February 4, 2012

The Perfect Content Management System

There is certainly a fine balance between good looking, functional and converting fitness websites, as well as the technical stuff in the background to do with search engine optimisation, site management, and ease of use for the non geek!

Would you trust this mans CMS?
Would you trust this mans CMS?

The solutions your “friendly” web developer will suggest will often be their excellent in house content management system (or CMS). Having been exposed to some of these in my time, exactly NONE of them have been particularly useful for all the things suggested in the first paragraph!

If your developer suggests their CMS, politely decline!

The only one I have come across that is any good is WordPress. Having already discussed wordpress in previous posts you’ll get the idea that I do like this software.

I like it a lot!

Not only do we get some cool wordpress themes, some top class wordpress plugins, but also the best CMS you’ll ever find.

The wordpress CMS has gone through many iterations and is now considered a “mature” software, meaning it is relatively bug free, extremely user friendly and has a really easy learning curve.

The fact that there are literally thousands of add ons and themes for this software tells you it is really well liked by the “geeks” of the world too and is certainly here to stay for at least the next few years, which is more than you can say for the CMS from your developer!

I’ve set up quite a few BLOGs now for my own business and other peoples businesses, and the CMS back end is easily adopted by my clients, which makes my life really simple too!

Fitness Professional Managing her Website
Fitness Professional Managing her Website

One other thing with WordPress, it is not restricted to just BLOGs, you can set up actual websites with it too! Whilst a little cumbersome for a simple website, more complex sites can happily thrive on a WordPress back end, making updating and managing you web site an absolute doddle!

So the next time you are wanting to get a BLOG or a website built, consider using WordPress, or asking your developer to build it using wordpress, so that you have much more control over the management of the site.

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Blogging Hell Part 2: WordPress is Powerful If You Use It Like This…

The other day I posted about creating separate BLOGs for each aspect of your business.

Now before you go crazy and start creating dozens of little BLOGs for each part of your personal training business, using WordPress or Blogger’s free tool there are a few things you should consider.

Whilst the “free” tool on wordpress.com and blogger.com is excellent there are some limitations with it.

  1. You have a limitation with the themes you can use, most of the standard wordpress ones look awful.
  2. On a standard wordpress BLOG I am yet to find a way of inserting the code required to put an opt-in form, to allow you to collect names and email addresses.
  3. There are a number of really important “plugins” (clever add-ons for WordPress) that cannot be used on the “free” site. The plugins I am talking about are ones that will accelerate your search engine rankings and optimise your site better.
  4. The standard domain name you use with the free site is not very pretty or easy to remember. For example TimIsAFatLossGod.wordpress.com compared to TimIsAFatLossGod.com (although it is possible to set up with a redirect it is not particularly search engine friendly.)

These issues may not seem like a long list of problems BUT they are significant enough if you want massive success with your BLOG.

The solution is relatively simply, but as always not necessarily easy if you are a bit wary of the tech stuff. It is likely you will need a geek to help you out on this, but it is possible to do yourself. You’ll need the following…

  • A domain name, buy it from GoDaddy.com
  • A web site host with the ability to install wordpress on it. HostGator does have this, as do I on my own server.
  • … erm that’s it! For the moment.

You may want to find a theme to use on the site as well, there are plenty of free themes out there as well as ones you can purchase. I can recommend TemplateMonster.com for some fantastic paid for themes…

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How To Beat A Geek Fitness Professional

With a bloody great stick is probably your best starting point… :o )

As it happens, you have a lot going for you if you want to compete with a geek fitness professional. All this HTML, FTP, JS voodoo that geeks band about to confuse non-geeks is simply a cover for our own inadequacies!

So what follows is the five steps to successfully getting one up on a geek fitness professsional.

Step 1. Know what you want in a website and stick to your guns. Geeks get too easily distracted by the latest widget, gadget and cool technology. We are pulled off track from what we really wanted our site to do in the first place.

Step 2. Once you get your website built, be happy with the being ignorant to how it works and how to change stuff. Geeks want to fiddle with bits of code to make them “better”. We are too fussy and forget to actually USE the site for its main purpose of marketing and attracting new clients.

Step 3. Have an eye for design. I have the artistic talent of an one eyed wombat, trapped in a paper bag! Techically, geeks are stunning, graphically we suck!

Step 4. Concentrate on providing high quality content that your web site visitors will love you for. Geeks have ZERO attention span (that’s why it took your web-guy months to make that really simple change!). We hate to actually sit and write anything intelligent, witty or vaguely entertaining.

Step 5. Communicate with real people in the real world. Geeks are generally social failures and cannot relate to ordinary non-geeks. You biggest advantage is your charisma and ability to be a real human being on the other side of the internet. Pick up the phone talk and meet your clients in the real world.

I both hate and love the label of being a “geek”.

I am a geek trying to beat off the stigma and personal traits that make it difficult to compete with you!

Rather than let technology and geeks beat you, embrace the technology and use your advantages to beat us.

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Group Training Success System Sneak Peek

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Should Your Website Cost You This Much?

It is MyFitGeek, Tim Goodwin here again. I was shocked when my friend Paul told me how much he paid for his website to be built.

When I saw his site I felt really sorry for the guy, it was really not very good, and to make matters worse he had no ability to change it!

He was stuck with it!

1500 British Pounds, which at the time, was about 3000 US dollars for a 7 page website that looked C**P and couldn’t be found on by the search engines.

I understand why Paul had gone down this route to get his site built.

FEAR.

How Not To Get Screwed By A Web Developer

Fear of the unknown, fear of not having control, fear of being screwed, fear of ending up with a bad site. The route he took, he thought, was the ‘safe’ option.

It was a local business with an impressive portfolio with some big name businesses on their books, it was the ‘safe’ option in Paul’s eyes, but it turned out to be not a great choice.

Today, I had an email from a personal trainer wanting my opinion on the quote he had got for his new website… without going in to the details the quote was in the same ballpark as Paul’s site. My advise was simple, say thanks but no thanks, then walk away.

To give you an idea of what sites SHOULD cost, I am currently managing a project for a new website, it is highly complex with many different aspects. Getting a quote for this site in the developed world would stretch in to 5,000 dollars and more!

I am getting the site done for just 1000 dollars.

One of the fears is dealing with developers or businesses that are not within our locality. What we think are large projects are not to expert teams of developers in India, Pakistan or Eastern European countries. They are simply bread and butter projects to these guys.

As Fitness Professionals we should be taking advantage of the best developers in the world at a price that is much more realistic to our budgets…

It is my opinion you are more likely to be screwed by the guy in your high street, rather the Indian developer trying to make a better living for himself and his family.

Outsource, outsource, outsource.

What is your biggest fear with hiring a developer who is not in the same country, or even the same continent as you? Tell me drop me a comment on this BLOG.

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