Wordpress - it's not as expensive as you think

A while back I was having a discussion with an acquaintance who ran the North Walsham Garden Centre in Norfolk. He expressed an interest in having his current website redesigned and was fed up with having to go to his current developer to do even tiny text amends to his site.

I suggested he consider Wordpress, as this offers the user a great level of content management, is well supported in the industry and with its inbuilt SEO tools is great for Google. His concern was the potential cost - but then isn't every client concerned with the cost?

I reviewed his current site, which had been neglected over the preceding years for a variety of reasons and now was visually getting left behind by his competition. I decided that I could certainly build him a new site using Wordpress as a CMS platform.

The design, like the final site structure, was kept very simple and clean while presenting all the information that the client wanted in an informative manner. It may not be the most technically advanced website ever built - it didn't have to be! Do not assume that Wordpress means complicated and expensive, that's not the case. It can be as complicated or as simple as the brief demands.

The website is performing very well and the client is very happy and, apart from a bit of periodic Wordpress maintenance on my part, the client updates the content themselves.

Why you should consider using Wordpress as your websites' CMS platform instead of a 'bespoke CMS platform'

I hate it when I hear 'bespoke cms', it's a word that should give companies and individuals looking for a new website designer a sense of foreboding and dread. What it means is that in 2, 3 or 5 years down the road when you want to move your website or have someone else manage it for you, you'll have to start from scratch again, as 'bespoke' generally means 'not portable', or in the slim instances where is is portable you then have the added stress of finding a competent programmer who can decipher the original programmers code and work with it. There's the added grip of not having the latest plugins or features seemingly available to your completion in the marketplace.

I love Wordpress! There, I've said it out loud and proud. Wordpress, in my opinion, is one of the best open source content management systems and website frameworks out there today. It's relatively easy to design and build with, it's open-source, widely supported and portable. It allows both web designers, web developers and the end user to create and maintain a site that performs well, can be responsive and adaptable to the end users needs. Over 30% of the worlds' websites are built using Wordpress and it's increasing all the time.

Some people say Wordpress sites all look the same. Not true. This is where us web designers and developers come into our own. The idea is that Wordpress isn't a constraint to design but the framework - and with clever thinking, great design and a structured approach you can create a website that is both functional and graphically stimulating and more importantly different to other sites sharing off the shelf templates.

I recently designed the www.hawkins-solicitors.com website. They required a website that portrayed their professional but friendly approach to their legal services and also offered them the ability to add, edit and delete pages, update the site with additional news, service pages and staff bios - something that their current 'bespoke cms' didn't allow them to do without incurring additional charges from their current host.

Using Wordpress allowed me to open up their website to them allowing them as much control as they wanted over the content. I used custom post types to manage staff biographies and services, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugins to create custom page areas and features and flexible templates to create a site that certainly doesn't look like your standard Wordpress 'blog' layout and creates a professional, corporate website with expansive cms-managed content. Integrated with Google Analytics and Code Guard (for automated back-ups it delivers the full package! A bonus with Wordpress is that it's relatively easy to refresh the site branding / theme at a later date.

I firmly believe in creating websites that give content control back to the end user - should they wish to use it. I also advocate that the client (with my help) sets up their own hosting account and Google analytics account.  Far too many times have I had clients say they don't have access to this element or that service. By giving the client all their own accounts it just makes what I do simpler and they have peace of mind that, should they ever need to, moving their account or changing their web designer will be much more straight forward.

Seajacks Zaratan illustration work

Final Illustration for Seajacks Zaratan vessel

One of three illustrations I did for Seajacks. A character/mascot for use on literature, clothing and on the Seajacks Zaratan vessel itself.

To find out more about me visit www.paulkirk-illustration.co.uk
To find out more about Seajacks Zaratan visit www.seajacks.com/zaratan.php

French Waiter character illustrations

I recently did some rather fun visuals of a character that had been nicknamed 'Happiere' - he's a French waiter that was to be used to promote travel to France for one of our clients. As the job has not been picked up I'm unable to say more for confidentiality reasons.

