Blog

Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of RaTS & Affiliates’ very first website. While we are excited about ALL of our new site launches, there’s something particularly fun about launching a business’ first ever website. RaTS founder Mark Lewis is a member of our BNI networking group and an all-around good guy, with many years of experience as a business consultant and franchising expert. He rightly realized that while he may be a traditional, face-to-face networker (and we’d never deny the power of the in-person connection!), the world has gone digital and it was time he did, too. We…

Creating and editing website pages may seem like a daunting task for those of us who are a little less tech savvy. Fortunately WordPress makes this task easy. If you can edit a Word document, you can certainly edit a webpage or blog post on a wordpress site. Start by logging in to your website. You can do this by going to www.yoursite.com/wp-admin (replace “yoursite” with your real domain name) and entering your WordPress username and password. You are now on your site’s Dashboard. There is a menu to the left where you will see options like posts, media, links, pages, etc….

Welcome to the slightly-delayed (thanks, holidays) fourth installment of my Organizing Your Blog series. Previously, we covered why you should organize your blog, how to set yourself up for success, and best practices for categories and tags. Today, we’re covering elements that improve the user experience on your site, keeping your readers around for longer and making them happier. Blog Organizational Elements to Improve User Experience Sidebar links: Now that you have good structures in place, make them work for you and your readers! Putting the tag cloud, category list or date archives in a sidebarthat appears on your blog is…

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about blog organization. I’ve covered why you should bother organizing your blog, the basics of setting up your blog, and today I’m covering the ever misunderstood Categories and Tags. Categories Categories are the filing cabinets of the blog. You should define a reasonable set of categories that do not overlap, are not overly specific, and will cover most if not all of the content you plan to have on the blog. Six to ten is plenty for the majority of blogs, and it’s often good to define only a couple of…

Last week I discussed why you should spend time organizing your blog. This week I’ll start telling you how to go about organizing your blog, starting from launch. Is a Blog/Has a Blog If you’re launching a new website, think about the overall structure at the beginning to save yourself time and hassle later. Do you want the home page to be a static page, or do you want it to have your most recent blog posts? Is this a blog site, or a site with a blog? The answers to these questions will determine the information architecture of your blog;…

There are many, many reasons that people write blogs. A few of the most common are personal blogs, blogs for the purpose of drawing in traffic to a site,  informational blogs and photo blogs. While personal blogs may have the luxury of not paying attention to organization, the majority of blogs do not. Why is Organizing Your Blog Important? You certainly can choose to not make use of categories, tags, date archives and URL structure to organize your blog. You have that option. However, even for a personal blog I wouldn’t recommend it. You might want to be able to…

It’s always a good day when I get to announce the launch of a new website, and this one has been a long time coming. The development of the Antonia Designs site has been plagued with vacations, indecision, and last minute changes as Antonia and I struggled to realize her vision within her budget. Ultimately I learned a lot in the process, which is always a good thing for me. The web is in no way static, and new solutions and options are always appearing when you least expect them. This was, for example, the first site that I built…

WordPress 3.4.1 appeared on most of the WordPress sites I work with over the last couple of weeks (this site included!). It brings with it a number of great new features, including: Live Preview for themes. This is going to make theme changes SO much less painful–you’ll be able to customize the new theme via the CMS before you launch it, reducing the ‘growing pains’ awkwardness of not having your theme look perfect on launch. Flexible headers: one annoyance I run into pretty often when working on a lightly customized theme is that the header size has to be changed…

WordPress is a wonderful, open source, flexible, user-friendly, mobile-friendly, SEO-friendly way to build a website. It’s what this site is running on, and it’s one of the most popular platforms on the web. However, this very user-friendliness comes with a price. The downfall of many things which are user-modifiable is that they are also readily user-breakable. Many people like to fault Apple for being a very closed system–and they are right, to a point. However, it is this closed system that lets Apple provide a highly functional and dependable computer with excellent customer service should you have problems. When building…

I recently had to research this question for a client–I knew the answer on a gut level, but needed the data to back it up. Turns out, it’s kind of hard to find. There’s a lot of information out there about what you should do with footer links. And there’s a lot of information out there about the practice of “keyword stuffing” (and if you’re still doing this in your site, please join us in this decade!). But there’s actually relatively little information about specifically stuffing your footer with keywords. Everyone wants to rank well for key terms that may be…