Archive for the ‘Wordpress Stuff’ Category

Our sister site, Small Biz Web Whiz, now heads our design business. Please click this message to visit Small Biz Web Whiz for all of your design needs.

Yup, that’s right! I’m giving away one free website design every month! AND, it’s easy to enter! All you need to do is sign up for my newsletter by entering your email in the form over there to the right, or like the A Virtual Edge facebook page.

Now for the fine details. Winners are picked on the 15th of every month (please see 2010/2011 schedule below). Each winner will receive the Gettin’ Started WordPress design package for FREE! You can learn more about the package on our WordPress packages page, but it includes logo creation, customized WordPress website (including premium theme), a year of hosting ($35/year after that), and integration of your newsletter signup, social media buttons, google analytics, etc.

A random winner is selected from facebook or my newsletter list, depending on the month. It’s not just easy to enter, but occassionally I also provide subscriber-only specials, too!

Contest Schedule

Our sister site, Small Biz Web Whiz, now heads our design business. Please click this message to visit Small Biz Web Whiz for all of your design needs.

I am a BIG fan of the WordPress platform for building websites. It’s not that I don’t know how to code HTML, but there are just so many factors about WordPress that make it a superior choice over your typical HTML site. So, what’s so special about it? Why are so many people raving about it?

Why You Should Use WordPress:

1. Once you have your site customized, you don’t need to know code to update and maintain it. Yes, you will need to learn the WordPress platform, but it’s very intuitive and user friendly. If you have experience using Word, then you can quickly learn how to maintain your own website if it’s built on the WordPress platform. What most HTML website designers and developers don’t highlight is the fact that if you don’t know how to code HTML, you’re stuck contacting them every single time you have the smallest change to make on your website. You’re charged for this, and many times are subject to an hours minimum charge – even if the change only takes 5 minutes.
2. WordPress is an afforable way to get a professional online presence for your small business, and development time is quick! I know that small businesses, especially those just starting out, face a lot of challenges. You know you need a website, done at a price that won’t kill your budget, and you wanted to have it done yesterday. You can get all that with premium WordPress themes. The base of all my designs start with a premium WordPress theme, which is then highly customized to your specific business or needs. This not only saves me time since the majority of the code is already there, but this time savings is also what keeps the development cost to you affordable!
3. WordPress is SEO friendly. By using WordPress, you’re already helping your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts by using a system that was specifically built to be SEO friendly. It’s easy to name your URLs, change your page titles, use headings, add tags to images, and all sorts of other things that make the search engines happy.
4. Plugins offer nearly unlimited functionality to your website. Through the use of plugins, and there are thousands upon thousands of free plugins, new functions can easily be integrated into your website. There are plugins to integrate your various social media accounts, SEO plugins that offer even more SEO capabilities, membership site plugins, forum plugins, plugins to add polls, plugins to promote sharing of your content on various outlets… I could go on and on, but this is definitely one aspect of WordPress that just rocks.
5. It’s simple to integrate a blog into your website AND have it match the look of your site. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve landing on someone’s page, clicked “blog”, and was forwarded to a horrible looking WordPress.org or Blogger blog that didn’t match the look or feel of their site at all. Not to mention, blogs are EXCELLENT ways to be found for all types of key phrases… and people are doing it all backwards. For a small business, you don’t want to send your traffic to your blog page if it’s not actually on your website. The idea of a blog for small business owners is to give your visitors the ability to get to know you AND bring traffic to your site from your blog. This is another reason why I highly recommend WordPress. You might not be ready to blog now, but when you are, it’s easy to integrate it seamlessly.

There are so many other reasons why WordPress rocks, but those are the biggest and best ones!

Our sister site, Small Biz Web Whiz, now heads our design business. Please click this message to visit Small Biz Web Whiz for all of your design needs.

Need a quick, easy way to integrate your twitter feed? Install PB-Tweet and your most recent tweet will be highlighted at the top of your website. Any basic WordPress user can get this plug-in up and running on their website/blog in less than three minutes.

After you download it, which can be done through your WordPress installation, or it can be downloaded at PluginBuddy. Because it’s easy, I always download all my plug-ins through my WordPress installation.

After downloading the plug-in, the only setting – Yes, only one setting to make this work – is entering your twitter username.

Hit Save Settings … and you’re done! Go to your website and check out how it looks.

WARNING: Don’t do what I did and not have any recent tweets. If you’re going to integrate social media on your site, make sure to use it Nothing looks worse than having a blank twitter feed at the top of your website. See: