Update May 6, 2024: The Make Marketing blog is temporarily closed to new activity. Current marketing focus and processesare shifting to a new experimental project called WordPress Media Corps. Check out the WordPress Media Corps Initial Roadmap to learn more.
Any marketing contributors wanting to participate or follow along with this new project can join the WP Media Corps site and Slack channel.
Work on the Showcase remains open to contributions, and marketing amplification requests can be made on GitHubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/. For any other ideas or discussions unrelated to these contributing areas, you can use this GitHub discussion area.
In my Big Picture post from January, one of the major obstacles I mentioned was our stagnating growth. To me, our first order of business to tackle this problem is to get a coordinated marketing push underway and despite significant effort we have not been able to do that. I acknowledge that there is blame to share, and I’m sure no one wants to argue process nonstop. The requests made by the Make Marketing team over the years are clear:
Influence over the product roadmap
Influence over brand standards
Influence over marketing strategy
Marketing budgets
Direct access to or more influence over official WordPress properties
With the exception of the possibility to influence marketing strategy through normal feedback/proposal review processes, these are not requests that I am able to fulfill for a variety of reasons from logistical to philosophical. However, I do want to find a way for this team to feel that their contributions are more impactful and, by extension, have a more meaningful contributor experience here.
Given that I cannot offer you the type of access and resourcing that a dedicated marketing team needs, I believe it is time to change the scope of the work. Since it’s become clear that we (sponsored and volunteer contributors alike) cannot collaborate effectively to market on our client’s (WordPress’) behalf, I would like to enable folks who are marketing independent of us to be able to do so with more confidence and less effort.
A WP Media Corps
It has long been the case that WordPress’ most successful marketing has been chalked up to word of mouth, but our substantial network of WP media partners has never been included in any definition of that. I know that we rely on outlets like WP Tavern Jukebox, Underrepresented in Tech, Do the Woo, Gutenberg Times, and countless others to get our information out to users of every variety. And for all these years, they’ve had to know the right people and read the right stuff to get accurate and up-to-date information into their content for their audiences.
I would like to enable their independent marketing to be of excellent quality with less chasing of people by creating a Media Corps which can be managed through this team.
What does that look like?
From a high level, this would mean weekly or bi-weekly media corps meetings where qualified media partners would receive highlights on progress toward project goals, a list of upcoming dates to know, and any future items on the horizon that they should keep an eye out for. A qualified media partner would:
have 80% WP content
have high quality journalism/writing
follow WordPress community guidelines
honor embargoes
etc.
The work of Make Marketing would encompass:
For anyone wanting to participate in this new concept, the contributions are around managing the media room (recruiting, vetting, and coordinating media folks, etc).
For anyone still wanting to provide written content, the contributions are around our current growth area: enterprise clients and deciders. So, content on /showcase and /enterprise.
Sponsored contributors will host the media corps meetings until we sort out cadence and process.
Stretch: help us monitor trends and/or identify which features need a stronger marketing push.
What about the current tasks and projects we’ve got?
It’s been my experience in WordPress that when we close things as wont-fix it is heartbreaking. Even when we understand that we can’t fix it because of intractable problems, closing something without movement registers in the “loss” column of our mental tracking.
For those tickets that can’t move forward because of access or control that I cannot provide, it makes sense to put them in the ice box at least and come back to them when the situation seems more flexible.
For those tickets that can move forward based on what is currently available, let’s triage down to the most impactful few and close those out while we’re getting the media corps ramped up.
For tactical execution of existing campaigns, the sponsored contributors will continue that work.
What if I don’t like this plan?
This solution doesn’t offer any of the direct access our current team wants, but it does give a considerable amount of power to groups who already have curated audiences and have much more autonomy (and budget) to market on WordPress’ behalf. It also gives us a better chance of having clear and consistent information being communicated on behalf of the project. And finally, it gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the years of work that the WP media folks have already put in to our collective success.
It’s not a full set of wins, but I think the wins balance the losses if we keep an eye on the stated goals and obstacles I outlined in January. And if this is not what you were signing up to contribute to, if you can find a way to see that this has the potential to solve some problems that WordPress has, even though it doesn’t solve all the problems Make Marketing has, I encourage you to whole heartedly join this experiment. If you can’t, fortunately there are many other teams where you might find your niche!
