What are the main advantages WordPress offers in terms of improving information architecture?

Anca explains that before using WordPress, the intranet was a laundry list of largely static links. Updates to the homepage were handled by the webmaster. Deeper content was tied up in a wiki – content that had grown organically over time with very little structure and in some instances out of date.

WordPress helped impose an overarching organizational structure, removing much of the extraneous/duplicate content – at least from the homepage. It also allowed for the display of dynamic content by pulling out the latest content for different sections:

Underlying this framework is Wordpress MU (multi-user) with a network of sites powering the different sections. MU by itself does not support a hierarchy: this was developed by Anca to permit the hierarchical organization of the sites, which is great for organizing deeper content, such as the different components of the HR department.

WordPress also relies heavily on Categories and Tags (and more recently custom taxonomies) for organizing its content – something Anca utilized to great effect with the display of announcements from across the different sites in the network.

One area that required custom development was the common network navigation (the top menu) shared by all sites in the network. The top menu was built to give people the sense of a site hierarchy. By applying the same theme to all of the sites in the network, visitors get the feeling they are always within the same website.

What are some useful customizations/plugins to consider for a Wordpress intranet CMS?

A selection of the plugins Anca recommends:

TinyMCE Advanced
Tables are not easy to achieve in Wordpress unless you have a good understanding of HTML. However tables are a common form of content organization in an Intranet, and this plugin does a great job of bridging the gap. In addition to tables, the plugin gives you much more choice over formatting choices.

WordPress MU LDAP plugin
Useful for connecting Wordpress up to a database of users (using the popular Microsoft LDAP interface). For instance, it allows company employees to post comments on the site, and update relevant content, using the same password they use for other applications such as email .

WordPress MU Sitewide tags
This plugin, used for some time on the Wordpress.com homepage, aggregates tags across all the sites into a common network cloud. As tag clouds are a great way of displaying large bodies of content in a meaningful way, this is a considerable navigational aid.

Customized link widget
Link lists are used in various places on the homepage to display important links. This widget developed by Anca’s team, allows you to set up custom classes for different link lists so you can alter the appearance of each list. It also allows you more control over the ordering of the links in the list.

What role does the intranet manager play?
The role should be more communications-based and less about the technnology. You ideally want someone who can help motivate the workforce into constantly generating relevant content. In addition, they should be able to help coach content providers and help fix minor issues that come up (such as post formatting). The individual should be able to form strong links with employees across the organization to make the intranet a lively, collaborative space.

Do you track how successful the implementation is? Eg. page views, frequency of posting
Tracking and analytics were set up as part of the site architecture from the beginning. The site has been only been up for a little over a month, currently having four users signed up to provide content. At the point of launch, new posts were being made at the rate of about one per day.

What are the key differences between designing an implementation for an Intranet vs. external consumption?
Anca points out that with an Intranet site, there are different priorities and constraints. One thing that can generally be guaranteed is the browser that will be used to view the site – there’s no need to cover every case, since everyone is standardized on Firefox. Contact information, personal names and email addresses can be published on the site without privacy concerns. There are less worries about security, because the site is behind a corporate firewall. This can also be a drawback, in that it provides disincentives to upgrade.

The site itself can be much more specific, since there are a fixed number of actual constituents and stakeholders. However, since there are these specific constituents, a fair amount of effort was expended getting everyone’s buy-in.

How long did it take to setup this implementation for the JGI Intranet?
All in all, the project lasted about 6 months. About 3 of those were focused largely on development, while the rest was focused on gathering support for the new site, inventorying content that would need to be added, and creating a design that would meet the needs of most of the organization.

Anca’s presentation on this project:

Anca Mosoiu is a partner in Tech Liminal, a web design/development agency and all-round tech-house based in central Oakland. They host regular Meetups to support East Bay bloggers (which I can testify has helped me breathe new life into Caged Ether).

If you must, check out this brazen masterpiece for yourself.

It could be I inadvertently clicked on some banner ad, or maybe in a semi-conscious flurry of activity, serendipitous surfing delivered me here, but for the sake of posterity, I’d like to blame my wife.

