ACSSO is a long term client and one that I value because the subject matter matters.

Having not so long converted the site to WordPress (admittedly in a clumsy albeit functional manner), it was good to be able to expand what should be an important interface between the peak national body for public school parent organisations and anyone with an interest in public education in Australia.

In the past few years, ACSSO has consolidated its role as a provider of information-as-advocacy to public education stakeholders. Much of this has been focused on web technology and information aggregation, and has developed some very solid information products.

These products – by which I mean mainly websites and email newsletters (produced by me) – have in turn created a direct dialogue with stakeholders that we’re seeking to expand through the website.

So far, it seems to be working well.

Sci-Tek Systems sells, installs, tests and services medical refrigerators.

These are the kind of fridges and freezers used by hospitals, pharmacies and pathology centres to store blood, vaccines and the like. They’re based in Wollongong and service pretty much all of NSW and ACT.

As always, I spent a bit of time understanding the business, scoping my client’s competitors, Googling for likely search terms and generally surveying the medical and pharmaceutical refrigeration market. As you do.

Even though it’s usually my client’s responsibility to provide the content, as it was in this case, I do the research because I’m the one who’s going to be presenting it, so I’d better understand it.

I’m also scared to hell that I’ll get stuff wrong. But then I’m also always pleasantly surprised by how interesting any line of business is. It all works out OK.

In this case, my client had some specific aims based on his own market research and that very much informed the basic structure.

I should say re-structure, as there was already a website in operation.

Apart from being a bit dated in its looks, and failing to cope with modern wide screens, the main issue with the old site was that it buried the items the client wanted to emphasise: the products themselves.

I was a little surprised, then, that my client opted to remove the prominent photo of a big three door blood fridge I had set on the home page and replace it with his phone number. He has a logic to it, which he explained, and he’s the boss.

As my client’s web hosting account didn’t include MySQL, among other things, this would be a static site. So I decided to make my first HTML5 site.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it play nice on Internet Explorer 8 – which is, of course, the browser used by my client. It’s possible – likely, even – that there are solutions to the problems I had with HTML5, but I didn’t have quite enough time to follow through.

But I will say that it felt very close. I think my first HTML5 site is not far away.

Not only does he know more about personal communication skills than anyone else I know, he has a singluar ability to draw the best out of people.

He brings to his consultancy AB Communicates a rare combination of a highly technical understanding of how people communicate and a gift for analysing and improving corporate management.

I don’t know whether he had those characteristics before he started a 25 year climb from regional on-air broadcaster to General Manager Local Radio for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, running a national network of 58 radio stations, or whether he has built up that skill set over time.

It makes perfect sense to put communication skills and corporate management skills together like that – I just don’t see many other people who have so successfully mastered both. And manage to remain a fundamentally good bloke.

Having managed Andrew’s consultancy website for a few years, I’ve now been allowed to give it a complete overhaul.

That gave me the chance to again review just what Andrew does, how he does it and how people can use his talents. Remarkable.

We used WordPress 3.0 as the content management system, adapting the Thesis theme.

FYI, I am very aware of the current argument between Thesis developer Chris Pearson and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg about whether the fact that Pearson charges for use of the theme contravenes the GPL conditions applied to use of the content management system.

Personally, I am sympathetic to both points of view, and I can only hope the resolution of this situation leads to greater clarity in the relationship between free and paid web applications.

We installed the following plug-ins:

Akismet
Fast and Secure Contact Form
Random Text
WordPress Automatic Upgrade
WordPress Firewall

We also installed Google Analytics to track site traffic.

In some lines of work, this might be regarded as a failure of the original work, but the web is developing so fast and in so many different ways that it’s almost a requirement to review any web presence on a regular basis to make sure it’s doing its job properly, and to take advantage of the burgeoning bag of web tricks that keep emerging.

In addition, a client may themselves also change: their basic set of services, who they see as their market, and how they want to portray themselves to that market.

A case in point is Julie McCrossin.