Let’s Talk
This is a dramatic shift. I want you all to be able to ask any questions you have to see if this is an experiment you can participate in. You can ask them asynchronously in the comments, or I will be answering questions synchronously today in #marketing at 9am CDT and 6pm CDT (1400 UTC and 2300 UTC).
Contributor Days are awesome. People are excited. Sometimes, though, the excitement is tempered by mild to moderate frustration with getting set up on all of the tools.
Please register for a WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ Account.
Login with your WordPress.org account on this link: make.wordpress.org/chat/
Scroll on that page to “Joining the WordPress team on Slack” and enter your email address.
If you can, make your Slack and WordPress.org usernames the same.
After you sign up for WordPress Slack, the email associated with your Slack username will be [wporgusername]@chat.wordpress.org. This is important if you forget your password.
Bonus points for uploading a photo and completing your bio so people can recognize you and know a little bit about you.
You may need a TrelloTrelloProject management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. Account.
Our team uses Trello to manage tasks and lesson plans.
Sign up: https://trello.com/signup
Training Team Board: https://trello.com/b/BsfzszRM/wordpress-training-team-lesson-plan-development
You may need a GitHubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ Account
Our team uses GitHub to build our lesson plans.
Sign up: https://github.com/join
Training Team Organization: https://github.com/wptrainingteam
This WordPress News Survey is a great opportunity for you to provide your feedback about how you view and source news and updates related to WordPress.
The information collected in the survey is used to make informed decisions about improvements across the WordPress project, so your answers are incredibly valuable and help shape the future of the platform.
Moving from Drupal 7 to WordPress made sense for a business user like Capgemini, freeing up much of the technical overhead and complexity surrounding content publishing and more.
The Project
Human Made helped Capgemini enable a new digital culture of creation with a robust, usable, and intuitive CMS to support them in delivering their business objectives and empowering their global network of teams to do their jobs effectively.
The Challenge
In 2012, Capgemini launched a series of websites using the Drupal 7 CMS platform. As the organization evolved, the demands on the platform increased significantly and their marketing & communications team experienced blockers at almost every stage of the publishing process.
Capgemini realized they outgrew their publishing platform. Because of this, it had become increasingly complex for the both the marketing & communications team and web operations team to manage.
Why WordPress?
Approaching the project, Capgemini had concerns that were centered around investing in a platform that could grow and evolve with their business through any future transitions and periods of growth. They wanted a CMS that had low barriers to entry for their users. This prevents a long and laborious onboarding period for publishers and their web operations team. WordPress ticked the box on almost every front; possessing a native capacity to publish content in a simple, easy-to-use dashboard, while also promoting a user-friendly experience for new users.
“We needed a system and a piece of technology that would force a reckoning of our team members to actually learn what digital publishing is, and what digital marketing means today, in a bunch of different cultures, languages, and markets.” Parker Ward, Director, Content Marketing and Communications
The Solution
The first thing the team did was enable editorial users to actually edit, modify, and update content on the website directly. WordPress does this natively — its inherent publishing capacity and the baked-in capabilities it has to facilitate editorial workflows were instantly impactful. This significantly improved the way in-house teams worked. The cost-effectiveness of migrating to WordPress was also a bonus. As a result, many of the publishing challenges Capgemini faced were instantly addressed without any additional need for a bespoke build.
The Results
Due to its popularity and usability, there was little in the way of a learning curve for the team to start using WordPress, enabling them to make the most of their new platform immediately. It also freed up their development team to tackle more difficult engineering problems and enabled more people across the organization to use and publish content from the site.
For business users like Capgemini, and for an organization of their size, WordPress has the capacity to free up much of the technical overhead and complexity surrounding content publishing, allowing content creators, editors, and developers to complete tasks much easier and achieve the results they require faster.
By the end of the project, a large portion of the Capgemini network had been moved from Drupal to WordPress, undergoing a complex migrationMigrationMoving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. of 38 sites and content syndication across their local and main sites, as well as rebuilding their entire platform architecture.
Other highlights include adding 1,400 new users to the platform and publishing over 20,000 pages which have impacted all their websites, spanning over ten languages.
