Website pages allow you to communicate more information with your potential customers more than traditional print marketing.  In the same way that direct sales are interactive marketing tools a website can give you a way to dynamically interact with your customers.  This interactivity helps to build trust and strengthen relationships and persuades potential prospects to become paying clients.  Some things you can do to increase interactivity on a site include:  signing up for a newsletter, a free report, or giving away other information.  Anything you can do to keep your future clients interested will increase its effectiveness and without the costs of traditional printing.  There are no distribution costs, postage or wasted paper.  (One note: Don’t disregard print marketing if it is the only way to reach your target market).  Communicating more information faster and cheaper is the goal of marketing efficiency and a good website or blog can accomplish this.  Just remember to keep the communication fresh and valuable, so your customers and prospects will keep coming back to your site.

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director

Web Hosting Recomendations for Wordpress Users

There are many of web hosting companies to choose from, and it can be confusing when trying to select one for a business website.  For those use any of the WordPress, we thought it would be helpful to provide a list of web hosting companies we recommend using. These companies are all dependable and easy to work with.

Blue Host:  WordPress Auto-Install, 1500 GB disk storage, free domain name, 2500 POP / WebMail addresses, 15,000 GB/mo transfer, host unlimited domains on 1 account, 50 MySQL databases, free control panel, free Fantastico, free SimpleScripts, 24/7 network monitoring, 99% uptime guarantee, mirrored storage backups, no hidden fees, voted best support from 2004-2008!

Categories can provide your blog with rich keywords which attract search engines to your blog like bees to honey.  Search engines see your categories as keywords that are relavent to the content that you publish, so it is important to pay attention to how you name your categories.

Your categories need to be both easy to navigate for the user and relavent to the content that you provide in your site or posts.  Instead of having a general category about Software, you may want to create multiple category names that corresond to the types of software you are blogging about.  For example:  Remote Desktop Software, Publishing Software, Antivirus Software, etc.  This will narrow the field for both your readers and the search engines.  You may also consider using a main category and then subcategories (or child categories) that give a few more details on what you are writing about.

Catergories use the custome permalink structure, so links to your WordPress categories become keyword tools to help search engines identify your content for their users.  Using custom permalinks gives you category page URL’s that may look like:

http://executive-edge.net/category/Web_Design/

It’s the Category_Name (Web_Design here) that helps the search engines identify the content for search engine optimization.

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director

How to Create a Static Front Page and give your site a CMS (content management system) feel

Worpress is built as a blogging platform and by default shows your most recent Posts on the front page of your site, but because WordPress is such an easy platform to use many people use it as a website tool.  In order to give your wordpress site the look and feel of a business website, you need to set up a  “static front page” or “splash page” as your front or home page.  This “static front page” look is great for those of us who want blog useability without giving our site too much of a ”blog” look to their site.  Unlike a traditional WordPress “blog” front page, which generates a list of your most recent posts, the “static front page” is a customized page that displays static content. It can be customized to direct people to featured content, or highlight posts, articles, categories, etc.

A point to remember when you create a static front page for your site is that you must also give WordPress a way to show your most recent posts in a “virtual directory”, wether or not you are actually using the posts in Wordpress.   You will be able to call it whatever you choose: Blog, News, Articles, etc.

Creating your Static Front Page (Splash Page)

Thankfully, setting up your static front page does not require editing or coding of files or templates and using the default configuration for a “static front page” in WordPress just changes the content area, but does not remove the sidebar or change the look of the entire site.

To create your static front page, go to your WordPress Adminsitration Panel (Dashboard).  You will be creating two new seperate pages called Home and Blog (Or whatever you choose)

1. Create two WordPress Pages from the “Add New Page” panel.
   1. Title one as “Home” (or another name) as your “static” front page.
      1. Set the “Home” template to the default template or any custom template.
      2. Add content you would like to see within the content area of the “Home” page.
      3. Publish the Page.
   2. Title the second one as “Blog” (or you could call it “News”, “Articles”, etc.). This page will be a place-holder for showing the Posts on your site.
      1. Do not use a custom Page template for this page!
      2. DO NOT add content to the Blog Page. Leave it blank. Any content here will be ignored — only the Title is used.
      3. Publish the Page.  

1. Go to Administration > Settings > Reading panel.
   1. Set which page will be designated the “front” page. Choose from display your latest blog posts on the “Blog” Page and “static page” for the “Home” Page.
   2. Save changes.

Next enable Permalinks to show the “page title” in the address bar

We are refering to this new page as a “static front page,” but you can change the content on that web page at any time by editing the Page in your WordPress Dashboard.

Final Note on Navigation Bars in differtent themes

Some themes have a top navigation bar containing links to the website pages.  By default most themes set “Home” as a link to the home page, and since you have created a separate page with the title “Home”, there is a likelihood of another link text appearing as “Home”.

To change it, edit the appropriate template file featuring the code of the navigation bar with the template tag wp_list_pages and set the parameters to change the link title.

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director

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