I actually had no idea who Khloe Kardashian was (honestly) and still only vaguely know: I understand she’s married to a renowned baller and comes with a pedigree only achievable from having a glamour model sister. The fact that she has a million and a half followers on Twitter makes me believe I live in a media-starved pit and need to get out more.

But that’s not why I’m writing. What caught my attention is how she deals with her fawning Twitterati. The esteemed Global Grind online gossip-mart hold her up as a paragon of tweeting. And this is where I realize I need to get off my lofty (read snobby) high horse and pay this article some attention. The report is crude and to the point, but I believe their analysis is fundamentally sound and bears some relation to the not-so-steamy world of big B2B business.

Let’s run through their criteria point-by-point, and draw comparisons with the B2B world:

Khloe responds to her fans. Do we, as B2B marketers monitor our Twitter @profiles and associated #hashtags for relevant queries and mentions with the same veracity? Or are we just seeing Twitter as another marketing broadcast channel?

Khloe sends pictures. Twitter is much more than a 140-character medium thanks to the humble ‘link’ which can grace any Tweet: a Twitter account is a showcase for your noteworthy content,  whether it be articles, audio, video or pictures (you may want to favor descriptive product screenshots over floss-bikini pool scenes).

Khloe chats with her family. Do you have an open conversation with your ecosystem, eg. suppliers, or even better, business partners? Show some of this intimacy on Twitter. You’ll display a strength that goes beyond your company walls, and also build the reputation of those nearest to you.

Khloe allows the world into her amazing life. This is pretty wide generalization, but there are a couple of takeaways here. Look over your Twitter channel and see if it gives a good representation of your brand: your personality, thoughts, aspirations and beliefs. Does the rich fabric of the life of your firm come across? Or do you appear as little more than a stream of press releases and marketing brochures?

Now I bring this up in light of a recent report by Wildfire, a UK PR agency, claiming that many companies are not as clued up as Khloe when it comes to Twitter:

“… only 3% of the tweets in the study were retweets and just 12% were replies. Shockingly, 43% of brands with a Twitter account had never replied to a tweet.”

The study they are referring to, believe it or not, consists of a sample of the fastest growing UK tech companies.

It looks like we as marketers have some way to go to really understand the rules of engagement on these emerging channels. The most clued-up celebs have realized that they need to break down the walls of PR agents and marketing hype and talk directly to their followers. How long will it take for us in the B2B tech industry to follow suit?

I noticed that they have recently added a social chat feature:

I found this intriguing, although not necessarily life-changing.

Advantages:

• I can engage directly with readers and converse/share in a much more intimate form than the standard blog publishing/commenting system generally allows
• Visitors can choose whatever network they prefer to login (currently the usual suspects  of Facebook/Twitter + a few others) yet regardless of network they can converse across the chat window
• Chats can be public or private depending on the topic

Disadvantages:

• You should be present to monitor the conversations – a potential time drag esp, exacerbated if you happen to be on a different time zone
• Dealing with trolls and other undersirables who wonder into the chat room could be tricky if you can’t always man the chat room
• Will anyone really want to stick around and chat, rather than just graze on your content and run?
• It’s unclear whether the chats can be saved for perusal/analysis at a later time

This makes me think it’s too early to run out and proclaim this a killer app that will transform the world of online publishing. I can see where there could be real applications of this. Large news  sites could use this kind of service to interact more directly with their readership and could take opinions as quotes or at least as a measure of public sentiment). If you are running a big event with an active blog, this could serve as a community around which discussions can congeal.

Therein perhaps lies one of the problems with the Wibiya service. This toolbar tends to be used by smaller blogs (like this one) who may not have the manpower or application for such a service. But maybe Wibiya now has its sights targeted elsewhere.

Any thoughts? I’m afraid you’ll have to comment below: I’m not quite ready to pounce in with the Social Chat feature quite yet

This recently brought me onto an argument on what is the most effective way of displaying posts. Here I’m not talking about the intricacies of laying out the front page of your blog like a magazine or a photo gallery. Rather just talking the basics: what options do you have with the straight forward roller approach that originally was one of the key defining features of a blog and arguably still remains the most common blog format. It commonly looks something like this:

This opens up a big question: how much of each post do you show on the homepage?

