There are WordPress meetups and WordCamps happening all around the world yet there doesn’t appear to be anything in the Brisbane area. A few people have tried to start a WordPress meetup around the Brisbane and Gold Coast area but they’ve never taken flight from the looks of it so the partners at sennza have got together and have organised the first monthly WordPress meetup in Brisbane.

Date

2 September 2010 @ 7pm for a 7:15pm start

Location

Community Meeting Room, Brisbane City Council Library in CBD (Brisbane Square)
266 George Street, BRISBANE, QLD 4000

Who’s hosting?

Bronson Quick and Lachlan MacPherson

Schedule:

7:00 Doors Open
7:15 Talk Starts
8:15 Talk Ends & Wrap Up

Part 1 – Up and running in 5 mins with WordPress

WordPress is an open source CMS for your website that is being used by over 200 million websites on the internet. As an introduction to WordPress we will show you how to install a WordPress site from start to finish in under 5 mins using WordPress’ world famous 5 min install procedure

Part 2 – Get more out of WordPress with Plugins

One of the great things about WordPress is the ability to extend its function with Plugins. We will look at the different ways we can extend on WordPress with a look at the Top 10 plugins to kickstart your WordPress site

A Question Box

You’ll notice a “WordPress Question Box” at the back of the room. Feel free to drop a question into the box with your email address and we’ll do our best to answer and WordPress questions you have that you don’t want to ask in front of other people!

Lucky Door Prize

We’ll be giving away a lucky door prize on the night. It’ll be a physical copy of Beginning WordPress 3 by Stephanie Leary for you to take home. If a WordPress guru happens to get it then you could give it to a newbie if you like

Parking

For those of you who aren’t from Brisbane the easiest place to park is on Elizabeth Street. A good place for park is underneath the Queen Street Mall. Google Maps link.

Join the group

We’ll be holding the WordPress Brisbane Meetups on a monthly basis so if you can’t make this one then please join the group and pop along to the next one!

After reading this article on inc.com, I had to do a quick post as this is something that I have been asked about recently, and nothing tells the story better that this example.

When trying to optimise your website for search engines there is the ‘right’ way to go about it, and a ‘wrong’ way to go about it, and as the New Hampshire flower shop recently found out, the wrong way can mean $4 million dollars worth of wrong.

When try to promote your business online search engine optimisation counts for everything, this is the score that google (and those other search engines…) gives your website that ultimately determines where you will rank for specific keyword phase. If you can rank for certain high value phases it can mean big bucks for your business, so it’s any wonder that people will do anything that can to get their website ranking on Google.

I have many conversations with either current clients of ours and potential clients looking for SEO, all of whom want to get the most bang for their buck, they want to know what they can do to ensure they can get to the coveted number 1 on Google, and trust me, I’ve heard many interesting theories. In the end I must sound like a broken record but there is really no upside to using dangerous strategies such as buying backlinks and trying other “black hat” strategies that Google frowns on, because it only take one person to report that link, or for Google to crawl your website and your banished from existence. In the case of Ryan Abood and his parents’ New Hampshire flower shop, that was 80% of his revenues out the door and $4 million big ones down the drain, luckily this story has a happy ending, but its one helluva way to learn it!

Bottom line, if your SEO company isn’t being transparent about what they are doing for your SEO you better start asking question.

I have been out and about networking a little bit more than normal over the last couple of weeks and I have noticed a bit of a common thread when I talk to people about WordPress (the CMS that we use for all of our clients at sennza). The majority of people who have heard of WordPress seem to react with the same answer: “But that’s just a blogging platform”. I want to put those rumours to bed in this post. I think this is a post that I might refer quite a lot of people to just so they can understand that WordPress IS a CMS (Content Management System)! Saying WordPress is only good for blogging is like saying Google are only good for searches!

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What makes WordPress a CMS?

