It’s time to highlight another business doing great things with blogging applications in the WordPress for Business Websites series, and the company website featured today is Le Tutor.

As Aaron of Le Tutor explained in his submission:

“I love WordPress for business applications and advocate that all small businesses convert to using it. It takes all of the pain out of running your own website and you can have an amazing looking website for a quarter of what design agencies will charge you for a sub par site.”

The Le Tutor site has a great color palette.  Its clean design and use of images makes it easy to find information.

The site also makes great use of video by incorporating a testimonials section filled with both videos and written testimonials.  Also, notice the strategic use of the sidebar to include information, a contact form, and video content.

The Le Tutor site also includes a blog filled with written and video posts that offer a mix of informational, educational and fun posts.

Kudos to Le Tutor for demonstrating that there is so much you can do with WordPress to make a business website standout without investing a huge amount of money.

To have your website considered for the WordPress for Business Websites here on BusinessLogs, follow this link, and leave a comment on the Call for Business Submissions post with your company website’s URL.

Scheduling your blog posts is different from simply writing post drafts. The latter requires you to login and publish the posts on a certain date- which is fine if you want to make last-minute changes to your posts- but scheduling means your blog software will publish your post automatically, on whatever date you set it to. If you’d like to get started doing this, here are some quick ways to schedule your blog posts:

On Blogger

If you write for a Blogger-powered blog, it couldn’t be simpler:

• In the New Post window in the Posting tab, write your post as usual, but don’t click the “Publish Post” button just yet.
• Click on “Post Options” at the bottom of your post, and in the right side you’ll be able to put in what date and/or time you want the post published.
• Then click “Publish Post”.

On WordPress

It’s easy to schedule your posts on a WordPress-powered blog. Simply:

• Write your post as usual, but don’t click Publish yet.
• In the “Publish” window in the upper right hand area of your dashboard, click on the “Edit” link next to “Publish immediately”.
• From there, you can choose what date and/or time your post will be published.
• Click the “OK” button, then hit “Publish”.

On Typepad

If your blog is powered by Typepad, note that you must be a Plus, Pro, Premium or Business class user to use this feature. Here’s how to schedule your posts in Typepad:

• Write a post as usual in the “Compose a New Post” page, then look for the area titled “Posting Status” .
• The dropdown beneath that will let you choose between Draft, Publish On… or Publish Now. Select Publish On…
• Enter the time and select the date you want your post published. Click “Set Time”, then save the post.

Do you schedule your blog posts?

Dashboard Custom Menu

This plug-in makes it easy to add a custom menu to your blog dashboard. As you can see from the screenshot above, you can add your own links (for example, other company sites or frequently accessed resources). You can also select who sees what, according to different user roles.

Dashboard Post-it

A must if you’re managing a multiple-user blog, this one gives you the ability to write short notes to other editors and authors. For something a little more powerful, there’s…

WP Task Manager

WP Task Manager takes the post-it note idea a step further, allowing you to create tasks for all authors of your blog, including yourself. The plug-in comes with a special page that lists all tasks, and includes support for comments and discussions on each task.

Theme Test Drive

It’s always a good idea to test new WP themes- or changes to your current WP themes- before going live with them, especially on a business blog. This plug-in makes it easy to test drive themes from within your dashboard, so only you see the changes.

Easy Admin Color Themes

Finally, this one’s more for aesthetic reasons, letting you create and change the color schemes of your WP dashboard. Its settings include options for setting site-wide schemes, forcing schemes for certain users, and the ability to import pre-made admin color schemes. It’s a nice way to personalize your company blog dashboard in a small way.

What are your favorite WordPress Admin Plug-ins?

But to set your blog apart, you’ll want to tweak that theme- and when I say tweak, I mean make small changes here and there. To make these tweaks to your theme of choice, a tool like the Firebug extension for Firefox can be very handy- but, really, any text editor will do.