Most blogging platforms, including Wordpress, Blogger and the Lotus Connections platform we use here at IBM show the entire post on the homepage. However, you’ll also see many popular blogs abbreviating posts on the homepage with just an excerpt and a link to the individual post in its entirety, eg. Altimeter, Read Write Web and TechCrunch.

Which approach is better?

Here I my thoughts on the blog excerpting question:

Advantages of excerpting posts

• Easy to scan many posts
• Easy to track interest/engagement at the post level
• Added Flexibility: decide on length of excerpt, inclusion of images
• Works well for group blogs: you have a greater chance of seeing the multiplicity of views from different authors upfront

Advantages of listing full post on homepage

• Remove an extra click between viewer and full blog post
• Good for display of short posts (‘Read More…’ could link to only one more sentence)
• Attracts more comments (visitors can often comment directly from the homepage)

As you can see, there is no clear-cut solution, but I favor the approach of displaying excerpts on the homepage with links to the full articles. Why? To appease the scanners. A homepage listing multiple excerpted posts makes it easy to move quickly through the content and see if you find something relevant. The caveat being if you are a blogger that tends to write short, pithy posts.

Am I over-fixating on a minor detail? Probably. As Mark Murnahan points out, content generally trumps structure. A well written, relevant piece will do well, whether or not it’s excerpted on the homepage. However, I would still contend that if you run a network of blogs and have to and have key objectives and targets to achieve (for instance average page views per article, number of comments per article) playing around with the homepage structure can have a dramatic effect.

How to excerpt with Wordpress

If you are blogging using a standalone version of Wordpress you can simply excerpt your homepage posts using the the_excerpt function within your homepage template. This will display the first 55 words and will strip out all images and HTML. If you want more control, you can use the Advanced Excerpt plugin which gives a lot more flexibility. I see the main advantages being the option to select which HTML tags to include and options over how much of the post to excerpt.

Somewhere in my distant past I was a sub-editor on a monthly print publication and this took me back to something I’d learnt then: the grid used heavily in the newspaper industry to construct those front page formats we’re all so familiar with.

For instance, here’s an example of a 5-column grid used by the UK’s Guardian:

Some elements such as the headline and the main image cross multiple columns, but overall they are still bounded by the lines of the grid.

Then along came the web and rather than designing for broadsheet or tabloid format, we have a screen to fill. Still, the grid format translates over into this world. However, rather than a 5-column layout, many news publications and blogs rely on different column formats, as illustrated here by Mark Porter:

In this instance, Mark points out just how similar the 12-grid layout is between between the online version of the UK’s Guardian and Telegraph.

In terms of blog templates relying on the grid system, take a look at the beautifully functional Neutica Wordpress template:

and the highly flexible Basic Maths theme:

So where did the grid system come from?

Graphic designer, lecturer and author Josef Müller-Brockmann is credited with being one of the strongest evangelists of the grid system back in the early 70’s. Interestingly, he is also the creator of the Akzidenz-Grotesk font: a precursor to what we now know as Helvetica. I say ‘interestingly’ because many of the grid system designs rely heavily on this efficient sans-serif block font: Helvetica is a great compliment to a tightly-defined grid.

For more information on designing using this system, check out The Grid System website: an excellent resource pulling together snippets from across the web. And yes, the site is a testament to the visual order and composure a grid system brings.

If you have any experiences of designing with a grid, please share them in the Comments section!

What was striking were the reasons for failure the piece lists:

1. lack of understanding what BPM really is
2. fear of failure
3. fear of criticism/losing face
4. unwillingness to change
5. fear of success
6. fear of reality
7. belief that expensive tools are necessary to get started

It struck me that these apply to the implementation of many technologies, including setting up a corporate blog. For instance, the idea that no one will read your content (fear of failure) is a roadblock to many a blog being setup.

The fear of success really bemused me at first, until I dug further. Jealousy is a very human trait. In the workplace we can express this around projects which we didn’t kick-start ourselves. If a corporate blog solution is initiated by marketing, when you turn to the sales team for help on an in-depth post explaining customer pain points, you may meet a wall of resistance.