In my opinion I believe that any content management system should have the following features:

1. A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor
2. The ability to easily add new pages to a web site
3. Templating (To separate presentation from content)
4. Versioning (So that you can track editing history)
5. The ability to embed and attach various files (e.g. pdf, documents, images, video)

WordPress satisfies all of these criteria and above all excels in ease of use for the end user. I’ve worked with a hell of a lot of content management systems over the years. These include Joomla, DotNetNuke, Modx, Mambo and quite a few proprietary CMS for companies who I won’t mention. I hate thinking about the difficulty and confusion that I’ve experienced with all of these other CMS when it comes to teaching the client how to update their website. As a designer and developer I understood the systems but always used to dread the handover meetings where I would have to teach clients how to use their CMS. WordPress is so simple and easy to use that we can sometimes just send a client a username and a password and they work out how to update their own site without any training!!!

What can’t WordPress do?

In my opinion WordPress can do anything. That’s right, anything! Let’s have a look at some awesome uses for WordPress:

1. eCommerce using plugins such as WP e-commerce or Shopp
2. Social Networking using BuddyPress (e.g. Activity streams, groups, forums, friending, messaging)
3. A searchable candidate database for recruiters Diva Recruitment (Disclaimer: The plugin for this site was developed from the ground up by our team).
4. A Wiki (WordPress Wiki Theme)
5. A business directory

Still not convinced? Let me show you some stats!

During a recent video from WordCamp San Francisco 2010 Matt Mullenweg (the founding developer of WordPress) updated us with some amazing stats on just how popular WordPress is on the internet today:

• There have been 21 million downloads of WordPress just last year alone, this number is double that of the year before.
• There have been 70 million downloads for Plugin’s and Theme on WordPress (this doesn’t include 3^rd parties).
• WordPress 3.0 has been downloaded 1.7 million times since it’s release on 17 June 2010. Check out the live download counter!
• 8.5% of webpages on the internet use WordPress!

Lachlan pointed out to my a recent talk by Simon Sinek where he talked about the Law of Diffusion of Innovation.

The Law of Diffusions of Innovation talks about the adoption of new technology and what it takes to get to the tipping point before your technology is accepted as commonplace or the norm. If WordPress keeps up its current momentum (which everyone believes at sennza!) it will reach the tipping point at the 13.5% mark.

We’re very proud at sennza that all of our clients are not only innovators, they are always happy because of the ease of use of this CMS!

WordPress: You had me at hello!

I’ve been madly in love with WordPress since version 2.5. I still remember the day I first saw you WordPress, you were sitting lonely across the other side of the internet. I made my way through a sea of blog posts and after a few clicks and our eyes met. I’ll never forget that day. Not only did my design and development life suddenly get easier…my clients lives got easier. And with the recent release of WordPress 3.0 it’s easy to see why!

Edit: Matt posted a great link on his blog to the showcase on WordPress.org for all the sites tagged with CMS.

I have worked at both great, and not so great companies. For me, one of the defining differences of a great company is their attitude to the training and the development of their staff.

When I was first given the opportunity to hire my own staff as a Sales Manager, I read somewhere that you either pay good money for good talent, or you choose to pay less but invest in your staff. For me I always chose to invest in my staff. This wasn’t because I was trying to be cheap (and this doesn’t work for every role, sometimes you need to hire for talent), I was creating a sales team and for me creating a culture was the number one priority. I felt the best way to do this was to start with off with a clean slate and train every one with great habbits.

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For me, I always chose to hire for passion rather than experience. When I was a Sales Manager I knew that I could always teach the sales skills and product knowledge that was required for the job, but something you can’t teach people is passion.

It is not as simple as hiring passionate people and then you have instant success, a passionate person will not stay in a company long (or simply wont start) if they don’t have something to be passionate about. This brings me back to my original question – to train or not to train? Should you hire people who you believe can do the job on their own and have the ability to take care of themselves or do you spend time training these people?

A lot of companies, especially during the recent reseion felt the need for new employees to be ‘self starters’ (read: look after themselves and do the multiple jobs of the people they fired) most companies, especially people in sales need to be self starters regardless, this is a given. If you are not, you are in the wrong job, but when you ask when you ask employees to be a self starter and to manage their own training, you miss out on creating something really big. And that something is company culture. When people go about their jobs their own way you end up with a fragmented company with everyone trying to do things ‘their way’ this makes for a many micro cultures within the company that dont generally work well together. By training your staff you get the ablilty to train them your way, and focus on what you (your company) believes is important and in doing so you create an advocate for your company not just an employee.

