Little things mean a lot, especially when it comes to presenting your image and expertise to the online world.
That’s what a blog post is. Your calling card. Your first impression. You strutting your stuff 🙂
So here are four super simple tricks of the trade that will immediately elevate your status. The first two involve wordpress.com’s Jetpack 2.9, a powerful plugin that hooks your self-hosted WordPress site to WordPress.com’s infrastructure with great features such as robust stats, easy social sharing, and much more. Jetpack comes preloaded with your WordPress installation, you simply need to activate its various settings and follow the directions.
1. Jetpack Related Posts
In many cases, we don’t need to resort to third-party plugins to get the job done. The Related Posts feature by Jetpack is a fine example. It pulls relevant content from your blog to display at the bottom of your posts. If the feature is enabled, a section of related posts appears just underneath your Sharing Buttons.
2. Jetpack Sharing Buttons
There are lots of sharing button plugins for WordPress. But, for simplicity nothing beats Jetpack’s Sharing Buttons which are built-in features. Recommended: Place your buttons at the top of the post. You will need to download the Jetpack Extras plugin to accomplish this task.
3. Twitter Follow Button
If you’re a Twitter aficionado like me, the Follow Button is a neat trick … a small widget that allows users to easily follow a Twitter account from any webpage. It’s very easy to implement. Below is Brian Gardner’s explanation of the code you can use to display various “Follow” buttons.
http://www.studiopress.com/design/twitter-follow-button.htm
4. Starbox
Push your content marketing with the Author Starbox plugin which lets you add author information to each of your WordPress posts. Link to as many as 11 social networks, customizable with various themes, Google and Facebook authorship friendly, all the bells & whistles. Your readers will feel like they know you better, feel a connection and most important … return more often.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia, WordPress Web Design, Inbound Marketing, at 561.906.3436.
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Responsive Web Design
The New Café Pro Theme for Restaurants
When people research restaurants for a nice dinner out, they head to the web. And if you want them to end up inside of your restaurant, then you need to make a strong, positive impression when they are on your website.
Enter Cafe Pro — the newest StudioPress theme for the Genesis Framework.
Here is a link to a customized Cafe Pro theme I recently developed.
Café Pro combines elements of two popular Studio Press child themes — Parallax and Foodie — to create the quintessential design solution for not just restaurants, but for any brick and mortar business looking to create a captivating presence online.
What makes Café Pro such an effective design solution for brick and mortar businesses?
First, the full screen background images that are featured on the home page. It is easy to set up and allows you to showcase your business through beautiful photography and dynamic effects.
Second, the pricing table widget allows you to showcase menu items (as shown in the demo) or any other listing of features and benefits that would help show the value your business delivers.
Third, all relevant information that needs to be on every page of your site — contact info, address, hours of operation, etc. — can be included easily, you just set it and forget it, using the convenient footer widgets.
This is essential not only for local SEO, but also for converting web browsers into real-life, in-the-flesh visitors to your establishment.
And of course, there’s more — so you can see for yourself. Take a look at the demo here, and see if Café Pro is the right theme to take your brick and mortar business online presence to the next level.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436.
Promote Your Work With the Author Pro Theme
Until recently, the goal of getting published was beset with a long, arduous road filled with rejection and delays. It was tough to be an author. But times have changed. Advancements in technology and changes in consumer shopping habits over the past ten years have made it possible for more writers to become published authors than ever before, making this the best time in history to be an author.
These days it is essential for any published author to maintain a personal website.
Meet the Author Pro theme
- A website that’s clean, clear, and easy to navigate.
- A robust platform you can use to grow your audience both before and after your book launches.
- A simple way to feature your work and sell from your own platform.
The newest theme from Studio Press, Author Pro, was designed with you — authors — in mind.
See the Author Pro in action.
Websites can range from the very basic to the very complicated, but all author websites should include a few key pages:
Bio and author photo.
An Updated list of all your books.
Events and Appearances
Social Media and Contact Information.
Meet the Genesis Author Pro plugin
This plugin is a one-click free install on your Genesis Framework website, and can be used with any Genesis Framework child theme. The Genesis Author Pro plugin was developed at the request of published authors who were looking for a way to easily display their books on their websites.
Once installed, you’ll get access to a wealth of tools you can use to build an audience, and promote your work. You’ll be able to easily create a library of your published work using our custom book post type.
For each book, you can feature the: title; description; book cover with featured text banner; author; price; ISBN; publisher; editor; edition; publication date; and available formats.
Plus E-commerce Functionality
Plus, you can give your customers easy access to buy your book wherever it’s available with custom button links.
With the streamlined design of the Author Pro theme, your work and your words will shine.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436
Train, Learn & Sell with This Incredible Genesis Theme
Interested in setting up online courses? Are you a school or in need of a learning management system?
The Caroline Theme is a just released WordPress university theme that makes a perfect marketing solution for academic websites for universities, colleges, and k-12 schools. It is also ideal for non-profits in need of robust learning platforms.
The website template comes with great options for alumni/member profiles, forums, an online store, a learning management system for selling online courses, an event calendar, and options for building an email list.
Caroline is integrated with the LearnDash training system. Robust learning platforms and professional advice don’t have to be expensive. LearnDash is priced right for the price conscientious.
The theme also includes the WooCommerce eCommerce plugin, bbPress for forums, and the BuddyPress social network plugin. It also comes pre-styled for The Events Calendar, Gravity Forms, and Soliloquy.
The Caroline template is a mobile responsive child theme that overlays on the Genesis Framework. The Genesis Framework is required, but not included in the purchase price of this theme. It must be purchased separately if a license is not already owned.
Caroline can really be used for any website that would include forums, a social network, a learning management system, or an eCommerce storefront!
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436
Simple Trick for Click-Throughs: The Title Tag
“Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. They can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. They are added to the <head> section of your HTML page. “ – GOOGLE
SEO jargon and search terminology can be very overwhelming, particularly when you start talking to an “expert” in the field! So it’s important that business owners know the basics of on-page SEO so they can do some of it themselves.
Start with the single most important on-page SEO element: the <title> tag.
The <title> tag defines the title of the document and is required in all HTML/XHTML documents. SEOmoz, the largest SEO community in the world, believes that it is the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content). The title tag appears on the results pages just above the URL and also appears at the top of a browser.
Titles give users a quick insight into the content of the web page and how it might be relevant to their query. It is often the primary piece of information with the meta description that is used by potential visitors to decide which search result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality and meaningful titles when you optimise your web pages.
Title tags generally should be less than 70 characters long so the whole tag fits on results pages when it is displayed and people can read it at a quick glance.
Every title tag on your website should be unique with distinct, descriptive titles for every page on your site.
Use keywords in title tags and place important keywords close to the front of the title tag. Search Engines will “bold” (or highlight) those terms in the search results when a user has performed a query with those terms.
Avoid keyword spamming. There is no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times.
Google recommends titles include your brand so include your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe.
What is a meta description tag?
Title tags and meta descriptions are important elements of your website’s content. Like the title tag, meta description tags should include keywords relevant to the content of the web page they describe. This helps Search Engines understand what the page is about and index your web pages accordingly for relevant keywords or keyword phrases.
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam announced in 2009 that neither meta descriptions nor meta keywords factor into Google’s ranking algorithms for web search. However, he stresses that it is still important to write a meta description as Google will sometimes use the summary in search results snippets (located below the URL) if the Search Engine believes it is an accurate synopsis of the page.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436