As a successful blog often involves the participation of many constituents across the organization, when setting up the blog it can be prudent to let all parties think they come up with the idea. For instance, don’t show up with a fully realized idea with all details filled in. Leave some room for other teams to offer their feedback, so the blog you come up with is as much theirs as it is yours.

The final point on this list is also pertinent: the belief that expensive tools are necessary to start blogging. It is true that to get to get a blog fully integrated into your core website can involve hosting, programming, design and possibly software expense (although open source solutions like Wordpress suffice in most situations), you can just as easily forgo all of these and setup a pilot blog on Blogger, Wordpress, Posterous or any of the other online blogging services available. These are perfect if you just want to dip your toe in and see if you have what it takes to maintain a blog long-term. If the pilot works, most platforms have tools that will allow you to pull the content onto your own site or at least link across to the new location.

So if any of these points resonate with you, go back to the BPM Institute and you may well find some guidance from an unlikely source.

OK, now we’ve got that out of the way, for those of you left, let’s try and decipher where the real value lies in theme frameworks. Help comes in the shape of a Wordpress Meetup earlier this week in San Francisco. We had the chance to hear a number of case studies from internet marketers, developers and blog owners – each with a different perspective on the utility of theme frameworks.

Alejo Grigera is a product expert at Google but also runs Mr Bluesummers: a blog covering 3D modeling. He talks us through Arjuna, which he terms a ‘robust theme’. What does he mean by that? Let’s step back and look at what a standard theme is.

Standard themes

The basics of Wordpress themes means you can take the default Wordpress blog theme that comes out of the box:

and turn it into something like this:

Themes give you the power to enforce your own look and feel around your sweet musings.

Robust themes

But what if you want to take this a step further if you have different types of posts (eg. video vs. articles) or different sidebar elements? Well, certain themes out there have a number of options allowing you tweak certain elements. Arjuna is one of these. It allowed Alejo to turn the standard Arjuna theme:

into this:

Notice the changed header (including translation flags) and different elements running down the right hand side. All possible due to options within Arjuna. He also has the flexibility to change the layout based on the type of post (eg. 2 column versus 3 column) – all from within the Wordpress admin console.

Theme Frameworks

If you’re still following, let’s start delving into theme frameworks proper. Jeremy Reither from R3R consulting showed us what he has achieved with Thematic on his side project My Family Law. Here customization goes a step further with different sections of the sites having completely different layouts.

Such as the library page:

And the article view:

Again, there’s a way you can code this with PHP but theme frameworks make this level of personalization possible from within the admin console. This is important for My Family Law as there are multiple authors – more skilled in the ways of law rather than development. Each author can have their own blog and some flexibility over how their posts appear, yet still adhere to the overarching ‘framework’.

Thematic also supports a number of widgets from Google Ads to Twitter, and by combining with a plugin like Widget Logic, you can fine tune which sidebar elements you want to display on which pages. Powerful stuff.

Child Themes

A big advantage of theme frameworks prior to Wordpress 3.0 was the ability to add child themes: that is related themes that share common elements but can be substantially different. Since Wordpress 3.0 came out, this functionality is included in the core, however depending on your implementation, you might still want to use the frameworks to handle children.

What exactly is a child theme? Chancey Mathews from GigaOm summed this up perfectly (he uses the Carrington theme framework). Look at these sites…

GigaOm:

The Apple Blog:

Earth2Tech:

All have the same structure and share common elements (including that signature thick black underline), but there are obvious differences. However they all share the same core display code. This makes it easier to maintain and easier to control updates across all the sites. I can say this from experience having spent hours adding extra navigation to a series of five blogs which were essentially identical save for minimal elements like headers and sidebar links. A framework could have saved me hours.

Anatomy of a framework

Jeremy Reither showed this image explaining where the framework code sits in the Wordpress template.

(click on the image for more detail)

The framework effectively wraps its code around the existing Wordpress code, extending the functionality. The architecture of each framework does differ so it is worth investigating which one makes sense for you.

