A common complaint we get about using WordPress to run a site is “I don’t want my site to look like a blog” which generally means- I want the same old content up – and nothing ever changes. Chris Pearson talks about the Information Architecture of RSS – and how it can stop readers from finding content- Pearsonified | Best damn blog on the planet.

It’s worth reading- as are the comments- but, here is what Chris is missing- there are only 3 ways people find your site:

• You spend a ton of money building your brand and promoting your URL

-or-

• They find your site through search- which means you have great content and great search engine placement

-or-

• you’ve built great link networks, or are heavily linked to (hopefully not by spamming comments)

That’s it- once they find you- they either bookmark (favorite) you conventionally- or they subscribe to your feed. If they do the former- they may never come back- if they do the latter- hopefully, they’ll keep coming back as long as you deliver the content that interests them.

If they are smart enough to use RSS- then they know they can search your site for more data- a different layout, or navigation structure won’t matter at all.

However, after reading this, it made me want to add some plug-ins for most commented articles to The Next Wave site.

My solution, would be to use a variation on webstats to drive the most popular pages- not based on comments- or, to put some kind of rating system into the post options- so that you could use a theme switcher type plug in to re-order the site in different ways.

Either way- read what Chris wrote- it should get you thinking.

Dr Dave » Blog Archive » Critical Announcement affecting ALL WordPress users

Dr. Dave is the spam killing god.

When he says disable the “anyone can register” option under your options page- do it.

We are in the process of doing this on all our hosted sites.

Back to our regular programming….

Roles and Capabilities « WordPress Codex

Suppose you have 30 sales people in your company- and they are constantly sharing information they find on the web with the other sales people- via e-mail.

A sales person might send an e-mail to his peers:

Our competitor is bragging about their 6 million hits on their website monthly at site xyz- our web site has 6 million unique visitors- with way more hits. Go tell that to all the clients who are considering advertising on their site.

Instead- he could post it on his WordPress driven site- for all to see- with comparisons. Depending on his level- he could have different abilities to post:

• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
• Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive newsletters, etc.

If the sales manager wants to keep control of what his sales people post- or let legal take a look- he can make them all Contributors– and make the lawyers Editors.

The great thing about letting everyone post- is content drives visitors and higher search results- so a small company of 30, posting often can create a high ranked site in a short period of time. The key will be making sure the posts are all properly categorized- and that everyone makes a good effort not to duplicate content.

Copyrights must also be observed- making sure that all content is properly attributed.

It never hurts to also hire an “editor” to try to make different writing styles all fall into one corporate voice. Look to hire a freelance writer- who is familiar with WordPress to help keep your site as grammatically correct as possible.

If you are looking for an editor- we can connect you with a few (it might be good if we hired one of them too- note to self).