Apologies, but, as someone once said, there’s somethin’ happenin’ here.  And I need to pay my respects — and attention — to it.

Yesterday, I posted about a fun, interesting book that puts forth the notion that the Grateful Dead, among all people, were rather savvy, innovative, ground-breaking business people.  Imagine that!

Then tonight: I get home from the movies — wonderful The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep (nothing short of a-ma-zing in the lead role of Margaret Thatcher) — and I pop open the laptop to check Yahoo for the SU – OSU score (the Orangemen lost!  sniff sniff!), but what immediately grabs my eyeballs is something I’ve never seen before on Yahoo: a featured item at the top of the front page highlighting an ongoing live concert by, get this, none other than Bob Weir, one of the founding members of the Dead!

The concert, as it turns out, is a fundraiser for “Headcount”, an organization focused on registering voters, particularly young people, who tend to be under-represented in elections.  (Yeah, I was one of those young, non-voters myself back in the day.)

So, I hook up my laptop to the TV via HDMI and start watching the show.  Weir is playing in a recording studio in San Francisco before an audience of maybe 50 people max., with a backing group called “The Nationals”, a bunch of young kids who are pretty darn good musicians.  And they’re spinning out a blend of never-heard-before songs intermixed with some good ol’ Dead classics.  As I write this they’re in the middle of the China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider medley — one of my all-time favorites.  It’s hard not to miss J. Garcia’s vocals and guitar, but they’re doing a damn good job on this tune, I have to say.

Anyway, between the sets they broadcast a rather free-ranging panel discussion among a group of people that I mostly don’t know.  They talk about all kinds of loosely related things, like voter registration, the energy crisis, the influence of money on politicians.  But what really grabs me again is: not only is Weir, himself, on the panel, but so is John Perry Barlow.  “Who’s he?”, you might be wondering.  Barlow is one of the lyricists who collaborated a lot with the Dead (with Weir, in particular), and he’s the guy who wrote the Foreward to the book I wrote about yesterday!

I’m sitting here wondering: what the odd are that this could happen?  What is the significance of this is, ah, incredible coincidence?!   Well, my dear eldest son likes to say, “There are no coincidences in life — everything happens for a reason.”  I think he may be right.  I just need to start paying closer attention.

Weir and Co. just closed the show with an blissful medley of some of the best tunes from the Dead’s early studio albums:  Ripple, Uncle John’s Band and Brokedown Palace.  What an unexpected joy.

Quoting Robert Hunter’s lyrics in Ripple,

Let it be known

there is a fountain

that was not made

by the hands of men.

How true.  How true.

By the way, Dr. Barnes confirmed for me that this is the Dead show where he had his epiphany…

The book provides a nice, concise summary of the author’s view of the great lessons to be learned from how the Dead, literally, went about their business — which, quite consistently, was to do nothing by the book.

The Dead amassed a huge and fanatically loyal fan base partly by allowing their work product (their music) to be freely shared — long before Napster was ever conceived. They built a large, flexible and very effective support organization that operated under few written rules.  They generated tremendous amounts of cash, largely from constant touring, not multi-platinum album sales.  They weren’t afraid to innovate — and so sometimes they would try things that failed.  And they often spent tons of money rather frivolously.  But in the long run, they were tremendously successful by almost any measure.  All the while, they operated way outside the boundaries of the (now moribund) music establishment.  Sounds like fun, huh?

I urge you to read the book if you have any interest in understanding how business can be successful in these crazy, uncertain economic times — and particularly if you’re a Dead fan, of course.  But, for those of you not inclined to seek out the book, here’s a link to a page that summarizes the keep business lessons that the Dead have to teach us,  according to Dr. Barnes.  You can find more info about Dr. Barnes and his studies of the Dead’s business values and methods here.

So, there you go.   Pass it on!

But I’m jumping ahead in the story….

For many of you, the idea of creating an online store for your business or charitable organization’s website – and doing it yourself - seems a bit far-fetched.  You may very well think it would be too time-consuming to learn everything you would need to know to even get started, no less to get the thing up and running.  And even if you could manage to get something out there, you may think it wouldn’t be a high quality shopping experience for your customers.  It might not look very good or integrate well with the rest of your site, or be too limited in it’s functionality, or too convoluted and unfriendly for customers to use, or….well, you name it – it just wouldn’t work!  Right?

