EndGamePR.com has a new design!

The last version of the site was more than a year-and-a-half old, and I was tiring of its limitations. Mind you, I’m still rather fond of it. I’ve never seen a layout quite like it. However, I never liked the look of the blog page, and a few other things with it were rather ponderous.

Here’s a quick nickel tour of the new design:

• My favorite thing about it was a late addition.  Just yesterday, I decided to add the social media tabs you see on the right side of every page except for the front page.  If you slide your mouse over them, they pop out.  Pretty cool, huh?  I’d like to thank the Human 3rror Blog for the code used to make them.  I made a number of modifications to the original design, including the addition of the white shadowed tabs.
• Interior pages of the site actually have several layouts.  There are two versions of the right sidebar layout (with different text in the sidebar), and one of the left sidebar layout.  I made a page layout with only one sidebar, but so far I haven’t found a reason to use it.
• The new blog layout is MUCH neater and easier to read than the previous iteration of the Social Media PR Blog.  Despite the fact that I styled it myself, I never liked the way it turned out.

Last, but not least, one thing that remains the same: This site is built using my favorite software … WordPress.

Have a look around, starting with the home page.  Let me know in comments what you like and what you don’t like.  If you find a bug, I’ll be happy to squash it :)

The new name, “Social Media PR Blog” reflects a new direction at EndGame PR. Actually, I don’t want to call it a new *direction*, because EndGame PR is still quite good at media relations and SEO PR. However, in the past three years since the company was founded, a lot of changes have happened both in the world of PR and in EndGame PR. Social media has crashed the party, and I’ve rushed up to meet it. Smart clients are coming to me with a desire to learn about and utilize the new tools available in the social media world … things like blogging, podcasting, web videos, Facebook, and Twitter. In fact, an extremely large percentage of the work I do is social media related. I think social media is a PR practice and I’ve started calling EndGame PR a Social Media PR firm.  Thus … the name of the blog.

Will the focus of the blog change?  Not much.  I already blog about social media quite a bit already, so you probably won’t notice a difference in the content.  One thing that WILL need to change is the address of the blog feed, which is at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/media-relations-seo-pr-blog.  I’ll be changing the URL in the near future to reflect the change.  I’m not doing it yet, but be aware that it’s coming!

PS: I’m not quite satisfied with the graphic on the masthead, and will probably work on that a bit more.

Facebook … is growing … by 600,000 or more users … per … day.

(crickets chirping)

There’s no way to really comprehend that type of growth.  Think about it … that’s like everyone in a small to medium-sized city signing up each day!  In all, Facebook has 140 million users.

If we didn’t have it before, this is proof positive that social media and social networking has reached the mainstream.  Facebook started out as being for college students only.  You had to have a college email address just to sign up.  Once they lifted that restriction, “old” people like me started to flock to the site as a way to keep in touch with friends, share pictures, and play games.  It truly is like a class reunion every day over there.

So, what does this mean for PR people and businesses hoping to promote themselves in this social media landscape?  Obviously, it means you need to have a presence (either a page or a group) on Facebook, and that advertising there is becoming more and more attractive.  Facebook has been known for some time as a very inexpensive site to place ad, and right now it’s probably the best social media site on which to advertisde.  Of its primary competitors for eyeballs, MySpace is so 2007 and Twitter doesn’t have advertising … yet.

Another way to take advantage of Facebook’s growing mass of people is by building applications for the site.  These are simple programs that provide fun or information for users.  They add them to their account, and when they do it’s broadcast out to all of their “friends” … essentially advertising the existance of the application.

PR professionals need to understand how to use these new tools.  It’s no secret that using the media to “get the word out” isn’t the only, or even the best, way to help our clients anymore.

For more on the service, please visit the EndGame PR Web and Blog Design page.

If I’m not mistaken, this post should be showing up over there right now.  Hi RVABlogs readers!

Sorry for the problem.  It’s just one more issue I’m clearing up with the new web design!  Here are links to all of the various EndGame PR feeds:

Media Relations & SEO Blog Posts
EndGame PR News Releases
Startup BizCast Podcast Episodes

First, the basics: To turn your WordPress blog into a website, first create a page that you want to be your home page. Then, create a page that you want to be your blog page. The blog page that you create should be blank, because the space where you’d enter information will actually be where your blog posts go. Once you’ve done those two things, go into your admin and go to settings/reading. You’ll see a place where you can designate your site as a “static site”. Use the dropdowns to pick your home page and blog page. That’s it! You’re done! It’s amazing that it’s so easy.

Now, here’s a look at what I’ve learned from my experiences with this site and my client site:

1. Even though it SEEMS like you have to have the same sidebar on each page of your site just because of the way the software works, that’s not the case.  The way I found to get around the sidebar issue is to use different templates for various pages. First off, I think the best way to go is to eliminate the home.php template if your theme comes with one. It creates more problems than it solves. The reason for this is that if it exists, by default your designated home page (the one you set in the WP admin as the home) and your designated blog page will BOTH use that home.php template. If you eliminate it, the blog will default to using index.php as its template, and the homepage will default to the page.php template. You can then make another template for your home page if you want it to look different from other pages on the site. You can then set different templates for different pages, you can build them with different headers, sidebars, etc. To select different templates, use the dropdown at the bottom of the admin when you’re writing a page.

