Posts Tagged ‘Wordpress’

Newmeasures

Boulder, Colorado
Type: Informational

Most survey company websites are overly corporate and stuffy, and overwhelm you with various products and services. For the  Newmeasures redesign, we sought to highlight their fresh value-based approach to traditional employee engagement.

Website Design Features: Custom themed content management system with admin login to update the website.  One primary default theme plus sub-themes or sub-templates for various interior pages.

Visit the website: www.newmeasures.com

Glossary of Blog Terms

First and foremost, the term blog derives from the word weblog, which is just an online diary of sorts.  The writer(s) are called bloggers and you may have heard the term blogosphere, which just is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections. Now that you know about bloggers blogging in the blogosphere, on to some specific definitions:

Atom: Another popular feed format developed as an alternative to RSS.
Blogger.com, a free, popular blog hosting web site.
Blogroll: A list of links to other websites or blogs a blogger recommends.
Comments - when a blogger creates a new “post” or journal entry, site visitors have a chance to write a response, or comment, regarding that post or topic.
Comment spam:Like e-mail spam. Robot “spambots” flood a blog with advertising in the form of bogus comments. A serious problem that requires bloggers and blog platforms to have tools to exclude some users or ban some addresses in comments.
Feeds: see RSS Feeds.
Permalink: AKA. Permanent link. The unique URL of a single post. Use this when you want to link directly to a post somewhere instead of linking to your homepage
Pingback: The alert in the TrackBack system that notifies the original poster of a blog post when someone else writes an entry concerning the original post.
Plugin: AKA Plug-in or Plug in.  A module that extends or adds to the basic capabilities of the blog software.
Podcasting: Contraction of “iPod” and “broadcasting” (but not for iPods only). Posting audio and video material on a blog and its RSS feed, for digital players.
Post: An entry written and published to a blog.  Usually presented to the site visitor in reverse chronological order (newest entry first).
Post Slug: For blogs with common language URLs, the post slug is the portion of the URL that represents the post. Example: http://domain.com/2008/01/this-is-the-post-slug
RSS:Really Simple Syndication is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.
RSS aggregator:Software or online service allowing a blogger to read an RSS feed, especially the latest posts on their favourite blogs. Also called a reader, or feedreader.
RSS feed:The file containing a blog’s latest posts. It is read by an RSS aggregator/reader and shows at once when a blog has been updated. It may contain only the title of the post, the title plus the first few lines of a post, or the entire post.
Subscribe:The term used when a blogs feed is added to their RSS feed reader like Bloglines or Google. Some blogging platforms have internal subscriptions, this allows readers to receive notification when there are new posts in a blog.
Templates:Templates, used on the “back end” of a blog that work together to handle information and present it on a blog.
Theme:CSS based code that when applied to the templates will result in visual element changes to the blog. The theme, as a whole, is also referred to as a blog design.
TrackBack:A system that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written another entry concerning it. The system works by sending a ‘ping’ between the blogs, and therefore providing the alert.
Weblog: the unshortened version of ‘blog’.
Wordpress: a free, popular, customizable blog software; can be used as a content management system

Estes Park Winter Festival

Estes Park, Colorado
Type: Informational

The Estes Park Winter Festival needed a website to launch this exciting new event.

Website Design Features: Custom themed content management system with admin login to update the website.

Visit the website: www.estesparkwinterfestival.com

what a content management system won’t do

A content management system will provide a framework for you to quickly and easily update your site from any computer with internet access.  However, a CMS will not give non-technical users 100% flexibility with their site.  They provide a structured means for adding content.   If you’re considering a CMS, keep in mind that…

  • CMS will not write your content for you.  If you didn’t have anything to say before, adding a CMS or blog will not magically create copy.
  • Without a custom plugin, you will not be able to change your header and footer images or text.  You will only be able to update the content portion of the page. 
  • Your navigation will either be images that you cannot update from within the CMS admin control panel, OR text that will allow you to add/remove navigation items from within the CMS control panel.  So, if you want smooth-looking graphics for your navigation (i.e. http://www.iconeden.com/ or http://www.giraffe.net/) you will probably not be able to add or remove navigation from within your CMS panel.  However, if you are okay with regular text for your navigation, you’ll be able to add or remove pages from the navigation.
  • Images inserted into posts will have limited stylization options.  If you want a dropshadow, wooden frame, poloriod frame, or some other decoration, you’ll either need to have it on every image that you add to the content area, or you’ll need to add it to the image before uploading it.  It’s sort of an all-or-nothing feature.

If you’re unsure of whether or not a CMS might be right for you, please contact us today and we’ll answer any questions you might have. 

want to update your own website?

what is wordpress? what is a blog? what is a cms?
Want to update your own website? Not sure what a blog is? Not sure what a content management system is? Click here to find out by watching this informative presentation about the features of Wordpress Content Management System.

(2MB PDF file opens in a new window, Please be patient as it loads, Thanks!)