Like many people, I do not speak tech. Conversations with web developers can feel like trying to understand someone in a game of charades. It takes focus, time, and energy. It is ironic that as the world becomes more reliant on the Internet to conduct business, so few people can speak both tech and plain English. Janine Warner, one of those rare bilingual individuals affectionately dubbed the "Techy Translator," has helped thousands of businesses create successful websites and blogs. From large companies to small startups, Janine knows how to help a company thrive online. In preparation for her course, I had the opportunity to ask Janine a few questions.
Q: You have given some powerful speeches in the past about selling yourself and your services online. For creatives, what are some general reasons why establishing an online presence is vital to success?
Today, before someone hires you as a photographer, designer, consultant, or just about anything else, they are almost certainly going to Google you. If someone searches for you online, you want to make sure they see examples of your work in the best light. If you are a fashion photographer, but the only images you have online are old landscapes on a poorly designed website, you are almost certainly losing business.
You want to make sure that your website reflects the quality and integrity of your work. You want to make sure your website tells your story and reinforces the way you present yourself in person. If you do it well, you may not even have to sell yourself. Your site will bring in customers for you.
As we wrap up my CreativeLive course on the second day, I will help you with some search engine optimization tips and show you my favorite plugin for social media icons and sharing. It is fantastic how plugins make these important additions to a website so easy today. It is also impressive how well some photographers, artists, and others have done by combining a well-designed website with social media.
Q: Why do you use WordPress, and what makes it the best or easiest platform to use?
WordPress started out as a simple blogging tool and has grown increasingly sophisticated and powerful over the years. Today, WordPress is a full-fledged content management system capable of creating complex websites, highly efficient blogs, or both.
WordPress is an open-source program, which means it is not owned by any one company. Instead, it is the product of many different developers working together over many years, along with countless people testing and using WordPress to build sites. As a result, there is a vibrant and diverse community of designers and developers who create themes, plugins, and other tools you can use to customize and enhance websites built with WordPress. There are also many developers and web designers who customize WordPress sites for clients, so if you ever need extra help, it is usually not that hard to find.
WordPress itself is free, which is part of the advantage of an open-source program, but many of the best plugins and themes cost money because that is how many of the most talented members of the WordPress community support themselves.
During my CreativeLive course, I will show you some free themes and plugins that anyone can use. I will also point out some of the best premium tools and help you determine when it is worth paying for a theme or plugin and when it is a rip-off.
Q: WordPress has lots of add-ons and plugins. Are there any new ones in 2013 that you find interesting, helpful, and game changing?
The most important lesson to learn is that plugins and themes can be made by anyone and, like anything else, there are good and bad options out there. My goal while on CreativeLive is to help you identify the great ones and avoid the ones that can cause problems.
As far as the latest options, the big change is the move to responsive design, using themes that change their layout to best fit different screen sizes. Most themes are not responsive, but there are a growing number of great ones out there, and you definitely want a responsive theme to future-proof your site.
In my CreativeLive course, I will show you how to quickly tell whether a theme is responsive and why that is so important.
I will also show you how plugins can help. For example, the Advanced Responsive Video Embedder plugin makes it easy to insert videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and many other video hosting sites in a way that is responsive, so your videos also change size based on the screen size of the user visiting your site. That means the video will automatically display smaller on a smartphone than on a large computer monitor.
For more information about Janine's CreativeLive course, visit her course page.