Blog Designer News

As a web developer, I get asked this question a lot: “Which is better, Joomla! or WordPress?” And my answer is the same every time: it really depends on what you want to accomplish. Each Content Management System (CMS) has its strengths and weaknesses, so when you’re trying to decide which one to use, there are a few factors you’ll need to take into consideration.

To make this process a little easier, I’ll show you a side-by-side comparison of these two web applications so that you can make a decision based on objective and concrete facts rather than hype or popularity trends.

Although Joomla! comes out ahead, the difference between these two applications is only 0.60 stars. You’ll notice that WordPress is stronger in manipulating text, and it is also simpler and faster to deploy and use. This would be the ideal solution if you’re just looking to develop a blog with a simple overall style, and your readers want a low-key interface and minimal interaction.

However, if you’d like to have more than a blog and predominantly textual content on your site, then Joomla! is a more appropriate solution. It will allow you greater customization, a sleeker and often even “sexier” appearance, advanced menus and other options, and you’ll have far more multimedia management capabilities. The trade-off is that Joomla! will also take you more time and effort to deploy, and the setup process is definitely not meant for people who don’t have any web development and programming skills.

If you fall within that category, I recommend finding a web design & hosting company that offers automated installation of the application.  You want to look for a company offers automated installation of both the WordPress and Joomla! CMS applications; that way you can skip the pains of setup and focus immediately on developing your site and managing your content.

As a blog designer and a WordPress fanatic I have an extremely unhealthy obsession with themes ,lol.   Whenever I see a theme I like used on a site, I immediately check the footer for a link or the source code for a name.  I then hunt that theme down and download it.  I’m like a kid on Christmas morning, anxiously waiting to unwrap my gift and play.

The problem is when I have a project that I’m working on, choosing a theme becomes a nightmare.  Sometimes I change a theme four or five times before I settle on something and move on.  Don’t get me wrong having options is a beautiful thing but when I’m trying to launch a blog or working on a client’s blog, I don’t want to lose the momentum because I am busy sifting through WordPress themes.

Recently I began to organize my themes by categories.  For example: magazine, blog, business, premium and favorites.  I find this has helped me when a client is looking for a specific look.  I can easily find the perfect WordPress theme instead of opening up every file and looking at the theme screen shot.  So now that I have shared with you what I’m doing, how do you organize your themes?

There exist basically three search engines out there that mean anything:  Google, YAHOO, and MSN (a.k.a. Bing).

These are the only three on the market that give you any significant amount of traffic if you were to rank anywhere on the first page.  ASK!, AOL, or Hotbot, are the runners up to the “big three” and are barely worth mentioning nor worth analyzing their merits at all.

After having established that fact I want to take this time to back up a minute.  The idea for this post came from my recent trip to Montreal for two weeks.

Not to long into my trip I found myself into a heated argument with a stock broker/ trader  who was trying to convince me that a) Bing, which is Microsoft’s new name for their woefully lacking  search engine, has made inroads into Google’s gigantic gigantic market share and that b) if Microsoft is able to purchase YAHOO, like they have been trying for years, they will be able to compete toe to toe with Google.

It took everything in my body to keep from laughing at him!  We got started on that subject because he was trying to convince me Microsoft was highly undervalued and had an enormous upswing based on what they are doing in the present and might be able to do in the future in the search engine department.

He was good and skilled at what he did but he did not know what he was talking about.  All he could do was go by the news, press releases, and if you haven’t noticed the thousands of commercials “BING” is putting on television.

What am I getting at?

To the point if you do not rank high on Google you are nothing.  I have to put it as bluntly and hopefully some people’s feelings are not hurt.  You may have a sense of pride if your site is on page one of MSN or Yahoo but I’m telling you the “big G” is all that matters.

How do I know.  My Statcounter tells me so.

When I rank #1 on Google for one of my targeted keywords I am able to produce 100s of organic hits per day.

When I rank #1 on MSN or Yahoo for one of my targeted keywords I am able to produce maybe 20-30 hits per day.