Java Traveller was looking to transform the level of customization that vacationers could use to tailor their online bookings. They were in the market for features such as the ability to select extra days, tour guides, add late pickups and other items, like an extra bed. This is an important factor for travel agencies who offer FIT (Fully Independent Travelers).
Andry knew WordPress was flexible enough to provide all of the technical requirements while remaining a simple Content Management System with huge community to support it. However there were no plugins that did all or enough of these custom actions available.
Why WordPress?
Thanks to the open architecture and experience with pluginPluginA plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party development, Andry was able to custom develop all the requested user actions and integrate them into Java Traveller’s global pricing system. These include: twin sharing, extra bed, child not needing a bed, late pickup, upgrade options like a candlelight dinner and hiking, as well as tips from tour guides and more.
Given the tremendous amount of new content required in the travel industry, WordPress enables the staff to easily add new content, trip updates, and more to meet the needs of their global customers.
The Results
The resulting customization and quick ability for Java Traveller to update images and copy has enabled them to more efficiently target land tours, honeymoon trips, various cruises, general leisure trips, religious excursions, and more.
Rolling Stone is an exceptionally well-loved brand with millions of readers. When Penske Media Corporation (PMC) made a strategic investment in the property, they worked with XWP in 2018 to migrate the site to WordPress while refreshing the brand’s website design.
The Challenge
The challenges for the project included the need to move hundreds of thousands of articles while simultaneously executing a brand new design. Penske needed to trust that the transition was seamless for both readers and the editorial teams alike.
“From the start, we knew that this project would be a significant undertaking due to the vast amount of historical archive data, dating back to the 1960’s, and the brand’s massive fanbase. We approached this project with the necessary care and foresight to ensure a smooth migrationMigrationMoving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. and an end product that is built on solid technical grounding.”
Matt Geri | WordPress Architect, XWP
Why WordPress
Rollingstone.com was transitioning from a Content Management System (CMS) that lacked modern editorial features to enable their writers. Additionally, the prior system was missing many of development efficiencies needed to scale the platform to the next stage of growth for their brand. WordPress was quickly identified as the ideal solution because of the ability to create a great experience for content creators while also providing an enterprise-grade coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. platform to make further development more efficient with the goal of maximizing ad revenue.
The Obstacles
The migration to WordPress faced a few unique challenges. With over 250,000 articles in the backlog and millions of image and media attachments, this migration was also coupled with a full redesign of the website. New plans for editorial features to improve the publishing experience were also introduced as well as an integration with Penske’s existing WordPress website. The obstacles involved ensuring the migration accounted for the functional requirements while also delivering the brand new, high profile refresh of the brand’s online experience.
The Solution
Migration
XWP leveraged Google Cloud Platform to build a highly-scalable import process that handled the transformation of data and images into a WordPress compatible structure without any data loss. This migration process, as is the case with any large migration, was successful because of the time spent on architecting, building, and testing. When the time came to push the migrate button, it ran correctly and efficiently.
Code Quality
With performance, stability and security being the top priorities, code quality was a major priority to set the team up for success in the future. Custom plugins and themes give WordPress its competitive edge. Combined with WordPress VIP as the host, this set the site up for success at launch. XWP used Tide and custom code sniffssniffA module for PHP Code Sniffer that analyzes code for a specific problem. Multiple stiffs are combined to create a PHPCS standard. The term is named because it detects code smells, similar to how a dog would "sniff" out food. to ensure the plugins and themes met WordPress VIP’s coding standards without issue.
Editorial Experience
Rolling Stone regularly breaks down the music, film, and TV industry into list-style articles with a unique layout and design, giving readers a high-level view on a particular topic. The editorial needed an interface that would easily facilitate the production. Working with the editorial team to identify the UXUXUX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. requirements, XWP was able to do the following:
Provide ability to number and reorder list items;
Provide a custom focal-point image cropping too
Provide template selection based on the focus of the article.
Additionally, some of these list-style articles can contain 100’s of items, so implementing a custom pagination solution helped the end reader easily navigate through longer lists.
“This was one of our smoothest and most successful launches to date. Everyone who reviewed the site – both before and after launch – commented on the exceptional quality. This was down to an incredible effort led by you all, with a focus and dedication that was a joy to be involved in.”
