May 22, 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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Is WordPress The Solution To Your Website Woes?

It is MyFitGeek – Tim Goodwin here. Have you been literally tearing you hair out over your bootcamp or personal training website? If you have seen a picture of me lately you’ll have seen I have none left on my head :o ) squeak!

This morning I was going out of my mind with the 12 days of fitness website, that I am helping Dax Moy with this year…

Something wasn’t right, it displayed fine on FireFox browser but it was all over the place in Internet Explorer…

Anyway, it made think about one of the questions I got last week about WordPress and using it as the basis for a website. I have had in the past wordpress site for an information product I had.

Whilst the site looked good and and maintained a common look throughout, I did get frustrated by the lack of control I had with it. Despite being a geek, I don’t care to understand EVERY coding language out there and PHP (which WordPress is based on) is particularly geekie and ugly.

Anyway, before I get off topic, I believe WordPress to be one of the most accessible ways for fitness professionals to create and maintain control over their sites, although it does have its limitations…

To get it set up you DO need a geek to install and set up a few “plugins” to make it work most effectively for you. For example you’ll need a plugin to improve your control over the Search Engine optimisation stuff I talked about in a previous BLOG post

http://myfitgeek.com/blog/33/are-you-focussing-on-the-wrong-search-terms/

You’ll need to have a theme designed and coded by a competent designer/developer, as the themes you get for nothing are in general quite poor.

Saying all that, once it is set up, editing and adding pages as well as maintaining a BLOG is really very simple. Editing pages is just like using a WYSIWYG editor, and now WordPress can add in things like videos, audio and other media with relative ease.

This BLOG is based on WordPress… and I am in the process of finding the right developer to design and code the full MyFitGeek website based on WordPress, hopefully it will look way cooler than this shabby template.

It is not the ultimate solution, but it may be the right solution if you want more control, without the need to get heavy in to the techie coding stuff. Sounds like the ideal solution for many fitness professionals??

Do you have a WordPress web site now, how do you find using it? Is this something you would like to have for your website solution? Leave me a comment below…

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