Company culture is what makes employees stick with a company through thick and think, it its is what inspires people to do and be apart of something greater than themselves and to go above and beyond the normal 9 to 5 expectations.

2 companies that come to my mind when talking about amazing company culture are Zappos and Netflix. These companies are quoted around the world for their ability to create an uplifting culture within their companies.

Zappos is so bent on spreading their company culture, not only within their own company but to everyone in the world that they let you purchase their company culture book for free along with free deliver anywhere in the world. I did, and you can aswell right here.

Zappos famously offer employees $2000 at various points in their initial training to quit their jobs, and have no time limits on phone calls for their customer service staff.

Netflix has many examples of their culture but my favourite from them is this slideshow presentation below

Usability is something that each and every one of us occurs on a daily basis. We experience usability in both online and in the real world as well. Have a quick think about how many times you’ve thought things like this:

• “Which damn aisle has the pasta in it? Why don’t they have signs?”
• “Okay, so I left in a rush and forgot my GPS and my iPhone doesn’t have service here. Why haven’t I seen a sign for Timbucktoo in 30 kilometres?”
• “Why do I have to fill out this damn form again online for the third freaking time?!?! Give me a decent error message and at least remember what I’ve already typed in before so I can correct it!”
• “Uhhhh, so why doesn’t this train have a map so I can see how many stops there are before I need to get off. Hmm, I’ll just sit here in a mild state of anxiety until I hear my station called over the PA then I guess. Woot!”

Being a designer/developer I have to consider usability on a daily basis. Our company stands for simplicity so of course we have to think about usability as we develop products for our clients. That being said, sometimes a product is developed so rapidly that extra features can cramp usability when the good old “feature creep” tends to kick in when a client gets excited about the end product…but surely that’s a compliment to our work right?

I think I know quite a lot about usability because of a combination of my experience, excessive time spent online and of course my favourite, plain old “common sense”. However, Google has just changed their search and blown my mind with something that I’ve never had to consider before. Language based usability for people who speak and “type” multiple languages.

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Google are starting to introduce “virtual keyboards” into their search. The short version of this new feature is that soon you’ll see a little keyboard icon in Google that allows users to click it and a “virtual keyboard” in a second language will be displayed so that people who speak multiple languages won’t have to manually change their regional settings to type letters from a different language.

This might not seem much to you at first, however, even to someone like myself it would make a world of difference if I was in an airport in Armenia and was using an internet café (aside: Haha I had to type Alt+0233 to get é then. Love the irony!) I could eventually get to Google on a foreign keyboard and then click on this icon and click-to-type on a virtual keyboard. Once again I love Google’s work!

Why companies insist on punishing their loyal customers that they depend on I’ll never understand. Whats more, they do it over and over and again and expect them to come back to them.

This vent is against so called “fees” that business like to use to punish their customers. The fees I want to focus on are the ‘late fees’ that are synonomus with the video rental industry. It is their bread and butter that they reply on and the extra income that comes from this is a large percentage of their revenues, yet they understand to some extent that customers will fight tooth and nail to avoid paying that extra $1 fine.

Now I realise that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but when you slap your customers with fees and fines for doing business with you, you are setting yourself up for disaster. When you call it a late fee it makes it feel like you’ve done something wrong and are being punished for it, and making your customers feel bad is no way to create loyalty.

Now to juxtapose this punishment model employed by all the major video/DVD retailers with a relatively new companys such as Red Room DVD and Quicklix who are trying to disrupt the encombents, they treat their customers a little differently.

When you choose to rent a DVD from Red Room DVD, you can keep it as long as you want. There is a flat rate per day and you simply return it when you are done and pay for the days that you keep it. As a bonus – If the rental charges exceed the replacement cost (Normally around $35), you keep the DVD! This is what we call a win/win situation! So does this mean you actually get a ‘reward’ for keeping the DVD late? What a concept. This what some might call positive reinforcement!

