WordPress sites are just about everywhere, and it’s not hard to understand why. For many, they represent the ultimate in good looking, “have it now” sites. In fact, on most hosting panels, it can be installed in just a few mouse clicks.

Instead of having to pay a designer, work on layouts and revisions, and then finally uploading your site, the budding online marketer can simply register a domain, install WordPress, pick a theme, and start selling on the web. Sounds just about perfect… right?

As someone who has designed websites and helped business owners to meet their marketing goals for more than a decade, I’m not so sure. The whole thing makes me more than a little concerned. There are a lot of reasons to think that WordPress sites might not be the fantastic value it seems to be at first sight.

Consider this:

Instant WordPress sites are easy, but they are usually far from customized. Just because something looks good at first glance doesn’t mean it’s right for your business. That’s especially true when dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other business owners might be using the exact same template. Do you really want your website to look like your competitors?

Consider also that your Calgary WordPress developer may be designing using non-design tools or WordPress theme generators that will undoubtedly restrict the potential creative outcome. Where the design and creative of a marketing website plays such an important role in converting visitors to potential clients this has to raise a red flag or two. The fact remains, just because you can open pictures on a computer and manipulate them, does not make you a designer.

And that limitation doesn’t just stop with aesthetics, either. Different sites, in different businesses, need different features and functionality. While WordPress has a large community of plug-in developers, finding, implementing and designing the look or plug-ins is not for the faint of heart.

Security can be a concern. An improperly installed WordPress installation can be a hacker magnet, not to mention a spammers heaven.  A seasoned website application programmer can insure that your WordPress installation is not vulnerable to attack.  Having a proper backup strategy and the ability to recreate your website should it be destroyed by a hacker is critically important and it requires someone who has more than an entry level knowledge of web applications to accomplish.

Deploying a cheap templated WordPress blog might be right for your budget now, but they’re usually wrong for the business. When it all comes down to it, this is really the big issue. For most businesses – even the small ones — the money that will be saved by using a cheap or free WordPress template isn’t ever going to come close to the amount they’ll lose by not having a professionally designed WordPress installation. While there are a lot of great ways to save cash when searching for web design or online marketing, going with something generic shouldn’t be one of them.

I can understand the pull of WordPress sites; they’re quick, cheap, and easy to put in place. But, just like most other things you could get for your business, the best investment usually isn’t the one that costs you the least and comes to you the fastest.

To answer the question, “But is it Effective?” – Yes, WordPress is hugely effective if it is properly deployed and designed with purpose.

Having a professionally installed and custom designed WordPress blog theme still does not have to break the bank.  The eKzact team can help you.

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David West began began his career as a freelance designer, later launching a full service website design and development company (eKzact.com) in Calgary, Alberta. He firmly believes that quality traffic is better than quantity, and has always used “coaching” approach to the development online strategies for his business clients. David’s clients especially love his “non-tech” way of talking about technical issues.

The point of email is to communicate. Years ago, when I felt like I was one of 4 people in Canada with an email account, I read a bit on email ettiquette. One of the points always stuck with me, “One day you will send an email that you will regret.” I have indeed.

Have you ever sent an email message that you regret? Big corporate servers sometime allow users to recall their sent email, if it is sent to a co-worker. Traditionally though, when you fire off that heated response to politically charged cult leader (he who’s name we shall not speak is what we call him)… your mail is gone forever and you can’t take it back.

The ability to get delivery and read reciepts is also a function that is missing in many modern email clients and web based email solutions such as gmail.

Enter the solutions: PointofMail

PointofMail is a great web service that allows you to send email by appening .poinofmail.com to the email recipients address. The email goes through the PointofMail server and then spins off to the intended recipient. You can setup your account to simply track delivery, opens and forwarded email. If you wish though, you can kick it up a notch and send your mail so that it can self destruct after a pre-determined period of time or so that you can, at will, recall the message.

In order to facilitate instant self destructing email or email that you can litterally yank out of the other persons inbox, PointofMail actually converts the email into an image and send the image to the final recipient. When you recall a message, PointofMail simply deletes the image off of their secure server. Should the person look at the message after it is recalled, you can have a polite little note show up… “sorry, I recalled my note because it was time sensitive, please call me …”

One nice feature is the ability to track attachments, such as how many times an attachment is read. You can also track your email message as it is being forwarded. In terms of sending sales proposals or other sensitive documents, you can learn quite a bit about the interest in your message by the frequency that it is opened, and forwarded.

Incidentally, when you send through PointofMail, you dont’ have to recall the message completely. You can simply edit the message. Change the message completely if you wish and it simply updates in the recipients email box!

If you send a document that is highly confidential and you want to, you can send it with a prompt to automatically delete itself if the first recipient tries to forward it to another person.  You can even password protect these highly sensitive messages with PointoMail!

PointofMail.com has plans starting as low as $29.99 per year.  Check it out here…

Cheers – David A. West
Calgary Social Media Consultant

Regards - David A. West

Google’s annual developer conference is well underway and there are a number of predictions and announcements being made. These advancements in both Google product offerings as well as technology announcements.

Technology announcements / predictions such as the general adoption of HTML 5 over the coming months. HTML 5 is being developed as the new standard and will bring a ton of functionality to web developers including the ease to embed video in h264 format and the ability to build rich web applications that have access to the local PC’s storage and resources such as cameras. I am going to refrain from making bold predictions about HTML 5′s impact on the internet, but it seems that it is going to propel the move to the cloud faster than ever before.

Google Wave has dropped the need to be “invited” to join wave. This will hopefully mean greater adoption by users. Wave is reported to also be “much faster” to use now. Google has also added permission management and an extension gallery to wave. I haven’t seen the ability to use wave as a primary email tool yet though. When Wave can pull my regular email from non-wave users, then it may be more widely adopted. Until then, it’s rather a closed community.

One of the other product developments that Googlers are talking about is “Google Storage for Developers”. This is a cloud based service build on Google infrastructure that will give developers access to low cost cloud based storage space. It sounds very similar to Amazon Simple Storage 3, a widely adopted cloud based storage solutions for developers. These services tend to be exactly what they are sold as… “for developers” to develop applications and services that leverage the low cost cloud based storage. Twitter, for example, uses Amazon Simple Storage to host portions of the Twitter application. While cloud based storage solutions like these are not exactly consumer products, they become the foundation of some fairly powerful potential in terms of development of cloud based services that you may very well already be using.

Cheers,

David West