So, what do you think?

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Back in “the day”, a website was little more than a flyer or brochure that was available on the internet, rather than mailed out.  It might have had as few as one page and as many as five or six pages.  There usually wasn’t a search capability built in, and it was only updated infrequently… if at all.

Today’s websites have all sorts of cool things to draw the consumer’s attention, and to hold it.  Search is a BIG part of that.  Blogs, updated weekly, daily or even more, are another part.  Twitter feeds for breaking news can be included, as can Flickr feeds for new pictures and YouTube feeds for videos.  There might even be links or widgets displaying other blogs or sites…  The possibilities are almost endless.

In short, they provide a new experience each time a consumer visits. Why go back to the website if it is only displaying something that you’ve previously seen or read?

Which leads us to some options…

Active Rain

This is Active Rain. And so it THIS.  Obviously the blog you are looking at is part of Active Rain.  It says so right at the top of the page.  But the link to GwinnettGarageGuy.com is also linking to an Active Rain blog.  It is referred to as an “Outside Blog” or RainMaker Blog.  It has a custom URL and only a very discreet logo in the upper left corner.

There are some tremendous advantages to Active Rain RainMaker Blogs.  To begin with, they offer built in traffic and “Google Juice” (search engine strength).  The traffic comes from the 170,000 members here in the Rain.  They provide a sense of community, as well as feedback and support.  In short, there is a LOT to learn at Active Rain, and being part of the community enriches the experience.

Another great advantage of Active Rain’s RainMaker blogs is ease…  It is SO easy to get rolling. Build a profile, type up a post and publish… you are GOING.  Of course there are plenty of things to learn after that to tweak the performance of your marketing, but you can learn that here in the Rain as well… and a lot of it is free… and of course there are RainCamps to take it to another level.

The drawbacks of the RainMaker Blogs are few…  It costs $29/month. They aren’t as customizable as the other platforms.

In the world of the web, $29 isn’t that much.  There are a lot of agents paying WAY more money for platforms that don’t deliver these results…  But, $29 is $29.

WordPress

Almost everyone has heard of WordPress. Here is a WordPress site… and another one.  Notice that they look NOTHING alike?  That is part of the beauty of WordPress.  Sites can be themed VERY differently and not look at all like “the next site”… or the agent up the street.  Full-on branding.  Every part of the site is customizable and extensible.  There are thousands of widgets and plug-ins to alter the site experience.  Almost anything you can imagine can be accomplished in WordPress.

However, while the platform is free, hosting it isn’t (expect to spend about $100/year).  Also, there are many free themes, but the best ones cost a little money (expect to spend between $30 and $100).  Just a note, don’t bother with WordPress.org… you’ll spend at least as much to get it up to speed as you would with Active Rain, and not have the flexibility of a self-hosted WordPress blog (sometimes called WordPress.org).

Another drawback of WordPress is all of the flexibility… there are too many choices for some people. There are thousands of themes and thousands of plug-ins and you can do almost anything with it…

Joomla

And then there is Joomla.  Only the fairly hardcore know about Joomla!. Here is a Joomla site… and another one.  There are competitors, like Drupal… but Joomla! is the one with the most support.  And much of what I just said about WordPress applies to Joomla.  It is free, but hosting isn’t.  there are free themes, but the cool ones cost money.  There are loads of extensions… and some of them cost a little bit.

But Joomla is WAY more involved and WAY WAY more powerful that WordPress. Using most good hosts, setting up either is easy.  One click in Simple Scripts and the site is live… but after theming and content creation, Joomla requires a structure be thought out in the way content is arranged.  WordPress organizes content more “on the fly”.  Joomla takes a little time to set up BEFORE content starts to flow… it can be done later, but it is much easier to start out with the structure.

Since Joomla was designed as a Content Management System, that is what it does best.  It can be a news magazine.  It can be a search portal.  It can be a blog. Honestly, being a blog for Joomla is like driving a Corvette ZR1 as a golf cart… you can do it, but that isn’t really using the power.  But incorporating a blog into Joomla is pretty easy…

In fact, using my theme provider, theming a WordPress blog and a Joomla site to look like family is pretty easy.  So, for the consumer, the experience of moving back and forth between the joomla CMS and the WordPress blog is almost seamless… even if they have different domians.  LaneBailey.com and GarageHomesUSA.com are completely different sites and different platforms.  They could even be with different hosts…

FaceBook and Posterous

There are other options as well, and the leader among those are FaceBook Fan Pages and Posterous.  Both are free options and I thik they have a place in a comprehensive web strategy.