I have seen several charts and graphs showing that Google had an overall market share from as low as 65% to as high as 80%.  I would put their overall dominance at at 90% from my true life experience.

Here is an example.  I love pugs.  I have two if the cutest pugs but they bark and yap all the time.  So a little over a year ago I went and bought these bark collars that a friend suggested.  They worked great.  I thought to myself  “why not start a blog about this.”  So I did and and called it Anti Bark Collar Guide.  It was a cool site to do and I perfectly optimized it.  I was able to easily get links for it with other dog lovers and wrote some nice articles about the subject.  Low and behold I rank on the first page of Yahoo and MSN.  On Google I am on page three.  How many hits do you think I’ve gotten over the last week for this term.  9 hits today, 4 hits yesterday, and 11 hits the day before.  I think the highest number of hits I have gotten was 15 hits on a Wednesday.  I rank on the first page on both Yahoo and MSN and that’s all that produces for a relatively medium-high researched term. Hum???

I am not going to say which other sites I own that rank on the first page of Google.  That’s not important.  Needless to say those sites, even some being at the bottom of page one, get 100 hits on a bad day.  In my experience I have even found that being on page two of the “big G” is better than being on page one of any other search engines.

So I hope this clarified things a little bit.  We design blogs for two reasons no matter if its for ourselves or our customers.  Either we want to make money from our blogs through various forms of monitization or we are passionate about a subject and we want people to read it.  To accomplish that you need visitors and the anything but ranking high on Google, as of 10/17/2009, will not produce that.

This information should be of use to you when you are designing a blog or website.  You now know how you need to optimize it and what direction to go.

Working with a new client recently I found myself in an awkward position.  I wanted to convince him to move in one direction over another in order to make my work easier.

Have you ever been there?

I’ll be completely honest.  I did bully my client.  The theme he wanted to work with was awful.  I gave it a good old college try but finally pressed him to consider going with another theme that I liked to work with that would give him a similar look.

Then, I pressed him about his choice of hosting – his preference was really difficult to work with and their servers were pitifully slow.  For about a week, I bit my lip and worked with it but then I literally begged him to consider another option.

There are been some other issues that we disagreed on that I pushed him hard to see things my way.

Do you ever feel like you’re bullying your clients?

Or do you just go with their preferences no matter what?

As the owner of fifteen blogs and counting I can tell you one major fact that I have learned.  Simple blogs with a white background work the best.  I have become an ardent fan of getting or making blogs that come as close to the Simplex Wordpress theme , made by “WPShoppe,” as I possibly can.  This is goes along with what Heather said in an earlier post about white clean backgrounds being very much in demand.  The reason being is that they work!

I’m going to tell you that my best performing blog is still using the default theme that is already installed when you load Wordpress (blue header with the white background).  That’s my favorite theme!  I have tried 100s of themes and the most complicated themes I used like Revolution, though very attractive, converted less be in adsense or/ and affiliate sales.

The reason being is that there is too much for your potential customer to look at.  You bring them to a complicated site with a lot of text and images and they turn into a kid in a candy store.  They do not know what they want.  He/she will click on this and then click on that.  You will find that they click on a lot of things but end up getting confused and not buying.  Magazine type blogger templates are too much for most sites.  This DelliStore template is more like what I look for.

If you just have a blog for social traffic than this does not apply to you.  If you want to make money from your blog or want your clients to make money from their blog you need to understand the art of channeling your traffic.  When someone comes to your blog they eventually need to channeled into an area where they can a) click on an ad b) buy your product c) or get your proper contact information so they can buy your product or service in the future.  Crisp white backgrounds with blue, red, or black lettering seem to work the best.  If I have any pictures of my blog I usually put them within a post and do not make them part of my actual blog.

Taking this a step further I would like to remind everyone that we live in a society that is big on “instant gratification.”  ADHD isn’t a disorder anymore in my opinion because most of the population has it.  Most of us are not patient people and when we go to a website we want to see immediately what we are looking for.  When we go to a site we are looking for something and we want the answer to jump out at us.  This was confirmed by one of Grizzly’s post, one of the best internet marketing minds in the business.