Original concept for the French waiter



The waiter was required in a variety of poses to be used on print, web and point of sale. He was a fun character which I hope comes across in the following sketches. These are purely black and White but would have been developed to include colour later on in the project. I started these using my favourite medium - a blue leaded pump pencil which I then inked in and then scanned into digital files so the designer could manipulate the various elements of the sketches, such as forced perspective.




Anyway I hope you like them.

A few helpful website optimisation and analytical tools

Your website nowadays is probably one of the most valuable real-estate that you as an individual or company owns. The development of the web and it's accessibility on a variety of different platforms and devices combined with the explosion of social media means that you have to work that little bit more clever than you used to.

A website isn't just a site that's built and forgotten about, it's a sales tool that needs to be kept fresh, optimized and promoted using a variety of channels available to you. When you commission a website you have to think long term - it's cheaper than a brochure but it carries your 'brand' to the outside world so it's important that your site is as optimised and integrated into everything else you do effectively and you don't get worried if your web programmer/designer wants to review your site in 3 months. This is normal, in the digital world trends change daily and a 'review' is a good time to see what pages/content are performing well and what's not and to then adjust elements accordingly.

Here's a few pointers on website builds and third party integration

• Make sure your 'on-page' content and tags are fully optimised for the topic or service that page is promoting. Web copy is not the same as brochure copy. It's important that you develop your content using the 'keywords' you want to drive traffic to your site/page for. Web copy should be much shorter in length - people scan websites, so grabbing their attention quickly is vital
• Make sure the site is using clean coding practices and the programmer is adding key metadata to your site.
• All images should have 'alt' tags and 'title' tags used accordingly to aid usability.
• Place a contact form or email sign-up form to  collect users who are interested in any email campaign you might send. WuFoo offers excellent integration with Mailchimp to make data gathering and broadcasting as simple as possible.
• Once live, submit your site to the leading search engines, local directories and put yourself on the map - using Google Maps. Also ask your programmer to use Google's Webmaster tools to create a sitemap and validate the site.
• Ensure your site has Google Analytics installed and that you have access to the monthly reports
• If you're a new business consider starting a Google Adwords campaign (remember to integrate to your Analytics account) to help promote your company. Google often offers £30 or even £50 starter amounts for news businesses or individuals starting their first Adwords campaign
• Place a contact form or email sign-up form on your site to collect users who are interested in any email campaign you might send. WuFoo offers excellent integration with Mailchimp to make data gathering and broadcasting as simple as possible.
• Consider creating an amazon associates account so you can strategically promote either your own media or media that you would recommend your followers, - you even get a small percentage of every sale that's made through your unique link.
• Start a Twitter account and feed this into the site. It could be a good way of offering 'web -only' offers or promoting your service(s). It's important to have a social media strategy in place as without this you could be jumping the gun and not having clearly defined goals with which to evaluate your social media push. If you're running twitter consider an analytical tool to help you evaluate it's impact - I recommend Crowdbooster, and at a basic level it's free! To schedule your tweets try Tweetdeck.

These are just a few of the points to consider and are by no means all encompassing but hopefully they give the un-initiated a few things to bear in mind.

If you're interested in my digital work take a look here: http://bit.ly/nMYOow

Here's some of the useful resources I've mentioned:
http://crowdbooster.com/
http://www.adwords.google.com/
http://wufoo.com/
http://www.mailchimp.com
http://www.tweetdeck.com/
http://www.twitter.com/

Cooking on gas! My latest website

Website design and build for Simon Morris - a gas safety, servicing and installation specialist

It's been a busy couple of months and I'm pleased to say that the website for Simon Morris - a local Norwich based gas safety, servicing and installation specialist has been performing really well. His smgassafe.co.uk website might be small but it's been carefully optimised to give him a great online presence.

View the site at http://www.smgassafe.co.uk

Google Analytics Blog: What’s happening on your site right now?

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