Hello -

Everyman Marketing is changing its newsletter system to reflect our new primary offering, the webinar series “Internet 101: Build a sensational website in 4 weeks using WordPress”. 

To remain on the list, you will need to signup again from the link above.

We will continue to provide traditional WordPress customization, website development and internet marketing services.

Warm regards,

Marc Beneteau – Everyman Marketing
Websites, blogging, video, social media for ordinary people
http://everymanmarketing.com
(215) 376-4345

Choosing the right theme for your WordPress site is probably your most challenging task in creating your first business / corporate website.  You should choose your theme fairly soon after you begin your site (if not immediately), since it does have an impact on how you create your content (i.e., two or three-column layouts, screen width, etc); however, note that in WordPress, content is mostly separate from presentation, so you can always change your theme later.

Here is the process I suggest to my customers, including the wisest choices for a WordPress theme for business:

1. Have a look at our professional WordPress themes samples page for inspiration. Some of these are based on free themes, others are based on theme frameworks, and others are totally custom sites.
2. Decide if you are going to need drop-down menus, since not all themes support them. If you have less than 10 pages on your site, do not use drop-down menus.
3. Try Artisteer first.  This is a Windows software that provides a range of customizable design choices and then generates all the files required to upload to your WordPress installation.  The designs are on the simple side, but attractive.  See this collection of Artisteer-generated templates.  If you don’t want to buy the software ($50), just generate your design and send me the project file (.artx file) and I will generate and upload the theme to your site.
4. Try one of the common theme frameworks.  Using a theme framework will make customization to your site much easier, since
   • Most of the formatting options (CSS settings) are customizable within the WordPress administration form (in Appearance > Theme > Options);
   • A good theme frameworks provides “hooks” for you to attach any text or graphic to a defined region of your site.  Otherwise, you have to edit the PHP file, which is complicated;
   • When the theme provider publishes a new version (ie to fix bug or support a new browser) you don’t have to redo your customizations

   A few good theme frameworks are ThemeFrame (Free – based on the very popular Atahualpa theme), Thesis ($70), and WPRremix ($75).  The Everyman Marketing site is based on Atahualpa.

5. Check out the WordPress.org free themes directory.  Note that unless you find a complete “bull’s eye” design there, customization will be more difficult than if you use a theme framework, and in some cases may be impossible (for example, changing from a 2-column to a 3-column theme, or sometimes even switching the side-bar positions from left to right).
6. If you are looking for a theme for a specific business type, try searching the WordPress theme directory site or else Googling directly, ie, “WordPress theme for therapist”.

However you choose your theme, you will need to upload it to your web site and activate it.  You need an FTP client software for this (I like Filezilla or FireFTP for Firefox) but once you know that, it’s frighteningly simple, and is described in this article.

How to customize a theme

The first thing you will normally do is substitute your company banner and logo.  If you don’t have a banner, we can make one for you for a very reasonable cost, or else make it yourself in an image editing software such as Photoshop or Paint.Net.  You need to upload your banner image to your website using FTP.  If your template was generated with Artisteer, all your styling was done by the program, and so at this point you are done with your styling, and just need to setup your Widgets (see below).

Then check out your customizable theme options (in WordPress Admin > Appearance > Theme Options).  This will normally allow you to set the width of your site and the presence / absence of side-bars.  The best themes and theme frameworks also give you control of the styling of every element of your site, such as background color, font, margins, etc.  You need to know a little CSS to do this, but this is quite simple and if in doubt you can Google “CSS background color” (or whatever) for the precise syntax.  If your theme has a limited number of customizable CSS options and you need to manually edit your CSS file, there is a very cool software called Firebug, which is a Firefox addin that lets you examine each element of your site, view the underlying CSS code, and modify the CSS code on the fly and see the results.  In order to choose color settings, I use the free ColorPix software – just hover the cursor over the color you want (say, another website you want to copy the look-and-feel), and it will tell you the hex color codes (that look like #AA0944 – this is hexadecimal notation).

One you have styled your site to your desired look-and-feel, you need to setup your side-bars.

