Website Development

Top 3 Pages That Should Be On Any WordPress Based Website

WordPress has come a long way in it’s journey as the #1 blogging platform out there today. As the features and functionality has increased over time, the possibilities for what can be done with WordPress as a website solution have increased. With today’s features, WordPress can be used to create an entire site in most cases in addition to just a blog. This article discusses which pages should be on a WordPress blog.

1. Landing Page

The landing page or home page, depending upon the type of web site, is critical in being able to convert your visitors to taking a specific action. It is very difficult to do that with a blog. When people land on your blog home page, they usually land on a page with a lot of content and nothing really directing them to do anything. If any of your blog titles happens to catch their attention, then when they click on a specific post, you may be able to convert that into an action, but only if your post is written up to do just that. If not, then you will just have a reader who may or may not come back to your site.

Having a landing page will allow you to prepare the visitor and guide them through the site the way you want them to go.

2. Contact Us Page

WordPress makes it easy to put a contact us form on your website that will get emailed back to you when the visitor submits the form. There are a few contact us plug-ins that give the website owner a lot of flexibility in getting the kind of feedback that will be most beneficial to them. One of the contact form plugins […]

By |October 7th, 2010|Website Development|0 Comments
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3 Advantages to Having an Ecommerce Business

1) Low Overhead

Running an online store requires much less monetary cost to maintain and operate than running a traditional brick and mortar storefront. The costs for an online presence include a shopping cart, merchant account, gateway, hosting, web hosting, domain name and secure certificate. A traditional brick and mortar storefront has to deal with rent, utilities, cleaning and maintenance costs, employees, merchant account and card reader at a minimum. Having a business online is better because the overhead is much lower than the offline counterpart.

2) Convenience

Having an online presence is much more convenient than having a physical storefront. Running your online business can be done from the convenience of your own home, on the beach, at the ski slopes, or in any remote office. All that is required is a computer and an Internet connection. It is also convenient because your online storefront is open 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It doesn’t require you be online because sales of products and services will occur without any human intervention.

A physical storefront requires that someone be in the store in order for business to take place. If no one is in the store to run the cash register, open the doors and serve the customers, then no business can happen. The business owner has to make sure either someone else or them self is available to manage the store.

3) Larger Market Base

An online business gives the business owner a much greater reach to their target market. Anyone from anywhere in the world can purchase your products and services directly from your web site. For physical products, an online merchant would want to have a […]

By |September 8th, 2010|Website Development|0 Comments
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Free WordPress eCommerce Plugins

Here are some free WordPress eCommerce Plugins.

These plugins are available for free and can be found at the Plugin repository on WordPress.org.

Ecommerce plugins come in both free and paid versions. The jury is still out on whether or not the paid plugins are better. The best way to understand which solution is best for the blog owner is do a feature/product comparison table and determine which plugin best fits those needs.

Some free ecommerce plugins:

Yak Shopping Cart – This plugin provides simple ecommerce capability to the blogging platform. Some of the features of this plugin include the ability to create products from posts or pages, configurable shipping, checkout widget, downloadable products multiple payment options, and ability to set promotions, among other features.

eShop – eShop offers customizable checkout, product options, downloadable products, multiple payment gateways, shipping options, automatic emails for purchasing and it’s compatible with WP affiliate for affiliate marketing. You are even given some inventory control as well.

Are Paypal – This plugin is more of a paid content type of plugin. Users of this plugin would use it to manage the payments of paid content on their blog. This plugin allows for subscription payments, bonus add-ons as well as standard one time access payments. What is nice is that google can search the hidden content so it can be indexed in the search engines.

