our company websites “broke.” That’s my non-geek analysis. It wasn’t the first time and we knew it wouldn’t be the last, so –with the support and encouragement of our IT department– we decided to just flush it and start over.

At noon on Friday I installed a new WordPress theme ($59.95 from StudioPress) and started copying and pasting content. By four o’clock, I was pretty much done. Here’s a screen shot of the work-in-progress:

Learfield Communications is comprised of two operating divisions: Sports and News. We have a corporate website; a website for the sports division; one for the news division; and one for each of the networks that make up the news division.

The news division site was a challenge because we really didn’t have any dynamic content for the site and I hated putting up a “brochure” that never changed.

The WordPress site we tossed together in a few hours on Friday afternoon won’t win any awards but it will allow us to do things we couldn’t before. Like video. It’s becoming much easier to shoot, edit and host (yea YouTube and Vimeo!) video, so it makes sense to include it. WordPress has endless plug-ins for this task.

And WordPress is just a very good content management system, at least for our needs. I’ll be able to show folks in our marketing department how to create and update pages which makes it possible to keep the site fresh and current.

WordPress is very social-network friendly. Flickr, YouTube, Twitter… wherever you have content, you can quickly incorporate it.

The effectiveness of this –or any– website will be measured by the quantity and quality of the content and ease of interaction with the people who visit it. WordPress delivers.

It would have been easy to spend a couple of months a  few thousand dollars getting a simple site like this developed. I can now take that money and time and go improve some more of our sites. [END OF COMMERCIAL]

Searching smays.com

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If you’ve used the search feature here at smays.com since the move, you’ve probably noticed it’s not working very well. We’re hoping this straightens itself out as the Google bots crawl find everything again. If there’s a particular post you can’t find, email me (link in sidebar) and I’ll go up in the attic and try to locate it for you.

UPDATE: Just switched from Google search widget to WordPress widget and it seems to be finding everything fine. Gotta love that WP.

The smallest things make me happy

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favicon

It really doesn’t take much to make me happy. Since the first time I saw one in a browser address bar, I’ve wanted to add one of these little graphics (they’re called favicons) to my website(s). And it always requied getting someone else to do it for me. I hated my ignorance.

But it’s a snap on WordPress. No end of little plug-ins that make it a snap. You’ll probably have to put up with a bit of gee-whiz’ing for a while as I discover tiny new wonders about WordPress. Thank you, and good night.

We’re gonna need more boxes

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The Typepad-to-WordPress migration is underway. My friend Phil managed
to get most of the 4,000+ posts ported over with images and links
intact. I’ll have to re-post photos from the last six months but that
won’t take long.

 

You shouldn’t expect any visible dramatic changes. Most of the good stuff is under the hood. I’ve picked a rather spartan theme and expect to do a bit of experimentation in that regard. Sort of like coming home to discover your wife has repainted the living room. Every day.

Posting here will continue to be light until we point smays.com to the new home.

WordPress adds audio playlists

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