Several factors are motivating these changes. WordPress, the platform I’ve used to build my websites and that I use for my web development clients, has recently released version 3.0 which makes having multiple sites managed from one WordPress installation possible and easy. Explaining all the things I do as professional services is tricky and seems to need an even more visual approach. The process of doing something is the best way to learn how something works. These are just three of the motivations for making these changes. Therefore, one of the first things to change, at least temporarily, is the Theme I’m using for this site. You may recognize it as TwentyTen, the newest and most powerful default WordPress Theme that now comes with each installation.

As the infrastructure of my websites becomes consolidated and streamlined, you’ll see the Theme or Themes for each site be designed to express what I’m trying to do with each.

Please stay tuned.

Billboards used to be a wonderful opportunity to express oneself large! Now they seem like the red-headed-stepchildren of the Web 2.0 age; they’re barely remembered and when they are they’re clearly copied and pasted. The result is layouts that, even though they may measure 30″ x 70″ are unreadable.

There’s a great example on 101 heading north in the heart of San Francisco. It’s on one of those rooftops in the design showcase area of Townsend. It’s a Stella Artois billboard and the concept is a metrosexual man and a glamourous runway model/socialite are sitting face-to-face at a small (restaurant?) table in a white photo studio (in other words, they’re in a limbo world of white, but you get the picture).

He’s gazing lovingly at her, or something, and she’s holding a glass of Stella Artois.

The headline,… wait for it…, is… illegible. Why? Because it’s so damn small!

If you’re a passenger, not driving, and crane your neck to follow the board as you pass it, it reads “A thing of beauty” (or something like that). By the way, this is not good advertising because I remembered it and I’m writing about it.

The concept is lame. As my advertising teacher used to say, it’s a horse-laugh. It’s a guffaw concept. “Oh, I get it! He’s gazing at the beer!!!” Second, it takes such a straight-ahead approach to the concept, including a clearly gorgeous woman on the opposite end of the interaction, that there’s no surprise.

The ad would be markedly better if they had posed an ancient “bag lady,” holding the beer, opposite the metrosexual dude with the same headline. Then at least there would be some conceptual dissonance and interest.

But it’s still an easy concept in that it ultimately only says that “Stella Artois is good!” Duh!

So, it doesn’t help that you can’t read it.

I have lots of thoughts as to why art directors can’t art direct billboards nowadays, the most obvious being that they’re designing them on their iPods at Burning Man. But that’s it for now.

A blog for entrepreneurs.

I particularly like this one:

4. It helps not to call people “human resources”. They’re people. And, as it turns out, people like to be treated like people. Go figure.

This is true for your staff as well as your customers. This dovetails with what is said throughout AnAdGuy.com, that advertising and marketing needs to talk To people rather than At them. This is more important to remember now that we’re in a recession, whether you’re developing a new promotion for your product launch or your new website.

The first one in the series is called The Break Up and tells the story a couple breaking up. She, Consumer, is fed up with his, Advertiser’s, dismissive and self-centered ways.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You’re 28 to 34, your online interests include music, movies and… laser hair removal….

It’s a wonderful satire on the sorry state of affairs in the quality of advertising and how ad agencies and advertisers (that would be clients that pay ad agencies) largely treat their customers as numbers instead of human beings.

If you’ve read through this site, you’ve encountered the frequently repeated credo that advertising should talk To the audience, not At them. This commercial, ironically for a Microsoft product, perfectly encapsulates the negative things that happen when an “Advertiser” assumes they know what tricks and gimmicks they can use to manipulate people to buy products.

While it’s an exaggeration to say that advertising forces people to buy things they don’t need, it’s a fair statement to say that a culture of consumerism, reinforced and possibly created by advertising agencies, with the intimate collaboration of large corporations intent on selling mass-market products, has created a situation where people live beyond their means to have…stuff.

This film perfectly illustrates that at the core of the problem is “not listening.” This applies to small and large businesses equally. If you want to advertise your business, — and advertising really can take any form — then you have to first start by acknowledging that you’re ultimately speaking to one human being, albeit in a process that may be repeated over a million instances.