I’ve been managing Julie’s website for four years now and, while it has incrementally reflected changes in her working life, the time came for a complete structural and design overhaul as she enters a new phase of the business of being Julie McCrossin.

We used WordPress 2.9.2 as the content management system, once again adapting the Atahualpa theme.

For particular functionality and layout, we installed the following plug-ins:

Akismet

Clean Archives Reloaded Version 3.1.8

Alkivia SidePosts

Fast and Secure Contact Form

Simple Archive Generator

WordPress Automatic Upgrade4

WordPress Firewall

WP Events Calendar

We also installed Google Analytics to track site traffic.

Among his diverse range of projects is a weekly 30 minute radio show called Living is Easy on Eastside FM in which John explores health and lifestyle issues, with equal regard for alternative and mainstream diagnosis, therapy and medication.

John brings in experts on topics suggested by listeners, and is keen to use a web presence to expand on this kind of interaction: inviting suggestions and requests for topics for discussion on the show, podcasting the show, building the listener base – and seeing where it goes.

We used WordPress 2.9.2 as the content management system, adapting the Atahualpa theme.

For particular functionality and layout, we installed the following plug-ins:

Akismet

Contact Form 7

Podcasting Plugin by TSG

WordPress Category Archive

The website for Russell Vale Scouts is my latest effort, and a good example of a very local group working within a global organisational structure.

Or perhaps a better way of putting it is that Scouts is a global organisation requiring very localised web-based shop windows to inform current members and their families as well as attract new members.

It’s the perfect atmosphere for trying new things in just about all aspects of building a web presence, from the first discussions through the user group analysis, content decisions, back end & site management planning, layout & structure, functionality and visual design from paper through Photoshop to browser.

Just as my former experiments with a range of content management systems for dynamic sites resulted in my becoming a WordPress devotee, trying the different themes and plugins available has also pulled me towards a quite narrow range of options.

Currently, I seem to be able to meet all of my existing and new client needs by using Atahualpa or Thesis themes, both of which add a theme-specific set of modification tools that amount to a self-contained CMS within the greater WP framework.

With the RV Scouts site, I delibrately tried five or six different themes, but ended up using Atahualpa because it works so well.

When we do get to work properly together on a project, the results are pretty good, if I do say so myself.

We’ve known Therese Fuller socially for many years now and she was very keen to draw on our combined skills to design and build a web presence for her management consultancy ThinkSmart.

Management consultancy, change management, corporate consultant, human resources, staff management, professional development: the web is awash with self-proclaimed experts on these subjects. Our task was to make ThinkSmart stand out.

This is where content, particularly text content, proves its critical importance.

Good writing is hard to find on the web. Actually, that’s not true. It’s easy enough to find if you know what to look for, but it’s enormously outnumbered by the vast morass of mediocre-to-poor writing on the net.

So it’s good to have someone on board who not only knows good writing when she sees it, but can turn good writing into great writing and great web copy, AND come up with it herself on demand, to length, in required style, on time, every time.

In this case, it also helps that ThinkSmart has the track record: client list, testimonials, case studies – and hence, the web content – to substantiate the credibility and authority of Therese and her colleagues in this highly competitive field.

We used WordPress 2.9 as the content management system, adapting the Caribou 1.0.6 theme.

The only plug-ins we installed were the increasingly ‘standard’ WP-ContactForm, Akismet, WordPress Automatic Upgrade and WordPress Firewall.

We also installed Google Analytics code for traffic tracking.

A good example is Financial Education Professionals, which provides training to employees of financial institutions in meeting their legal compliance obligations.

Since FEP first accepted my 2003 proposal to build them a website, the company has grown in the number of staff, the number and scope of training programs it offers and the geographical  range of their customers.

During the same period browsers have improved, bandwidth has increased, coding and programming languages have evolved, screen sizes have increased, search engines have grown in scope and sophistication and people have become more adept, confident and discerning in how they use the web.

