If You Don’t Get It Yet . . .
For twenty years, the skill that I have depended on the most is my ability to navigate change. Change is an event. Change is something that happens to you – you either cope, or you get left behind.
I have met people who, at a young age, felt that they could learn everything they needed to know, and achieve some sort of enduring technical competence. They quickly learned that the cycle of learning and changing never ends.
This video makes a few things clear: change is massive, change is unrelenting, change is occurring on a fundamental level. Assumptions are changing. Keeping up with the technical aspects of change is hard enough, but understanding the effect and significance of it is mind bending. Let’s face it, the impact of the change is enough to knock some of us out of our orbits. I will let the video speak for itself:
How to Select a WordPress Theme
I am much better at design than some developers I have worked with, but I will never be great.
If I depended on my artistic flair to earn a living, I might be in trouble. Fortunately for me, there are cheap templates, and there are designs I can imitate.
Because I have been using it for years, I have found WordPress easy to start using it as a basic CMS for some of my clients.
My favourite place to buy a template is Themeforest. I host small sites for clients who do not have big budgets. Themeforest provides attractive templates at a very affordable price. However not all themes are equal. Here are some things you should consider.
1) Read the comments. Users often post comments about themes. They contain useful info. You do not want to buy a theme that has problems and issues, and you especially do not want to buy a theme from a designer who does not respond to that are raised problems.
2) Buy a well supported theme if you can. At ThemeForest, at least one designer has posted training screen casts.
3) If you are buying a theme for a client, buy cautiously. Themeforest displays the number of times a theme has been sold. I prefer themes by designers who have made number of sales. Also, I tend to choose themes by designers who have posted multiple themes that I can also check out.
4) Ensure that your theme is web standards compliant. There are tools you can use to check the template before you buy it. Read about this subject to learn more.
5) Use the theme preview and look at the CSS files. Do the CSS files contain useful comments? Can you figure out how the CSS corresponds to the pages you see? If you need to customize the template, you may have to work with these files. Don’t buy yourself grief. Buy templates the employ some CSS best practices.
6) And, finally, it never hurts to have a good book to help you alter the template, or to add functionality. I depend on Smashing WordPress, but there are others. And, of course, there is a lot of information available online.
7) Do not buy a template just for how it looks. Be smart. Buy something you can support and change with ease. Buy something that provides good functionality. Buy something that saves you and your clients headaches.
Strategic Blogging 101-001
If you having been visiting this blog for a period of time, you will have noticed a few changes. After five years, it was time for a new look.
However, I have bigger plans than that. For five years, I have blogged about whatever I pleased and I have created a haphazard collection of categories to classify my content. Now, I want to blog strategically, and I need to create tags and categories that help drive traffic to this site. I am also beginning to work with clients to show them how to do the same.
Today, I deleted useless categories, and I began to think about what I want to achieve by blogging. In short:
- I need to know what I want to achieve.
- I need to prepare to measure my success.
- I need to measure my success, and course correct as necessary.
I am going to delete more categories, and tags. Then, I will create new categories and tags, and I will apply them to my old content as I see fit. This blog needs focus. This is happening after the fact, but it is never too late.
The first part of the exercise is about branding, I guess. Strategy, for me, is about knowing what you want to achieve, identifying the resources you have at your disposal , and planning how to use them to achieve your end. My blog is a resource.