Do you remember the 1988 movie Crazy People with Dudley Moore? It was about a fried ad executive who discovers a brilliant new advertising strategy while locked up in a psych ward: level with your customers. Here he shows his new campaigns to one of his associates.
I recommend renting the movie, there are some other funny gags in there too.
People are always saying they want honesty, but do they really? Could we handle a world of brutal honesty?
I think it would actually winnow out the actual good-for-you products from the crap. But who knows, maybe McDonalds could come out with an ad saying, “When you need to eat cheaply and don’t care if it’s actually food” and it would still work. Because sometimes, people just don’t care.
What The Heck Is WordPress and Why Should You Care?
WordPress started out as a blogging platform, but it is so much more powerful than that. WordPress is a flexible and customizable content management system (CMS).
In WordPress, Content Is Separate From Design
What does this mean? In the olden days, changing the design of the site would mean taking it “down,” doing the updates, and then uploading pages to the site. And what if you needed to be posting an update while I’m working on the site? Tough titties. But not anymore. WordPress allows the designer to simultaneously tweak the design of the site while you add articles. It allows the designer to completely change the site design (in whole or in part) at any time, quickly and easily. It also allows you, the content writer, to update the text on the site anytime you want, without knowing a lick of HTML (website code).
WordPress Hooks Into Other Social Media
Nowadays if you want a web presence, you need more than a blog. You need to be present on Twitter, and Facebook and others. WordPress can help you there too. There are plugins (code that adds functionality) that hook up your WordPress blog to Twitter and/or Facebook, so when you post, Twitter Tweets and Facebook….books!
Lots of Fresh Functionality and Designs
Also, programmers have made thousands of plugins for other functionality for WordPress, and designers are making themes. What does this mean for you? Even if we design a custom theme for you, if you see a theme you like better in the future, a few clicks updates you site instantly!
If you design right, you can’t tell which sites are built on WordPress. Most frequently-updated sites on the web these days are built on WordPress platform, like the New York Times site and the Huffington Post.
An artist friend of mine said she liked to be in a room that had interesting objects in it because there were “places for my eyes to rest.” It’s the same thing with a page of copy. Your eyes need places to rest on the page as they skim it. See a before and after [...]
Readers have the attention spans of a gnat these days, and don’t spend more than a few seconds lingering on any post or article title found in search, deciding whether they want to read the following content. It gets worse on Twitter, where you only have 140 characters to entice someone to click through. Follow [...]
A client/friend of mine asked me to review the website she’d had made. She was unhappy (after having spent a good deal of money on it) and needed to get it updated for the better and wanted to opinions of another web professional to take back to the web design company. She is unhappy with [...]
I really hate it when someone takes good business practices and uses them for evil. Done well, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) can drive traffic to websites, and once there, make it easier for users to fulfill a call to action, whether that’s to buy something, or contact the site owner. [...]
The awesome gals at Geek Girls Guide elected me “Geek of the Week” and had me on their podcast this week! Geek Girl’s Guide is a fabulous website/podcast series in exploring how technology can be fun and productive, geared to real-life people who may not have their heads in the pixels all the time like [...]
Hi New York Internet Week! Although I am not partaking much in your parties this year, I did peek in on your website to see if there was anything interesting going on. I appreciate you trying to jam-pack the site with lots of options for me, but it ended up being kind of confusing. Problem [...]
Hi copywriters! I know you’re trying really hard to write commercials that make me want to buy products, but I’d really appreciate it if you could learn to use words that makes sense with other words. What do I mean? Annoying Ad #1 Shampoo I just saw an ad for Pantene’s Flat to Volume Shampoo. [...]
What The Heck Is WordPress and Why Should You Care?