   The only downside of this approach to having different sidebars is that you can’t use widgets on all of your pages … just one. What I did was eliminate the code for including widgets on all except my blog page. Then, I just included in the templates whatever I wanted to put on the sidebar on other pages. The non-blog pages all have the same sidebar in my case, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

2. It is very possible to make a page on your site that looks nothing like the rest of the site. You can see an example of this by looking at this news release for client Save Our Shelters. The page has a different header, no sidebar, and a different background. It doesn’t look anything like the rest of the site, really. I did this because I wanted my news release pages to look more plain and non-fancy. Really, it looks more like my old html site than this one. The way I did this was by creating a new “div” call in the CSS that dictated what that page would look like, and then created a template that uses that “div”. For ease of use, I also included the link back to the EndGame PR News. page, the contact information, and the social bookmarking and RSS details. That way when I want to post a new news release, all I have to do is copy, paste, and format the text. I’m loving it!
3. WordPress does have some limitations that I’m hoping are fixed in future releases.  I had hoped to automate certain things that I had to do by hand with my previous html-based website.  Top on my list is making the front page “Latest Releases” section and my news page update automatically when I post a new news release.  This could be done if I posted my news releases on this blog, but I don’t want to do that because I want to use a custom template for the news release pages, and because I don’t want to clutter up this blog with client news — that’s not what this blog is for.  So, instead, each news release has its own page.  WordPress doesn’t handle pages as well as it handles blog posts, which makes sense when you consider the history of the software. I’ve tried using plugins that allow you to designate categories or tags for pages (which the software by itself doesn’t allow) but the pages aren’t fully tagged or categorize like blog posts. If anyone has a way to do this that will work, please let me know!

Here are a few plugins that you should consider that will help you handle your WordPress website better:

• Pages+ helps you manage a large number of pages better than the standard WordPress admin
• tags4page allows you to use tags on pages, just like you can for posts. While it doesn’t do what I’d hoped it would, it does help quite a bit with organizing your pages for feeds, etc.
• Page Category Plus allows you to use the same categories with pages that you can use for blog posts. Once again, didn’t do what I’d hoped it would, but it helps with organization.
• PJW Page Excerpt lets you control the excerpt used for pages, like you can with a blog post. This is particularly helpful when you’re making a feed from a page tag or category, like I am with my news releases.
• All in One SEO Pack is something you should install for every WordPress website or blog.  It lets you set the page or post name, description, and keywords.  It’s outstanding control for SEO elements.

To sum it up, I’ve learned that using WordPress as a CMS is an outstanding way to build a static website. I’m hoping to create more client pages like this one, and will let you know when I do!

1. This website hadn’t had a true redesign in about two years.  That’s an eternity on the Internet.
2. The original design was done in standard html with no stylesheet.  That means it was a bear to update.  This design is managed using WordPress as a content management system, or CMS.

This design is an improvement over the previous site for several reasons.  First, it’s easier to manage.  Second, content is organized much better because it’s all on the same platform and the front page is a much better design than I had previously.

I’m going to write a post about using WordPress as a CMS in the near future, because it’s very exciting.  For now, however, I’m still working on completely finishing everything on endgamepr.com.  I apologize if you find a loose board or dusty corner here and there, as it’s quite an undertaking to port over a several hundred page site (including news releases).  I hope you enjoy the design, and I encourage your feedback!

[Updated 8/9: I'm continuing to tinker with the design and functionality of the site. One of the main things I'm doing is trying to automate things that I had to do by hand with my html version. The news archives page now updates as soon as a new release is posted. Unfortunately I'm having trouble getting my news page and the news headlines on the front page to do that. WordPress is a great CMS, but it isn't perfect. There's no good way to work with pages like that. If I were to post all of my client news releases on this blog, it would solve the problem, but I really don't want to clog up the blog like that. For now, I have to update those two sections by hand.

Another thing I've done is worked to shorten up the copy on each page of the site, to more closely match the available "white space". I'm quite pleased with my expertise page. I replaced the descriptions of each EndGame PR capability with a small pop up that has that description. As a result, the page is merely a list, but I don't lose the descriptions that some people need.]

[Updated 8/6: The site is more or less completed now. I'm doing some tweaking and trying to figure out how to automate some of the things I had to do by hand on my old html-based website. Now that the database issue is behind me, I'm absolutely loving WordPress as a CMS]

[Updated 8/5: Due to massive slowdowns and database errors, I took the drastic step today of deleting the WordPress database, uninstalling WordPress, and then re-installing everything.  The site is running like a CHAMP now!  I just added what I think might be the last page -- the video podcast client samples page.  I'm going to run through my old site files and see if there's anything I missed.  If not, I can finally remove the "under construction" sign and fully open the site for business!]