Quicklix (Australia’s answer to Netflix) has a different model again. Here you pay a monthly fee, and depending on the subscription you get a certain number of DVD’s a month sent it the mail to you. Again, no late fees, you simply send your current DVD’s back when you are done and more arrive a few days later.

These are 2 compaines that are innovating and looking for a different model in a what has become a fairly stale industry. It just goes to show you that you can treat your customers with respect and make money.

In all honesty, if your business is not getting the results you want, there is one thing you can do right now, without question, that will help your business in leaps and bounds.

Pick up the phone!

Talk to previous customers that you have done business with. Talk to your current customers. Talk to customers that enquired or stopped purchasing 3 ,6, 9 or even 12 months ago but chose not to go ahead. Whoever it may be, human contact can go a long way in helping you succeed.

Now this may seem hypocritical given the fact we are an internet company that advocates maximising online sales and your online presence in general. We believe there are a lot the wonders the internet can do to help your business, but that is just one aspect of your business. Today I want to write about connecting the online with the offline as it is not something that happens automatically.

If you are aren’t getting the sales you want or if people have stopped picking up the phone to call you, then simply pick up the phone and call them! At Sennza, our mission is to make the internet a better place. We do this by making amazing websites that customers love to use and that business owners can update easily without our assistance. So if I come across a website that I believe should be doing a better job for that company, I pick up the phone and call them. There aren’t any hard selling tactics or even a call script. I introduce myself in simple and caring terms, tell them what I like about their website and how I think I can help them make it even better! Just asking are they happy with the results they are currently getting from their website can be enough sometimes. If you do this in a way that is non salesy and adopt an approach that is genuine, you will show that you actually want to help them! You can’t go wrong with this approach no matter what business you are in.

Now there are a few key rules you need to follow to make this work.

To start with:

• It must be a customer that can gain substantially from working with you.
• You have to genuinely believe that they will be better off as a result of working with you.

Notice I didn’t say pick up the phone book and start at A then work your way through to Z! That wont help your business, or the people you speak with!

If you don’t believe that you can truly help this customer, you truly have no business in talking to them. Period! Now if they decline to take the conversation any further, that’s fine, it’s nothing personal, it just means that 1 extra person knows that your business exists and the world is a better place because of it! It might not be the right time for them, but in the future…you might potentially do business with them because they remember your business name!

Keep Surging!

I’ve been a student a few times in my life, so I understand what it’s like to be tight on cash. The first time was at uni doing a Bachelor of Microelectronic Engineering, the second time was at TAFE studying Applications Programming and the third time was at another uni doing a Bachelor of Accounting. Granted, during my stint studying Accounting I was working full time so money wasn’t an issue during that period of my life.

However, when you’re a full-time student you’re quite often struggling to make ends meet and I can understand and relate. I was talking to one of my friends on instant messenger the other day while she was at uni and she was having a bit of a rant about how she wished her lecturers would stop giving her documents in .doc and .docx (both Microsoft Office formats) and it got me thinking.

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Why are students still expected to purchase Microsoft Office? Sure, most of them can (and do) attain Office through torrents but there are still a few honest ones who do the right thing and purchase the student version Microsoft distribute. But here’s the thing…why the fudge should they even have to do that? Everyone…and I repeat…everyone has access to Google Docs for free.

Here are just a few of the benefits:

• There isn’t any installation required
• Files can be exported easily in many different formats
• Files can be shared publicly (so a lecturer can share an assignment, lecture notes and files to everyone)
• Everything is stored in the cloud! Read: You can access your documents anywhere, anytime on any computer with internet access…plus if your computer blows up your assignment is still in the cloud!
• It’s freakin’ FREE!!!!!!

So…can somebody with some weight in the university or government world please get universities using Google Docs instead of Office and save students some extra dollars and lots of stress? That would be awesome for all our current students. Remember, they are going to be building our economies in a matter of years. How about we think logically and look after them?

How about you retweet or share this on Facebook if you agree with my reasoning? If not, drop me a comment below because I’d love to hear other peoples thoughts.

I just came across this video on TED and felt compelled to share it. TED is a fantastic resource for inspiring talks from everyone from Bill Gates to Al Gore.

