1) Using WordPress as the foundation for your Artificially Intelligent Website

2) Using a qualified and competent Hosting provider to make your life easier with less headaches, and support when they happen (it is, after all, technology).

3) Using cPanel, and Fantastico, to quickly and easily install WordPress on your website.

For this segment, I am going to ask you to step away from your computer and do a little thinking about the structure of your website.

Two areas which slow website implementations

There are two pieces which slow down most web implementations.  The first has to do with how the website will look, the second has to do with the content of the website and how to organize the content (the menu).

In this segment, we are discussing the website menu structure.  Effectively, thinking how your clients, customers or prospects will interact with your website.

Your website has a purpose, generally for profit generating companies this has to do with supporting sales and support services.  I.E., show me the money!

For others, it might be to help reduce support calls by giving the clients a place to help themselves quickly and easily get the information they need without calling your offices.

Whether for these, or other reasons, your website needs to have it’s content easy to find and easy to consume.  There needs to be an simple call to action placed on the front page when you are ready to push your marketing and sales effort and compelling and fresh content to encourage prospects to come back and sample your website again.  After all, research shows that it takes an average of 7-8 contacts to move a prospect to a client.

When you are thinking about creating a menu, think about how you want a particular type of client to get to your information internally.  If you are targeting an information seeker, then make sure that your information is clearly organized and easy to find – don’t make them search through months of content (posts) to find the gems they might rave about to their friends or co-workers.

For example, look up YARPP (Yet Another Relevant Post Plugin) to automatically find similar posts and encourage your readers to see other content on your website.

When you have an Artificially Intelligent Website, you are creating a system to automate your efforts.  For example, if someone was browsing your products, you would want a service person to show them additionally related products if they are in your store, right?  Well, YARPP (and similar plugins) do the same function for your content, automatically.

Think not only about your main menu (usually underneath or on top of your header), but also about side menu’s and the integrated links within your website.  Always encourage the wonderful curiosity of prospects to get to know your services and prospects … and you … better by pointing them to your website’s information.

When your website creates a compelling draw for prospects, you have a better chance of being ‘top of mind’ when they have a problem or opportunity you can solve. Furthermore, the prospect has become more comfortable with your company by learning valuable information in your field of expertise.  Hopefully, the prospect has learned they can trust your direction and has overcome some of the beginning sales issues when your brand is unknown and untried.

Since the point of your website is to deliver information (whether sales, support, marketing etc.) you need to have a defined path for the viewer through the website.  When their is a logical flow to your website, the prospect is more likely to look around since their frustration has not been triggered causing them to just go back to Google and try again.

If you would like to understand more about how your website is used by viewers, consider installing Google Analytics (free) to get objective information regarding what pages are viewed on your website.

Finally, remember some of the basics that prospects will need when seeing your website.  Always include a ‘Contact Us’ page for example. Make sure a client never has difficulty figuring out how to get in touch with you to purchase or hire your companies services and products.

Your website must have compelling information to be beneficial to a prospect, however; if they cannot easily figure out how to locate the information they will just go to another website.  Protect against this by doing some early planning on your menu structure and links which draw the prospects into and through your website.

Fortunately, when you host with a qualified and supportive provider (read the last Building an Artificially Intelligent Website segment here), you can be literally minutes away from a stress free install experience.

Most hosting providers (at least Linux webservers) provide an administration interface called cPanel to handle your email, ftp, subdomain and other services setup needs.

If you look ‘down’ the list, you will find an option to click on a button called “Fantastico”. Upon clicking this link, you will be giving a practical Christmas list of Open Source options to install for your company.

One of those options will (or should) be WordPress.

From this interface, you will be just a few answers away from installing WordPress for your company.

There are a few items to consider which could trip you up, however; they are not esoteric requests which confuse easily.

The first item to consider is what domain you are going to connect this WordPress install with.

Typically, you will be given a selection of domains and subdomains you have created for your company with cPanel at this point. Every one of these choices have already been associated with a folder on your server (or should have been).

