Would you go masked to a business meeting?

Surely not. But that is effectively what people do when they tell us nothing about themselves in the content of the About or About us page on their site.

I don’t know of any research that explains why so many business people neglect to provide any content about their company or themselves, even when the tab says “About Us”. Is it choice or is it an oversight?

I do know that it is a mistake for us to neglect our About or About Us pages.

Because there is nothing mysterious about why people might want to check out our About or About Us page.

It’s just basic human nature: if we like what we read in a blog post or are interested in a product or service we list, it’s perfectly normal for us to want to find out something about the author or the provider of the product or service.

Which means that if we leave that About page in its raw template form – you know, “This is an example of a WordPress About page…” – of just drop some boring promo material into it, then every time someone clicks on that About or About Us tab there could be a missed opportunity for lead generation or for collaboration possibilities.

And I for one find it very frustrating when, having read an interesting blog post, or having received some sort of proposal in my email, I go to the About or About Us page on the company’s site and find either no relevant content or just a (usually) boring blurb about their products.

Only yesterday I received a pitch, via another site of mine, to look at a service which offered to help me manage my sites. On the About Us page there was a whole screed about the service and the benefits I could expect to gain from using the service. And it was free – what was not to like about that?

A lot actually. Because there was no information on that page about the company or people behind the service.

It may be that there is a legitimate company and good people behind the service, but I was not to know from the About Us page.

So I moved on.

Why do people neglect their About page or do a poor job with it?

There could be a number of reasons for not getting the About page right:

• They left their site design to a designer, who just got some information about the company’s products and dropped that into the page.
• They are uncomfortable writing about themselves and singing their own praises, so they put off doing anything about it, sometimes putting it off indefinitely.
• They are trying to make up their minds whether to write in the first or third person.
• They don’t actually have a real, duly registered business.

The key to getting the About page right

He lists some questions users will be turning over in their minds as they read our About page:

• Are you financially stable?
• Who are the people behind your company?
• What is the makeup of your organization?
• What do you do?
• What’s this company’s culture?
• What makes you different?
• Can they back up their claims?
• What do they stand for (and against)?
• Are they trustworthy?

And he provides examples, with screenshots, to illustrate how each of these question has been addressed by various firms.

Is there a guide you can use easily?

The best guide I know for any home based entrepreneur who wants an effective About page is the blog post by Ivan Walsh (good friend, no relation) in his post Why Your About Us Page is the Second Most Important Page on Your Site. Although I had read that post ages ago and in fact linked to it in a post here some months ago, I re-read it yesterday and realized I had not really taken in all of Ivan’s good advice on the topic.

Walking the Talk time

So last night and today I gave my About page here a going over. Frankly it wasn’t easy and in fact I don’t feel it’s right yet, but it is more focused before on answering those questions listed by Peter Boag in the post mentioned above and it’s more now like Ivan’s model than it was before. Feedback welcome.

One thing I intend to do soon is to add a video. (Update Feb 10: video now added.)

If you have examples of About pages that work well, your own or others, I trust you will feel free to share the links and tell us why you like the example you are sharing.

Image credit: Decorative Mask, by alantankenghoe, Flickr, Creative Commons

I find it both amusing and rather sad that I still get emails from local businesses which do not seem to have moved in their thinking beyond somewhere in the latter end of the last century, at least as far as marketing is concerned.

You get the sense that they think email is hi-tech.

And some can’t even get that right. One local real estate agent, part of a nationwide group with fancy offices and distinctive uniforms, keeps sending me emails addressed:

Dear ,

That’s right, can’t even figure out how to do a mailmerge.

And that’s not all. At the foot of the message – which is pretty meager anyway, a plea to click on a link to go to a website, without telling me what it is about – is the following message:

If your e-mail program does not allow you to click directly on the above address (such as AOL), you will need to copy and paste the address into your World Wide Web browser (eg Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer).

Netscape Navigator?

I would unsubscribe but – in clear breach of the Australian Spam Act – there is no option provided to do so.

What was I saying about last century?

The New, Connected Consumer

Businesses like that real estate franchise don’t seem to realize that there is a new consumer abroad in the land today, what author Brian Solis in his book The End of Business As Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution
calls the social/connected consumer.

Unlike the traditional consumer – a member of an increasingly rare species – who studied print catalogs and maybe even read emails, and unlike the merely online consumer who takes to search engines and finds sites with relevant products or services, the new, connected consumer goes first to her social streams – her network on Facebook, on Twitter or on some other social platform.

Here’s where the home based business owner comes into her own. She has not spent all that dosh on fancy uniforms. She has not rented out expensive office space on Main Street. She can use her marketing budget on what counts – smart strategies and tactics to connect with her customers where they are.

And that is increasingly, overwhelmingly, on the social web.

That’s where the rubber hits the road these days.

Not on Netscape.

Or email.

