With many excellent off the shelf WordPress themes available at minimal cost one thing that can really set a site apart as being highly professional and special is good quality custom images.
This site recently done by our team for an Adelaide Hills earth moving company is an excellent example.
The cost of getting the custom photography done was really justified by the end product.
Digital Market Square are developing and promoting the CC Me app. The Community Connect Me app is relevant, because it delivers timely, targeted and device-specific community event and activity information.
The CC Me communities are co-operative networks of schools, sports clubs, social groups, churches, councils and charities.
We produced the Digital Market Square web site in collaboration with Cultivate Design.
This client provides innovative solutions to a range of engineering problems. The challenge for us was to get all the images we needed to give a good representation of their work. To achieve this we partnered with Jon Burke Digital Video,
For some time we have been using the Google Analylitics plugin from WPMUDEV for many of our clients with great success. It does not give the extensive information that you can get from drilling into your GA reports but it does give a great snapshot available in the dashboard every time you open up the WordPress dashboard.
For many clients this is both useful information and a great reminder to think about what is happening with their site more strategically.
As per my previous post about getting initially listed with Google the site that was previously unable to be found now appears in the search engine index.
The whole field of SEO has a huge range of inconsistencies and vagueness, but it is nice when an admittedly extremely simple example produces the outcome we expect.
So the lesson from this is you need other sites linking to you.
I often get asked by friends, family or someone I have just met at party “I’ve made a website but I don’t seem to be listed by Google. How come?”
There is a few more technical things that can be done by us with SEO understanding, but there is a fundamental concept that will help you get listed.
Google crawls the web following links from one page to another from one site to another recording information on each page as it goes link by link.
Now if you have just made your first web site and there is no links from anywhere that Google knows about to your site it will never follow a link to your site and never list you in it’s index.
So what you need is a link from a site that is indexed by Google.
In reality you need lots of links but that’s another story.
To illustrate my point here is a site done by a friend of mine – http://ferretfarmforestry.weebly.com/#/ lets see how long before Google finds it!
We have been convinced for some time now that WordPress makes content management super easy. WordPress also has such an array an array of plugins that adding a range of additional features becomes easy and very cost effective.
These benefits were enough to get Aboto, one of our clients to get us to rebuild their site maintaining exactly the same look but within a WordPress framework. I think this demonstrates that using WordPress does not in way limit our ability to create the overall look required by the client.
These two shots are before WordPress and after WordPress.
Original Aboto Site
New Abot Site
LearnDash has recently produced a Learning Management Plugin for WordPress. We have had a look at it and think that there will be clients where this might be a nice tidy solution.
At this stage it is unlikely to replace a full blown LMS, but if you have a WordPress site and you want to be able to provide online training courses for your staff or to have courses for sale to the general public then LearnDash might well be for you. It does have an easy integration of payment gateways so that selling online becomes relatively easy.
LearnDash does have the ability to load Storyline course material and if the Storyline course has been published to Tin Can API then the Storyline’s results can be sent to a LRS. We are doing some more investigation into how well this works but at a quick look it seems to be a great way to integrate Storyline.
Stay tuned as we investigate this further or contact us if you have a project that you think might fit the WordPress/LearnDash/Storyline model.
There is a huge benefit from using Articulate Storyline for online course development. On one hand the course can be used to output both Flash and html5 versions of the same thing including video, interactivity, quizzes and results and on the other hand the program allows quick changes to content allowing revised courses to be available in a matter of minutes.
When we were deciding on the right development platform we looked closely at a few options that ultimately came down to the choice between Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline. Both had pros and cons but we feel we made the correct choice with Storyline.
Since using Storyline one of the big pluses has been the support for this product. The forums are great with a good team of supporters and also the support from Articulate has been excellent. When there have been issues that nobody has been able to make sense of we have been able to upload our project and get one of the Storyline experts to have a look at it.
A free, monthly Goolwa-Victor Harbor community magazine distributed across the Fleurieu Peninsula and to Kangaroo Island.
A critical part of this site was for the Coast Lines team to be able to easily add new stories and information. We used WordPress for back-end content management with various plugins to get the effects they wanted.
One effect that was important to them was the ability to schedule content to appear and disappear from the site based on date and time. This means a considerable amount of work can be planned ahead of time.
“Regrettably, we joined the queue with those who had an unfortunate experience with someone who was going to deliver the world with a new website. The cost said we should have got the world. Of course, it didn’t work out, and someone recommended that we start from scratch again with Drew at Nile Street Media. Something was terribly wrong here; he communicated in simple terms; and used phrases like ‘this may be more economical for you’ and ‘may I suggest…’ There had to be a catch. Not so; the final product was brilliant. Drew delivered what our business needed and well within our budget restraints. We have since had people ask us whom we used for our website, and we have been proud to say Drew from Nile Street Media” Ashley & Jenny Porter, Coast Lines magazine