Nicola Catton | Senior Project Director, PMC
The Results
By project completion, Rolling Stone had successfully moved decades worth of digital content from their former system over to WordPress and was able to launch the new online expression of their beloved brand with complete confidence. Launch day proved that the focus on code quality and Quality Assurance paid off, with a public release without any hiccups. The business is now positioned to build on its strong historical foundation and move forward into the next phase of growth.
At @ninianepress‘s DM request, I’ve added “temporarily” to step two about archival plans for current marketing assets. It was a poor assumption on my part that we were all reading this in the context of “for the duration of our experiment”.
Last month, I introduced the idea of a WordPress Media Corps. I’d like us to take some next steps with this experiment, with full and hopeful conviction about what this might enable us to do in the future if we can pave this foundation today.
This change is intended to tackle the big obstacles for the year as shared in the 2024 goals post. Because the changes rely on important parts of the WordPress project and ecosystem, we need the change to be big enough to see quick impact, but small enough to manage with the time we have available. Therefore, and by design, the MVPMinimum Viable Product"A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development." - WikiPedia scope for the WP Media Corps is limited but allows for future growth and experimentation.
In this post, I’ll share some next steps for the WP Media Corps and a recap of important context so that we all have the same starting point.
The background
In order to simultaneously tackle both obstacles in our 2024 goals post and alleviate a long-standing struggle in getting reliable WordPress project information to end-users, I would like to create a Media Corps that will enable independent WordPress marketers and media members to produce excellent quality content with less time and effort.
The hypothesis
If we get accurate information more quickly and effortlessly to WordPress advocates, then the audiences that rely on them for the latest news will end up with more awareness (of features, programs, and the community at large) and contribute to additional growth in the project.
The risks
The current plans for this experiment have a lot of Automattic involvement, which is not desirable long term. For now, it will help limit variables while we quickly test the hypothesis, and will avoid calling in another round of contributors without a clear concept of what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how we think we get there together.
Next Steps
As noted earlier, a change like this needs to be big enough to see impact but small enough to manage with the time we have. To that end, here are some next steps that will direct full efforts towards this initiative.
A new Make Media Corps team, blog, and SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel will be created in the next few days. Any handbook materials and documentation that still make sense for this new team will be migrated to the new team blog.
The existing Make Marketing Team and Slack channel will be temporarily archived once the new team is created so that people interested in WordPress marketing initiatives will be directed towards the WP Media Corps. The Marketing Team GitHub Repo will remain open for continued work on the WordPress Showcase and amplification requests.
Plans for the MVP version of the WP Media Corps will be published on the new Make team site so that future media partners and community members can stay up to date on how this project will progress and have ample opportunity to provide feedback. I have asked @rmartinezduque to lead this initiative.
All contributors who want to give a whole-hearted go to this experiment, can join the new site and Slack channel.
Thank you
Marketing an open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project is a difficult and unique challenge. It’s especially difficult for a project like WordPress with software that supports myriad use cases, and a community that tends to a sprawling, multifaceted ecosystem that supports current and future WordPressers at many points in their journey. I’m grateful to the folks who have chosen to tackle this since 2015 and I’m appreciative of everyone who showed up to do the important work of figuring out next steps together.
Thank you to our past Marketing team reps (see the list below) who have documented this team’s history and welcomed numerous new contributors over the years, and thank you especially to @bernard0omnisend@ngreennc and @ninianepress who served as the most recent group of team reps.
And thank you to everyone who has contributed to the various efforts this team has made to market WordPress. While the Media Corps may not solve all of the problems that we face in marketing WordPress, I truly believe it gives us the opportunity to tackle some of our most immediate problems and hopefully open new paths to contribution. As with any new project, we won’t know until we try; and as with any experiment, we won’t know until we try hard.
Bridget Willard
4:37 am on February 1, 2018 Tags: use WordPress
You know you need a website, a presence online, and you’ve thought about different ways to publish content, so does the method matter? We think it does. We hope you choose WordPress.
What is WordPress?
Before you consider using WordPress, the first question you may ask yourself is “What is WordPress?” Simply put, WordPress is a website building and content publishing tool. While WordPress began as a blogging tool, it evolved to become a full-fledged content management system, as well as retaining the blog functionality that made it so widely used. Through the addition of thousands of plugins and themes, created by the user community. WordPress is extensibleExtensibleThis is the ability to add additional functionality to the code. Plugins extend the WordPress core software. and can be used as a platform. As an open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. platform, WordPress is constantly updated against new security threats, keeping your data safe and secure.