This is a short excerpt of what he said:

I rank on top of Google’s serp’s and bring in traffic. Visitors see my inept, amateurish and oh so ugly blogs and they run like hell. Fortunately 10 -12% of them leave by clicking on my Adsense ads. That is my system (not totally as I do have other forms of monetized blogs) and it works.

Now I am in no way advocating writing spammy or crap content.  I hate that!  My point is that Griz makes thousands of dollars every month from very simplistic looking blogs that have great content on them for the MMO niche but I am telling you that Grizz seems to have a fifth grade writing level at times.  I think he does that on purpose.  He starts off his blog not making a lick of sense to your common person and saves the juicy parts for the end.  He channels people, at the tune of 10-12%, into the adsense and he’s able to do that because his readers eyes are where he wants them to be and not over here or over there.

The same goes actual products and affliate banners.  Have a simple yet professional blog design and put what you want them to click on in plain sight.

Have you ever finished up a design project and just been dazzled by your own creation to such a degree that you hate to give it up to the client’s control?

I’ll admit it.  I feel that way sometimes.

The problem is that I’ve seen what some clients are capable of.

That perfectly customized blog theme that suddenly turns an obnoxious shade of bright purple a day after you hand over the keys.  Suddenly you want to ask them to remove your design company name from the footer.

Try as I might to teach my clients the do and don’t do rules of site design, they have a mind of their own and Wordpress makes it so easy for them to tinker.

It can be hard to let go… but it is as all the good poets say.  You have to let what you love go… maybe it will float back for a redesign one day soon.

I interviewed Charly Leetham, one of our writers here at Blog Designer News, a few months past about her business as a blog designer and today I’m sharing that conversation with you.

Find out more about Charly at Ask Charly Leetham or Follow her on Twitter

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Google would like to have you design something for them.  Seems that they want to add some new templates to their Blogger program.

Of course, you won’t get paid. LOL!

What do you think?  When one of the richest companies in the world seeks free designs from the community… sure, it’s exposure for someone – but it’s exposure to people who are building free websites on free hosting.  Not too exciting in my book.

Check out this Wordpress theme, it makes me want to create something with it.

In the past, I have developed some beatiful blog designs and really effective ‘front ends’ (the bit the customer sees).  The really are a ‘beauty to behold’.  However, the back end management of the blog – how I or my customer changed the elements to be displayed on the front end – was (at times) incredibly difficult.

I’m not referring to your standard blog layout here – where you have a content panel and 1 or 2 sidebars.  I am talking about the Magazine Style layouts or the designs where the front page of the blog is different to the rest.

Typically in a Magazine Style layout, you will have elements that are ‘pulled’ from the content on the blog and displayed on the homepage to give an overview of the type of content available.  Perhaps one of the most popular ‘Magazine Style’ layouts are Brian Gardners Lifestyle Theme.

The theme is lovely and Brian provides some very nice management functions for it in the code however, modifying the front page elements – the categories that display, the image that is included for  each post etc – requires a knowledge of php and coding… great for someone like me, not for my site owners.  Believe me when I say that at some point the site owner is going to want to change what is displayed on the front page and will try to do it themselves!

Another challenge that I encountered with the theme is the use of the Featured Content Gallery Widget.  It is just AWESOME – and truly adds a dimension to the layout however, ensuring that you have an image to display in that widget is crucial – if you don’t, the widget stops working…. causing grief for many of my clients.

To alleviate most of this, I have been working on administration menus that appear in WP-Admin that literally give my clients the ability to ‘point and click’ to choose what they want on the home page.  For the Featured Content Gallery, I made a modification to the code that will display a ‘default image’ if one is not specified in the blog post (and allow the site owner to specify what that default image through the admin panel).

When your client is ready for the ‘next level’ blog design – don’t just think about the front end.  Think about your clients and the fact that you want to empower them to manage their content.  In the long run, they will thank you for making it easy for them

As a client, spend time talking to your blog designer about how easy managing the content display will be.  It might add a little cost to the overall project – but it will save you much more in terms of money, time and frustration.