In the presentation Simon Sinek goes on to explain what it is that makes a truly inspiring leader different from everyone else. The main ‘premise’ he states is that most people in their every day lives start with the ‘what’ they do and use that to come about the ‘why’ they do it. Great leaders do this in reverse, the ‘what’ they do is simply a by product of what they believe.

For me this video really struck a chord as this is something that I think about everyday. The WHY.

There are are a million Web Design companies out there, yet every time I speak with a client, more and more I am told that their previous web designers just didn’t ‘get’ what they wanted. For me, a company website has to be an extension of the company, in most cases it may be the only interaction your customers have with you before choosing whether they wish to do business with you. So for me, I’m not build a website, I’m building your business with you.

Simon goes into some great examples from history.

I highly recommend every business owner owner out there to take the 18mins and watch this truly insiring video below.

I was going about my daily morning wake routine, which generally starts with a few barely audible groans as I wake up and use gravity to roll out of bed and stumble over to put the kettle on while I rub the sleep out of my eyes and attempt to recollect the evenings dreams. (I should mention that unfortunately, not enough of those dreams involve scantily clad Swedish vixens having pillow fights). After I’ve made my coffee I usually fire up the computer to read my RSS feeds in Google Reader, then see what inane ramblings my friends on the other side of the world have made on the “Zuckerberg Platform of World Domination”…err, I mean Facebook.

This morning one of my mates had a status update about her “managing to assemble some IKEA furniture after several hours” and it got me thinking.

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I have to admit, I’ve never EVER had any problems assembling any furniture from IKEA…a.k.a. “the flat-packed warehouse of dreams”! However, I have watched a couple of my ex-girlfriends struggle with the task even though they would all attempt to follow the instructions. As a male, I stick to the “if all else fails, read the instructions” rule that my father passed down to me and no doubt his father passed down to him as well.

Anyways, in my briefing musing, I wondered why IKEA hasn’t taken an online support angle to their products. These days most web applications have a knowledge-base containing videos that are short and engaging. In a world where nobody seems to RTFM and every consumer has a DVD player then why don’t companies like IKEA include a short amateurish DVD of how to assemble their furniture? Media is cheap, HD video cameras are cheap and Sweden is filled with attractive, young, long legged, tanned blondes…so why not hop to it IKEA and make life easier for your consumer?

EDIT: After talking to Lachlan this morning he said to me “Oh, by the way nice post. I can’t believe you wrote DVD though. We should be telling IKEA to make better use of their youtube channel, if this is their real one? http://www.youtube.com/user/Ikea#g/a.

After having a sniff around I found another IKEA channel on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/user/IKEAFAMILYLIVE and they have a Facebook Page here: http://www.facebook.com/IKEAUSA. Frankly, I’m disappointed with their online presence on social networking sites. So here’s an online strategy the sennza way!

The plan

YouTube – We would film DVD instructional videos for all the furniture items with two hot Swedish blondes which would entertain and inform the blokes about how to assemble furniture. These would go viral on Facebook, Twitter and in emails as all men love to perve and share links of hotties with their mates.

We’d also give the ladies two ripped Swedish dudes assembling the furniture as well to capture their attention. The chances of these videos going viral would be much lower than the hot Swedes because women are generally more subtle and reserved when it comes to that kind of stuff. Although Gen Y and Gen Net females are breaking through this generalisation.

Facebook – We’d build you a custom FBML (Facebook Markup Language) page that would have a monthly special page with click through links to the product pages on the IKEA site. We’d also post new YouTube videos of the Swedes assembling new products on the Facebook wall to show people new products.

In-store – After the hot Swedish chicks and ripped Swedish dudes have gone viral we’d make them embark on a tour of the IKEA stores for instore furniture assembly. Why? Because we all know how much women love IKEA and blokes hate going in the store. If we’ve got two hot chicks in-store to entertain the blokes, they’ll be happy to take their wives and girlfriends to IKEA and whilst they wander around shopping, the blokes can have a good perve and everyone is happy. Also, I know my gay mates all love IKEA already so they’d be even happier to perve on ripped dudes as well and they’d also go on a testosterone fueled spending spree afterwards.

Have a think about that IKEA! sennza can sort you out online!