If you have a desire or passion to share, discuss, or connect with the world, WordPress allows you to create a platform to do exactly that, all while requiring very little web development knowledge to start. Due to its overwhelming popularity, content creators expand the use and extensibility of WordPress daily. For users, this means you can easily find massive amounts of information on how to build, promote, and extend your WordPress website.
Why Use WordPress?
Whether you are looking to create a simple information site, a food review blog, a niche community resource, or an online store for your business, WordPress can be used to easily build your website. The functionality of your site can be extended using WordPress plugins increase functionality, allowing automatic posting of articles to social media, growth of email subscription lists, set up password-protected content, and much more. When it comes to using WordPress to create your online presence, you are only limited by your imagination.
For example, if you are a sports fan, you could set up your own blog about your favorite team and gradually add additional functionality to track stats, make an online store for your brand, and even create a place for other fans to discuss certain games and players. This is exactly the story of fansided.com, who grew from a small blog to a large scale media site using WordPress.
Perhaps you may be interested in eCommerce. WordPress allows you to scale very easily, allowing you to power both small shops or very large eCommerce websites alike, using WooCommerce, among other eCommerce tools. A great example of this is Clickbank, who grew to become one of the largest eCommerce sites online utilizing WordPress.
Getting Started
There are multiple ways you can get started with WordPress. On WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ you can download and install the open source software on web hosting of your choosing. Many web hosts offer a WordPress ‘one-click install method’ which makes it much easier for the non-technical user.
Alternatively, there is also a web hosting service called WordPress.comWordPress.comAn online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/, where you can set up an account for free and have your website or blog up and running within minutes. Both methods all you to easily connect with millions of other users in the community with either regardless of which route you choose.
Whichever path you decide upon for hosting your website or blog, WordPress helps you grow. The WordPress.com service is great for true beginners while allowing you to move to a self-hosted installation as your site and business grows in the future. The WordPress.org self-hosted path gives you more flexibility and control of your website, with fewer limits on your ability to expand the functionality and design.
We have some great resources to help you get started, so head over to WordPress.org and grab a copy now or check with your host to see what installation methods are available to you. If you need web hosting you may want to check out WordPress.com; we also have a list of suggestions for web hosting companies to use. With so many people using WordPress, it’s tremendously easy to find help when you need it. If you run into problems while setting up your website, feel free to drop by our Support Forums for assistance.
On behalf of everyone involved, we would like to welcome you to the WordPress Community, where Code is Poetry! Happy Building!
Is having an online presence important or useful for your organization? Then creating a business website is one of the first steps you will take. It is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to find clients both locally and around the world.
So how do you actually create a website? We will take you through the ten key steps.
First, let us look at why you should build your business website using WordPress.org.
Why you should create your business website with WordPress
WordPress is one of the most trusted and used Content Management Systems (CMS) and platforms in the world. Reasons for choosing WordPress include:
31% of all websites run on WordPress. With nearly two billion websites in the world, that is a lot of users putting their confidence in WordPress.
Websites small and large use WordPress. From personal blogs to large newsgathering sites like CNN, WordPress can handle all types of sites.
Get the look you want. You can create a unique style for your website by utilizing thousands of free and paid themes available for WordPress.
Huge community available to support you. WordPress users can access help and support from one of the largest Open SourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. communities consisting of developers, writers, editors, and designers. You will find no end to the amount of assistance available in the community’s support forumSupport ForumWordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations..
If you are a small business operating on a tight budget, using WordPress helps you build an online presence more easily. The WordPress Open Source CMS is free to download and use. You need to pay for your domain, hosting, and maintenance (if you choose to hire a developer).
You also have the option to join an amazing network of people by contributing to one of the WordPress groups. These groups are organized at https://make.wordpress.org/
Now that you have chosen WordPress to help run the website for your organization, we will explore what you will need to build it.