So, how does an advertiser connect with the consumer if it seems like the “marriage is over?” The truth is that the marriage is never over. There are new opportunities born every second. So, the reality is that each and every marketing effort is really an opportunity to speak to the consumer, to connect to them as human beings.

How does one do that? Well, gimmicks aren’t the way to do it. That’s the number one problem with Promotions as a field of advertising. Apparently companies make money with Promotional Advertising, so something must be working. As The Break Up shows, a lot of money has been made with traditional advertising too. That doesn’t mean that because it works to some degree that it’s not tragically (if not fatally) flawed to another degree.

Promotions that simply bribe a consumer into trying a product, without even bothering to honor the possibility that the product does have some intrinsic value the consumer may want, or advertising that simply dances around like trained circus animals, entertaining a viewer while forgetting to clearly introduce themselves to the viewer so that they can remember what the product is, let alone why they should care, all fail for the same reason. A lack of acknowledgment.

So, how does one apply this to the next great, possibly award-winning campaign (print, TV or online) for your product. Well, that’s what real advertising is. This is not a potion that can be poured into each concoction to produce miraculous results time and time again. This is an approach. In a way it’s really a humility. It’s the notion that you, the Advertiser, are perhaps intruding on the consumer and you should therefore choose your words (and pictures, colors, fonts, etc.) carefully, if you want to persuade them to your side. Not just Pop, and be loud and get their attention!

And ultimately that’s what it’s all about. Advertising is Persuasion, not selling.

Still, there is a great deal that leaders can do to minimize technology-related disruptions and maximize technology-driven benefits.

Despite new technologies and the increased acceptance of telecommuting, there are some who fear and resist it, assuming that not being in the office will harm productivity. Obviously, if people are professional and focused on producing results, productivity is not jeopardized. But it takes clear and candid acknowledgment of the issues, covered in this post, to make sure that every member of the team performs effectively.

The lifeblood of any online business, or presence even, is traffic, the number of people or eyeballs that go to your site. The way these eyeballs can find a site, unless they’re reading the URL off of an ad, business card, coupon or hearing it in a commercial, is through a search. Therefore, for a website to be truly enabled to function on the internet for any commercial purposes, large or small, it has to be Search-Engine Optimized.

Anyone can be a web designer. Particularly nowadays with all of the user-friendly web authoring tools and technologies, determining how a site looks is not as difficult as it may have seemed before. But that may not produce a product that really works hard for the business it represents. In contrast, a web developer provides a product or a suite of solutions that enables a business to truly use the internet for all that is available.

This age of the internet has drawn together people from wildly different poles, coders and designers. Coders, to pick just one word, represents people who started with software languages and learned how to use those to build solutions. Designers, to pick just one other word, represents people who focused their attention on how visual elements communicate concepts and emotions, both subtle and overt.

Web design has mashed these two groups together in a confusing huddle that is still trying to sort itself out. A handful of developments have made things much more efficient and worthwhile.

It’s useful to know or remember that even the geekiest Coder very quickly opted to use Copy and Paste as they built websites and other interfaces. Instead of doing everything from scratch, re-purposing vital elements of web pages and websites made complete sense. The real prize lay in the final results and being able to go to lunch. Copy and Paste is available to anyone.

Likewise, Designers, like custom tailors, learned that if you can’t make something unique, or make something serve your (or your client’s) purposes, then there wasn’t much point in it. Also, uniqueness is great, but if it’s hidden in the forest, under a haystack, or some other metaphor, and no one can find it, that too is pointless.

Which brings us to the first of the handful of developments to make things much more efficient and worthwhile in web development and design: XHTML/CSS.

XHTML/CSS has capitalized on the idea of collecting all of the data that tells web pages how they’re supposed to look and storing it in one document and has revolutionized web design by making it so much easier and more logical.

The next development is scripting languages (PHP, JSP, ASP) designed to make dynamic web sites. A dynamic website is a website that doesn’t really exist on a server as a set number of pages, such as a static site does. Instead, a dynamic website, using a scripting language, calls up chunks of web pages (templates) and creates a page on the fly, in nanoseconds, containing and displaying the data that the user, the person browsing the site, requested to see or read by clicking a button or visiting the site in the first place.

