We are all about getting your business off the ground with as little money as possible. After all, your bottom line is what you need to grow your business and when you are a small startup, every little bit helps. So, my first suggestion is going to be to look for a theme [...]
Web Hosting Plans
We recommend that small businesses sign up for the Annual Plans, but if your budget is a little more restrictive most host also have monthly or quarterly plans. The hosts listed here are either hosts that we use or that our friends and associates use and have found to be true to their claims.
Just Host [...]
Embedding HTML Widgets in Sidebar
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We recommend that small businesses sign up for the Annual Plans, but if your budget is a little more restrictive most host also have monthly or quarterly plans. The hosts listed here are either hosts that we use or that our friends and associates use and have found to be true to their claims.
Just Host Annual Plan – $72
$71.40 (breaks down to $5.95 monthly)
Domain Name Free for plans of 12 months or more
Monthly Plan available @ 7.95/mo with $20 setup fee
Domain Name Registration is $9.95 for plans less than 12 months
Lunar Pages Annual Plan – $108
$107.40 (breaks down to $8.95/mo)
Domain Name Free for plans 12, 24, or 60 months
Quarterly (3 Month) Plan available @ $10.95/mo with $30 setup fee
Domain Name Registration is $19.95 for plans less than 12 months
Host Gator Annual Plan – $120
$119.40 (breaks down to $9.95 monthly)
Monthly Plan Available @ $9.95/mo
Domain Name Registration is $15 for all plans
Listen in on this 1 on 1 strategy session about word of mouth on-line. Valuable insights into what business owners should be thinking about when launching their business on the web. Your website not only needs to look good, but it should speak well to your audience and give them something to pass on to others.
So, you should think through what you want others to say about you and your business and then employ that strategy in the words and word structure of your website to give your website which will speak for you 24/7 the best chance of telling your clients what you what them to hear.
Listen in on today’s audioboo podcast as Kendra, Chief Diva of GoodLifeDiva.com shares on this important topic.
The Black Canvas theme is a great theme for photo enthusiasts. It is laid out quite nicely. The middle panel displays a 600 X 400 pixel image of the photo to the left with a description, category and date displayed to the right of that. The home page nicely displays thumbnails of the photos most recently taken. You can click through to the photo post where your customers can leave a comment in the comments section below the picture. Of course being a WordPress theme, this is customizable and if you don’t what everybody commenting, you could remove the ability to leave comments, or only make it available to subscribers. The menus look very nice, and are attractive with the hierarchical drop-downs and semi-transparency it is a great professional touch.
The other nice feature about this Theme is that it has a blog built-in to the framework. So it creates more of a professional website feel overall. All WordPress themes don’t have this feature and when they don’t it is a bit of work to code it in, so having it built-in saves much time and money for business owners looking for this feature.
The theme is dark, so If you have a problem with that, but still want it, you may have to have someone change that for you. I’m assuming StudioPress doesn’t have a color change option in the admin panel for this one, since it is called “Black Canvas”, so you or someone you select will need to modify the CSS to lighten it up or change the color to what you desire.
I have not had a chance to play with the admin panel for this theme, so I can’t comment, but as for the layout, movement, functionality, and style this is a good site for showcasing a photography portfolio.
At the time of this post, this theme is available at $59
Have you purchased this theme? If so, what do you think? Share your experience here by leaving a comment.
If you love your iPhone, like I love my iPhone, then you cannot go without this app. Yeah, the screen is not optimal to write post on, but it can be done with relative ease and the app is improving continuously. Just give feedback to the developers when you want something added. That is the awesomeness about open source.
It is a really great way to get a WordPress post started so that you don’t lose your thought when you are away from your computer. You know, you get this great idea to blog about that will really hit home with your customer base, but have no way to write it down. Well, now you do, because your WordPress for iPhone will always be on your hip.
One caveat with using the WordPress for iPhone App is that if you get a phone call in the middle of a post, you could lose the post if you haven’t saved already. So, you might want to turn off the phone until you are done with your post. This happened to me 15 mins into a WordPress post I was really excited about at my blog site, thegamechangers.wordpress.com. I was upset, but you live and you learn and you pass on the knowledge, so others don’t have to go through the pain.
To start using it on your iPhone, you will have to enable moveable type by checking the “XML-RPC” under Settings->Writing in your WordPress Admin Panel. You have to do this for each blog you want to enable. After that, just enter the same login that you use for wp-admin and you are in and ready to add a blog using your iPhone.