A domain name is the website ‘name’ or the web address where users can visit your site, like www.yourcompany.com. There are a variety of top-level domains available. These can be country-specific and have a suffix like .com, .uk, .ie or represent the type of organization for example .biz, .org
Many domains will have an option for you to choose an email address which uses your website address, for instance, hello@yourcompany.com
An email address where prospective clients or customers can contact you is a vital part of having an online presence. It may not look as professional if you use a personal email address.
You can purchase a domain name through a domain name registrar. There are a number of registrars available. Each one is equipped with its own set of features and comes with a number of advantages and disadvantages. Once you have identified the one that fits your organization, you can pay to register your domain name for a set period, from a year to a maximum available from that particular registrar.
Many of the domain name registrars will also offer email addresses for your business at an additional cost. While you are viewing the benefits of each registrar it is a good idea to see which email package fits what you require based on the number of accounts you can create and amount of storage you might need.
Now that you have your name and contact details set up, it is time to think about exactly what you want from your website.
What does Your Website Offer?
It can be beneficial for an organization to have an online presence. But do you know what you want it to achieve?
A starting point is to consider what makes your offering unique. In other words, why will people want to buy your products or services? One of the best ways to do this is to write one clear sentence outlining your company’s value proposition.
The next step is to plan what your website will include. This can include text, images, selling or sign-up options. Make a list of the features and functionality you will need. Do you need an FAQ page to answer complex questions? What about a blog? Do you need an eCommerce option to make online sales? Do you need a contact form?
At the top of this list should be what you will include on your homepage. It can’t have everything so you will need to choose what elements are the most important to your organization. This can be by considering what will maximize customer conversions – whether that is for sales, leads, subscribers or anything else
This screenshot shows how you can add pages to your website using WordPress.
What is your branding?
A strong brand is important for businesses of all sizes. It improves recognition of your organization and fosters confidence in it which, in turn, can generate more repeat customers.
The first step is to design your logo which is consistent with your existing brand or helps you define one for your company. If you do not have an offline logo you can adapt for the web, you can either design one yourself using a graphic editors or hire a design agency or freelancer. The style and wording that form part of a logo are aimed at reflecting your business and its offerings. You will want your logo to reflect your company in a meaningful way and this can be discussed and developed as you explore what you want through the design process.
Another factor to take into account is your logo’s color — something you will also need to think about for the website as a whole. Different colors create different emotions for customers. Are you creating a youthful brand or one that is a bit more mature? Your color palette can help you develop and market your brand.
Web colors are different than the ones you work with offline. There are a number of online palette tools which can help you choose web-friendly and accessible colors, find schemes which are close to your printed publication ones, and better understand how different audiences may reactReactReact is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. to your choices.
How will you build your site?
There are two general approaches to building your business website — either doing it yourself or hiring a developer to help with part or the entire project.
If your knowledge of coding is mainly basic HTMLHTMLHTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. and CSSCSSCSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site., you can build your business website using WordPress or using a drag and drop WordPress page builder. Page builders allow you to customize much of your website without having to write complex coding yourself. However, while page builders are much more powerful nowadays, they still come with some limitations.
The new WordPress Editor named GutenbergGutenbergThe Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ has features aimed at supporting you in developing your website pages and posts through the use of blocks.
Gutenberg and WordPress
If you have limited time and would like to work alongside a web specialist, you can hire a developer, web designer, or a web content builder familiar with using the WordPress CMS. When hiring a developer, make sure they have have a track record of building reliable, fast websites, is aware of mobile-design and has an understanding of search engine optimization (SEO).
Who will host your website?
You will need a hosting space for your website. This is where the website will live.
Before selecting a host, carry out some research on what might best fit your organization’s needs. There are generally three main factors to consider when picking a host: ● speed ● customer support ● uptime
You can start by reviewing the hosts recommended by WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/.
Think about the look and feel you want to have for your website look and and how it is going to fit in or change your existing organization’s branding.
On WordPress you can browse through thousands of themes to select one which will help your website content stand out. In the Theme Directory, you can find out more about each theme, whether it is compatible with your version of WordPress and the experience of other users. Here are some factors to consider when picking your theme and theme provider:
● is it being regularly maintained? ● are other users of the theme satisfied with what it offers? ● does it support your chosen plugins? ● will it help make your website easier to find by search engines (more on this later)?