1. Tweak your header
   Usually the first place new visitors will look, and a good place to start. Some themes include “theme options” pages that show up when you’ve activated the theme, and others include banner photos or graphics that can easily be replaced with your own. If you’re using the default WordPress theme Kubrick, the aptly named Kubrickr will automatically find photos on Flickr for you to customize your header with. To get more in-depth, I recommend reading through WordPress’ official codex page on Designing Headers.
2. Play with your widgets
   Most WordPress theme designers “widgetize” their themes, and for good reason: widgets are probably the quickest way to personalize a WordPress theme. Built-in widgets, available in every fresh installation of WordPress, include widgets for displaying your Archives, Calendar, Recent Comments and so forth- and And if the theme you love isn’t widgetized, you can do it yourself.
3. Experiment with color
   Even slight changes to the colors on your site can have a big impact. Online tools such as the Color Scheme Designer can keep you busy for hours, or you can check out pre-made color schemes at sites like colr.org and GenoPal.
4. Change your fonts
   We used to have just two choices when it came to web fonts: serif or sans-serif. Today, we have methods like sIFR and FLIR, which replace your fonts using Flash, the newish Cufon, which doesn’t require Flash, and CSS3′s @font-face, which works by downloading the specified fonts.
5. Personalize your About page
   This one, which requires no CSS tweaking at all, just might be the most important way of all. Tweaking your About page, the only page that comes pre-built with WordPress, is where you can truly let your personality shine through. A photo of yourself is always good, but you should feel free to add anything here that shows the world- or your readers, at least- who you are. You can read more about tweaking your About page in a previous post of mine.

Of course, we’ve only barely scratched the surface of the ways you can tweak your WordPress theme. For more ways, the WordPress Codex is an excellent place to start.

Update: Investor Mark Evans posts his thoughts and I think he misses the point completely, saying that the reason it happened is because the VCs had little interest in Odeo and that they were low on money or about to run out. Mark, this isn’t Ev trying to save a sinking ship, it’s him using 7 figures of his own money to buy back control and do what he wants to do, not what his investors think will make the best exit strategy. My comment over there goes into a little bit more detail.

Vox… You Know… For The MySpace Kids
Wednesday also marked the non-beta launch of Vox.com, Six Apart’s new blogging-photo-video tool that not-really-but-yeah-it-kinda-does compete with another Six Apart product, TypePad. Vox is billed as “a free personal blogging service for sharing your experiences with friends and family” but it’s definitely 6A’s product that hopes to allure MySpace users, the kind that have been sharing songs, pictures, and video for awhile now.

I’m not sure exactly why 6A chose to create a totally new product rather than just give TypePad a Vox-like makeover, but maybe Vox is based on a totally new codebase which is something that TypePad desperately needs. As a previous TypePad customer I was constantly frustrated by the slowdowns associated with the service — by the end it took nearly 30 seconds for the stats page to load up, 1 minute to list my recent entries, etc. etc.

I do like Vox from a design and interaction point of view as it’s very well polished, but I just have to wonder what Six Apart is really trying to do here. Their Movable Type publishing software that was the Big Man On Campus just a few years ago is now all but eclipsed by open source WordPress and the thousands of free themes that are offered. TypePad, their once-novel hosted blogging service, now goes up against WordPress.com which offers similar features, greater reliability, and a better price tag of “completely free” which usually makes people happy. Now they release Vox which is positioned up against MySpace and Facebook for the “create your own space on the web, put happy shit in there, meet new people” social publishing/networking niche. In case they haven’t noticed, MySpace is already a noun (“Hey have you got a MySpace?”) and I suspect a lot of paying TypePad users will be defecting to free Vox, so they’re 1) taking on MySpace, and 2) losing their own customers?

Vox is a very cool service but its positioning within the 6A lineup just isn’t clear to me yet. Here’s how I wish 6A’s product lineup looked:

• A free version of Movable Type (or another app) that is as easy to theme as WordPress, can import/export blog entries flawlessly for easy switching, and can easily switch to dynamic publishing without any hassles.
• A “Pro” version of Movable Type that has the features listed above but can also have modified data fields to store/output anything you want and a publishing workflow system built-in, aka, a mini CMS.
• No TypePad, just Vox. Give Vox the same capabilities as TypePad and implement a paid tier that lets you drop your own CSS and templates in. Free for regular users, power users pay $10/mo or something.

It’s nice to dream :)

Movable Type Enterprise still doesn’t seem to be the MT Pro version we’ve been promised for a few years, so if you were hoping to be able to add new data fields or edit old ones then I don’t think this will let you do it. Some “catch up” features present on this release include the ability to easily add small pieces of functionality into your blog (widgets) and change the look and feel of your blog and admin UI without too much hassle (transformer plugins, style catcher).

