Mobile blogging with my iPhone is possible, and easy, with the WordPress iPhone app. It’s a free application that makes blogging from your iPhone as easy as text messaging.

Parts of this post were used in an article I wrote for Work.com

In my years of website development, I’ve typically seen two scenarios when it comes to small business websites.

The first scenario is the do-it-yourself business owner who learns just enough HTML to cobble together a website either from scratch or from some template or model site. Typically, the website is just adequate, and maybe not quite as professional looking as expected. “But it’s just temporary until I get the time to really do it right,” says the owner. Often the site remains neglected because additions and modifications are just too cumbersome.

The second scenario is the business owner who is willing to spend some money on a web developer to create a site. In this case, often the website ends up costing more than expected. Additionally, the business owner typically becomes dependent on the web developer for any future additions or modifications, making the costs even higher.

Both of these scenarios are far from ideal.

If you find yourself in or contemplating either of these scenarios, I suggest you consider creating your website with WordPress. Whether you do it yourself, or hire a developer, WordPress turns out to be an excellent website creation and management system.

Bloggers have long known of the benefits of WordPress’s  feature set in creating a blog. However, recent upgrades to WordPress have transformed it into an excellent tool for both easily creating and maintaining a small business website.

The beauty of a WordPress site:

• large selection of free themes
• easy interface, even for beginners
• makes additions and changes simple and quick
• extended feature set from plugins
• large and increasing support community
• it’s free

Themes Define The Foundation of Your Site
Once WordPress is installed on your host, you’ll need to carefully decide on a theme. There is a vast selection of free themes (see below) that offer a huge variety of layouts (2,3, and 4 columns) and colors. Take some time to carefully understand the format needs of your site and try to match a theme which most closely fills those needs.

You can also choose from a large selection of commercial themes (typical cost: $30-100). Generally, the commercial themes are a bit more polished and have cleaner code.

The theme becomes the foundation of your site’s look-and-feel and functionality, so it’s most important to take the time to find or develop a theme that works for your business.

Plugins Define The Functionality
There is also a huge selection of plugins (see below for plugin resources) which add or extend functionality to your WordPress site. Many plugins are designed for the blog, but there are plenty which help turn WordPress into an excellent website management system.

A few of the especially good plugins:

• All in One SEO Pack  - search engine optimization
• Audit Trail  - check the work of multiple authors
• BackUpWordPress  - the all-important scheduled backups
• Broken Link Checker  - find those broken links
• Google XML Sitemaps  - help Google find your pages
• Widget Logic  - customize the sidebars

The Beauty Is In The Simplicity
What makes WordPress especially attractive to the small business owner is the simplicity of site maintenance. The interface in WordPress is simple, and easy to learn. As this screenshot shows, if you are familiar with basic formatting in a text editor, you are well on your way to understanding the WordPress interface.

The WordPress Interface

Training & Tutorials
Over the next month or so, I will be developing, marketing and selling a training package based on my experience with creating sustainable websites with WordPress. I will detail my process, the tools used, the themes and plugins I found most valuable, and the resources I found that were particularly helpful.

Since I am primarily a visual-based learner, this package will make generous use of graphics. I will also produce a video series as part of this package, which takes you through narrated video screenscraps of the most important configuration and maintenance steps.

Stay tuned…

Resources:

• A nice collection of free WordPress themes can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
• A large selection of WordPress plugins can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

If you’re interested in having a website which runs on OS X, having full control of the server with multiple fail-safes and redundencies, and a very large pipe to it, then you might want to consider the offerings from MacMiniColo.net.

These folks are part of a larger operation run by Switch Communications in Las Vegas, Nevada. Switch runs one of the biggest high-speed data centers in the country.

MacMiniColo specializes in running MacMini servers with OS X server. You can send them your MacMini, or buy one from them. The monthly costs start at $35, and go up from there depending on what add-on services you require.

While you can certainly get hosting packages for less then this, remember that your site will be the only one on your server. Also, these guys offer a very fat pipe to your server.

Check them out: http://www.macminicolo.net

I’ve done web design and development for over 10 years. In the past, it was done in the typical way: I design and develop the site for a client, and deliver and launch the site. Then, typically, every time an addition or change is needed, the client must come back to me because they don’t want to invest the time into learning DreamWeaver, CSS, XHTML, PHP, etc.

