Trends in Web Design Involving WordPress
February 20th, 2009 | Posted in blog 20 Comments »
This week I caught up with Debbie Campbell, a Colorado web designer and developer and the owner of Red Kite Creative, and asked her about the latest trends in web design. I’ve been following Debbie on Twitter for a while. This week she posted a few tweets about web design and WordPress, so I asked her to share a little more.
In the projects you take on, how common is it for websites to integrate a blog? Are there any trends you’re observing?
I almost always suggest that my small business clients consider including or adding a business blog to their sites. I’ve been doing this for several years, but only in the last 6-9 months have many clients either been agreeing to the idea or, even better, they came in with it in mind at the start.
When you integrate a blog into a site, do you code the site in an authoring tool such as Home Site or Dreamweaver and then add a blog, or do you put the entire site in a blog, using the blog’s navigation and page functions as a CMS?
If it’s a new site, and an overall CMS is also needed by the client, I would build the entire site in WordPress if it can accommodate all the features they need. But sometimes the client is only interested in adding a blog to an existing site, or is not interested in a CMS but wants a blog.
In that case, I can create a custom WordPress template from any cleanly-coded HTML page and create a 2 or 3-column blog layout that matches the rest of the site perfectly.
If you use WordPress as a CMS for the entire site, how much of the content can the client maintain? What about with the other method, when the pages are created with Home Site / Dreamweaver?
If the site is built in WordPress, the client has access to everything — they can easily edit and add pages and posts whenever they like using the administrative back end. How much they can do depends ultimately on how interested they become — I have some clients that only write posts, but others who understand how to install addons to enhance site functionality.
Regular HTML-based sites can only be changed if the client knows HTML and has access to both an HTML editor (like HomeSite or Dreamweaver) and FTP software. I would not recommend this route for a client who has no experience with HTML.
As a web designer, how do you avoid being inundated with free tech support for the life of the website? (Especially when it’s a WordPress installation, where users may have a lot of questions or do something that corrupts the pages.)
Tech support isn’t free. I’ll make corrections at no charge for two weeks after launch, but I stress to all blog and CMS clients that the burden is on them to learn and understand what they now own. Clients are shown how to backup their sites and databases, but it’s their responsibility to do so unless they’ve signed a maintenance contract with me and specifically requested that I take care of their blog or CMS updates and backups.
What level of interest do clients have with SEO when it comes to sites? What do you tell them?
Most clients are quite concerned about SEO and rightly so. I do basic SEO on every site I build (researching keywords, appropriate coding such as ALT attributes and link titles, and writing specific title and description tags for top-level pages) and have done larger SEO projects in the past on my own; I work with dedicated SEO professionals on many projects.
As a former Internet retailer I have hands-on experience in both SEO and PPC and can talk to clients about the pros and cons of each. And I choose open source software that’s search engine-friendly.
Overall, as sites like WordPress enable clients to do more web publishing and management themselves, what problems do you notice? Do users quickly get themselves in trouble?
Not really. I’d say that most of my clients who’ve gotten a blog in the last six months are doing just fine with it — that speaks to the ease-of use of WordPress vs. some of the more complicated blog and CMS platforms.
Can you comment on any other trends you’re observing in web design? Are there more requests for shopping carts (for example, for people to start their own businesses), more jquery additions (for example, to create custom image galleries), more emphasis on SEO so people rank higher, more blogs?
Emphasis on SEO has been steady or growing since I started my company in 2005, and I think that it will stay that way (even as the nature of SEO work evolves). I’ve had a lot of gallery or portfolio-based sites in the last six months or so – some of my favorite types of sites to build — and am starting to see more e-commerce site requests recently.
It seems that about 2/3 of my clients are now getting or considering blogs. I think that’s a good trend to watch; it’s a fine thing when a small business owner begins to realize that he or she really is an expert in what they do, and can use their website to both share that expertise and build interest in their business.
For more about Debbie Campbell, see her site, Red Kite Creative. You can also browse her portfolio.
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Nice! Love the information… gets me thinking about doing the same for my clients. Thanks guys.
[...] Trends in Web Design involving WordPress [...]
Nice piece. I agree about the tools and WP. Although powerful, it seems like tools like DreamWeaver slow down the building process. With WP everything is all set and there are plenty of available themes to build on.
I also like WP because my it lets regular users control the content. I’d rather give my clients the freedom to update. With HTML I don’t feel comfortable having some clients use FTP and editing the HTML on their pages. Even though it’s no longer my responsibility, seeing a nice page messed up or erased is never fun. I really like your two week rule advice–will try to put that to use in the future.
Thanks,
B
[...] Webseitendesign und WordPress wächst immer mehr zusammen: Trends in Web Design Involving WordPress [...]
Yeah it is a great and nice article looking forward to have such article it is so useful. It is very interesting article and quite impressive and more informative and looking forward to read such article. Since I’m new to blogging, these articles are greatly appreciated; very useful and informative blog and every body must visit this blog.
Thanks for the information… this is a great article. SEO is becoming pretty popular nowadays, isn’t it? Many people get SEO consultation along with the initial designing of their websites from web designers.
Every client we have had this year has either wanted a blog, a shopping cart, or both. Brochure based websites, while informative, are becoming less functional as people strive to call out to search engines by blogging, and monetizing different parts of their site whether its through product based transactions or advertising.
Interesting post and thanks for sharing. Some things in here I have not thought about before.
I’m going to bookmark this page so I can return and keep reading.
An interesting and informative post. Thanks for sharing your good work.
Great informations. i’ll try it in my web design also. Thanks friend.
I love the template our marketing company picked out for us. It was a quick solution that will allow us to generate leads and not have to rely as heavily on PPC because the template is SEO friendly.
Great post.I really enjoy reading your blog.The keyword sniping links are awesome.Keep it up.Thanks for sharing with us.I’ll definitely try it in my web design.
Great informations. i’ll try it in my web design also. Thanks friend.
Once I created the sites for articles without CMS. I integrated MySQL database with handmade templates and added content through MySQL-PHP client. Now I’m thinking about adding a blog to this site and have to decide should I use the previous informative structure of the site or add wordpress designed blog.
Thank you for this post. I will keep it in mind.
Wow Eldev, if you’re able to create your own templates that interact with a MySQL database, it sounds like you’re pretty technical. But I’m not sure what advantage you gain by doing this yourself rather than using a platform [WordPress] already worked on by dozens of techies for years.
Interesting! Always looking for useful SEO tips.
As a webmaster , I’m very glad to see that someone thought to post this topic.
Quite a few people out there don’t understand what all is involved in this industry, and I think also we are many times underrated
or taken for granted. Never the less I’m very glad to see that you may feel the same way I do , thanks so much for this post!
We’ve found that folks we’ve hooked up with WordPress only quickly want to move up to something more robust, like Joomla. So what we do is we’ll keep WP in the /blog subdirectory and apply the template to the “foyer” site so it’s seamless. This is unless they really do just want to blog but most of our clients are businesses. If we get the chance to talk them out of WP (no offense, it’s great for blogging but for businesses who aren’t really blogging?) we will set them up with Joomla but then throw JomComment or something on there or maybe customtags also so they get some of the blogging features built in.
Joomla is a great platform, and a very popular one. Have you ever used the WordPress extension for Joomla? How well does it work?
small business are great for trying out new markets’:-