FaceBook is becoming THE destination for millions of web surfers.  Maintaining a storefront there will become as necessary as having a website.  Your personal profile isn’t the place to do business… get a Fan Page, they are free and you can even get a vanity URL.  Mike Mueller on Active Rain is “THE Dude” when it comes to FB Fan Pages.

Posterous is a different kind of beast.  I have written about it a few times, and it is certainly worth investigating.  There are more ways to leverage Posterous than anyone could possibly imagine on thier own.  Brad and Bobby Carroll (Dakno) are “THE Dudes” when it comes to tweaking out Posterous pages.

from Lane’s Active Rain blog

So, because I know that I am really bad at avoiding the compulsion, I know that I have to start looking around at WordPress themes for LaneBailey.com.  There are tons of cool themes that are free…

Of course, the other problem is that I also want to make some structural changes to GarageHomesUSA.com.  That one is Joomla.

Why does this keep happening to me?

I guess it is the same drive that won’t allow me to leave well enough alone with cars…  I have to mess with them as well.  Even when they are “done”, they aren’t ever really done.  They are just awaiting the next round of modifications.

So…

Any suggestions of WordPress themes for me to look at?  I know a few places to find a couple hundred, but I am wondering if anyone has any groovy suggestions.

Well, I did it… I made the change.

Yep.  I dived in and made the change.  I think that my estimates of the time involved were pretty close.  Of course, there is one thing I didn’t do… and I am still up in the air as to the direction to take.

I have been using ‘read more‘ tags on my blog for a long time.  The Ikarus doesn’t need them.  So, I could go back and take out the tags in old posts… but I don’t think so.  Aside from it being a MASSIVE amount of work, it would be work that would have to be repeated if I changed to a theme that benefitted from ‘read more’ tags in the future.  I think I might continue to use the tags on the posts so that I have more floxibility in the future.

** A ‘Read More’ tag is a little piece of code that allows the front page to have an intro to the post displayed so that when it is clicked, it links to the whole post.**

I made the other change, too…

As I said, I think that Shifter is a GREAT theme system.  I had been wanting to play with the ‘Portal’ option on it for a while.  So, I chose to re-deploy that theme on another of our WordPress sites, BaileyServices.com.  I am certainly not close to finishing that site, the plan is to more fully populate it with content and play with the different options for Shifter.

For those that remember how LaneBailey.com looked while running Shifter, you might notice that it looks complately different on BaileyServices.  That is one of the strengths of the Shifter system.  It allows a lof of options to change the look of the site without having to dive into code or re-arrange widgets and such.  Usually, themes might have slightly different orientations, and so widgets might have to be tweaked when the theme is changed.

End notes

There is still some work to do with Ikarus.  To start with, I am working on a way to rotate the header image randomly on each load.  Also, I have a javascript conflict which prevents me from having the block with the video/tags/recent posts AND a mortgage calculator.  I need to figure out how to resolve that conflict…

Finally, and only a little related, LaneBailey.info will be my social networking hub, maintaining links and info about all of my current social networking.  It will also eventually have all of my technology related posts in one place.  I am testing another theme on it that I think might be applicable to my property blogsites.  The best way to test it and see what it can do is to toss it out in a production environment… where it still isn’t crucial, but where issues will show up.  Basically, I want to see if there are ways to re-skin it to look differently for different properties.

Just a note here.  There are tthings to consider when looking at themes for WordPress.org.  This is the version where you load WordPress onto your own hosting account, not WordPress.com… the hosted type.

Fixed Width – As the name implies, the width of the theme is fixed.  The good side of this is that the blog owner knows how the site will display… it is the same regardless of the viewers computer.  The bad side is that if they have a wide screen, it will be a band down the middle.  If they have a narrow screen, they might have to scroll to the side to see everything.

Fluid Width – Instead of a fixed width, the theme expands or contracts to fit the monitor of the viewer.  On the good side, the display generally looks good… it fits where it sits.  But… that also means that different people will see different presentations.  Pictures may move around a bit.  Things might not fit the alloted area.

Widget Ready – This means that the sidebars are able to be modified.  The blog owner can add widgets to their blog… Even if a theme isn’t widget ready, it might be modifiable to accept widgets.

Plug-ins Required (or not) – Some themes need other plug-ins to be installed in order to function.  Others don’t.  I would select a theme based on that criteria… plug-ins are easy to deal with.

Picture Menu - Instead of having a post represented with text, the posts are represented with an uploaded image.  I am working on one here.  Each post will have a descriptive picture.  Of course, I won’t be posting every day…  These might also be called Graphic Menu or Image Posts… or a variation.