Archive for blog set-up
Keep it Simple
Posted by: | CommentsWhen I am building a blog or website, I often want to incorporate all of the latest bells and whistles into the site. Flash and slide shows, picture galleries, videos, etc. all intended to maximize the experience of people visiting the site. There are occasions (a lot of occasions), when the best thing to do is keep it simple. I just finished a site at ww.floridakeyselectricalcontractors.com for my newest Business Blog Consulting client. At this time, what they wanted was a simple, professional looking website, that would represent their business well. They had come to me me after a bad experience with another web company. Besides a new website, they also needed me to start developing online marketing strategies to help bring some organic traffic from the search engines to their website. Like a lot of businesses, their existing domain name didn’t offer them any help as far as search engines go. We picked a new domain name to anchor our SEO strategy and then pointed their existing domain name to the site.
In building the site I decided to use the WordPress Twenty Ten theme. This is about as simple as it gets. I added a Contact page, a Services page, and a new Home page. I used the existing About page and added some content about the company. I set the site as a static website, and installed the new Home page. I did a Google search for images about electricians at found three that I thought would work nicely. I took one of them and designed a new header and uploaded it to the site. I took the second image and made a nice Contact widget for the sidebar. I took the third image and used it to fill out the home page and linked it to the Services page.
I spent more time than I should have tinkering with the code to make the nav bar appear to light up when you went to click on a page. I thought this would be a nice touch for an electricians website. This would have probably gone a lot faster if it hadn’t been really late at night while I was tinkering. So, here is the new site for Florida Keys Electrical Contractors:
Blog Consulting with Wordpress
Posted by: | CommentsHere on Blog Consulting, I recommend using Wordpress as a content management system for our clients. It is a very powerful web tool and it is extremely flexible. Part of that flexibility is due to a huge amount of plugins that are available that allow Wordpress blogs to be set up to do almost any task that comes up. Another great flexibility is the availability of a large number of themes which allow Wordpress to take on a variety of looks. A recent project called for a website to look a certain way and after a lot of research I found the perfect theme for the project, Wordpress Thesis.
The Thesis theme is recommended by a lot of blogging SEO types. I had read about the theme some time ago but never had the occasion to use it before, but with this new project it looked like it would be a perfect fit. So, after reading all the great reviews I purchased the developers version of the theme and got to work. At first, the theme made me feel really stupid. I have been working with Wordpress themes for quite a while and feel very confident when it comes to customizing them to get them to look and act the way I want them to. Thesis has a whole different way of doing things and it was a little overwhelming initially. I kept plugging away at it and over a couple of days it started to make sense. I could see why so many people had given the theme such high praise. I used the theme to build a skydiving website for Skydive Florida Keys. Here is what the Skydive Florida Keys website looks like with the Thesis Wordpress theme in place:
If you have a couple of minutes you should go and see the site in action. It has a nice slideshow running in the middle of the themes that introduces all of the Page options on the site. It also has a nice peel away in the top right corner which opens up encourage people to make a reservation. As far as Thesis goes, I believe it will become my go to Wordpress Theme, but I would suggest that blogging newbies start with some of the other themes that are available. Thesis is awesome, but it does require some previous experience to get it set up. The Thesis people do have an excellent support forum and I got responses to both of my big questions in less than twenty four hours.