No.  Wrong, wrong, wrong on all counts!  Some extremely powerful tools have evolved to the point where adding professional-looking, high performance e-Commerce capabilities to your site – without having to fork over big bucks to someone with a Master’s in Computer Science – is well within your grasp.  And it won’t take you years – or even weeks – to do it.  You can build a robust storefront that integrates seamlessly with your WordPress website in a matter of a few hours.  Yes, I said hours.

Oh, and did I mention that these very sophisticated development tools are free?  Yes, they’re free.  And anyone with a understanding of WordPress fundamentals can readily learn how to use them.  It’s there for the taking.

If it sounds like I’m excited about the opportunity to share more information about these tools and show you how to use them, I definitely am!  I’m hoping you are excited, too, and will consider participating in this new, high-value class.

Again, the name of the class is Creating Online Stores with WordPress: An Intensive 1/2-Day Workshop, and the first time it will be offered is on Saturday morning March 17th.  Just follow that link to learn more details and to register for the class.  (Registration is through the Amherst Recreation Department website).  If you have any questions about the class, feel free to leave a comment below or to contact me via e-mail.

Hope to see you on the 17th!  No green beer provided, but maybe some green tea.  ;0)

All the best,

Jonathan

The reason for this epiphany: I attended a webinar about how you can use a WordPress plugin to help ensure that the websites you publish are usable on mobile devices — devices like the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Blackberries, Windows CE phones…the list goes on.  And I started wondering: how well does my own website function on one of these devices?  I had no idea…

The fact is: it’s no longer just the early adapters of technology who are using these devices to access the Web — millions of people are.  And, if you haven’t taken steps to make sure your website is mobile device-friendly, there’s a good chance that your site just doesn’t work very well — if at all — on those devices.  It could load too slowly for anyone to want to use it.  Important features could be hidden or unusable.  It may require an excessive amount of zooming in and out.  And mobile users usually are not looking for a ton of information — they need to get at only the most important information, and do it quickly and easily.

If you are just getting started developing a website, you have so many basic things you need to worry about: the information content, the features, the page layout, graphics, color schemes and so on.  It’s a bit much to expect that you can also worrying about how mobile-friendly your site is.  On the other hand, it’s not too early to start educating yourself about the topic of website mobile-readiness.  There is all manner of good information and advice out there.  Here’s a good article to get the thought process moving.  Or just Google “making websites mobile-ready” and you’ll get a ton of results.

It’s also easy to find tools that can help you test how mobile-compatible your website is, like the W3C mobileOK checker.  And WordPress themes that are mobile-friendly, like WPTouch.  And WordPress plugins, like Plugin Buddy Mobile, that can display a mobile version of your site when a mobile devices accesses it.

It can all be a bit overwhelming.  For now, stay focused on your primary goal of getting your website up and operational and, hopefully, well received by the members of your target audience who use the more conventional devices, like desktop and laptop computers.  Once you’ve got that problem licked, you can tackle the mobile compatibility problem with gusto.

http://sixrevisions.com/tools/10-excellent-tools-for-testing-your-site-on-mobile-devices/

The Honeymoon

I was quite happy with my now ex-web hosting vendor for a couple of years.  My site was fairly quick and seemingly reliable (at least I didn’t notice many, if any, service outages), the vendor’s tech support staff responded quickly and effectively the few times I raised questions or concerns, and the cost of the service was, well, dirt cheap!  What could be better?  I was so pleased with the vendor that I started recommending them to other people.

The End of the Honeymoon

But times change, and the service provided by a web hosting vendor can, too.  A few months ago when I tried to access the site my browser reported a “site unreachable” error.  Hmmm!  Opened a chat session with someone from the tech support staff and asked what was going on.  After a some delay, the response was “Oh, we’re re-booting the server.”  No explanation as to why, but, oh well — the site was back up and running in a few minutes.  Didn’t think too much about it, at least until I had the same problem a few days later.

Over the next few weeks things went from a little “sketchy” to much worse.  As the frequency of outages increased, so did my level of concern.  I started asking the tech support person more pointed questions about why this was happening so often.  The answers they gave were varied, but always incredibly vague.  Either they didn’t know, or didn’t want to tell.  But each time I complained, sure enough, the site was back up again in a few minutes.  This got me wondering: how often is the site down for periods of time when I don’t even notice it?  And how is it the site comes back up so quickly each time?  It seemed like the server administrators were simply reacting to customer complaints — not proactively monitoring the performance of the servers to fix problems before customers like me would notice or complain.