To add insult to injury, Six Apart doesn’t think highly enough of its own blogs to bother writing about the news on them, instead opting for a typical press release that can’t be Trackbacked or commented on. This solidifies the direction that Six Apart is now headed in: a direction far away from their base supporters and fans.

Live Journal is a culture, not simply a product or commodity that can be bought. From an outsider’s perspective, it might appear as though they are similar properties – they are both blogging tools, right? Wrong.

Jump inside LJ culture. People who use LJ talk about their LJs, not their blogs. They mock bloggers who want to be pundits, journalists, experts. In essence, they mock the culture of bloggers that use Six Apart’s tools. During interviews with LJ/Xanga folks, i’ve been told that MovableType is for people with no friends, people who just talk to be heard, people who are trying too hard.

I saw the LJ acquisition as a way to break into the 12-18 year old market segment of the population, but didn’t think much about it until I heard Project Comet (now named Vox, an awful name that I will refuse to use in this entry) was coming out soon. Comet is the new lifestyle publishing platform coming from Six Apart, which they describe as “combin[ing] the publishing power of TypePad, the community aspects of LiveJournal and the years of insight garnered from Movable Type.” I anticipated that Comet would be a way to merge the free LJ users into a TypePad-esque payment structure, but now that screenshots of Comet are out I can see that they’re taking it a few steps further… Comet will be taking on AIMPages and MySpace for a slice of the youth audience pie.

The Draining Pro Market

I’ve compared Movable Type to WordPress previously because I feel WP is snatching up the professional end of the Six Apart user base right from under their noses. For the past 3 years, rumors and chatter have been surrounding 6A in the professional development community regarding their Pro version that was “in the works”. Supposedly this Pro version of Movable Type would allow for more advanced content management functionality, a dynamic and customizable template system, fully changeable user permissions, and more “pie in the sky” stuff that professional MT developers (like myself) have been dreaming about. Unfortunately, when Movable Type 3.0 came out in 2004, it had a lot of surface improvements like a beautiful new interface and standards support, but the advanced pro functionality wasn’t in there yet. The disappointment reminded me a lot of the late-90s, when Apple fanatics were anxiously awaiting Apple’s rumored Copeland OS but were instead given Mac OS 8 which didn’t include all the cool stuff that was hoped for.

Fast forward to now: MT 3.2 is out (with MT 3.3 in beta testing, coming soon) but the more advanced CMS functionality that pro developers have been waiting for doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. Many developers awaiting the MT Pro release have made the switch to WordPress, with more switching almost every day. As a developer who still prefers Movable Type, seeing all my friends and clients talking about using WP on their blogs makes me feel like I’m the dinosaur who doesn’t see the meteor heading to Earth.

Go Where The Money Is

To me, “Web 2.0″ is about the anti-enterprise, the anti-establishment, the anti-business, among many other things. Although MySpace doesn’t have any fancy fading DHTML effects or a Ruby on Rails backend, it’s very much a “Web 2.0″ company in the sense that it lets its users do whatever they want, however they want to do it, and basically just sits back and observes. Unlike many other “Web 2.0″ companies though, MySpace actually makes money so that’s where the similarities end ;)

Six Apart’s Project Comet seems like it’s going after the growing MySpace segment of the population — the kids in middle school through high school who are responsible for so much of the economy. Comet is giving them the features they want: photo gallery integration, your friend’s content on your site, letting only “your friends” view your pages (the exclusivity/clique thing is always key), and many more youth-targetted options. Comet isn’t catering to the pro developer who craves advanced functionality, it’s catering to the MySpace crowd and the money that crowd brings with it.

A New Business

I truly feel as though Six Apart has now totally separated itself from the wishes of the pro development community, the community that put Movable Type up on its shoulders back in the mid-to-late 1990s. If no MT Pro version is around the corner (with the functionality we’ve been promised for the past 3 years) then 6A’s new game plan is completely apparent, and that’s to go where the money is and forsake those that supported you when you were a fledgling bunch of code written by one Perl hacker in his spare time. I can’t say that I blame 6A for their new strategy as it makes a lot of sense financially, but I feel let down that the bright blue skies and crystal clear water of Movable Type Pro may never be seen by these eyes.