More on Ecommerce shopping cart plugins:

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By |August 21st, 2010|Website Development|0 Comments
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Free WordPress Plugins That Will Take Your Blog To the Next Level

WordPress is a blogging platform and a content management system that provides an extreme amount of functionality for a very low lead in cost.  With some plugins, you can turn your blog into anything from an ecommerce site to a social networking site.  There are free solutions as well as solutions that are paid.  What is the advantage of the free solution?  Well it is free.  The free solutions allow the blog owner to get going at a low entry level.  The thing with these solutions the support for these plugins can be a bit spotty.  (It can for paid versions as well, but that is usually less likely.  Look at the reviews for the plugins before investing)

So what are these plugins that will take your blog to the next level?  And what exactly is that level?

Membership Site

If you want to turn your blog into a membership site then there are a couple of free plugins that you can use to do that.

1) Members is a free plugin that turns your site into a membership site.  Some of the features of this plugin include:

  • Edit Roles: Edit (and delete) specific roles and each role’s capabilities.
  • New Roles: Create new roles for use on your site.
  • Content Permissions: Control what roles have access to specific posts and pages.
  • Shortcodes: Use to restrict/allow access to content.
  • Template Tags: Functions to be used within your WordPress theme.
  • Widgets: A login form and user list widget for use in any widget areas.
  • Private Blog: Force visitors to log in before viewing your site.

You get a bit more flexibility with user status and content, but as you can see, you would need additional functionality to add payment plans to the site.

s2Member […]

By |July 4th, 2010|Website Development|1 Comment
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How to Start a Blog for a Life Success Coaching Business

The importance of a blog is that it provides many benefits to the owner of the blog, especially in the areas of branding, SEO, displaying their knowledge, and a means of connecting with their target market.  A blog is an important tool for many businesses, however it is especially useful for those in the coaching business.

For those in the life success coaching business, blogging is one tool that can really let you connect with your target market.  You can use your blog to discuss different life coaching topics and share with your readers how you would either coach someone through different life situations, or how you yourself would handle different life situations.  The later one is the more powerful as you are showing your reader that you are practicing what you preach.

So how does a life coach start a blog?  Here are the steps for both not having a website, and having one.

1)  Not having a website.

If you don’t have a website and don’t desire to get one, you can still start a blog for your business, and get leads for your business as well.

Here are the steps:

  • Decide on one of the online social blogging sites that allow you to register a blog.  There are free and paid sites.  For your purposes, a free blogging service will be more than adequate.  Some of the free blogging services out there are:
  • Once you have decided, choose name for your blog that is keyword focused (I.E. Denver Success Coach).  Begin blogging about different training topics related to Life Success Coaching.  Blog regularly (in the beginning, at least once a week), and you will begin to build up […]
By |December 21st, 2009|Website Development|2 Comments
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Fixing the Dreamweaver Unidentified Error When using the Data Objects

So If you have used Dreamweaver to do rapid development of a website, you will quickly learn of it’s limitations.  In areas it can shorten development time, and in other areas, it still requires good old fashioned programming knowledge to get the job done.

Well, in this last project I am doing, I require a database interaction (which means handling data entry forms as well as listing and updating as well.  This is one of the functions that Dreamweaver can save time on… a lot of time because it creates the tables and database update code for you.  Sure, there will be some minor modification that comes up, but it is much less by far than creating everything from scratch.

So what is required to use this functionality and where is it on Dreamweaver, and how do you avoid the “Unidentified error occurs when testing a PHP / MySQL connection”?

Before you even get started, you do need to have your database schema in place (all of your tables and even some of your data if needed).  You will need the usually database username, password, and localhost info available as well before you get started.

These are the steps I took to finally get this working and finally get rid of that Unidentified Error when trying to get the data objects working.

  1. Create database and tables on your host server
  2. Create a new site (or update one that is already there) within Dreamweaver
  3. Upload the server scripts into the directory “_mmServerScripts/”(or whatever you call your test server scripts directory)  at the same level as your /www directory on your server.  You won’t see this directory within Dreamweaver and will only be able to see it with another FTP Program.  You can […]

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By |October 9th, 2009|Website Development|1 Comment
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