You have the option of creating the installation in the main directory for the domain / subdomain choice (by leaving the next option blank) or selecting a subdirectory (new or existing).

For most clients, their main directory is where WordPress is installed. However; for example, one of my clients has an existing website in their main directory and wanted the new features of a blog. Here, I created a new folder to install WordPress into, and pointed the subdomain “blog.WebsiteName.com” to this folder.

Once you are past these two selections, the next five have to do with giving your website a name, a tagline, an admin username and admin password and where you want to send the setup email (I highly recommend you do this). At a minimum, write down the username and password you just created!

Sit back for the 5-10 seconds that the script takes to setup WordPress and you are done. Total time for most installs I do this way takes less than 1 minute.  Plan on maybe 3-5 minutes for your first time.

If you make a mistake (for instance, installing in a wrong directory), Fantastico allow to you to easily delete the installation and start fresh.

So, with the right services provided with your hosting solution, your installation experience can be overcome without having to learn a new profession.

Now, with a hosting provider selected, a content management system selected and installed, next segment we discuss your first planning step.

In this article, I will discuss the engine which powers (or supplies power) to your Content Management System with the right server, operating system, services (email, ftp) and database connectivity.

While you can purchase a server, install the Operating System (Windows Server, Linux, or Mac OSX Server – Snow Leopard) and setup the services, pay for the Internet connectivity (and worry about the Internet connectivity redundancy) and electricity I wouldn’t suggest doing this.

In today’s economy, the benefit of hosting your own server (with the included headaches) is not a fiscally good idea.  If you need more capabilities than you get with shared hosting and are considering a virtualized server option, you might consider looking into the Mac-Mini as a server.

However; hosting yourself is a bigger discussion for another time.  Today, we are discussing automating your marketing and sales and  procuring hosting for your website using a third party.

In our last post, I discussed using WordPress as the CMS of choice to move your company along when creating an artificially intelligent website.  Although WordPress is free (meaning, no license costs), you still have to make sure that it is installed properly.  If you do a little research before you pick out your hosting provider, you should be able to install and setup WordPress using provided scripts which could have you running WordPress in a matter of a few minutes with all of your hair intact.

WordPress requires PHP (a web scripting language) and MySQL (a database server solution) to be installed and running in order to operate.  The right hosting provider (frankly, if they do not have this capability they are not a ‘right’ hosting provider) will have these abilities already installed and running for you.

I recommend HostGator (www.HostGator.com) or BlueHost (www.BlueHost.com) for hosting needs.  While I personally supply hosting for my students, I will often have my larger clients procure their own business account with HostGator directly.  If necessary, I call HostGator on behalf of my clients to solve technical issues.

With this setup, you will have your email services, web servers, ftp services and significant options available to load other software (such as vTiger for Sales CRM) for the same monthly fee.

When you add their excellent customer support (based here in the USA), HostGator has proven to be a dependable partner for web and email hosting.

One word of warning.  I do not recommend using the same company to host your website and be the registrar for the company domain name.  The reason for this is if you choose to move your hosting, or have an issue with the hosting for any reason, you can easily use the Registrar to point to a new web hosting company be be back online quickly and easily.  This way, no one hosting company (no matter how good they are) will ever be able to limit your options and take your website out of business.

Unfortunately, technology has provided us a way to do so much more, with less time and across many more areas of knowledge however; it causes us to have to do so many more smaller and dissimilar tasks to get our jobs done.

The best tools (from either the future, or the past) are simple to use, easy to understand and work effectively to save us time and effort.

For websites, the core tool we need to make creating, updating and editing a website is a Content Management System (CMS).

Enterprise ready CMS tools came together to allow those with less technical expertise, and more content knowledge to create the content without needing to know the technical software.  These tools (10 years ago) cost well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now, the most popular Content Management Systems are free.

You can look at Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, WordPress and others.  All of these systems will help you create a compelling website, without having to learn how to integrate static HTML, database connectivity and SQL query requests.

