WordPress Websites featuring the Genesis Framework
On Sunday, May 11, I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Miami. My session, Managing Yourself, Projects and Clients, is at 10am. Project management and productivity is near and dear to my heart, and I’ll be sharing things I learned managing large teams and multi-million dollar projects in the corporate world, as well as tips and tricks from 11 years running a small agency.
At 4pm I’ll be joining my fellow business track presenters for a Q&A session, so bring your questions.
Thanks to Rob Neu and Ozzy Rodriguez, otherwise known as the WP Bacon crew, for inviting me to be on their podcast today. I think being the “WordPress Wallflower” is a backhanded compliment, but you can’t be two sure with these two!
The lovely, beautiful, and talented Carrie Dils invited Rebecca Gill and I to be guests on a new podcast series she has started, Genesis Office Hours. This series is unique in that it centers around answering questions from the Genesis community of developers.
We had a great time discussing tools, project management, business strategies and more. Super fun, thanks Carrie! You can find the show notes here.
Client: “I’m really looking forward to starting this project, we’ve needed an new website for a long time. By the way, I’ve purchased this incredible theme so we can jumpstart the process”
Web Designer: “Oh! Well…we’ll have to take a look at that” (Drops head to desk)
Let’s look at few of the problems when clients go theme shopping
As web designers, we begin assessing and identifying the key needs of your business from our first conversation.
An effective website is going to prioritize the key marketing goals of your business. When clients are theme shopping they are rarely looking at the the functional and structural approach of a design, how flexible it is, and how it may or may not grow with their business.
Commercial themes can be incredibly sexy. That’s a comment we hear often “That’s hot!, very sexy, big wow factor!”. Now, let’s be honest, is your business sexy? Do people seek you out for that wow factor? Unless you are a record label or a rock star, 3D sliders and elaborate designs are probably not what your potential clients are seeking from you.
We agree, that slider is amazing!
Now, do you have professionally shot wide angle images (that crop well) that tell the story of your business?
You’re also going to need a dozen or so professional images to fill out all those feature and content boxes.
What are you going to put in all those boxes? Good question…this theme isn’t really mapping very well to your business, is it?
One of the worst trends that has developed in commercial themes are pages and pages of options settings so this theme can do everything but wash your dishes. This sounds like a great idea, until you realize it takes 2 days of configuring and watching three videos to make it do what the demo does.
Code. Four letters that can be your best friend or your worst nightmare. The quality of code in commercial themes range from absolutely excellent to stunningly bad. That little change you want could be a no brainer or it might be hours of sifting through spaghetti code trying to figure out what somebody did. Then we need to look at whether the theme is following WordPress best practices…is it using the new menu system? Does it manage Jquery properly, or load it four or five times? What happens when WordPress has a key update, does the theme get updated as well? Is there a track record of support by the theme developer?
No, not at all! Commercial WordPress themes can be a great option for sites when selected for the right reasons, and with the help of your web designer.
In our experience, the best choice for purchasing commercial themes are the established frameworks like StudioPress and WooThemes.
Clients often look at the available themes and don’t see a clear fit, not realizing these themes offer base frameworks that can have literally any design and features added.
Why is this a better choice than shopping for a theme visually? These themes are put through their paces from a code and feature perspective, both by dedicated teams and their sheer popularity. They offer clean code, excellent documentation, SEO options, and are always in sync with WordPress’s latest features. There can also some very good themes available on sites like Themeforest, but the trick is knowing which ones they are and how they fit your website goals.
Rather than purchasing a theme, make notes about themes you like, site features, color schemes and features that catch your eye. Keep these handy to discuss with your web designer, they will be thrilled to have reference material for your design ideas!
Do you agree? Disagree? Comments are welcome.
You can’t get far online right now without coming across an article about Pinterest, the hot new visual bookmarking tool. Pinterest’s growth is explosive, and content creators and “brands” are scrambling to figure out how to “leverage this channel” (hate the buzzwords).
Most advice focuses on creating a presence on Pinterest and pinning your own products or content. This is a mistake. The real strategic opportunity is in optimizing your content for Pinterest.
Here’s a great article from American Express Open Forum. Everyone talks about social media, here are some concrete ideas you can implement.
Your domain name is the internet address of your website, and also part of your email address (if you are using branded email, and you should be.)
Over the years, we have seen a startling number of scenarios where web design clients have absolutely no idea how to access their domain name or do not have control over the domain. Do not let this happen to you.