As a supporter of the open source initiative and GPL, I was happy to get to attend Phoenix WordCamp 2009! If you’re not sure what WordCamp is all about, just imagine 500 nerds getting together under a giant white tent, having conversations, collaborating, and spreading their love for WordPress.  If that’s not a clear enough picture, read more about what WordCamp is.

So, I admit, until this year, I was a WordCamp virgin. But no more! I learned a lot and met some great people at WordCamp, including a computer guru, a phoenix website designer, and JDog, the dating coach. If you missed the event, don’t worry, you can watch the WordCamp video on GoDaddy starting Nov 18, 2009. 

Here are some of the things I took away from my experience at Phoenix WordCamp 2009:

From Lorelle on WordPress – Blog Content and Writing

• #1 Rule – There are no rules
• Don’t work for your blog; make your blog your bitch (yes, she really said that)
• Headings pull readers
• Don’t copycat
• Many people say "Write what you know" – Lorelle doesn’t agree with that
• Learn how to talk
• Blog for you, then for like minded people
• Publish content with intent

From Merlin Mann on Social Media

• Decide what you can’t / won’t do – set priorities
• Make people feel awesome
• Don’t pretend
• Respect people
• Manage expectations
• Figure out who you are
• Be you without apology
• Know what you have to say and say it
• Talk about things that interest people
• Be yourself

Poignant quotes from Merlin Mann:

"How much are you going to pretend to pay attention to people?

"Social media is a lot of people who aren’t you, telling you what they think about you."

"People sweat brand management when they don’t know who they are."

Web 3.0 is going to be a filter for Web 2.0. Do you want to be the noise or the filter?

Matt Mullenweg Rountable

Matt’s awesome! He took a lot of questions. Two things I took away from his answers are: "The biggest opportunities on WordPress are in education, not more features," and "The greatest innovation in the next few years is Geo location." Hence, WordPress has a new geotagging feature.

Dave Moyer on Multimedia

• If you want to stand out, you must be outstanding
• Go beyond words with multimedia
• Awesome WordPress plugins include:
  • Audioplayer Plugin
  • WPXSPF Flash Player
  • PowerPress
  • PodPress (but it’s broken…)

 Jim Christian on Search Engine Optimization

• Track what you’re doing
• Stay organized and track each page and it’s position in the search engines
• Use tools
  • Adwords Keyword Tool
  • Google Trends
  • Touch Graph
  • Backlinks Analyzer
  • Advanced WebRanking

Jason Cote on Wordpress for Business

• Branding is You!
• Engage your community
• Publishing content is only half your job – building relationships is the other half
• Look for problems in your community and provide solutions
• Crowd sourcing – leverage the talents of others to be successful
• Build your business around your heart

John Hawkins on Building a WordPress Plugin

Everything you need to know about building a WordPress Plugin.

Clintus on Video Blogging and Video Marketing

Just take a look at his blog to see how it’s done. All you need is a NokiaN95 and Adobe Premier if you’re a PC, or Final Cut Pro if you’re a Mac.  Use video hosting sites like Vimeo for hosting and embed on your blog.

Were you at Phoenix WordCamp 2009? Did you watch the video? Leave your take away moment in a comment below!

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Welcome back!  This is the 3rd part of the 4 part series on moving our website to a new hosting company, redesigning the verticalmeasures.com website and integrating this blog linkbuildingbestpractices.com in to the new website so they are all one site.  

Last week we talked about why we chose Wordpress as the platform for the entire project and we showed you what the raw theme looks like that we are modifying to meet our design and functionality needs.  This week I will share some of the specific action items we indentified, problems we encountered and decisions we made to ensure we have a user friendly site and our excellent search engine rank is not negatively affected by all the change. Our hope is that with the new platform and the blog integration we will see better search engine results and PR when the dust clears.

Give your opinion and get some exposure!

First things first…with the exception of a few tweaks here and there we would like to get your feedback on the new design and colors we choose.  Although our team is busy updating and revising content we have settled on a color and design and invite you to take a look on the temporary development site.  Here is the link: [link removed] Again don’t pay too much attention to the content, just tell us what you think of the design, colors and layout in a comment below.  If you suggest something we love and implement we may mention you and/or your business in our 4th and final post next week after the site is live!

Road map to moving the site:

Here are most of the steps we identified so far to accomplish the goal:

1. Review current content and decide on what pages will be included on the new site and which ones wont as well as which pages need to be revised.
2. Identify the pages that will be considered the main pages available from the primary horizontal navigation
3. Patty Adams was given the responsibility of writing new content and updating the old content
4. Chose a WordPress "theme" and have the team vote on it
5. Set up the new hosting account and install the current version of WordPress
6. Add to the database the tables verticalmeasures.com uses so there will only be one database for the entire site
7. Install and configure any plug-ins needed for the blog or site
8. We used the awesome Xenu Link Sleuth to get a list of all the URL’s from the old site to make sure we dont miss anything. It also shows us any broken links.  We’ll be running it against the new site to check for broken links also.
9. Add any widgets and widget content to Wordpress
10. Update the 404 template page with custom content to make it more user friendly for our visitors.  We considered Google’s new 404 page helper script but I decided against it because it could take our visitors offsite and it allows Google to change the content of the page at will.  Instead I added our site search functionality to the 404 page, a link to our sitemap and a link suggesting they email us for help.
11. Forms: We have 2 primary forms on the site. The contact us page and the (now Orange) inquiry form on the right sidebar.  Although we could use the cFormsII plugin to quickly and easily add the forms we wanted complete control of everythng from the look and feel to the functionality and user experience so we developed our own forms and processing functionality.  In additon we implemented a new free captcha system by Simon Jarvis.
12. Design the header graphic for the new site, (we unanimously agreed the old one was outdated) and we didn’t like the color of the default clouds.
13. Decide on, purchase and customize the main feature images that fade in and out on the home page.  You’ll also notice we went with a straight arrow in the main black feature section versus the half circle that came with the template.  That was Arnie’s excellent idea.  We think that minor change made a huge improvement to drawing the eye to the messages.
14. ORANGE?  After much debate our Link Manager Eli (pronounced "L + E") suggested orange for the Inquiry form.  The fact is it’s all over the web lately and we think it works well with the blues.  I wont share how many different shades of Orange we tried before picking the current one but it was easily double digits.
15. 301 Redirects: This is a BIGGIE…Since many of our pages currently rank very well with the search engines we have to make sure to transfer that link juice to the new site. We have to create a 301 redirect for every page from both sites to the new corresponding page on the new site. All totaled there are about 200.  Tedious but critical.  We are about halfway done.  Once we make the switch we will be testing them also to be sure there are no 404 errors.
16. Meta Tags: cant forget the extremely important meta tags!  They all had to be transferred from the old pages to the new pages.  Kaila Strong handled that task.

There are more steps involved (and I know I am missing some we have done) but that is basically where we are right now so I will save the rest for out final post next week.

Once again I encourage you to click the link above or here: [link removed] to our dev site and give us some feedback via comments below on the new design, layout and colors. 

We will be taking the new site live some time in the next 48 hours so wish us luck!

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The decision to consider WordPress as a platform for the entire new site came almost as a no brainer.  It’s the most popular blogging platform on the web and quickly becoming the #1 choice for websites.  If you are not that familiar with WorPress here are the strong points you should be aware of:

1. You can’t beat it for SEO
2. Super easy to set up, configure and customize
3. Built in CMS (content management system) which makes it easy for non technical people to work with the site content.
4. It has a huge community of developers writing useful “plugins”
5. Hundreds of free themes to choose from for design, look and feel
6. It’s free!

Of course the fact that this blog is built on a WordPress platform was part of the final decision in trying to keep the project as painless as possible.  Decision made!  WordPress it is.

Finding a theme/layout

The next thing we did is set out to find a “theme” for our new site.  Since adding new content and updating our old content was part of the plan we wanted to finalize a layout for the new site 1st thing so we could get our team working on writing and moving content.  We were looking for a theme that would work well as a website and a blog. NOT an easy feat!  We searched through all the WordPress.org free themes as well as a number of paid themes until finally finding  iThemes.com.  Believe it or not they had a Real Estate theme we felt was a perfect fit : http://realestatethemes.com/irealestate/ It has a non flash based fading main image powered by as many images as you want and we loved the sidebar “tabber” feature.  It also has a very “website looking” home page and the integrated blog we were looking for as well as a lot of flexibility for customization.   A great bargain at $79.00. 

Before making the purchase we had the staff look at that theme and several others.  It was the unanimous winner so we made the purchase and installed it on the already in progress new site.

We need a plan

In order to pull this off effectively we needed a step by step plan to work off of.  We have to make sure all details are covered and things are done in the correct order or disaster could occur.  We wrote down each step and assigned one of three categories based on at what stage that step will occur. (Pre, Move, Post) “Pre” is the prep stage before the new site goes live and includes anything that will not affect either verticalmeasures.com or linkbuildingbestpractices.com.  “Move” includes steps that will occur once all “Pre” work is finished and we are taking the new site live. “Post” is steps that will occur in the frantic moments after the new site is live and we are seeing everything we didn’t think of! (hopefully not)

In our next post we will talk more about actual action items we indentified, where we are at in the process and some major decisions we have made as far as content and functionality.   Be sure to tune in!

As always your questions and comments are encouraged.

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The time has come to update our company website http://www.verticalmeasures.com however for extra fun we are also moving the website to a new hosting company AND merging this blog (Link Building Best Practices) in to the website so they are no longer separate sites and domains.  We thought it would be cool to document the process in a 4 post blog series so you can follow along, give us feedback and/or ideas and hopefully learn something with us during the process. 

So let’s get started! 

There were several factors and concerns we had about executing the move:

• We do not want to lose our excellent search engine rankings
• We want to update the content and make improvements to increase sales
• We want an updated look and feel  using scalable technologies
• Since many of our pages on both sites rank well in the search engines we want to make sure either the new URL structure was the same as the current one (yeah right!) or that we implement 301 redirects from each old page url to the url of the new page to prevent 404 page not found errors after the move.  This in itself will be quite a task but absolutely worth it from an SEO and user experience perspective.
• The current Vertical Measures website is written in html with a little PHP and a MySQL database.  This blog is based on a Wordpress platform (also as you most likely know PHP & MySQL database driven). So how can we merge the two sites without ending up with a website that looks like a blog or a blog that looks like a website?
• Should we hire an outside company to handle the project or do it internally?
• How can we accomplish the entire project by the end of the year as cost effectively as possible?

In our next post we’ll share the answer to these questions and start getting in to the “nuts and bolts” of the planning stage and beginning of execution.

Feel free to leave comments to share your experiences, ideas and tips on the topic or just wish us luck!

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