(And yes, email still works – for some. Just not a great strategy for most of us to rely solely or mainly on that particular channel.)

For those new to blogging, it may help to explain that while email spam is targeted at you or me, comment spam is targeted at Google.

It’s a parasitic activity, aiming to get a better ranking on Google by linking your site to the spammer’s site via the comment. Hence the practice described dramatically as “Google bombing”.

As the WordPress.org Codex explains:

A spammer might have a site that sells a “mydrug” and wants to be at the top of a search for “mydrug” on Google, so to create the effect of a google bomb they leave comments on hundreds or thousands of weblogs linking to their site with the link text “mydrug”. They don’t really care if you see it, in fact they’d rather you didn’t because you would delete it, they just want the search engine to see it when they index your page.

What to do?

If your site is built on WordPress, the first thing to do is to make sure the Akismet plugin is activated.

The Akismet plugin developed and maintained by Automattic, the company behind WordPress, comes supplied with every WordPress installation.

I for one would not be without it. It does a terrific job in keeping this blog, for example, free of spam comments.

But you have to activate it. And for that you need to have an API key.  I got my API key from a site I set up on the WordPress-hosted platform at WordPress.com If you don’t have a WordPress.com blog and don’t feel a need for one, you can still get an API key by signing up, at no charge, for a WordPress.com account .

This is a non-trivial issue for any blogger

I just counted in the Akismet spam folder 18 spam comments on the one post I published here yesterday, 5 Things I Look for in a WordPress Theme. A genuine comment was let through as was my reply. All the spam comments had been picked up automatically by Akismet, so they never appeared on the blog. Typically they are illiterate or semi-literate and have little or nothing to do with the blog post in question.

These days, unless I go and look in the spam folder I don’t see many of these “comments”. That’s surely because Akismet learns from the blog owner’s or  administrator’s actions as indicating what he or she regards as spam.

When Akismet is still in the learning phase for your blog, you may see “comments” along the lines of the following examples taken from yesterday’s mini-blitz on the one blog post:

Great post. I used to be checking continuously this blog and I’m impressed! Extremely helpful information specifically the closing section I handle such information much. I was looking for this certain information for a long time. Thanks and best of luck.

Highly interesting post. You consistently publish a absorbing post. Thanks!

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

very cool blog. Plus for the article!

We are a group of volunteers and opening a new scheme in our community. Your web site provided us with valuable information to work on. You’ve done an impressive job and our entire community will likely be grateful to you.

Very interesting topic, regards for putting up.

Really impressed! Everything is very, very clear, open is a description of the problem.It contains the information.I wanted to let you know that I linked to your site with a dofollow links so visitors can come to see your blog.It is all very new to me and this article really opened my eyes,and I guess since I like reading your blog, others will too.You can find the link to your site here:

awesome blog excellent job

It would be funny if it wasn’t such a plague. I see blogs with this sort of comment and wonder if anyone is taking responsibility. It is such a bad look.

As well as having Akismet installed and active, you can moderate the comment stream using the various options provided in your WordPress Dashboard, under Settings -> Discussion.

Do you have any other tips for managing the comment spam issue?

Image credit: Blog with cockroaches photoshopped using the image Cockroach, by masterbutler, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0

But for someone new to this way of building a website or establishing a blog that very abundance of choices can be mind-bogglingly confusing.

So I thought it might be helpful to share briefly some of what I have learnt in years of using various different themes.

By the way, these are just my non-expert opinions (but learned through often frustrating experience). As regular readers will know, I am not a techie. I have taught myself some basics about site coding along the way – mainly HTML, a little about PHP and CSS (but not enough to impress anyone who really knows that stuff).

A little background on WordPress

Because of its origins, WordPress is commonly thought of as a blogging platform, which it is, but it is much more.

WordPress is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) which happens to have evolved from a blogging platform.

An important distinction to make is in terms of site hosting. You can have your site hosted, at no charge, with WordPress.com or you can “self-host” with the same software, from WordPress.org , on your own web server. For most of us, “self-hosted” means we choose and pay for a hosting service, as I do with HostGator.

In a post last year I wrote about why I recommend that businesses choose the self-hosted option from WordPress.org, rather than using a WordPress.com (or Blogger – hosted by Google) site.

To get an overview of some of the possibilities in using WordPress.org, check out the official Showcase.

There are thousands of WordPress themes and plugins available: many themes are free, some are “premium”, with either a one-off payment or requiring an annual subscription. I have used many free themes and eventually realized the truth of the saying about the support you can expect for a free product – “you get what you paid for”. So now I use premium services. But there is something to be said for using some free themes to start off, so that you get an idea of how it all works.

 What I look for in choosing a WordPress theme

The five things I look for are:

• Architectural Design
• Graphic Design
• Usability for a non-technical person
• Support
• Currency

1. Architectural Design

I have learned the hard way that there are many themes that look nice enough but ultimately don’t deliver in business terms because they lack a well-articulated architectural design. There is of course an underlying architecture for the WordPress platform, which is the same for everyone. I’m referring here to the architectural design of the theme itself.

