Must Design

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Web Designers Beware
If you can make Wordpress sing like a fine violin we applaud you. We're leaving Wordpress because it's promise of publishing well-designed content to the web feels false, spoiled and crushed. 

Crushed under the weight of battling plugins, poorly supported themes and the false belief that beautiful design beats SEO basics (like not putting a rat;s nest of code into your HEAD). Ugly and Google friendly gets more traffic than beautiful and Google nasty. 

We've proven the point. Our ugly Blogger site (Scenttrail Marketing started in 2008) had 100,000 visitors. Curagmai.com looks great, but Wordpress is crushing us for 5 reasons:

* Spam, Attacks and Potential for HARM

* Unrealized Promise
* Crap Overload

* BAD SEO and poor site performance (load times)
* No Easy Multi-Platform Content Curation

Let's Compare to @Scoop.it where we've spent LESS TIME to get more results including:

45,000+ followers
276,000 Views
204,000 visitors 
95,000 reactions 

WINNER = Scoop.it (as you can read on our Curagmai post). And the horse race isn't even CLOSE!!!

When we started using WP six years ago the platform was full of promise. But there is a problem. Ugly and Google friendly gets more traffic than beautiful and Google nasty. That sentence is worth repeating. If you are a designer who can make WP sing don't forget the ultimate goal - creation of RETURN for your customers. 

Beauty and great design is ONE ASPECT of creating online ROI. Make sure your WP designs overcome the 5 reasons we are leaving, out, history, see ya :). Marty 
 

Ugly and Google friendly gets more traffic than beautiful and Google nasty. 

Had fun creating CureCancerStore.org with my friends Eric and Cynthia Garrison's Agile7 template. As I worked I was reminded of a few tips that may help any web designer, and aren't we all web designers now, work with templates including:

* SEO Don't Forget it.
* Adjust YOUR Perspective Not Other Way Around.

* Get Creative and Modify What is THERE.

* Improve Shopping Cart LATER.

* Tables and old HTML are TOUGH.

This last bullet is important. The world is HTML5 and CSS3 and if you don't have CSS skills templates are both a Gift from God and a Curse from the Devil. If, like me, you still can write <tables> don't expect them to look like what you expect because their display is controlled by CSS (style sheets).

I tend to bull forward and do the best I can until a firm understanding of where and how we are making money. Once I understand how the site makes money I can invest intelligently in designers with more talent than me (not hard to find those btw lol).

This post should help anyone know how to work with templates better to design a website or blog and templates are in all of our futures because they are great, getting better and cheap.

Adding Haiku Decks To WordPress

I love  Haiku Deck tool and figured out a way to add our decks to our blog:

http://www.curagami.com/marketing-haiku-decks/

I've been prodding  Adam Traitt, one of Haiku's founders, for a user profile (done) and more control over display (Haiku Deck team is working on it). In the mean time I decided to add my decks to Curagmai's  blog. Here's how we did it. 

*How To Add Haiku Deck To Your WP Blog*

1. Create a new Haiku Deck category on your blog. 

2. Create posts for every Haiku Deck to be added. You may want to use a date from last year or the year before to fool WordPress into moving your new Haiku Deck posts to the back of your stack. 

3.Create a grid we used WP Ultimate Post Grid and we upgraded to premium for the ability to filter by category. 

4. Redirect your WP posts to your Haiku Deck (we cheated and used the Twitter links, better to grab the nasty URL you can find in the embed area since we will drive up our Twitter share numbers artificially) we used Redirection plugin by John Godley. 

We wrote copy into this page mostly for   reasons. You can see a grid without copy here; http://www.curagami.com/magazines-2/ ;

We also use embedded  feeds behind the "Magazines" link. Each "Magazine" is firing from our Scoop.it feeds. This is how we see "websites" changing. Instead of a place where you creating everything tomorrow's sites will share your creations from all over and encourage visitors to collaborate and share too. If that sounds like we suggest you create online community you win a cookie (and I'm writing this from  so just tell me what kind you want :). Marty 

WordPress themes are very popular. While minimalist & clean themes are high in demand, there are also other types of themes which are less popular but still beautiful, creative and original. Here