Blog publishing applications and Content Management Systems are another of these developments. There’s some confusion about blog software and CMS and indeed, a fair amount of overlap and blurring. The simple distinction is that blog software allows a website to publish posts or blogs and a CMS allows a website to manage communities of people participating in one subject matter or many. Blogs serve information out to many, CMS sites serve many types of information out to many.

Which brings me to WordPress. WordPress is many things (wordpress.com, wordpress.org and wordpress-mu), but for now it’s a very powerful blog publishing application or software that allows a web developer, either a Coder or a Designer, to generate a website instantly. This instantly generated website provides the client the 100% complete ability to edit it, depending on whether they want to just publish pages of information or time-relevant posts of news and views or actually “open the hood and look inside.”

The Designer, thanks to the wonders of XHTML/CSS, can make this same instantly generated site look unique and branded according to the client’s needs; the Coder can too, but my guess is that the Designer would do a better job. With some nominal learning about the rest of what WordPress offers, this Designer or the Coder can expand the functionality of this instantly generated dynamic WordPress website to truly be a powerful ecommerce presence.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, at this years WordCamp SF said that WordPress provides 80%-90% of the Search-Engine Optimization a website needs to compete on the internet.

So, if you’re doing web development, I strongly recommend that rather than worrying about re-inventing the wheel either through web-authoring tools such as Dreamweaver, to create static websites, why not use an incredibly stable, powerful, scalable and tested platform such as WordPress to provide the engine of your next website and use XHTML/CSS to make it unique.

Of you can crank up your favorite web-authoring tool and build each page your client needs, for them, and hope for the best.

Read More: WordPress: What is it? How do you use it? Why?

You could hear the brains getting bigger.

1. Matt —
   Matt Mullenweg’s opening presentation was wonderful. He’s a charming and able public speaker who clearly is passionate about what WordPress makes possible and all those who feel that way too.
2. The other Matt —
   Matt Cutts, in his presentation on WordPress and SEO, joked that he wished that he was the highest ranked “Matt” on Google, but instead it was Matt Mullenweg. Matt Cutts is also a charming and able public speaker and quite probably a stand-up comedian. Finally, a confirmation of what I had suspected, that WordPress, because of the way it’s been put together, takes care of 80-90% of Search Engine Optimization for a website built on it. He had a lot of great, grounded points about improving your own SEO and what to avoid, all of which you can see for yourself at WordPress.tv soon.
3. Andy Peatling —
   This presentation really made me happy because it dealt mostly with WordPress MU and the newly announced BuddyPress installation that together seem to add a whole lot more functionality to a WordPress-based website than I thought possible. Suffice it to say that one of my next to-do items is to install WordPress MU and BuddyPress and see what they can do.
4. Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A —
   I’ve found that Q&As at conferences tend to dredge up the dumbest questions. That was not the case here, happily. In fact, I learned a lot just from the Q&A. For instance, I need to look into P2…
5. The awesome catered BBQ lunch.
6. Meeting other very cool WordPress developers from the moment I stepped off of the train to Mission Bay. Now I can actually ask someone some questions in realtime rather than on a forum, and return the favor, hopefully.
7. The cool T-shirt that came with the ticket price. Thanks! (Lunch and a T-shirt?)
8. Getting a much better sense of what the term “developer” really means.
9. Getting exposed to (just some of) the many faces and executions of WordPress, the platform that allows you to offer your clients a solid and scalable website platform…that they can edit!
10. The Anniversary Party at the Automattic Lounge! (Lunch, a T-shirt and a party?)
11. Matt Cutt’s suggestion to focus on adding relevant content on your website, such as writing a post entitled, “The Top 11 Best Things About WordCamp SF 2009” or something to that effect.

Very, very cool. Thanks WordPress/Automattic! …and everyone else!

When’s the next one?

Check out their introductory infomercial, Recipe for Success. If you feel as successful after viewing it as I did, I recommend that you go to the original YouTube page and rate it!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Clearly, the Germick brothers, Ryan, Nathan and Dylan, and their global multimedia conglomerate Germart.org, are awesome.

If you dig this, tell your friends to check this out here, or at Germart.org or on their Facebook page and then they can “ride that booty good” too.