We Have a New Site Design

Time to stir up the water and get a new blog design. Our previous design was very minimalist. We've decided too minimalist. We want you to be able to see the range of topics we care about, the various projects we are managing, and have room for things like Twitter and Comments too! Please tell us what you think. We splurged and bought this theme from a top Wordpress designer, Brian Gardner. (Internet oddball perhaps, but I like paying for quality services.)

One of the coolest things about blog software is how the design elements and the content are separated, kind of like how editorial and advertising once used to be. In theory, it's possible to swap out a new "theme" on the Wordpress blog, and the database of posts and comments simply gets wrapped in a new look.

In reality of course, it's not that easy because inevitably we want to tweak a little here, change a color there, add a widget, hide a widget, and make all new graphics too! It's so emblematic of the state of the web these days. On the one hand the glass is half-full: so many things are free and creativity abounds. OTOH, the glass is half-empty: it takes hours and hours to find stuff and make it work the way we want it to, a full spectrum of brain matter is useful when managing the wide and deep terrain that covers coding, design, and ultimately writing a coherent message!

I interviewed a marketing exec from IBM back in 2002. He said they had already survived 11 iterations of their web site over the past 6-7 years! Meanwhile, many small businesses are content to have one iteration every 10 or 11 years! (OK - so maybe I exagerrate a little.) Here's a list of things to think about to see if it is time to redo your website.

We want some of our clients to update their sites; "unfortunately," we built them with the most modern tools available at the time, so the sites are surviving, if not thriving. If it's not broken, don't fix it makes sense. But then there is the question: what opportunities are being missed that can only be gained with new technology?

One last thought. I used "we" a lot in this post. Really, it is Shane who gets the big kudos as he researched the WP themes, did all the extra programming, and even added some upgrades to the templates that he is sending back to Brian, the original developer. Mahalo nui Shane. You are no ka oi!

iWPhone WordPress Plug-in for iPhone & iPod Touch Users

Looking for a mobile interface for your WordPress blog and admin? Shane recently installed a new plug-in on this site, that allows me to see a lean and clean version of our web site when using my iPhone. You can get the plugin from ContentRobot and it works on both the public site and the admin area. And once the plugin is installed, your iPhone will automatically use the mobile version of the site.

On the admin page, you'll see a little checkbox. Changing this setting is location-specific, so you can leave it checked for use on the iPhone but it can stay unchecked when logging in from the web browser on your main computer.

It makes it really easy and much faster to blog from the iPhone or iPod Touch. You have simple choices once you log in: Write, Manage, Comments, Plugins, Users, and Latest Activity. I would have been happy with Write, Manage, and Comments!

The interface is very clean on the admin. Here are a few screenshots of the "Write" interface. It's great for starting a post when I am on the road or out and want to capture an idea or two as I can save without publishing, just like in fully caffeinated WordPress.

Clicking on each of the buttons in the lower part of the screen gives you WordPress functionality with iPhone appearance. Each Category, for example, has an on-off slider just like you find elsewhere on the iPhone.

Limitations
It currently only shows blog posts and not pages, but that is on the agenda for future upgrades.

Cost
The plug-in is free, however there is a PayPal donate button and we made a $5 donation. I am happy to support the open-source developers who are creating things that make my life easier!

The downside of being popular

For those of you in a hurry (and there are many!) the answer is: blog gets ignored.

For those of you interested in nuance, here's more:

1. Months ago we started planing a web site re-design. That's one of our core businesses, so it should be easy right? Wrong. We know too much. We ask ourselves too many questions. We consider all kinds of things that would not even be on the radar for many - especially, "What software should we use?" We love software; we get in there and push it hard to see what it can do for us and for our clients. At the end of the day, our wish list is huge and there isn't any one app that does it all for us. For now. So this is worthy of many delays.
2. I hope it's obvious, but if you can't settle on the bones, you can't work on the skin. We did finally settle on WordPress - another post to go over why - and therein lies the next seduction.
3. There are thousands of themes that have been created for WP! That's a lot to look through. And the bummer is that each one is coded by an individual who may or may not have a clear sense of coding the durn thing. Just when we found a concept we likes, we would get in there to do a little customization, and things would fall apart. Those of you who have worked with WP themes are now smiling.
4. Then there is the site transfer. In theory, one database (our old web site) can talk to another database (our new website). In reality, db's are fussy. They want apples to be apples and oranges to be bananas. They don't know what to do when you toss a lilikoi into the mix. So, that takes time holding everybody's hand to move the content over to its new home.
5. Server management. Our old site has been on its old server for over 8 years. Think about your house - you are moving, and you have collected 8 years of stuff. Only when it;s the web, if you don't move everything or update its info, then you inadvertently have all sorts of links out on the internet that break. Uggh.
6. Optimism maybe doesn't help. Every weekend for the past three months, we've thought: this weekend we will just knuckle down and get it finished. We already had 2 sites up (one hidden, waiting for its debut.) I didn't want to start another blog post, and have to enter it in two places! So my apologies to my good friend Chris Brogan, who also inadvertently got stuck as the topic of our most recent post! Chris - hope you got some good link love from that!
7. Popularity. Yes, this is the bottom line. If we hadn't been so popular, with people contacting us to do all sorts of fun things for them, we would have had plenty of time to get the new site up. Fortunately, people love us regardless, and for that I am a happy person today. Is Twitter a measurable distraction? Most days no - much more of an inspiration for me.

So it is with very little fanfare that we present the new old (or old new) site version. We've downsized, simplified, and I am SO ready to get back to regular blogging.

[update march 2008 - this post refers to yet another expired version of our site. We just keep updating it! As new things come along. When did you last update your site?]