ELCA Web and Multimedia Development Blog

Tips and other useful ideas

Facebook Ads

Posted on February 27th, 2009 by Len Mason


I read an article today that made me aware of a great option that Facebook offers companies wanting to connect to more people through social apps. Facebook has recently added Facebook Ads to their list of offerings on their site. Some of the differences from their normal Facebook pages are that much more information about the company can be highlighted, and that there are many more chances for connections with potential customers to be formed. Here is an example from AT&T. Notice all the options available that are not available in a normal Facebook page, such as the Latest News sidebar.

As part of an organization trying to leverage social apps to build community, I welcome specially designed pages for organizations and companies. But Facebook and MySpace and sites like these need to offer a free or greatly reduced fee option for organizations that need a page like this. It is hard enough to take a page that is geared for an individual and design it to reflect a professional organization. This recent “pay to play” direction these sites are taking will only widen the gap between non-profits with cash and those without. Facebook would do well to offer this design to the non-profit world.

  • Share/Bookmark

WordPress as your Low-budget CMS

Posted on February 23rd, 2009 by Len Mason


Companies and even mainline denominations have been known to spend thousands and even millions of dollars to get control of their growing Web site. If you have ever owned a site, maintained a site, or even contributed to a site, you know that it can be very cumbersome to keep it fresh. But how can someone on a limited budget get a hold on its Web site that seems to be getting out of control?

If you have ever blogged and thought, “This is so easy! I wish I could update my Web site this way?” then you may be happy to hear that you can. WordPress is a wonderful blogging platform that can be used as a Content Management System for small to moderate Web sites. The application is free and can be installed on your server. Most hosting companies such as MidPhase offer shared servers for a low price and include WordPress.

There are two main things that make WordPress a great budget CMS and different from other blogging platforms. One is the ability to create static pages. These pages are not posts in a blog, but rather actual pages you can create navigation around. This is half the battle in reinventing your blogging platform into a CMS. You can choose to incorporate a blog into your site, or leave it out altogether.

The second thing that really makes WordPress a great choice is the support of Community. There are thousands of themes that the WordPress community has created that are easy to install to give your site a custom look. If you are even a bit savvy in CSS, you can tweak a theme to look like whatever you like. A good place to look for themes is here, but a simple search will show you many more. WordPress also allows user-created plugins. Say you want to show your Twitter status in the sidebar of your new WordPress site, you can! Just add the Twitter plugin! For more about plugins, click here.

Have you had some experience with WordPress? I’d love to hear from you. I look forward to your comment!

  • Share/Bookmark
-->