Movable Type

I’ve been a Movable Type user since May 2003, and was also one of the very first beta testers invited to checkout Typepad (my username is just “mike”) before it launched, so suffice to say I’ve been working with it for a pretty long time. I still prefer Movable Type to WordPress, but the gap is shrinking a bit. Here are my favorite features that MT offers:

• A professional user interface. MT is a commercial product, so it’s no surprise that the software’s administrative user interface is clean and polished. As a designer and blogger who spends a good amount of time staring at a Movable Type backend UI, I absolutely appreciate the time and effort put into the look and feel of it. The icons were all custom-designed, form elements are laid out in a usable manner, and it’s just a very solid-feeling piece of software.
• A great template tag system. Movable Type’s tag language is extremely easy to learn if you already know XHTML, just because all the tags basically look like XHTML. Outputting data is easy: ex: <MTEntryTitle$> gives you the entry’s title. Movable Type tags are setup such that tags that start and end with dollar signs ($) spit out an actual data value, whereas tags that do not have dollar signs are container tags, that loop through data: ex: <MTEntries> loops through your weblog entries, <MTCategories> loops through your categories, etc. It’s very natural and intuitive once you start working your own templates.

Okay, now what I don’t like about MT:

• Old technology. This is the kicker. Movable Type is a bit like Windows XP in the sense that its underpinnings aren’t up-to-date — MT still has a large Perl backend, and Windows XP still runs on NT kernel — it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. Back when MT was developed (late 90s I believe) I’m sure that the reasoning behind using Perl was two-fold: Ben Trott was a killer Perl programmer, and PHP wasn’t installed on as many web servers (nor was it as popular) as it is now. Unfortunately, the Perl backend has been showing its age and the results of that are slow rebuild and publishing times. The latest version of MT had a major code rewrite, however when that came out WordPress was gaining some major steam so it might have been too little too late.
• Static publishing. Up until the latest release, all your pages needed to be generated before they could be viewed through the usage of a parsing engine that rendered HTML and stored it statically on the server. Pages were not generated on the fly, and once again, MT’s core was written back when weblogs were first coming out, so it would have been difficult to imagine a weblog with 10,000 entries back then. After people were using MT for a few years and built up a large cache of entries under their belts, they started griping that rebuild and publishing times were extremely slow. Six Apart took the steps necessary to rebuild the core of MT for the 3.2 release, however by that time WordPress was really popular and solved all the problems that hardcore MT users had. MT v3.2 might have been too late.

  Update: Just so everyone is clear here, I’m not saying that dynamic publishing is the silver bullet for all your slow loading woes, in fact, it could put even more of a strain on your server depending on load and how your DBMS is configured. The real key is having the most popularly-loaded pages kept as static (no SQL queries to bog things down) and possibly other pages still dynamic since loading times won’t be as much of an issue.

WordPress

Although I’m more versed with Movable Type, I’m very plugged into the active WordPress community through 9rules. Some of the most well-known WordPress themes were designed by 9rules members and friends of mine, I hangout with Matt whenever we’re at the same conference, and the 9rules Network actually runs on a unbelievably customized WordPress install. 9rules is basically the mecca of all WP development on this planet, so naturally I’m working with or talking about WP a lot. I like a lot of things about WordPress, here are a few:

• Dynamic publishing and general speediness. WordPress has dynamic publishing on by default, meaning that all pages are accessed and generated on-the-fly via an SQL query. This may not be the best idea for sites with extraordinarily high volumes (aka Google, Yahoo, etc.), however for just about every blogger out there it’s absolutely perfect. WP is very fast, publishes quickly, and is a very stable piece of software. Unlike MT, WP is built completely with PHP so it is future-proofed so to speak.
• Strong and active community. There are few open source projects in the world that have as strong a following as WordPress does. Every single user is an advocate, every designer an enthusiast, and you can hardly walk around the blogosphere without tripping over a WP plugin that does something interesting or useful.
• Blog themes. Although some people now think that weblog themes (I like to call them “website designs” but maybe I’m crazy) should all be free based on the abundance of WP blog themes, it’s still a big positive to see how many themes are available. Unfortunately, the most popular WP themes are pretty plain, which lends to their popularity because they can be used for any purpose and customized fairly easily. Personally, I’m not sure I would design a WP theme and give it away for free, for the simple facts that I’m really busy and also wouldn’t spend time on a (non-charity) project without getting paid, but I can see the allure for younger designers trying to gain a foothold or get some recognition. I’ve spoken to many of my designer friends, and some also think that way, where others are parlaying their newfound WP theme popularity into paying gigs. I’m still waiting for when more well-known designers (Doug Bowman, Shaun Inman, Jason Santa Maria, Didier Hilhorst, Dan Cederholm, Jeffrey Zeldman, Andy Budd, D. Keith Robinson, etc., etc.) put out a WP theme, but somehow I doubt that will happen, for the reasons I stated above.
• Page templates. These are really useful for blogs, especially when “About Us” and “Contact” pages are used so frequently. Yes, you could achieve the same effect with MT and include files, but WP Pages are built-in and easy to use.

