Most of you know, I am a big proponent for getting yourself a WordPress website. If you have a business, it is essential to have a place of your own, where people can find out exactly what you do and why they should work with you. If you don’t have a job, but are looking, then it can be a great way to set yourself apart from your competition and showcase who you are and what you do in a way a resume can never do. But if you haven’t got a web presence yet or, if you do, but want to have another place online to put your profile out there so that you or your business comes up in a Google search, check out About dot me.
About.me lets you quickly build simple and visually elegant splash pages that point visitors to your content from around the web. It is an easy and free way to have a web presence, where people can find you or your business and where to connect with you on various social media sites. If you already have a website, it is still a nice thing to have because it can come up in a Google search and connect with a link back to your website. Take a look at my About.me profile and then give it a try yourself.
About.me provides an easy interface with several templates and examples to help you with ideas. Upload a background and a photo, write your bio, add your social media sites and you are good to go. I’d love to see what you come up with!
Creative freelancers are passionate about what we do and spend a lot of time making other people’s businesses look great, but sometimes we are not as good about focusing on our own businesses.
It may be that you know what to do and are not doing those things, but with all the new technology and the way the Internet is changing the way people find people to do work for them, it may be that you need to cut through all of the haze and hype, and have someone tell you how all of this technology actually works together to help you powerfully connect with the people seeking your services.
Recently, I have been speaking on this subject a lot and have had a lot of request for my slides and notes from people who could not attend these events. So by popular demand, I am going one step better with presenting it as a free webinar with the audio and slides available below.
Follow along the audio with the slide presentation for Rock Your Business with a WordPress Website:
Learn my secrets of attracting plenty of the exact kind of clients that I want to work with and how you can do this too.
A Facebook “Like Box” on your website is a great way to increase the number of people who “like” your Facebook Page (these instructions are for sharing your “Page,” not your personal “Profile” account) by allowing them do so right from your WordPress website. In this post, we have shown two options to get the “like” box on your site. One is a simple Facebook “like” box and the other a tabbed container for Facebook “likes,” Twitter feed and RSS combined.
Here are the steps for adding just a Like Box to your website. I am assuming that you already have a Facebook Page set up for your business or event. If you don’t have a WordPress site, the concept will be the same, but the directions to adding it to your site will different. [click to continue…]
Plugins are little apps that extend the functionality of WordPress. The core of WordPress is designed to be lean, to maximize flexibility and minimize code bloat. Plugins offer custom functions and features so that each user can tailor their site to their specific needs. Since WordPress is an open source program, there are lots of people that develop plugins and offer them to the WordPress community, most of them for free.
Here are the ten essential WordPress plugins that I always include with each newly installed WordPress Website we build. For instructions and information on downloading, installing, upgrading, troubleshooting, and managing your WordPress Plugins, see Managing Plugins. You will want to activate each plugin that you import and then most of them have some easy configuration to take care of before they work. You can find their configuration areas on the dashboard after they are activated. [click to continue…]
When someone comes to your website, you have about 3-5 seconds for them to “get” whether they want to stay or leave. I believe that part of their assessment is whether or not they can ” know, like and trust ” you through your website. I have found that several factors go into building this first impression with your potential and your current clients. [click to continue…]
I won’t go into all of the many reasons you might want to move your blog from WordPress.com to self-hosted version which is available from WordPress.org. However, some of the reasons are:
your url is www.yoursitename.wordpress.com rather than www.yoursitename.com unless you pay extra to have your own domain mapped to that .com account.
limited to the 60 or so themes that come with the .com account.
cannot customize the themes.
limited to the plugins that come with the .com account which reduces functionality of your blog.
can’t easily hit a button after posting to send to twitter or facebook ( that is functionality available with many with .org plugins).
The list goes on. I am assuming that you have made the decision to make the switch. Now What? [click to continue…]
We have written before about the evolution of WordPress’s use as a website development platform rather than, what most people think, as just a blogging program. Using WordPress for websites is cutting edge Web 2.0 and takes advantage of WordPress’s use of a My SQL database. It then becomes a content management system, otherwise referred to as a CMS, which offers much more to a business than a traditional old skool static or Flash website.
Today, I want to bring you what I imagine must be the first song in history about using WordPress as a CMS. I know it is a little rough and I understand there is a new version coming out with much improved production quality. In the meantime, I bring you a performance by Charles Williams from the Dallas WordPress Camp:
I am Co-organizer of the Atlanta WordPress User's Group Meetup. We meet the third Wednesday of each month and try to have a little something for people at all levels.
Check it out! We now have almost 900 members!