I’ve just started work on a redesign of this site using the Thematic framework and so far have been surprised with the ease with which you can built out a fully-functioning site. One word of caution: most frameworks rely heavily on the power and flexibility of CSS (especially in terms of child theme implementation) so brush up on your CSS skills if you are looking to modify an existing theme.

More information on theme frameworks

Theme frameworks covered in this article:

• Thematic
• Carrington
• Arjuna

Other popular frameworks:

• Thesis
• Hybrid
• Sandbox

Further reading:

• Wordpress codex
• Lorelle on Wordpress

Conclusion

So if you are looking to create a stylized blog/CMS with Wordpress, look further into the world of frameworks. If you have have experiences to share around theme framework implementation, please comment!

As Karen points out, blogs allow you to reach customers, those who know nothing about you, critics and the press all through a single post. In some ways blogs can be thought of as surrogates for newsletters, where you don’t have to wait to collect 16 articles before publishing. She also points out that posts serve well as your statement on an issue that can exist for years. She draws on the Googlebomb example, where the original post served them well years later when the issue arose again. There is a downside to this approach: especially if you are in an industry/organization where the viewpoint can shift over time. A blog post has a serious shelf life so be prepared to stand by what you say for months, if not years.

Blogs also allow you to put out information that you wouldn’t consider for a press release. Think about the back story into how a product came to life. You can also go further and integrate customer stories, video footage and geeky stuff about what’s going on under the hood. There can be an audience for all of this, but the traditional press release really doesn’t offer the breadth.

As an aside, I’m you’re probably aware that Google owns the Blogger platform so it makes sense for them to adopt this tool for company communications.

Just how many official blogs does Google have?

Karen mentions that currently Google has more than 150 product-related blogs (with over 10 million unique visitors a month). supplement that with around 80 Twitter accounts reaching 2.3 million followers and you get some idea for the scope of this effort and the payback in terms of visibility. There are Facebook pages for the consumer products, however these are a newer addition.

What should you consider when starting a blog?

I think Karen gives as good a criteria checklist as I’ve seen:

• Do you have a lot of regular announcements?
• Are you in a busy area with a lot of activity?
• Do you have a lot of customers (eg. Gmail)?
• Do you have a strong community of developers (maybe around an API)?

Karen also points out the notable exceptions where blogs can make sense. If you have an area where less frequent detailed stories may exist, this can still make sense for a blog. For instance a research department, or security team. In this case the content does not appear very often, but when it does, it tends to be deep. An external example of this is Clay Shirky. His posts are infrequent, but read like book chapters.

What are key parts of the content strategy?

While Karen points out her team tends to take a light touch approach and isn’t in the business of editing posts, she does give some content pointers that are used in training:

• A good title is very important: especially as more people consume information on mobile devices and through channels other than directly visiting your web site
• Use a consistent style (eg. around capitalization)
• A post should have one designated author, even if it has been worked on by a team
• If the message is global, think about translating the content
• For product announcements, specify the availability
• Offer the most useful links
• Clearly mark any updates you make and don’t alter either the title or the timestamp

Closely related is the voice with which you write. Google relies on an informal tone (one person talking to another, rather than a company broadcast). The language should be clear and direct, peppered with examples and understandable real-world examples. If humor is used, make sure it is appropriate.

When should a blog be terminated?

Occasionally, it may not make sense to continue with a blog. It could be that the blog is not being updated, there is a new related blog that is more relevant, visitors have stopped coming or a project has been terminated. In these cases the blog should be shut down: a final post should be written as explanation, the blog removed from the public directory, but importantly, the blog should not be deleted. The posts should still be available on the web.

Do Google have official bloggers?

Whilst there are some in the organization who blog frequently (such as Matt Cutts), Google does not have official bloggers. Blogging is a part of the job description of some employees and others may be asked to create a blog post (a product engineer that comes up with a new gadget). Google prefers to go to the source of the story and have that person tell it, rather than have official blogger/journalist types.

Karen provided a great insight into how one of the world’s most successful companies makes blogging a cornerstone to its communications strategy.

More on this topic:

• An example of Google using blogging for announcements
• Creating a ’social’ online newsroom