And now, WordPress negatives:

• Unprofessional or “unfinished” look. Before the current 2.0 release, the WordPress admin user interface lacked polish and looked clunky, ill-conceived. The padding around the navigation shelves on the top of the page was so squished together that I’d constantly miss the “Theme Editor” link because it blended in. The current release is a lot better in terms of usability and design, however Movable Type’s admin user interface is light years past WP. You can install your own admin themes but out of all those available from the WP site, Steve’s Smith’s Tiger theme is the only one that 1) looks any different from the default admin theme, or 2) is usable and cool. So many people work on WP blog themes but few tackle the real feat of making the user interface look good.
• Template tags are PHP code. Many new bloggers choose WordPress because it’s easy to install and they can choose a theme pretty easily. But how many of those bloggers go into the theme and mess with it (beyond CSS or header images) aka changing the code around, switching how things output data, etc.? I would guess not many, just because you have to know your way around PHP a bit in order to manage changes like that. Movable Type has a strong, built-in template tag system (which is easier to implement in a pre-parsing system like MT, versus a live-parsing system like WordPress) that is very easy to use, whereas WordPress opts for quick PHP snippets to do the trick. Don’t get me wrong, I know PHP really well and none of the WP coding phases me, but from the standpoint of your typical blogger, HTML-like tags might be easier to figure out rather than WP’s PHP syntax. Of course that could just be the opinion of somebody used to how MT does things, so take with a grain of salt.

The Verdict?

It seems to me that unless Six Apart really gets its act together and revitalizes the entire Movable Type application, codebase, and community, new bloggers will no longer use MT but will use WordPress instead, a change that’s already happening. WP’s active development and range of free blog themes to choose from are extremely inviting to new bloggers. I know that a very nice WP admin theme is currently brewing so we’ll have to see if it can live up to the standard that MT has set.

The Blog Herald was recently sold to a private buyer, however in the SitePoint auction it was listed as having 750,000 pageviews per month, with an Alexa ranking of 26,607 (now it’s 21,586 at the time of posting.) Okay, well let’s compare that to the Alexa ranking for 9rules.com, a site that receives only about half as many pageviews as The Blog Herald supposedly receives which is about 300-400k pageviews per month. Well Alexa tells us that 9rules’ rank is 21,772 which is less than 200 ranks lower than The Blog Herald, a site that is said to receive more than double our traffic! Well either the traffic of TBH is grossly overestimated, or Alexa is messed up. Here’s a graph comparing the last few months of traffic on Blog Herald vs. 9rules:

9rules is in blue, TBH in red, and as you can see we’re pretty much even except for those 9rules traffic spikes in December and January. So for a site that receives 3/4 a million pageviews per month, Alexa is reporting their pageviews graph much lower. I’m going to come out and say that Blog Herald’s traffic is probably much higher than 9rules.com’s (to be expected, at least in our fledgling company’s first few months) so it seems that Alexa is a bit off here.

Now as a comparison, I’m going to put Business Logs up against Paul’s extremely popular Damn I’m Cute celebrity/gossip weblog. I’m staring at Paul’s stats right now via StatCounter, and I know for sure that he receives between 25-40k pageviews per day, depending on who links to him or what pictures he makes public. Now compare that to Business Logs’ daily traffic, which is extremely low — less than 3k pageviews per day. 25,000 vs. 3000, it should be an easy battle:

Alexa is off again! I know for a fact that Paul’s weblog does nearly 10x the traffic that Business Logs does, however in the graph it’s nearly even or Business Logs is ahead for most of it. That makes no sense to me.

So is Alexa a good way to measure sites’ traffic relative to other websites, probably not. But that won’t keep everybody from using it :)

Niall Kennedy, MT genius, has.