How to setup your side-bars with the Widget control

1. In your WordPress admin go to Appearance > Widgets
2. Select the left or right side-bar (on the far right of your screen)
3. Drag your choice of widget onto the side-bar and edit it / customize it.
4. Remember to save your settings, then view your site

The most important widget to know is the “Text” widget, which lets you insert custom html text to your side-bar.  Use this, for example, to put your mailing list signup code in your side-bar, or make a “Quotes” section on your site (such as this site), or place Google ads or affiliate links.  It helps to know a little html, but if you don’t, don’t worry.  Just type your text and ask your designer or webmaster to format it, or else look at the underlying html from a site that you want to emulate (in most browsers do View > Page Source and then search for the text that you want to view the html for, or else use Firebug as described above ).

Note that until you place at least one widget in your side-bar, most themes provide default settings that will decide what goes in your side-bars.  So, to take control of this, you need to place at least one widget.

Publishing images and videos to your WordPress site

The easiest way to publish images (with automatic resizing) and video to WordPress is with Windows Live Writer and is described in this article.  Use this, for example, if you want to put both an image and some text in your side-bar: compose the text block with Windows Live Writer, paste in the image, publish it to a temporary post, copy the html on the post and paste it into a text widget, then delete the post.

Mailing list management and WordPress

WordPress is a wonderful platform to create a mailing list for your customers – and it can even be free.  Details in this article.

Windows Live Writer is a marvelous tool for creating rich content on WordPress offline.   It is much more powerful than the built-in web-based WordPress editor and is particularly useful when publishing text with a lot of images.  With Live Writer, you create your content offline and publish it using WordPress’s built-in XML-RPC protocol (this must be enabled for your blog – see your Settings menu).

The usual way to publish text and images to WordPress is this:

1. Capture or save the source image to your hard-drive
2. Open it using an image editor (I like Microsoft HTML Help Image Editor.  Picasa is also good)
3. Save the resized image to your hard drive
4. Insert the image in the web-based WordPress editor

This is a lot of keystrokes and a lot of navigating Windows file directories.  Using Windows Live Writer, you can short-cut two of the above steps.  All you need to do:

1. Copy the image from any web location (from your web browser, just right-click > Copy); or else capture it from your display with Microsoft HTML Help Image Editor and then Ctrl-Copy it.
2. Paste into Live Writer.  You can resize, hyperlink or apply effects to the image directly
3. Publish your post.  Live Writer will connect to your host and publish the image automatically to your wpcontent/uploads directory

Live Writer only works on Posts (not on Pages).  If you are creating a Wordpress Page (static page), just cut-and-paste the generated html from the Post into the Page, then delete the Post.

Up until a few years ago, if you wanted a professional website, you hired a web designer.  You gave them all your content, your graphics, some ideas of what you wanted your site to look like, and a few thousand dollars.  They produced a “mockup” (snapshot of your future site) in Photoshop, and you went back-and-forth a few times with revisions.   After your final approval, the mockup was “sliced” (converted to an html template in Dreamweaver), the content added, and the site went live.  The entire process took from two weeks to two months.  The type of site produced is called a “static html website”.  It was possible for you to make minor changes to the content of the site, however, if you wanted to add pages or change the navigation structure, you had to go back to your designer.  If you wanted programmatic features such as a blog or a bulletin board (forum), it was extra.

Nowadays, unless we’re dealing with a very high-end or graphic-intensive site, nobody will settle for that.  Due to great improvements and huge popularity of open-source Content Management Systems (CMS), particularly Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal, you can put up a nice-looking site in days rather than months, and at about one tenth the cost (or even for free).

In the rest of this article we’ll focus on Wordpress, since it is the easiest to use of the popular CMS’s and yet has all the functionality that is required by your typical small business website.

