Professional web folk share plenty of eye-rolling anecdotes about departure from best practice.  It’s one way to let off steam and retain sanity.   I don’t imagine this is unique to web designers and developers — I imagine shoe cobblers had their own, “OMG!” stories.  It was in this fine tradition of mutual “kvetching” that a colleague recently told me about her meeting with a client who shared something about their web site that made her jaw drop.

Apparently for some months, the client’s product image on the home page was completely invisible to site visitors using Internet Explorer.  Now whether you love or hate IE, it doesn’t matter, you wouldn’t want any scenario that resulted in a significant chunk of visitors simply not seeing your primary product image.   What’s more, the client knew about this issue and *shrug* it just hadn’t been addressed.

How could this happen?  Easy.  Somewhere, somehow, someone decided that a “height=auto” attribute could replace an image pixel attribute in the <img> tag representing the client’s flagship product.   Honestly I don’t know where they got that attribute from, but the bottom line is that a completely non-standard code approach was adopted and they let it sit.  The result?  Probably some 50% of the site visitors missed a key marketing element of this client’s home page.

Along similar lines, I was browsing the web site of a local community college and stumbled upon a scheduled event that was presented as an image.  That’s right, date, description, content everything was in a GIF image file.  Aside from the content being opaque to Google, it goes without saying that this approach to content is difficult to update to say the least.  If the graphic designer packs his or her bags… then what?  Perhaps that’s what happened because this site included the text-based annotation, “This event has been rescheduled to February 15.”  True story.

In practice, we naturally bring our best talents to whatever we do.  If we know graphics, then our site will tend to be graphic-heavy and display our talent for top-notch image creation.  If we know programming, then we might rely more strongly on some back-end techniques or in-house custom apps to manage content.  On that engineering-heavy end of things, I’ve seen user interfaces for a CMS so unfriendly that, in fact, the engineers end up maintaining the content.  Both extremes can do a disservice to efficiently creating and managing content.  This is why from a practical point of view we need a CMS that is relatively friendly and that is standards-based.

Clearly then, one huge advantage of putting a CMS into production, whether WordPress, Drupal or other standards-based systems, is that you start with a platform that assumes a best-practice approach to web publishing. Ultimately we want to adopt a tool set that helps us get out of our own way.

Another example?  If you are a web geek like myself, you occasionally peek under the covers at the source code of sites to determine what they are using for content management, or just to see how things are put together.  I performed this exercise recently with a major university web site.  What did I find?  Tables… horrors!  In web years, this approach went by the wayside eons ago.  Yet, so many sites still rely on this methodology for layout.   Cascading stylesheets was supposed to mean the end to using tables for content layout.

Here it is, 2011 and we’re still wondering why so many sites are being developed using these methods.  In case the boss needs convincing as to why time and resources should be invested in making your site standards-based, bear in mind the following concepts and arguments:

1) Standards-based sites utilize CSS and typically employ content databases, both of which serve the chief practical purpose of separating web content from web design.

2) By separating content from design you position your site content to be more Google-friendly.  Adopting a CMS that creates key-word-based URL’s further enhances this position (SEO), and makes subsequent Analytics easier to understand.

3) By putting style and content in their proper places, your site is more easily distributed via RSS subscription, more easily adapted into mobile format, and is typically friendlier to screen reading software in the event that 508 accessibility compliance is a concern.  Also a key point of this standards-based approach: it will be less expensive and easier to redesign the site in the future.  Seems like a win-win-win, right?

It’s hard to measure the cost of obsolescence, or presenting your visitors with a look that is clearly based on yesteryear’s method of web page presentation.  But clearly, adopting the most flexible approach will position you well for whatever changes come along next!

Okay, first I have to start with a big caveat: I’m not currently using all of these plugins in www.wordimpressive.com. Whew, now that’s out of the way, one more cautionary note: Don’t go plugin crazy. Adding a plugin to your WordPress site is like making a long-term commitment — it is not something to take lightly. Plugins can interact negatively with one another and can take hours to find out why something isn’t working right. Don’t ask me how I know.

Twitter for WordPress: Maybe you’ve got a lot to say to your audience, but it comes in fits and starts. If you are a Twittermouth, try this one in a sidebar. It comes as a widget and will potentially drive your readers to your Twitter profile and potentially your Twitter followers will hop onto your site now and then. Likewise, regular updates tend to keep Googlebot happy with seeing changes to your site.