This was expensive for the client, and not very interesting work for me once the original site was complete.

So I’ve been working on a new model of site design for small businesses which uses opensource (free) software and allows website owner (or staff) to easily login and make changes or additions to the site. I’ve developed a design technique and process, using all opensource software, which allows me to design smart looking sites that are easy to navigate, have a high level of functionality, and have a simple backend user interface for maintenance.

This translates to considerable savings for the business over the long run, more internal control of the website for the business, and it allows me to focus on site design and development rather than site maintenance.

I am putting together this process with a training component for small business owners who want to create a website.

Please email me if you are interested in this model for your business.

A new survey conducted by Yankee Group Research Inc. of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives revealed that nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house. This number is up from the last survey in 2006 which indicated that 47% of businesses had in-house Macs.

Two interesting details of this survey are:

1. 21% of the firms surveyed reported having delpoyed more than 50 Macs (some ranged into the thousands)
2. 28% of the firms reported running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs

Clearly, virtualization software has helped catalyze this trend towards Mac delpoyment. The two leaders in virtualization software are VMware Inc. (their product is Fusion) and Parallels.

In business and in education, there is an increasing trend towards making the Mac the platform of choice. The one unfortunate side-effect from this trend may be the increased (although minimal) exposure of the Mac OS to hackers’ efforts.

I usually refrain from posting “theoretical” OS X exploits since they rarely pose any real threat to Mac users. However, several sources are now reporting multiple Mac Trojan horses in the wild. These Trojans exploit a root vulnerability in Apple Remote Desktop Agent in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

This exploit has been rated as “critical”, but it does require that a user download and open the Trojan file.

Pay attention, folks. We knew that Macs would come more and more into hackers focus as market-share grew.

See more information at the SecureMac site.

Apple announced OS X 10.6 named Snow Leopard as more of a performance release rather than a feature release.

Some of the announced changes include a smaller footprint (giving back some hard drive space), Microsoft Exchange support, extended 64-bit support to allow a theoretical 16TB of RAM, faster clock speeds with the multicore “Grand Central” technology, and QuickTime X which includes optimized support for the latest codecs.

It’s not known yet whether Snow Leopard is the beginning of dropped support for PowerPC by Apple. Several developers are reporting that their developer preview copy runs only on Intel machines.

The rumors are that this will be a free upgrade, but that hasn’t been announced yet.

It’s been around for awhile now, but I don’t see much mention of it. GOOG-411 is a great 411 service that is free and convenient.

From any phone you dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), when you connect to the system you say out loud the city and state. Then you say the name of the business or the business type. The system quickly returns the top listings, letting you choose one. Then it automatically dials the number for you.

Like most of Google’s services, it’s simple, elegant and very useful. GOOG-411 is on my iPhone’s favorites and is a service I use often.

For more information, check out their site and the quick video: GOOG-411

It appears that identity theft has hit Apple’s iTunes store.

ComputerWorld is reporting in their article Phishers point scam at Apple’s iTunes that some people are receiving email messages telling them that a problem must be corrected in their iTunes account. The email contains a link to a bogus iTunes billing page, requesting the user re-enter their information, including credit card number, security code, and other information for identity theft.

iTunes Store users beware.

Several sites are now reporting that Apple will launch the 3G iPhone sometime in June, 2008.

This is really no a great surprise since rumors of the 3G iPhone have been around since before the last iPhone release. The interesting buzz is about the possibility that AT&T may offer subsidies of as much as $200 on this phone for a two-year contract. If that’s the case, this would bring the 8GB down to $199 and the 16GB down to $299.

The other buzz is that the new phones will have a slightly different form factor. Early rumors suggested the phone would be slightly thicker. But more recent rumors suggest the new iPhones will be 9.2mm thick, compared to the current 11.7mm thickness. So, I guess this means that they’ll either be thicker or thinner. Such is the nature of rumors.

Unfortunately, I just bought my 16GB iPhone a few months ago. So. I’ll not likely be getting one of these next generation iPhones this year. Perhaps it’s better to first hear reports of the 3G network,  and determine whether or not it will make a difference in my area.