Wordpress is an open-source CMS that is optimized for blogging (which is the posting of sequential articles on a given topic or theme).  However, it is also very good at creating static pages (ie. web pages whose content is fixed such as “About us”, etc), which are the “bread and butter” of your average small business or self-employed website. In addition:

• Wordpress comes configured “out of the box” for the greatest search-engine visibility – you just need to set certain parameters correctly.  Also search-engines love blogs and other frequently updated content.
• You can easily add or delete pages, change your theme, and change your content, and the changes will be immediately reflected on your site and in the navigation structure of your site
• If you have special needs (such as a Calendar of events for example), it’s very likely that somebody somewhere has written a piece of code (called a “plugin”) that solves your problem, and is giving it away for free.  If it’s not free, it’s probably very cheap.  There are numerous plugins that turn Wordpress into a paid-membership site, which is a very nice way to sell your content down the road
• You can write your content offline using a tool such as the free Windows Live Writer, which makes it very easy to add rich content (images and videos) to your site and/or your newsletter.

Here is the process that you will typically go through to create a professional small business website using Wordpress:

1. Open a cPanel-enabled web hosting account, which costs $5-10/mth.
2. Install Wordpress from your web hosting account control panel using cPanel’s “Fantastico” application (about 5 min). Any Linux hosting will support Wordpress, but I like a cPanel hosting system for its user-friendliness and capabilities
3. Download, install and configure any of the excellent free Wordpress templates that are available on the web (about 15 min)
4. Download, install and configure the necessary plugins.  At minimum I recommend : All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, Comment Relish, Subscribe to Comments, and Email Shroud (about 15 min)
5. Configure your newsletter system and add your newsletter signup code to your side-bar (about 15 min). See this article. Almost every small business needs a newsletter to stay in touch with customers
6. Create your content
7. Hire a web designer to make you a banner, or else find a free or inexpensive one, or else make it yourself in Photoshop
8. Your site goes live – tell all your friends and business associates.  It helps to have an active Linkedin or Facebook account for this.  If you have current customers, import them into your newsletter system. Although a courtesy email is recommended, you are allowed (under CAN-SPAM) to add people to your newsletter with whom you have already done business.
9. Continue writing great content of interest to your readers.  Some of them are sure to become customers.

Bottom line: your site will be up and ready for business in 4-8 hours of work, rather than months.

Just a few final tips if you are new to this:

1. Find a competent and reasonably-priced web person – but be sure to explain to them that you want to be educated.  There are plenty of people on the freelancer marketplaces (RentACoder, Guru, or Elance) who want your business.
2. Don’t obsess initially about your site’s design or presentation.  Just get the content out there.  You can easily change your presentation later.

Here is a nifty little trick that I am using with most of my clients these days.  It consists of using either FeedBurner or FeedBlitz services, in combination with a Wordpress blog, to manage your newsletter (mailing list management system).  What you do is publish your newsletter to a blog, and configure the FeedBlitz or FeedBurner service to periodically poll your blog and email new posts to your subscribers (this is called “RSS-to-email”).

The advantages of this system are:

• FeedBurner is free for any number of subscribers, while FeedBlitz is very reasonably priced, especially for small lists (under 500 subscribers).  FeedBlitz offers possibility of newsletter template customization, subscriber import, and auto-responder sequences.
• You can use the free Windows Live Writer program to compose your newsletters (mailings) offline.  This makes it much easier to create rich content by cut-and-paste of images and video into your content.  Other newsletter management systems (Constant Contact, Emma, Aweber, Vertical Response, etc) require you save your images and then upload them to the web, and offer much more limited options for image editing.
• You can put your newsletter archive (previous articles) on your site itself.  If your site is Wordpress, the newsletter archive is available in the side-bar (see the side-bar to this site for example).  Alternatively, create your site in Joomla and use the RSS Feed Plugin for Joomla to put your newsletter archive anywhere on your site.  For a nice example of this see Trellis House (the newsletter archive is at the bottom where it says “Latest Newsletters”).

The main disadvantage of this system, is that FeedBlitz does not have as good a newsletter template editor as its competitors (Constant Contact or Emma), especially for long newsletter with side-bars and hyperlinked content (ie multiple articles in a single newsletter that are hyperlinked from a table of contents).  However, if your newsletters are single-focused, such as a specific article or event announcement, FeedBlitz or FeedBurner should work fine for you.

Next article: Why traditional website publishing (static html sites that are created and maintained by your web designer) is dead.  Instead, use a content management system to create and manage your site (Wordpress is first choice, Joomla or Drupal recommended for more advanced sites).