Website Connections

One of the themes of the Gil­bane Report art­icle I wrote some time ago on Blogs and Wikis: Tech­no­lo­gies for Enter­prise Applic­a­tions? was that people can use blog soft­ware as an easy way to cre­ate a web site that does­n’t look like a blog. It’s easy to update the con­tent, easy to add more con­tent, and although some thought needs to go into the design of the site, it’s still a much more reas­on­able under­tak­ing than more “tra­di­tion­al” ways of cre­at­ing a com­mer­cial web site. Which enables even small com­pan­ies to under­take the task, although it’s still some­times a little nerve-wrack­ing for those who aren’t embed­ded in the com­puter world.

Recently I man­aged to con­vince Mair­in, who runs the Dianne Miller Pil­ates Cen­ter, where I do Pil­ates on a reg­u­lar basis, that the web site needed updat­ing, and that blog soft­ware would be the right way to do it. Then I put her in touch with Kim who did the actu­al work of installing Word­Press, installing some use­ful plu­gins, pick­ing a reas­on­able selec­tion of themes, then tweak­ing the chosen theme and plu­gins to make the site look just right. We both helped teach the people doing the con­tent how to enter the data. And now the site is live, has been for a couple of months, and it’s made life at the stu­di­o’s recep­tion a whole lot easi­er. People can find out what the stu­dio teaches, what the philo­sophy is, and then call to get more per­son­al­ized inform­a­tion, where pre­vi­ously the recep­tion­ists had to explain again and again all the basics on the phone.

It’s so easy for those of us in the soft­ware busi­ness to get car­ried away with the new­est and greatest and for­get just how much an applic­a­tion of even rel­at­ively simple soft­ware, where the basic prin­ciples have been around for ages, can help. And, incid­ent­ally, that com­puters are still nerve-wrack­ing for lots of people.