The FEP site has been through five major incarnations in those seven years, with the latest just completed having moved the site from a static HTML format to a dynamic format using WordPress for its content management system.

The neat thing about FEP as a model of how a website evolves is that it is both very simple and very complex.It’s one of those sites where content is not just king but holy emperor: it’s a site of text-based information about text-based services. The company made – and has stuck with – a conscious decision to eschew elaborate visual flourishes in favour of the best possible presentation of tightly honed, highly purposeful words.

“Best possible” in this context is judged by the ability of the site to bring in new business.The needs of potential FEP customers can be complicated and diverse, according to their understanding and application of legal requirements. The customers for the various training products have different needs, and the website must convey these differences while retaining an overall cohesiveness that will give customers confidence in the company.

It is naturally also an exercise in search engine optimisation. Given that professional SEO is still dominated by people who think it’s about manipulating search engine rankings in order to attract maximum traffic, it’s not really hard to look good simply by focusing on placing relevant, well-written, accurate, timely and actionable text on web pages that are easily indexed by search engines.

Even though financial training is a very competitive online market, it’s not hard to stand out by being clear, honest and empowering.

It doesn’t hurt to think things through (even if you get a high search engine ranking for a specific term, what will make someone click through to your website from a Google page rather than your competitors? And once they’re on your site, what will make them ‘buy’?), but I find there’s much to learn from successful actors who learn to “leave themselves alone” in order to do their best work.

In SEO terms, that means saying what you have to say well and letting it do its work. Allow potential customers to make a balanced and informed decision to come to you rather than trying to trick them. That will get you targeted, meaningful traffic with a higher likelihood of making a sale.

It doesn’t hurt that WordPress theme developers are increasingly offering convenient ways to use meta text to the best possible effect.

Another aspect of the FEP website is that the proprietors’ active focus on the site as a tool for bringing customers has made them very aware of their customers’ online habits. They know their market very well, and their online market even better. For example, potential FEP customers are not going to purchase a training program online at the click of a button. What they want from a website is enough information to make them comfortable contacting the vendor by email or telephone or downloading an application form to complete offline.

That may change – as ecommerce customers in all markets have changed radically in the last ten years – but right now FEP have a good handle on who will buy their services, why and how. The website is an extension and reflection of that know-how.

A key point is that it is a design task in itself to organise and present a basically text-only site in such a way that it looks and acts cutting edge. I’d like to think that in those terms the FEP has site has become better and better during the last seven years.

It’s actually really rewarding to think that my work on the FEP website has played some part in helping the company to reach its current level of success.

I look forward to the inevitable set of new challenges as the site continues to develop into the future.

It won’t surprise that I volunteered to set up a website for them. Junior club President Garry Luyten showed great interest in taking a hands-on role in managing the site and expanding it over time, so I set out to design a site that was complete but basic.

WordPress was again the obvious content management system to use, and Atahualpa stood out as the theme of choice, mostly because it offers that modular but flexible approach to finessing the structure and design.

For those who are interested in such things, we used WordPress 2.9 as the content management system, adapting the Atahualpa theme (again).

For particular functionality and layout, we installed the following plug-ins:

Alkivia SidePosts Version 3.0.2

We also installed what have become our standard plug-ins: Akismet, WordPress Automatic Upgrade and WordPress Firewall, and installed Google Analytics code for traffic tracking.

What he does is marry cutting edge technology with an audio artist’s aesthetic understanding to create truly superior loudspeakers.

In Brad’s case, that often involves creating the cutting edge technology required, or at least applying the known in a new way. He’s without doubt one of the best in Australia, and his speakers end up all over the world.

The brilliance of his products is not something you can easily demonstrate on a website. You’re saddled with whatever audio capabilities the site visitor has, and it becomes a bit like demonstrating colour tv on a black-and-white monitor.

But when you have fans and customers of the calibre Brad has, it’s not hard to demonstrate the popularity of his custom-made speakers with people who are either true audio afficionados or who depend on audio quality for professional reasons.