You Need Content, Not Just a Custom WordPress Theme

August 13, 2010 By 53 Comments

If you’re a business and just landed here looking for help with WordPress themes stop for a second. And read this post! I dare you!

Although you might be set on investing in a cool design for your business blog or website, there’s one thing you need to remember before you hire a designer: a website without implicitly meaningful content, is like a store without stock. Seriously.

white elephantAs content marketers at Jontus Media we usually get to talk to businesses who already have a website. Maybe they’re generating stacks of traffic to their site from a (rather expensive) pay-per-click campaign and not getting enough conversions or wondering why no one contacts them for a quote despite having just spent BIG MONEY on a really cool website design.

It’s at that stage that we enter the frame and look at their site, assessing how their current content is working (or not). We then show them that you need great online content to not only drive visitors to your site but also engage them.

This is particularly true of the B2B market where the sales process is typically more drawn out. You have to work hard to convince visitors to your site that you’re the go-to company they’re looking for.

Boring, run of the mill, text filled with stacks of weasel words like “best practice” and “cutting edge” just comes across as blah blah blah to real humans. And you know you don’t read that stuff either! [Read more...]

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When Good Content is Better Than Great Content

May 21, 2010 By 3 Comments

A lot of content marketers will tell you that your content has to be perfect. Outstanding. It really has to hit the mark.

Trouble is sometimes companies spend so long tweaking the content, talking to focus groups, trying to second think through every possible permutation that by the time something’s published it’s lost its initial momentum.

Don’t Just Climb the Mountain

Let’s say you’re launching a business blog to help drive traffic to your site and bring a less corporate feel to your online communications. You can spend a long time deciding on the right software (WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, ExpressionEngine, etc), the right design and, the right content but going with a simple self-hosted WordPress blog using a generic premium theme with a few tweaks to brand the blog can be enough to get you going and building page rank. Saving this extra time might just help you first to post compared to your competitors.

Climbing a mountain takes monumental effort but using the chair lift will usually get you pretty high up very quickly and with less effort. In business content marketing, sometimes getting ahead before the rest of the competition is a victory in itself and give you the edge over others.

Get it Out There

Look at Crisis Management. When a crisis hits a company they don’t waste time perfecting their response. They get a YouTube video with the CEO out in two hours, or a blog post up in minutes. The production quality is low because the content is needed quickly. In this way, good content actually becomes great because it gets the job done. It addresses the concerns and issues at hand in a timely fashion.
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Johnny Spence on How to Start a Business Website

March 11, 2010 By 10 Comments

To succeed online you need a great business website. The trouble is it can be a minefield finding the right people to build it, the right content management system (CMS) to run it, and the right web strategy to help your business grow.

johnny spence

'There really isn't a wrong choice for a CMS,' says Johnny Spence

So to get the lowdown on buying a website and the more technical side of online communications, I talked to Johnny Spence, a web-developer who runs Oscarrweb! out of Barcelona.

As well as knowing his way around web code and developing great business sites, the great thing about Johnny is that he’s an awesome communicator and blogger. Vist his blog: The Freelance Rant

We chatted over email and twitter between Spain and Stockholm.

Jon: Getting started with online content marketing means you need a website. As a web programmer, what do you think a business should be looking for in a web site or CMS?

Johnny: There are thousands of possibilities for a business website with a budget to match. Rather than picking a CMS and going from there, you should ask yourself the following to start planning a website:

  • What is my budget?
  • What is the purpose of my business website (advertise, inform, both)?
  • Will I need to update my website on a regular basis?
  • Will I need to expand my website in the near future?
  • Will I need a blog?

Then the next step is to find a recommended web designer/developer and consult on a solution with the above needs in mind. Better yet, if you know of a freelance designer you communicate with on Twitter or other social media, hit one of them up.

Jon: There are SO many different kinds of CMS out there. How does a business user know what’s right for them? And how do they make the right choice?

Johnny: There really isn’t a wrong choice for a CMS whether it is a custom made or utilizes one of the widely available open-source softwares such as WordPress or Drupal. It does have to suit needs and for a website though. So, before deciding on one, you will want to have a test run with a similar CMS with a developer to see if you will be comfortable with what you will be using.

As a general rule, WordPress is great for a business website with an emphasis on a blogging platform and is the most cost friendly to implement since it is so popular. Drupal is good for a larger scale website, with or without a blog, but development costs can run higher. A custom CMS, however, can be made how you like it and is generally easier to use, not having all of the complexities of a commercial CMS.

Due to the custom and/or proprietary nature of a custom CMS, though, costs can run higher and, if you decide to migrate to a more commercial CMS in the future, you could incur more costs there as well.

Jon: Small businesses just starting out probably aren’t going to have a massive budget to develop their website. There’s always a battle between investing in the “visual stuff” and “technical stuff”. If you’re on a tight budget what’s essential if you’re looking to use a website as a place to market your company?
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