You will want to know that the CMS you choose is freely extendable, easy to use, supported by a significant user base (or larger company), has many themes or is easily skinnable (to change the look of your website) and offers some sort of easy way to add functionality.

I have chosen to use WordPress for all of our clients websites.  From the easy to learn and use interface, admin support, huge theme repository and active 3rd party plug-ins activity WordPress is a powerful and fully mature CMS today.

With a little over 11.4 million active installations, and over 28,000 extra downloads daily, WordPress  (now at version 3.01) has become one of the top (if not the top) CMS in use today.

Not only for smaller and mid-sized companies, WordPress is used by world class companies for some of their web needs including: UPS, Coca-Cola, Harvard University, People Magazine, GE and the United States Navy.

In order to create an Artificially Intelligent Website, the foundation is a powerful and easy to use Content Management System.

This tool allows our clients to create more content to drive more opportunities in Social, Search Engine and eMail Marketing simultaneously without hiring costly I.T. staff or huge graphic budgets for their websites.

The website should be about creating relevant conversations with new and existing clients.  When your website integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Google and Bing to promote your latest post, you have effectively supercharged your marketing, increased your sales options and decreased your time and effort.

All of this while needing the same amount of knowledge as using Microsoft Word.

Consider implementing an Artificially Intelligent Website to bring the power and opportunities back to your marketing and sales people.  Get those on the front line empowered to drive your company to the next level.

One of the wonderful tools in WordPress (and other CMS’s) is their automatic functionality to change your content to make the html results user friendly when saving.

These special codes (including singles quotes, double quotes and ampersands) are handled in the post content filtering you can read about here http://codex.wordpress.org/How_WordPress_Processes_Post_Content.

Unfortunately, this can have negative effects for those inserting special links (like affiliate information) or other links which have embedded parameters

For example: http://www.mywebsite.com?param1=mike&param2=anderle&width=512

&

The post processing can take your “&” character and covert it to & which can be a problem if the page is used for video embedding codes and URL’s.

The page I was working on used these special parameters to set the column width and sent the information back to the video service, which then inserted the HTML back into my page.  Since WordPress would change the code ‘on the fly’ (not inside my database), I didn’t see this issue at first.

Fortunately for me, while debugging another issue, the support person for the video service did notice and brought it to my attention and I tracked down the issue and the fix.

Raw HTML Capability

If you want the ability to remove this automatic functionality from a post or page individually, I suggest adding the plugin Raw HTML Capability by Janis Elsts to your WordPress install.

Once you do this, open up the page or post where you are having the problem, and on the right side you will see this new functionality:

Now, choosing which post processing functionality to disable, on a post-by-post or page-by-page choice is quick and easy.  Once this was done, my page went back to working as I wanted it to.

Hopefully, this helps.  If you have any other ways (for example, the inline method) you want to discuss, please just add a comment below!

WIkipedia has this definition:

Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam,Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified adsspam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social networkingspam, television advertising and file sharing network spam.

One of the types, spam in blogs, is a problem for any of my clients which build an Artificially Intelligent Website (TM).

In order to combat this type of Spam, WordPress has offered a service called Akismet for a long time, and is integrated into the main menu under the Dashboard in WordPress 3.0.  Over the years, Akismet has protected blogs from over 17.5 billion (with a “B”) potential spam comments.

In order to use Akismet, you only need to procure an API Key from www.Akismet.com.  The key is free for personal use, and they only ask large companies or bloggers who make “mad money” (which they define as making more than $500 a month from their blog) to donate $5 a month.

While I could list all of the information about the service, I want to point you to the Akismet FAQ page which does a great job listing the most obvious questions and showing you where to sign up.

It will only take about 5 minutes to get the website connected with the service, however; it can save you substantial time and annoyance having to deal with obviously spammy comments.

Finally, protect your company from lost sales by making sure undesired and unwanted comments are not on your website potentially offending new clients and / or customers.

Empower your website to work for you, while you work on something else.

Namely, when you create a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisement, approximately 50% or 1 in every 2 searches will the people even notice the ad.