MultiFeedSnap: This one is more “Web 2.0″ than “social networking,” but what the hey.  It is great for embedding RSS feeds right into your content post.   What I like about it is that you can build a page that is essentially a dynamic directory of content. It will, of course, update based on the schedule of the remote feed.  Neat, huh? I’m using it on a site I have built for my day job, you can check out an example of MultiFeedSnap here at ClarkVoices, where we’ve used it to pull in a podcast of Alumni interviews.

TubePress:  Have video content from YouTube that you want to integrate with your WordPress site?  Learn a single line of WordPress “shortcode” and you will be on your way to adding YouTube Galleries to your postings.  Humor me again, and check out how these YouTube galleries display in ClarkVoices.  Not just individual videos, but entire playlists can be referenced.

Smart Youtube: Maybe you just need the simple capability of adding a YouTube video now and then.  If this is the need, then this little plugin is just great.  No need to copy the YouTube embed code.  Once this add-on is installed and activated, you just plunk in the URL to the YouTube video, with the little addition of a “v” in the address, after the “http” and voila’, you have an embedded video.  Simple and nice:  httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWYi4_COZMU

I Love Social Bookmarking:  I’ve reviewed a number of these, and they function in a pretty similar fashion, but this one presents very well.  Getting “slashdotted” is really a good problem to have, and building inbound links is essential for gaining ground with your organic search placement.  So you really MUST get social book marking, and this one is a good one to have, it installs easy, and requires no fiddling with PHP code, as some do.

Now is a good time for a housekeeping note:  keep your plugins updated!  As fabulous as they may seem, all software is constantly improved, and you don’t want to miss out on new features.  Likewise, assuming you are keeping your WordPress updated, you want to make sure your plugins are “keeping up” with the latest release that you are no doubt running.  Also be sure and test and review functionality after each update.  Did I mention this is a long-term commitment?

The add-on’s I’ve featured are great for adding dynamic content.  They give an additional sense that your site is alive with changing content, and that is valuable, without a doubt.  However, it is not really a substitute for presenting and sourcing original, quality content on your site.  Now we all know that the Google-rithm is a mysterious proprietary thing and while Googlebot will index your new content, your site map won’t be updated.  By the way, the Google XML Site Maps plugin is a must-have, but that’s a topic for another entry!

There’s a good bit of discussion here and there, concerning whether WordPress can act as a Content Management System for a web site  Obviously WordPress is a strong and incredibly popular blogging platform, but how about as a CMS?  Some “how to’s” we find around the interwebs would have us believe it is a good bet.

Caution: may require many plugins!

But, is it a good bet to employ a very flexible, extensible blogging tool for the purpose of maintaining “regular” web presence?  It certainly possible and tempting.  After all, WordPress has a ton of developers and an incredibly active support community.

But whether you should deploy WordPress in this fashion may require careful consideration of the complexity of a given site.  Is it web presence for a small business with half-a-dozen editors or less?  Are we talking a larger organization with multiple departments and business units?  If the latter, then we can end up with quite a challenge on our hands.  WordPress isn’t quite designed for hierarchical permissions.  I’m referring to scenario where staffer Suzy Q. who edits the “Customer Support” area of a site does not need to have access to edit the press releases or product marketing copy.

WordPress seperates content into Pages and Posts, and these content types may further be typed by Category. Out-of-the-box (or tar-file as the case may be), WordPress does not prohibit an editor of one content area from editing another area.  Of course there are plugins to help with this, and that’s the beauty of open source.   However with extensibility comes the inevitable trade off!  Techno-karma has no mercy.

That’s to say, through plugins you can potentially scale WordPress into more CMS-like functionality by adding the workflow, permissions, notification bits that you’d expect from a “real” CMS.   But do not expect that you “add it and forget it” with plugins.  Assuming that you plan to keep your WP install current (you DO plan to, yes?!), you enter into a long term commitment with every bit of add-on functionality you install.  Do so… with fear and trembling.

For example — check out this list of plugins you might need.  Yowza.  Be aware that each plugin has its own life-cycle, meaning that in addition to being a good doobie and keeping your core WordPress install updated, each plugin will need to be updated, and, this is critical:  may or may not be compatible with major WP upgrades.  It happens.

Coming soon… WordPress and Google Analytics.