If you know me, you know that while building blogs is an unavoidable component of my social media consulting practice, I tell everybody that I’m not a web designer. In fact, I’m not.
I picked up HTML on my own around 1993 or so, about the time I discovered the Mosaic browser, the ancestor of Netscape, and there was a time, before WordPress, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, etc. when I used to code by websites by hand, or use things like Adobe GoLive or Dreamweaver to construct my own websites.
I confess, I didn’t keep up. I don’t have the level of CSS, PHP, Javascript, etc. skills my contemporaries (the real web developers) do. I was busy with other things—a job as a technical manager in a Silicon Valley company, then later building a photography business on my own, then a social media practice, and it wasn’t a priority for me. Flash forward to today, and the tools exist to build elegant websites without too much fuss and bother if you have a little grounding in old school web development.
A good social media strategy requires a content home base—something flexible and easy to post updates to, has an RSS feed, easy connections to social networks, and so on. In other words, a blog. As a consultant, I often need to build them for my clients, but their time is precious, as is mine, so I can’t spend a lot of time doing those builds. That’s not what my practice is about. It’s about strategy and positioning my client to be able to execute that through guidance, training and direction.
So it’s imperative that I pick tools that allow me to build elegant blogs without a lot of time and hassle. There’s no arguing that WordPress is the current day blogging platform of choice, but unless you can come up with a good theme, you’ll spend too much time working with the framework and not enough time on the content, which is really the thing you should be working on.
A year ago or so, I discovered Thesis by DIYthemes (affiliate link), and it has served me well in being able to get a blog up quickly. It still does. It does a lot of the heavy lifting, so I don’t have to spend time worrying about sizing columns, changing fonts or color schemes, etc. But different businesses have different needs, and sometimes your blog site needs something more from a marketing standpoint.
A few weeks ago, as I was looking for that solution, my friend Roxanne Darling turned me on to the Genesis Framework from StudioPress (affiliate link). I was intrigued, and used my photography site as the guinea pig to walk it through its paces. I was sold. I proceeded to overhaul my social media site too, and then I decided it was time to merge inacoolhour.com, my personal blog, into this one, and used it here too.
I still believe Thesis is a best of breed solution, and I will continue to use it where applicable, but if you have a more complex solution that goes beyond a blog and you need a flexible framework with child themes tailored to your situation, Genesis is a great way to go.