I just realized a post on this blog jumped up to PR 7 in the latest Google Pagerank update! I was playing with the Smart PageRank Tool tonight, which allows you to check the pagerank of your inbound links (great tool for looking at the effectiveness of your link-building strategy) and entered in a couple of my sites and client sites. One post from this blog showed up in a couple of searches, and it jumped out at me like it was in red blinking letters. My Review of Online News Release Distribution Services, which is easily the most read post on this blog, has a pagerank higher than the front page of the blog or the front page of my public relations business!

Crazy … and very cool. I feel powerful ;)

UPDATED: I just found another post on this site that is ALSO PR 7. My Review of Online RSS Feed Generators post has also reached this lofty height. I’m thinking this trend could potentially be an indicator of what kind of content Google is favoring. It’s also proof positive that unique content is the way to strengthen your site’s standing with the search engines!

EndGame Public Relations: Increased from PR3 to PR5
Media Relations and SEO PR Blog: Increased from PR0 to PR5
Startup BizCast Podcast: Increased from PR0 to PR5
GeekLogos Graphics: Increased from PR3 to PR4

So, all in all … I’m obviously pretty happy. I still wonder what the heck took so long with the update. Maybe Google will let us know once it’s done. If your site hasn’t updated yet, it may still happen. The updates usually take a couple of weeks before they’re complete.

Also, since I switched URLs, it looks like of my posts have been Dugg. Feel free to Digg the crap out of my blog to help me catch up! :)

Going forward, for the Media Relations & SEO PR Blog, please switch your links to http://www.endgamepr.com/blog. Previously the address was www.endgamepr.com/wordpress.

Here’s some background on why I did this:

When I first set up this blog, it was my first using WordPress. I installed it through my web host. When I did it, I didn’t notice anywhere that asked me in what directory I wanted to install. Maybe it was there and I didn’t notice it, but regardless the end result was that my URL was www.endgamepr.com/wordpress. I didn’t really think about it for a long time. Then it started to bug me. I really wanted the address to be www.endgamepr.com/blog. But, by then I was starting to build up inbound links and had customized my theme (changed it since then, but still) and I didn’t want to mess up something that was working. I’m a big fan of not screwing up something that works.

Then, a guy named Paul (thanks, Paul!) emailed me to ask me about a plugin on this site. We got to chatting via email and the blog URL issue came up. He said “just change the name of the directory.” I knew it wasn’t quite that easy. There are a couple of other things that need to be done. But, it made me think for a moment, and I came up with the way to do it and NOT lose my inbound links.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Go into the WordPress dashboard and click on “Options”. Where it says “WordPress address (URI)” enter the NEW address of the blog. Below that, it says “Blog address (URI)”. If your old address is entered in, put the new one in there too.
2. Using FTP access, go to your web directory. Change the name of the folder where your WordPress files live to the NEW name. In my case, I renamed it “blog”, where before it was “wordpress”.
3. Create another directory, and give it the old name. In my case, it’s called “wordpress”. This will be an empty directory.
4. Create an .htaccess file. This needs to go in the ROOT (main) directory of your web folders. You may already have one there. If you have one simply add this line:
   Redirect 301 /oldfoldername http://www.yourwebsite.com/newfoldername
   Replace the folder and site names with your own, of course. If you don’t have an .htaccess file, it’s pretty easy to make one. Open Windows Notepad, enter the line I mentioned, and save the file as .htaccess. Then, upload it to the root of your web folder.

That’s it. If you do everything right, you should be able to access your site from the new directory you wanted, all of the links on your blog should point to the new one (unless you entered them by hand), and if someone enters your old address it will redirect to your new one. Additionally, all of the inbound links counted by Google, Yahoo and the others, will transfer over to your new URL. The 301 redirect tells the search engines that the site has been permanently moved.

The downsides of changing your blog URL:

There are always downsides, but they aren’t too horrible.

• I noticed I lost ALL of my Diggs. They’re actually still there, but they’re pointing to the old URL so they don’t show up in the Digg counters next to my post. However, due to the 301 redirect, if someone finds something on Digg that points to this blog, at least they’ll be redirected here.
• If you’re a fan of Technorati and use it to track people linking into your blog, you’re going to have to re-claim your blog. As far as I know, they won’t let you transfer everything over, because the links they’ve found are actually to your old URL.
• Any other social media site that you may love that has you ranked high will have your new blog as being .. well, new. You’ll have to start over. Basically, if you’re going to do this, and you care what your ranking is, do it before you build up 400 inbound links or favorites or whatever.

That’s it. It really is pretty easy. Let me know in comments if you see any problem with this strategy!

One theory is that Google changed its algorithm to more easily transfer the main page PR to interior pages. This stands to reason, since the Media Relations & SEO PR Blog is technically an interior page of EndGame PR site, and now has the same pagerank as the front page.

Editor’s Note: Nevermind. I changed my blog’s URL and lost my pagerank. It will be transferred from the old URL eventually, but for now I’m not even at PR0 … I’m unranked! :(