I didn’t mention ‘click’ on it, just notice it.  This is the same as if you buy a tv commercial, 50% of all viewers skip the ad, or throw away the direct mail piece without even noticing what is on it.  Fortunately with PPC, you don’t have to pay for the unviewed ads.  You only pay for those times someone clicks on your ad.

Yesterday, I went through a clarification of what a PPC ad was with a colleague who was in PR so I am aware some need a concrete explanation.  So, an example of the PPC areas on a search result page are the links you see above (with a colored background) in the middle column and in the right column of the search image below:

I want to state this again, only 1 in every 2 people will even SEE that there are ads here.

The short answer is that of all the people searching, most will not give these results a second of their time.  They do not see the relevance of how the ads can help them in their search.

Now, the top three (3) results in the organic answers will be seen 100% of the time, however; they will not all be clicked on the same amount of times.

The first result in the organic search results for a key phrase (the words you typed in to search about) will be clicked on approximately 42% of the time.  The third result in the organics list only 9% of the time.

Let’s not even discuss results for links brought up on pages 2 and 3 since if your website is coming up on those pages it will cause a mild form of depression.

So, a couple of thoughts.  If you are the 10th link listed on the Organic Search results, your link is seen approximately 20% of the time, you have to be the 4th highest on the Paid Search to be seen as often.

If your link on the organic side is clicked, I believe the person has a higher level of trust in your web page and what they are reading.  When they click the PPC, they know it is an ad, and now your website has to create a higher level of trust in order to overcome the fact the user clicked an ‘ad’.

Hopefully, these numbers are allowing you to think about opportunities where you could work a little to increase your organic search relevance.  It would be an investment that can help you for a long time.

To many people outside of technology, it is not obvious what is at stake.  Here is an excerpt from Clair Cain Miller and Brian Stelter’s article on the New York Times website describing the debate.

The debate revolves around net neutrality, which in the broadest sense holds that Internet users should have equal access to all types of information online, and that companies offering Internet service should not be able to give priority to some sources or types of content.

When you read the proposal from the massive global companies, you find that they all talk about how regulation for WIRED devices is appropriate, however; for wireless Internet access, we need to allow other forces to play and not regulate them, and certainly not the FCC.

Now, while I am not a Google fanatic (no matter how often I write about them), I do not believe they ‘do evil’ as some are suggesting (which is a cynical comment on their “do no evil” internal motto).

The problem and PR nightmare Google has found themselves in has to do with they are now a player in a huge group of technologies where it might behoove them to have friends which can cut out others potentially.

One example from the article above would have you believe that Verizon might cut out Bing (a Microsoft Search Engine) if permitted to limit certain services.  I really doubt this is a practical example.  It is too obvious.

Since the issue is for a ‘new’ set of services, I see real issues around a company as large as Google bringing together their technology (including Video dissemination (Youtube) and Mobile OS capability (Android)) and creating an application which would then be classified into this new set of services.

In other words, what about video marketing of your company?  If you want access to their platform for sales (which, isn’t that what Google is all about, advertising?), you have to pay more than if you just release the video from your website, or other services such as Vimeo.

Now, you are responsible for getting the marketing and sales message out, and you can’t just play with anyone anymore.  If you want your video’s to be seen on clear, fast, non-stuttering mobile wireless connectivity, you have to pay more.

Thanks Google, that is something I want to worry about for my clients.

I would rather the argument go on until technology ‘fixes’ the issue, than allow these two 800 lb gorillas help create the conversation to go down the path to the future that fits them the best.

So, in short, no Google, I don’t trust you to help fix this problem.  Political issues and all, I feel you just left your ethics at the door and are now one of those who are forcing a solution.  I can’t see a reason to do this except to grab a chunk of the future for your benefit, not for the benefit of the rest of us outside of giving us something in one hand (with a price) while taking away an option with the left (which was free).

Finally, one short comment.  If you read a bunch of the articles on this subject, very few castigate Verizon for this effort.  Is it due to the fact that we aren’t surprised that Verizon would act this way?  If so, what is the age-old comment about watch what company you keep around you?