Good content is what brings people to your website, stay there, and eventually make a purchase or build their relationship with your organization. This is why you will need to plan the information and how it is structured. Here are some things to think about:
What information do you want your customers to find on your homepage? In WordPress you have lots of options from a static homepage with a welcome message to a series of blog posts and sections showcasing your products or services
What will appear on the landing pages (the webpage visitors reach when they follow an external link to your website)?
What is the strategy for the type and style of your regular articles? These may be in the form of a blog or updates to your news pages
When creating content, think about how people will find your information when they are searching the internet (more on search engine optimization below).
How will your website be found?
How do you get people to find your site in the first place so that you can engage with them and encourage them to spend time on the content you are providing?
Developing a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is vital. There are lots of good templates available which can be adapted for an organization’s needs and incorporate useful tips from members of the WordPress community. By following a SEO strategy, you will be helping potential customers find your website through their online searches, which in turn can improve your sales conversions and increase brand awareness.
There are two avenues you can go down to increase search traffic: paid or organic.
Paid search involves an advertising budget to increase a search engine result when someone types in a word or phrase.
Organic search is based on publishing content using good SEO practices.
An effective way to organically optimize your results is by researching “long tail keywords.” To illustrate, a shoe company may want to rank first for “shoes” as may thousands of other firms. Given the popularity of the keyword “shoes,” you would need to spend a lot of money to rank well for that specific term.
A better option would be to target long tail keywords, for example, “women’s white air force 1s.” The keyword “shoes” will have more searches, but the consumers typing in “women’s white air force 1s” are much more likely to make a purchase. If your search engine strategy involves paying for Google Ads, it can be cheaper to pay for long tail keywords than a keyword like “shoes.”
Once you have planned your keywords, you can also plan how they link with each other. A URLURLA specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org map (also known as keyword mapping) can help:
your visitors in their journey around your site
encourage visitors to explore material you have linked together
help search engines in mapping the usefulness of your information, pages and posts
assist you in developing new content and promotion opportunities as the maps can help identify what other pages should link to each other and the keywords you are using on different pages.
Can your website scale?
Now that you have your SEO strategy planned, you will need to ensure that your website is capable to support your needs in delivering it.
WordPress plugins are like apps which you can use to add new features and functionality to your website. Plugins need regular updates to gain new functionality and to help keep your website secure.
Your first step could be to install an SEO pluginPluginA plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party to assist you in maintaining your website SEO by:
optimizing your content
giving you more control of your breadcrumbs (navigation paths which appear at the top of your page and help search engines understand your website’s structure
allowing you to set SEO metaMetaMeta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.-info for pages and archives
and through a number of other functions.
The screenshot above shows examples of the plugins you can use on WordPress to boost your SEO.
Once you have set up your website, you can build and submit your sitemap to Google, Bing, Yahoo (via Bing) and other search engines to make it easier for them to find your site’s pages.
All that hard work of attracting customers to your website can be diminished if it performs poorly. Users are often only willing to give you seconds of their time before leaving a web page.
Here are just some of the checks you can make to help your website run smoothly.
check your images are web-friendly in size and number to avoid users having to wait a long time for the page to load
put in security protection to mitigate against hacks and malware which could slow down your site
ask if your host can add an SSLSSLSecure Socket Layer - Encryption from the server to the browser and back. Prevents prying eyes from seeing what you are sending between your browser and the server. licence to your site to help protect your users if you are using forms and collecting personal data
identify WordPress plugins tested for monitoring or improving website performance
avoid lots of plugins that you don’t need which will have an adverse effect on loading times
find out how visitors with accessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) needs use your website and make it easier for them.
If you are not experienced in web development, you can talk with a professional web developer to help optimize your website’s performance.
Conclusion
Following these introductory 10 steps will help you highlight your business to new audiences and customers. By using WordPress, once you have your basic site you can add more features and content to expand your online presence.
Get started today by downloading WordPress.org and enjoy building your new site.
These summary notes focus on key items and actions from the meeting and to assist with an asynchronous contribution to the Global Marketing Team. For those unable to attend a meeting due to timezone issues, please do join the discussion threads and tasks on Trello after the meeting and send your updates.
Contributor Days are awesome. People are excited. Sometimes, though, the excitement is tempered by mild to moderate frustration with getting set up on all of the tools.
