Optimizing Your Wordpress Blog for the iPhone
If you happen to also follow me over at my personal site [ www.jonhaarstad.com ], you may already be aware of my passion for the iPhone. So what happens when you combine a Wordpress (blog platform I use) aficionado and an iPhone user? Well, I installed a plug-in yesterday on this blog that is a clever and well-designed plug-in that turns a Wordpress blog into an easy to read page on an iPhone.
Thanks to the folks over at BraveNewCode [ link ]. If you’re an iPhone user, go to www.webshoptalk.com and you’ll see the difference.
New Blog Set-up Service & Pricing
On that note - if you’re looking for someone to create a customized & optimized blogging system for you or your business, I’m now offering my services for a cool and affordable $350 per blog which includes a customized look and the full setup of all the backend items that will make your blog a thing of absolute beauty - sleek on the outside, with a monster engine under the hood…so to speak. Contact me for further details. Hurry before I get swamped and realize I’m charging too little…
| 3.5 (1 person) |
The Great Church CMS Hunt Is On
At the church where I serve as the on-staff web developer (among other things), we’re now looking at taking the site to the next level…CMS-style. While there are plenty of CMS solutions available - some free and some, well, not-so-free - there are very specific needs within a church environment that the one-size-fits-all mold of a Joomla or Drupal-style CMS can’t quite accommodate (in my honest opinion).
As I’ve begun the intense search for a solid and long-term solution, I’ve encountered some interesting things. For churches - there are more and more CMS options available today while the niche market itself is still in a bit of infancy. I realized just how relatively new this market is by the absolute lack of good sites that offer not some but ANY informed reviews of the various options available. If you’re researching this…you’re pretty much on your own with little to no information outside of the CMS companies themselves which will naturally have a favorable bent towards their product.
Well, I intend to shed some light on this as I finalize my proposals and we move toward the next stage of our church’s web presence. In fact, I’ve already made my decision … now it’s just a matter of convincing the leadership that the cost is not only worth the investment but is essential to our future growth as a fellowship.
More to come…but here’s some names to whet your appetite for what’s to come: Sky, Ekklesia 360, Arena, Church Web Works, and Osmos.
I’ll be posting general thoughts on each company and what they offer (and don’t offer). I’ll also go through the reasoning we’ve been working through in making our selection. To follow with me - make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.
| 3.2 |
Honesty in Advertising
When meeting with a client today, we were looking at various website in his market/field and we were intrigued by a site of a local competitor who, in my initial opinion, had a great site. Great presentation - easy navigation and overall, just a well put together website that was visually appealing. Top notch.
I was impressed UNTIL I looked at their testimonials page and encountered something a bit fishy. My client had the inclination right away when he made the comment, “I’ve seen those pictures before” and I realized he meant that he’d seen them in stock photography galleries. One picture did strike me as familiar…and so, true to my inquisitive nature, the hunt was on.
I did a search for the companies that the testimonies were referring to and an interesting thing happened…
None of the companies existed. Want to know what the top hits were when I searched for the company names? You may have guessed it. Oh yea, it was the service provider site which posted the testimonials.
Bad, bad form. Why lie? Why fabricate stories? This is a larger Portland firm so I’m a little baffled that they wouldn’t have three LEGIT testimonies they could post. Was it laziness or could they (aghast!) not actually find three testimonies that they could make public?
If you are a web developer working with a client who provides you with misleading statements or outright fabrications (a fancy word for “lies”), don’t you have a moral obligation to object to the posting of such material? Even if it may be common - it’s not honest and therefore immoral. Instead of outright objecting to the inclusion - I think we can make the honest choice to “suggest” that the client get some real statements and pictures of real customers. I’m guessing that the web designer was asked to get three photos to go with the testimonials.
Cheap tricks make you just that - cheap…no matter how shiny the outer shell may be.
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