Thank you so much Niall, this little bug was so annoying because I had no idea what I was doing wrong, but now I and other MT coders/designers can fix it. BTW: Check out the custom comment preview and submit images at Niall’s site — they finally see the light of day!

Unfortunately, the product really isn’t ready for prime time use. [...] Flock is horribly slow – at least on OS X – and worse, the feature set is really really confusing. Firefox, even when it was a 0.x release, was ten times more mature. Maybe that’s why it hit 100M downloads – it works! [...] My suggestion is to keep it simple, guys. Give me something that makes my life easier, not harder. So thumbs down for now, but I will give it another look when you ship.
— Steve Rubel

I’ve only used it for a little while, but I definitely noticed the speed lags. Safari is my primary browser, and for me to make the switch to Flock, it will have to be faster than Safari is — a tall task indeed.

Many were anxious to take a look at the product, and were even willing to overlook a sloppy demo at the Web 2.0 conference. Flock started life as Round Two with a focus on security extensions but quickly changed its game to being a social browser. What it means is that the browser integrates social apps like del.icio.us, Flickr, RSS readers and blogging tool. On paper, this makes absolute sense, but then reality and concepts rarely have much in common. So what does the world at large generally think of this? The early verdict is that there is no verdict. [...] Maybe I will get used to Flock later (UI is pretty nice), but for now I find scratching my head, wondering if this will ever be my permanent browser.
— Om Malik

I have to confess, however, that I’ve messed with it and been largely unimpressed. It is nowhere near as feature-rich as my preferred browsing tool, Maxthon, and the only interesting distinct feature, integrated blog posting, consistently screwed up commas and quotes when posting to this site. While I’m not convinced Flock is a pure raise-VC-money ploy, as some cynics think, I’m also not very excited by what I’ve seen.
—Paul Kedrovsky

And don’t get me started, even, about the little fake applications that launch before the actual browser launches. Something appears in the Dock, starts bouncing, then disappears. Something else appears, then immediately disappears. Then, nothing happens. Just as you start thinking “maybe it crashed”, the actual program starts running. What’s up with this? [...] Thus, harsh as it may be, my judgement after just four minutes of using this piece of software is: it sucks. And I don’t expect it to suck much else in version 1.0 either.
— Soeren Kuklau

Brian Benzinger reviewed Flock over at Solution Watch and gave it a fairly positive review:

Flock did a good job at sticking to the basic structure of a browser and basically looks like a beautified Firefox, but with extra features. The buttons on the navigation bar has the basic back, forward, refresh, and home button. But you also get a few new buttons such as a button to open the blog editor, the favorites manager, and the star button to star a site. [...] The blog editor actually surprised me on what can be accomplished with it. [...]
— Brian Benzinger

Flock PR Tastes Del.icio.us!

One of the things that Brian mentions later in the post is that when you first open Flock is syncs your favorites to your del.icio.us account somewhat automatically. If you have tried Flock, you see that the browser adds a few extra favorites by default which include the Flock homepage as well as the Five Ways To Get Started page. Nothing out of the ordinary yet…

…except it adds Flock links to your favorites and then syncs with delicious, which has made Flock links #1 and #2 at the delicious popular links page. So basically, the Flockers have hijacked the popular rankings at the most popular social bookmarking site in the entire world because of bad code. Or was it bad code? Did they plan on doing this so they could tip the leaning tower of buzz over a bit more? Regardless of the reasoning, that’s just bad form. I suggest waking your employees up and getting this fixed ASAP before your reputation is FUBAR.

I like MovableType so I like to use it to power full-blown websites that may or may not include a weblog, and may or may not include additional pages outside of a weblog. Unfortunately, when used to provide a backend for a portfolio, an image gallery, a company bio page, a FAQ section, every piece of content you’re writing for those non-weblog areas is still referred to as a post, when it’s clearly not. I’m not writing a “weblog entry”, I’m writing a “Company Employee Biography”. I’m not writing a “weblog entry”, I’m writing a “Branding Work Portfolio Example”. To get around these shortcomings, you can create additional weblogs within your MT install that all shoot out different include files, which are then cobbled together into what you need at the end. Step back from your deep weblog publishing roots for a second and look at this scenario: I’m essentially hacking together my own functionality, forced into naming conventions that honestly make no sense (“weblog entry” = “Software FAQ Entry”???), and then expected to do some PHP/template trickery in order to make the software work the way I want it to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this process lately, and it really doesn’t make sense to me.

