That Web Man

Well, well. As I reported here, the Number 10 website is a Wordpress site. An almighty row has now broken out because their web designers apparently started with a theme written by someone else - as is common with Wordpress themes - and despite making the site look completely different to the theme, many people have latched onto the Creative Commons licence requirements and how they should have given an attribution to the original theme designer.

I think that would definitely apply if the site now looked like the original theme, but it doesn’t so just how much of the original work remains? It’s a tricky issue.

Well, well, well.

I’ve been developing some client sites using Wordpress for a CMS and its ability to be updated from wherever, whenever. It’s a very mature product now and being so widely used there are a number of developers working on various plug-ins and widgets to extend its functionality.

So yesterday I saw a brief news item about the new website for the Prime Minister - Number10.gov.uk - and immediately thought how much it looked like a Wordpress site … and lo and behold it is.

It looks as though my decision to do this sort of thing a couple of years back was a good one and is now something I can pass on as being recommended by the Government!

…is that they seem to live in some sort of Utopia where spam simply doesn’t exist. Why do I suggest that?

Take a look at their latest product: Google Friend Connect. It’s an application/suite of apps. that can easily add social networking features to an otherwise static website and requires little programming or coding knowledge by the website owner. There’s a video that explains how it works.

All your friends and other members of the public need is a Google Account to be able to interact with your website. And therein lies the problem.

I run a number of message boards and blogs and have noticed more and more of the spam signups/user registrations are coming from confirmed Gmail addresses, i.e. spammers with fire and forget Google accounts. So imagine your spangly new website features. How long before they would be full of comment spams linking to online casinos and drugstores? About as long as it would take for Google to find your site and include it in Google searches, I’d bet.

Such a pity because if that Utopia were to exist, it’d be a fabulous thing.

I’d received some copy text and some photographs from a friend who’s asked me to do his business a web site. He’s a hands-on guy and marketing brochures aren’t his forté so there wasn’t a great deal to work with.

So I sorted out some crops, re-sizes and thumbnails, decided to use WordPress just because, added a few tweaks like a “lightbox”, put together a formmail page (with a “thanks” redirect) and Bob’s your uncle: one classy web site in just a few hours.

This site amused me a lot: Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Now this blog may be pretty ‘busy’, but I’m a big fan of white space and the “less is more” approach to design without being too heavy (or should that be ‘light’) on the minimalism.

I have two clients who were presented with clean and attractive web site designs that they slowly chipped away at demanding bigger, bolder fonts, in-your-face images and more “stuff” until they ended up with sites that frankly I’d rather I wasn’t featuring on my client portfolio.

Maybe they should buy some of these products

I followed a link to another site and from there to this guy’s site - another WordPress lover like me.

He’s set out his Top 53 Blog Designs of 2007 and there are some fab ones to look at and to get some inspiration from.

You’ll perhaps have noticed that over there in the sidebar are some adverts provided by Google’s AdSense program: they are based upon the content in the page where they are shown and if a visitor clicks through one of them, I get paid a few cents depending upon what the advertiser is willing to pay Google through their corresponding AdWords program. I run AdSense ads. on all my personal blogs and personal sites and I also serve some on one page of one of my businesses’ sites.

I’ll never get rich from displaying Google Ads - I reckon to average less than a dollar a day but hey, $300 a year is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick - but I had noticed that revenues had been falling.

Now the positioning of the ads. over there in this particular sidebar isn’t that good from a layout perspective as most of them are “below the fold”, i.e. you have to scroll down to see them.

Google helpfully provide a useful guide on positioning their ads for maximum exposure/benefit in their AdSense Help Center. There’s a dedicated page for positioning for blogs too.

So as something of an experiment, I changed the positioning and added another set of ads to two of my sites: one a business listing site and the other a blog-based site for a community project I am involved with.

The results have been surprising with both sites performing significantly better since taking into account Google’s suggestions. My advice? Give it a go if you’re serving the ads.

Not signed up to earn money through AdSense? Click on the AdSense button in the sidebar.

One thing that might come to annoy regular visitors {snigger} is the likelihood that I may well use this blog as a testbed for WordPress themes. There are so many really good ones out there and I’m always keen to roll out or adapt new ones to suit my needs (and those of some clients: I’ve done two client sites in WordPress already, one for the CMS aspects and one just because).

I apologise in advance…