The vendor’s responses to these more pointed questions were even more vague.  However, one agent confided: “The servers are old, and we know we’re having problems with them.  We’re moving to a new data center in a couple of months and replacing the servers.  If you can hang on for a while, it will all be better.”  It amazed me that this agent would speak so honestly.  (Were they speaking honestly?  Who knows.  Only one agent mentioned this.  The others always just said, “We’re working with the system admins to solve your downtime problem.”)

The Break-up

Last week, the site was down almost every other time I tried to login to it.  I had had it, and I decided to open an account with another hosting vendor, transfer the site –  lock, stock and barrel — to the new vendor and bid a not-so-fond farewell to the old vendor.  Once I finally made the decision, my life improved immediately!  The transfer process was quick, clean, free and painless.  All I had to do was to open the account with the new vendor, Host Gator, and submit a form requesting them to transfer the site.  Host Gator took care of the rest.  Once the transfer was complete, I simply had to change the DNS nameserver settings for my domain to point to the Host Gator nameservers.  (Sounds complicated, but it’s not — they tell you exactly how to do it.)  My site experienced no downtime whatsoever, and you are reading this post from the site’s new home on a Host Gator server.

Lessons Learned

• Check your site regularly to ensure it is performing well — not just that it is up and running, but also that response time is acceptable.  How often should you do this?  That depends on your site and how critical it is to you and your audience.  High traffic e-commerce sites should be monitored constantly — and selecting the right hosting service becomes very critical.  Personal blogs?  Well, not so much — maybe at least once a week.  (Hopefully you are making some additions or changes at least once a week anyway.)  Small business sites: probably at least once a day.
• Pay attention to and keep a record of how often outages or slow performance occur.  If you start to notice that outages are occurring on more than a very occasional basis, start asking the vendor those more pointed questions.  If things don’t improve immediately, you might try asking your vendor to move your site to another one of their servers.  (This did work for me once — at least temporarily — with my old vendor.)
• Most importantly: don’t be afraid to switch vendors.  There are so many web hosting vendors out there, you shouldn’t feel married to any one vendor, no matter how long your site has been with them.   As noted above, the transfer process can be quite simple and easy, at least if you go with the right new vendor.  What about the money you may have paid for the service contract with your old vendor?  Check with the vendor to see if they will give you a refund for any unused time on your service contract.  Most of them will.  But even if they don’t, consider how much money you really will be out by cutting that vendor loose.  Web hosting is a cheap commodity.  If your site means much to you and your audience, the choice between writing off a few bucks spent on a poor hosting service and providing a more reliable, responsive web experience for your audience should be an easy one to make.

Part of their confusion probably lies in the fact that, when you first create your site (the class is using WordPress.com for starters), the system creates a blog page  for you with a sample post and, by default, assigns the blog page as the home page.  Another potentially contributing factor: one of the exercises assigned in the first class is to create several post articles; we don’t get to creating pages until the second class.  But I think that perhaps most of the confusion lies in how the terms “blog” and “site” are so often used interchangeably in the World of WordPress, even in WordPress documentation.

Technically, a blog means something quite specific, i.e., a Web page that comprises a continuously updated online journal comprising a series of articles (or, posts) that contain a writer’s reflections, comments, opinions and often hyperlinks.  The articles appear on the blog’s page in reverse chronological order.  Typically, readers (or, followers) of the blog can subscribe to the blog in order to automatically receive a notification each time the writer posts a new article.

On the other hand, a site (or, website) is a more generic term, referring to a set — any set — of interconnected webpages, usually including a homepage, generally located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a collection of information by a person, group, or organization.  A given site may or may not include a blog page.

Despite the clear differences between these two terms, many people — myself included sometimes, I must admit — fall into the habit of referring to any site created using WordPress as a “blog”, whether or not the site actually includes a blog page.   Given that WordPress was first created as a tool to enable the blogging process, this is understandable.  But it can make the differences between the two concepts difficult for beginning web developers to grasp when the terms are used almost interchangeably.

I assured that student that there’s nothing to worry about: the WordPress Bootcamp course is all about creating sites with WordPress– and that they can choose to include a blog page in the site that they build, or they can have a “blog-less” site.  It’s up to them as the editors of their sites.

Of course, there are a number of good reasons to include a blog page in one’s site, and I encourage my students to consider including one in their sites from the very beginning.  But that’s the subject of another future post on my own blog here.

Enter Kuler, a fun and easy-to-use tool from Adobe (http://kuler.adobe.com) that allows you to browse through thousands of user-submitted color schemes (or “themes”, as they are referred to in Kuler).  You can also modify an existing theme to tweak it to your liking, or create your own themes from scratch and share them with the Kuler community.

