Dylan Thomas died over 60 years ago and couldn’t possibly have even imagined the internet age. But I think of his famous poem often. Few lines resonate like “Do not go gently into that good night”. Of course he was speaking of death, but I relate it to other things as well. As a web guy, I relate everything to websites. (I know, get a life right?) Specifically, I think about what makes a good, successful, useful website. This of course is content. Good, relevant content. Though we all know content is king, we sometimes can get stuck in a rut. Website work gets back-burnered and before long sites are irrelevant and begin to hurt your business. To the outside world it appears you are closed or at very least stagnant, not happening.
So I say, Do not go gently into that good night. Do something about it, don’t let your website go, make a plan and improve it. Take action!
Here are a few ideas
Make a schedule for blogging/adding news to your website…and stick to it!
Look for things missing on your website, perhaps do a competitive review. Is your competition doing something you aren’t?
Multimedia – When the last time you added photos, or video?
Social Media – Are you posting on a regular basis? Are your website blogs/news tied in to your social media sites? If not, make it happen.
Email Campaign – When is the last time you sent out an email to your customers?
Advertising – Have you reviewed your advertising? Are you taking advantage of Google adwords, Facebook ads or Twitter ads? Done correctly it is an inexpensive way to increase business.
I could go on and on. The point is DO SOMETHING. Get involved, don’t sit back and wait for your business to implode. And if you don’t have anyone to help you with bullet points above, contact us today.
Those of you who are regular readers of my blog know how big a fan I am of WordPress. That being said, I have a few things I’d like WordPress to implement.
Revisions: The ability to see and revert to previous revisions for posts and pages is spectacular. It allows you to fix errors and go back. This happens quite often, as WordPress is so user friendly, non-technical users can make their own changes and add content. But people make mistakes and you need to be able to fix them. But under Appearance > Editor you can make changes that can do irreparable harm to your site. This forces you to either revert to a full backup (if you have one), and that is not always ideal. So if WordPress could make it so you can see revisions of all files, that would make life easier.
Plugins: Another thing I would love to see is a little bit more testing of plugins. Part of the problem is that some plugins have updates that can really screw up your site. For instance, one of my very favorite plugins has always been the NexGEN gallery. However, lately it has had severe problems and people have been left with broken galleries and/or missing functionality such as lightbox effects. It would be great to be able to roll this back to a previous working version. Perhaps even a reporting system for WordPress so when a bad plugin update is is out there, people can report it and WordPress can temporarily disable the update until the bugs are addressed.
Security: As WordPress is so popular, people are constantly trying to hack your site. WordPress should take steps to harden the software. First off, forbid the username “admin”. Some of the software installation programs install with the default username of admin. (I will go into client sites and change this in the database, but non technical users can’t do that). WordPress should just ban the username admin and make secure passwords mandatory. I also think some of the security plugins are excellent. I think WordPress should consider purchasing one of the excellent ones like Wordfence and make it part of the core offering.
I would love to know what you would like to see WordPress implement. Please leave me your opinions below.
