For those of you who came to the first seminar- thank you. Your comments have helped me improve the content and the presentation-
What’s amazing- is, by next week- Rhythm In Shoes will have a completely updated website – thanks to WordPress –

If you are interested in building a website for success- this 3 hour seminar will walk you through from the basics of the Internet (even if you think you know it- you may not)
on through the secrets of search- and why optimization isn’t what it used to be-
to the power of Blogs- or just a data driven website- where content is fresh and relevant.

No more dependence on some web geek- you can build and maintain your site- without any expensive software, or knowledge of HTML-

come learn about the future of the Internet

Where: 750 S. Main St. in Downtown Dayton
When: Friday Nov 18, from 9am to noon
How much? $129 day of, $99 in advance. Next Wave clients are $99 day of, or $79 in advance. Each additional person for a company registered in advance is $79.

All attendees will be able to come to one refresher class for free.
This is only being offered for these early courses-

One participant will win a prize equal to or of greater value than the course.
Last winner was James Kent, of Kent Development.

It was fun watching the light bulb pop on with the first group- afterward- so many positive comments- and a lot of great suggestions. We’re going to work to reorganize some material- put together an amazingly useful handout- in pdf format with links- and put a lot more material on the site.
We’ve already got 10 people signed up for class 2- and will set a date as soon as we have a handle on the revisions. Hopefully- everyone figured out RSS today- and has added this to their reader- and soon, we’ll start seeing participants comment on the posts on the site.
Special kudos to Ken and Sue Clarkston of the Gospel Mission for providing such a great space with mmm…. donuts and pasteries for all. If you need to rent a space for a business meeting, it’s great that you can support these people who have dedicated their life to charity and helping the less fortunate. As a side note- they are in the process of switching their site over from a static HTML site to an active site running MySQL- and were very interested in sitting in on a Blogosopher seminar.
Thanks to all for making it such a success.

I’ve tried to explain this too many times in meetings, so here it is on paper. Just because you can “Blog” on a WordPress powered site, doesn’t mean you have to.
The word “Blog” is still not understood by a lot of people, they think it has to be like a journal, a daily entry of whatever one feels like writing. Yes, it can be, there are a lot of very bad, very boring “Blogs” out there.
That doesn’t mean it has to be like that for business.
WordPress is an open-source (meaning the code that runs it is open to the developers who work on it collectively for free) software program that runs on the server (the computer that hosts a web site). It can run on any platform (Windows, Linux, Mac) but I prefer to run it on Linux– another open source solution. It requires the backend database, MySQL and PHP (both open source software solutions). It takes very little time to install and have up and running compared to trying to do a conventional HTML site in something like Dreamweaver (or GoLive or if you are desperate: Frontpage) even using templates.
Wordpress is a database driven display system for information that one, or multiple users can enter data in easily- and have it display as properly coded HTML that is searchable and works well with search engines like Google, Yahoo and the like.
This allows any company to keep their information up to date, quickly, efficiently, and with “good” code that is readable by search engines and even people using screen readers (who are visually impaired).
It does this by generating code that uses CSS (cascading style sheets), which is a lot like using a style sheet in a word processing document. This allows the owner of a WordPress site to change the look and feel of a site instantly by changing the CSS- or “Theme” by checking a check box. How easy is that? Try doing it with a hard coded site without CSS. Days, weeks. CSS is the smart persons way to build a site.
We have integrated the WordPress engine into other sites so you can barely tell it’s there: see the Rogero Buckman Architects news section, or this section of The Next Wave site. Since adding the WordPress driven news section to The Next Wave site, hits have grown almost logarithmically every month. Not all hits generate business, but it has taken our site from being someplace that people stumble across, to a place that is actively showing up on the top page of Google search consistently.
One of the ways we have added to The Next Wave’s site popularity is our list of competitors. We had this on the site before, but it was static HTML, and was edited infrequently. Because of the ease of edit in WordPress, we update it as soon as we find a new firm. Why do we list our competitors you may ask? Well, we’re not afraid of competition and comparison to start off with, and because many ad agencies and design firms don’t use code that works well (or at all) with search engines. It’s actually kind of embarrassing. The point of the web is to deliver information- quickly and easily. We offer the list as a public service, since people searching for an ad agency or graphic design shop or marketing consultant in Dayton/Columbus/Cincinnati could be looking for us. It’s a basic part of marketing- being part of the evoked set- the set of options that comes to mind when thinking about purchasing a product or service- but I digress from the advantages of a WordPress blog. Soon people won’t turn to the Google local is on the upswing, but until it is more reliable, we provide this list as a service.
Another thing we’ve learned from our WordPress section of the site is that we can’t predict what search terms or phrases people use to find our competition or us. People type in odd things, and with our large numbers of marketing related words in our news section, we seem to hit more searches than our cheeky copy on the static part of the site.
It won’t be long before almost all sites are built around active engines like WordPress. Just as video production has been demystified by Apple with iMovie, and DVD creation with iDVD, WordPress is a tool that puts the power of the web into the hands of every business.
The ease of inserting links into text in WordPress also serves as an incentive to do it often. It may seem silly to some, but the frequency of links in and out are a key factor in search engine optimization. While incoming links are better than outgoing, links begat more links- trust me.
Every article in WordPress is a separate page. This is very important to your site’s visitors. How often have you navigated deep into a site, found some information that you wanted to share- and tried to send that page to a co-worker and couldn’t do it? The site was probably either built in Flash or Frames– both bad for Search- and bad for bookmarking and sharing. You can click on the title to this article and send it as a link to as many people as you want. It will also show up in Google as a complete, single page, with a descriptive snippet of text under it. A simple way to see what Google sees of your site is by going to Google and typing in site:yoursiteurl.com (or biz or net etc.) and seeing how many pages you index and what they show to visitors- I’ve made the link to this site so you can see how The Next Wave.biz site indexes.
This is a longer article than I planned to write, but this is an important subject. There are a few other key strengths to WordPress: the content is searchable, it’s organizable (using categories) and best of all, it provides RSS feeds that allow people to subscribe to you site and be notified every time you post- saving you from having to PUSH your message out with e-mail (which more people are starting to consider SPAM if it isn’t addressed individually and customized- but that’s another story).
I found this short article, “WordPress, or “How I finally built the website I needed” on someone else’s experience with WordPress and it inspired me to write this.
After spending much time explaining this to clients- I started the blogosopher seminar- so I could share this information with as many people as possible.
Don’t get confused- a Blog is just some sophisticated software to run a website effectively- what you chose to put in it is up to you. If you want traffic on your site- this seminar will show you how WordPress along with a site stats analysis will help you build a site you need for a fraction of what you thought it would cost.

What do you think?