The tool is a little too complex to completely describe here, but here are a few tips to get you started:

1. To get the most out of this tool, it’s best to login to it using your Adobe ID.  (If you haven’t got one of those yet, start by clicking on the Register link to register with Adobe.)
2. After you have logged in, you can search on themes by specifying one or more colors you want in the theme.  You can also browse through the themes by category, e.g., “Latest”, “Most Popular”, “Highest Rated” (yes, users can submit their own rating for a theme).
3. One you find a theme you like, you can drill down into it to see the color values by clicking on the Change/View Theme icon depicted here (last button on the right):  
4. You’ll then see a magnified view of the theme, that shows the values for each of the colors in the theme as represented in different color systems (e.g., RGB, CMYK).    Here’s and example color swatch showing these numeric values: The value that you, the Web designer/developer, need to use is the HEX value shown at the bottom of the page below each color swatch.  So, if you wanted to use the brown color shown in the example above, you would select/copy the “CFACBC” code, and then paste it into some sort of text/notepad file for safekeeping.

There’s far more to learn about this tool that we have space to go into detail about here.  And some of you may be wondering how you can effectively use the color codes to modify the appearance of your WordPress site.  Stay tuned – that will have to be the subject of future postings.

In the mean time, give Kuler a spin and get your color imagination going!

The Web and all that surrounds it have, in fact, completely transformed how we conduct business, giving rise to many brand-new businesses, even entire industries, no one could have imagined — no less built — without the existence of the Web.  Not insignificantly, the emergence of the Web and all that surrounds it have also tolled the death knell for many once-mighty enterprises.

But the impact of the Web has reached far beyond the business world.  It really has changed everything.  How we access information (does anyone remember the World Book Encyclopedia???), how we communicate and socialize with each other, how we make decisions…even how we view the world.

More recently I had an “Aha!” experience the first time I saw WordPress.  Of course, no Web development tool by itself is going to transform all our lives the way the Web itself has.  But what WordPress does do is change how we – the 99% of us who are not experts at programming, or databases, or Web architecture – view what we ourselves can do with the Web.

Instead of simple being consumers of the Web – beholden to the high priests of HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL and all the other acronym-laden tools of Web development used to create the Web experiences we consume – with WordPress we, the 99%, can become creators of those experiences, for our families and friends, for our employers and customers, for members of our social organizations, for the sports teams we coach and the youth groups we lead…for anyone within reach of the Internet.

Some would argue this is nothing new, that Web “templates” have been around for a long time, and that anyone who really wanted to create their own Website could have done it without WordPress.  Well, that’s true to a very limited extent.  But, as so many who have learned through painful, frustrating and sometimes costly experience, Web templates can take you only so far.  Templates simply do not provide the power, flexibility and usability that WordPress does.  With templates you quickly run smack into all kinds of walls that limit what you can do to lend a unique appearance to a site, to make the site behave in a certain way, or to provide the functions and features you want for the site – in short, to make the site be what you want it to be.

Yes, some of the template-based tools can be easy to learn, but so is WordPress.  Most people with fundamental computer skills can learn all they need to know to build an appealing and very serviceable WordPress site in a matter of a few hours.  And then, unlike with template systems, one sees that there are endless ways to extend, enhance and improve their site – all one needs is the curiosity to explore and experiment with the vast array of WordPress

Can you tell I’m a big fan of WordPress?  Well, as much as I enjoy using WordPress to create sites for my customers, it is even more exciting for me to share what I know about WordPress with others, and to help them harness the power of WordPress to create interesting, informative, useful, beautiful Web experiences of their own.  This is why I started the  course, Creating Websites with WordPress: A Bootcamp for Non-Techies, and it is why I am writing this blog.

I will be using this blog to share all sorts of material about both WordPress and Website development in general:  WordPress and other tools and techniques that have been useful for me, ideas about how to create and present compelling content, Do’s and Don’t's, tips and tricks, Websites I think are cool…just about anything that comes to mind — including, perhaps, the occasional diversion into laments about the ineptitude of the Red Sox bullpen, or singing the praises of my favorite “classic rock” bands.  (Dead Heads unite!)

I welcome you to join me on this journey of discovery (I definitely learn something new every day!), and to share your own questions and comments, opinions, ideas, raves, rants (within reason), pet peeves, success stories and war stories…whatever comes to your mind.  Just keep it clean, honest and relevant.  “Haters” can post elsewhere.  This is a place to share constructively.

I hope you enjoy this site.  I look forward to hearing and learning from all of you!