Author Archives: jamii

The Heart of your Website – Navigation Navigation is the way your customers move around your website. The ease with which they find the information they want will make or break your site. See Mark’s previous article on restaurant websites with examples of how to alienate your customers before you even get started. This article, the third in a series on WordPress, discusses how to set up menus. Blog or CMS? First and foremost you need to decide if you’re building a blog or a CMS. The fundamental difference is in what you view as the most important parts of your website. Are you writing a magazine or newspaper where content changes often and is less important as it gets older, or are you writing a book, encyclopedia or catalog where articles remain valid and useful for long periods of time? Blogs have a natural organization that is time based. Your primary goal in organizing a blog is to choose good categories and tags. You need to be more careful with a CMS in how you make your information available to your customers. Some websites are a hybrid of a CMS and a blog. An example of this is SWCP’s home page. All of the product information, support references, pointers to email clients, and directories are Pages. On the Home page under Recent Articles or on the Articles page is a list of Posts, (like this one). Most company websites … Continue reading →

In the last article we talked about why you might want to use WordPress to build a website and a few of the key concepts, like static versus dynamic content, separation of content from look and feel and how important the flow of your website it to the customer’s experience. This article will show you in an example where you’d find the concepts we’ve been talking about. Overall page layout In a simple website your pages will be divided into several sections. Common ones are header, content, footer, and sidebar. Below are a couple of examples. Header   Content and Sidebar   Footer Blogging versus CMS In a pure CMS, (content management system) you have pages with information about your company, service, or topic of interest. They’re usually organized in a hierarchical arrangement and they have the feeling of a book with chapters and subchapters. A natural organization of a CMS is to have a main menu that links into different sections of the website. A blog is much more like a magazine. It’s very time sensitive. Articles are  organized by topics, but also by when they are published. Generally the home page on a blog consists of excerpts of the last few articles published, and comments from readers regarding these posts. A natural organization of a blog is to have an archive linking to articles posted during a particular time period such as a month. Also organization by topic … Continue reading →

The view from the sky Building a modern, professional looking website and keeping it up to date can be a challenge. There are tools that can take some of the tedium out of this process. One type of tool that is used more and more is the Content Management System (CMS). There are many varieties of  CMS out there. Some are geared towards building a website for a certain type of business, like restaurants or real estate. Some are more general purpose. One that we’ve found really useful is WordPress. WP started out life as a blogging tool but has grown into something anyone can use to construct a useful and functional website. One key thing that a CMS will give you is the separation of look and feel from content. This allows folks with little website-building knowledge to easily add content to a website without breaking the site. While WordPress provides lots of tools for building a consistent, attractive website from scratch,  it does take some time to get familiar with it.  This series of articles will introduce you to the key elements of how WP works, and how to find your way around. These will all be at a fairly high level to get you familiarized with the basic concepts of a WP site. These are the articles I wish I had found when starting to work with WordPress. Website Structure Most modern websites can be broken down … Continue reading →