We are all about getting your business off the ground with as little money as possible. After all, your bottom line is what you need to grow your business and when you are a small startup, every little bit helps. So, my first suggestion is going to be to look for a theme that is free of charge to get started. Why? Because it is the most affordable way to go and besides that, revamping your site later is easy, as long as you plan to stay with WordPress. It isn’t as easy, if you don’t, but still feasible and with all the money you are saving by starting with a free theme, allowing you to be free to build a thriving business, you’ll have more than enough money to invest in your site upgrades, right? To date, all the sites that I have built for personal and business use were started with free themes. We can help most small businesses do the same. I do believe with a little bit of work and I stress the word “little”, that small business start-ups can find a low cost stylish solution that will impress from the get go without breaking the bank.
Now that being said, I just left PodCampAZ and realized that some of the Wordpress themes out there come with style and a lot of plug-ins already built into the admin panel. These themes are worth the few extra dollars for small business owners who really want a super fast solution that is easy to keep up to date by almost anyone, web savvy or not.
At danieltillman.com, we browse the web often for great themes to enable our clients and here are a few sites that have great looking WordPress themes for just about any small business.
In the past I would have advised most folks not to embed HTML code in the sidebar, because once you change the code, you can’t drag and drop widgets anymore. Either you modify the code for the sidebar or you use the Wordpress widgets available through Wordpress.org. Just recently though, I discovered the Text Widget and now I say embed away. There is a higher security risk with embedded html code, but that is beyond the scope of this post and I would have to do a lot more research to even explain it. Many Wordpress users embed code without incident, so I suspect we’ll be ok for starters.
Many things you desire to have on your sidebar is available as a plugin, but if you can’t find what you need and still need to embed html code, here is one way to do it easily and cleanly, without messing around with the sidebar code.
1. Go to Appearance->Widgets
2. Drag the Text Widget to the Sidebar
3. Copy and Paste the HTML code into the Text Widget
4. Save and You Are Done!
Let’s look at an example of when you might consider doing this. Twitter is a good an example as any.
Your web presence is about style and how well it looks to your audience is important, right? Of course you do. So, you may like the way the html based widget looks over pluggable widgets at Wordpress.org.
In the case of twitter, there are plugins available through wordpress.org and widgets available from twitter.com as well.
The widgets at twitter are flash based and written in html and can be found @ http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_profile.
The widgets at Wordpress.org can be found by doing a quick search at Wordpress.org, keyword “twitter”.
If you like the look and feel of the twitter widget from twitter.com, well then you will need to use the ole copy and paste method described above.
I installed Wordpress 2.8.5 from Wordpress.org directly without upgrading. When Writing a post, I was not able to see the buttons for the Visual tab. I thought it might be that the Visual Editor was disabled as mentioned in many help forums, so I moseyed over to my profile only to find that I didn’t even have the check box to disable the Visual Editor available to me. After researching further I was able to put two and two together and figured out that there were files missing from the wp-admin folder. Actually, in my upload of this folder, many of the sub-folders didn’t transfer. The one folder in particular that was missing and causing my Visual Editor problems was tinymce. I don’t know if it was a problem with my broadband internet connection (I have recently been experiencing intermittent disruption in the connection) or the ftp software I used to upload wordpress.
This post was helpful in understanding why this happened. My problem was a little different because I installed Wordpress 2.8.5 from Wordpress.org directly without upgrading, but I figured out from this post that there were files missing from the wp-admin folder.
No More Excuses. Establishing your business on the internet is just too easy to not have a website. It has never been easier and more affordable. You really can do it yourself. If you have a small business, then you know the how necessary it is to keep expenses low, but you also know the importance of brand and image management. Nothing can hurt your image more than an ugly website. And nothing can hurt your pocket book more than shelling out dollar bills every time you need to make a simple change.
I remember the feeling of helplessness when I needed to make a change as simple as changing a phone-number, but couldn’t because it was done in Flash and I didn’t have the tools to make the update. I had to call and send emails and wait for the developer. Ugh!!
That is why my search begin and ended when I found Wordpress. I’ve been a software developer for 11 years…I actually turned Software Program Manager the last 3 of those 11 years and I believe in reuse. Wordpress enables the ultimate reuse! It has a powerful well designed template structure allowing developers and end users to save hours upon hours of time. I can’t even imagine putting together a site that has as much functionality and flexibility as Wordpress within the limited amount of time I have to devote to website development and so the other option is to pay a developer. Again, I can’t imagine paying a developer to deliver a site that has the functionality and flexibility on the same level as even the basic Wordpress templates available, it would just cost too much for most small business start-ups. The functionality and flexibility are great and to boot, Wordpress enables stylish sites. Wordpress sites don’t look cheap and are used by many companies, big and small.
So, Grab a spot in our latest Web Express Seminar and walk away with a great looking site for your business in 6 hours.