It’s been immensely frustrating to find, on more than one occasion, that a theme which looked like seemed to need a lot more coding and tweaking to be able to serve my purposes. Nowadays I am more interested in finding out, as best I can, how good the theme developers are at coding than how good they are at graphic design.

A claim to incorporate an effective structure for SEO is increasingly, and importantly, a feature offered by theme developers – something to look for (and preferably not just have to take the developers’ word for it but get some third party validation if possible).

I prefer to have excellent architecture and excellent graphic design, but in a pinch I would go for architecture over elegant graphics.

2. Graphic design

The counterpoise to the previous point is that I look for graphic design which will work for my business. I see many WordPress sites that are a riot of color and drama, which is enjoyable enough to look at and may work for the relevant audience but which I see as not working for the audience I want most to attract.

One of the best ways I know to get ideas about what will work for you is to check out the sites of your competitors, especially the ones who seem to be doing well and where the site looks as if it was designed some time no longer than a couple of years ago.

Elements of graphic design I look at particularly are:

• layout
• ease of navigation
• style – I want it to look business-like in a corporate but non-stuffy sense
• typeface – elegant, appropriate to my target audience, and easily readable

3. Usability for non-technical person

This is very important for me. I don’t really enjoy getting under the hood and fiddling with layout, style, fonts and such, but I like to be able to do it when I want to and not find the process too much of an ordeal.

Understandably, you are more likely to find the premium services delivering consistently on this than do the free ones: the financial imperative is wonderfully motivating, although not all WordPress designers are good at explaining how to use their themes.

Some themes require more coding skill than others do if you want to modify them beyond the “don’t have to know code” options provided.

4. Support

As I indicated above, getting good support for free themes is not something you can expect to happen. My experience has been that even with those developers who do endeavour to provide some support for their themes, the support is more likely to be useful to other techies – people who know their PHP and CSS especially – than for the rest of us mere mortals.

And I think some developers get a bit bored with the whole idea of support. They are developers, after all.

In practice, I find that I get better support with premium themes than I have ever had with free ones. Stands to reason, but probably worth stating.

But even with a premium theme, it is not to be assumed that you will get quality support. It’s worth asking around, if you know people who use WordPress themes, about which providers offer and deliver quality support, consistently, over the long haul. And read the providers’ own blogs to get a feel for how well or otherwise they communicate – especially if you want someone technically skilled who can communicate in non-techie language.

The lack of an active support forum is a warning signal.

Another warning signal is that if there seems to be a long-standing but unfulfilled promise for a new release of the theme. That can mean it’s proved too difficult to update the theme, or maybe that the developer is not that interested any more in improving the product.

Instructional videos on site are a good sign of a company committed to support – as long as the videos are up to date: there are few things in this department more frustrating than trying to follow the steps in a video, then discovering it is out of date.

A well-frequented, busy support forum is a good sign that there is real interaction going on between the theme company and its userbase. If members of the forum are voluntarily providing help for one another, that is another good sign. Of course, you may have to become a paid customer before you get access to the forum.

5. Currency

I always want to have a theme which is to a degree timeless in terms of having a practical user interface and up to date in its look and feel.

I want to know that the theme is well supported and I am impressed when it is being used by leaders in the blogging/social media world.

If you have not followed the story of how various themes have come on the market, one way to get a sense of which ones are current and delivering good results is to do some searching for blog posts offering reviews (bearing in mind that some of these “reviews” are fairly uninformative promos for a particular theme for which the blogger is an affiliate). My experience is that blog posts comparing two or three industry-leading themes tend to be more informative than single-theme reviews.

An example of an informative blog post comparing themes is this one which compares Thesis and Genesis and has, at this writing, 160 comments in which you will find some gems of information and insight. Another example of an article which is informative and non-boosterish is this comparison between Genesis and iThemes Builder.

Recommendations?

Everyone has their own needs, skill sets, preferences for how much or how little time they want to spend or not on learning some CSS, or generally on tweaking their site.

That said, there are three main providers which I can confidently say meet the 5 criteria listed above. (These are affiliate links but I am recommending them because I know they work and meet my criteria).

• Thesis from DIY Themes (I have used this on a number of sites)
• Builder from iThemes (the theme currently used on this site)
• Genesis Framework with Enterprise Child Theme (which, after a lot of checking,  I have purchased but not yet installed)

Do you have any other criteria for choosing a WordPress theme/provider?

He always makes good business sense.

He is also very funny.

Just now, I took what I intended to be a quick, preliminary look at a video of a presentation he gave to a real estate conference this year. The presentation was so absorbing (and with no slides!) that I could not stop till the hour-long video was up.

He explains very clearly why now is a terrific time to be in – or getting into – social media for business.

I recommend it.