The naysayers will tell me that it’s a MovableType-specific shortcoming, but it’s really not. WordPress works on the same concepts as MovableType, but it has custom fields. “Custom fields” do not equal “custom content template.” I don’t want to add additional fields to a “weblog post”, I want to define my content with my own fields and metadata titles, whether it be a weblog post, an image gallery, or whatever. This isn’t a WP-specific shortcoming, but rather a shortcoming for all weblog software. As soon as a content management application targets weblogs, then it’s all over. You now have no options and can only write “weblog posts” that have categories, keywords, a summary, and maybe some custom fields. Want to put together a dynamic employee biography page? Go ahead and start writing some weblog entries with the employee’s name stuck in the “Weblog Entry Title” field and their manager’s name put in a custom field called “employeeManagerName”.

If I want to have a dynamic company employee page, then I want to have one that makes sense to me, and to my client who will probably be updating it once we hand it over:

“Now remember, Most Important Client We Have, when you’re updating your employee biography page with a new employee, make sure to put their name in the ‘Weblog Entry Title’ field, their job title in the ‘Weblog Post Excerpt’ field, their background information in the ‘Weblog Entry Body’ field, their building number in the ‘Weblog Entry Extended’ field, and the rest of their information into the custom field boxes.”

Not only does this sound unprofessional, but what if they screw it up? Your $XX,XXX website design probably won’t look right if they put the employee’s full job description in the wrong place, and then your site template stuffs it into an H2 tag because it can’t adapt to user error. See what I’m getting at?

How To Deal

This isn’t MovableType’s fault, this isn’t WordPress’s fault, this isn’t TextPattern’s fault, and it’s not Blogger’s fault. I’m not placing any blame on the weblog software company’s laps, because it has nothing to do with them. They make content management software that works with weblogs, so why not make it work with weblogs?

Unfortunately, if I want to define custom content, make custom content templates and template tags, I need to jump up to enterprise class CM software territory, but what if I still want to run a weblog? What if I need weblog functionality (comments, trackbacks) but need it to be robust enough to handle my employee biography page with fields and dropdown menus named “Employee Name”, “Job Title”, “Team Name”, and “Building Number”? What if I want the software to be robust and flexible enough for me to define its functionality?

Now that’s a question I’d like to tackle. Anyone have an answer?

A detail of note here: Many browsers comply with most of UAAG, and we have a few thousand sites more or less accurately claiming to comply with WCAG, but nothing whatsoever complies with ATAG, including demo projects created by the W3C itself, like Amaya.

We could sit around and wait for inconsequential and minor products like Amaya to comply, or we could go big right away. Movable Type is pretty big, isn’t it? And aren’t they committed to standards compliance and accessibility, at least on paper?

Joe is referring to the A List Apart interview where Anil discussed TypePad’s concerns for accessibility and web standards. Joe’s point being that content generating tools like Movable Type and TypePad should adhere to the ATAG guidelines because they’d be an amazing example of highly-accessible products. I’d have to agree.

Paul wrote about how just having a weblog isn’t the only thing needed for it to be successful. The design and aesthetic appeal of a website still counts for something, doesn’t it? I can’t tell you how many corporate blogs, weblog companies, or “important weblogs” are still run by a slightly-modified Movable Type, TypePad, or WordPress templates. If someone can’t put the time into making their weblog look like it didn’t just jump out of a “Start Your Blog Now!” box, then what makes me think they’ll take the time to write for it? If you don’t have a designer on your team, then please, for the sake of all users, find a nice designer and outsource the design of your blog to them. Don’t skimp on the design, it’s not worth it.

Take the time to do more than just take the “off the shelf” route. True, get up and going, but as much as writing is about comminication, so is design.

“We were able to create pricing that enables us to invest more
in the development of Movable Type while also removing the
limitations that many users felt were too restrictive.
And, ultimately the new licensing is simpler to understand
and more flexible in how you can use the tool.”

— Mena Trott, Co-Founder of SixApart

The new agreements state that any paid licensing
scheme allows for an unlimited number of weblogs, clearing
up the somewhat confusing terms of contract originally posted.

We feel that 6A handled
the situation like a champ. They took in user feedback, didn’t react
irrationally, and came up with a great solution for their great software.