Tag Archives | Business Website

Best WordPress Theme – Factors to Consider to Have the Best Page Theme for Your Online Business

By Randy R on April 26, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Best WordPress Theme – Factors to Consider to Have the Best Page Theme for Your Online Business

If you are looking for the best WordPress theme for your business website, this article may help you. You need your website to be user-friendly and professional looking. That way, web users or your customer can navigate in your site with ease and convenience. They will also keep coming back to your site, thus, increase profits.

In choosing the best WordPress theme, there are some factors you need to consider. Here are they:

Widgets Position

Position of the content in your website is important. You need to make your sales proposition to be in the centre of the page; which is the first thing that the user will be able to see once they arrive in your website. That particular content should be distinctive and customisable. Put the call options or call action in the right part of the page. This is helpful as user is naturally looking for call option at the right hand. At this part, you can try using the enticing sales words such as ”Try this now” or ”buy now”.

Menu Bar

You business site should have menu bar so that the web user will be able to navigate in your site more convenient. This is also reserved for your sales proposition.

Logo Space

You want to make your business site to be professional-looking thus you have to reserve space for your business logo. The logo should be in the upper left hand part of the page as this is the part where the user is looking at in the first glance. This will help you to be recognizable.

Background Color

You don’t want your web visitor to have difficulties in reading or viewing your page thus you have to use a background in your WordPress theme that the fonts or images are easy to be read or seen. It is safe to use white color as background as it can complement in any font colors.

Stretchable Sides

You need to consider the sides of your chosen theme. You need to make sure that users won’t have any difficulties in viewing your entire page as there are a lot of different screen sizes and browsers.

CSS Menu

This is not images; this is for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Most of web users are searching certain sites using search engines such as Google or Yahoo thus you have to make sure that your site will be able to be read by search engines. You have to make sure that the contexts are highlighted.

Customisable

It is also important that you can customize your WordPress theme whenever you need to add content or CSS. This way, you can update your site whenever you need to.

How to Get a WordPress Theme With No Linkback Required

By Randy R on March 23, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Get a WordPress Theme With No Linkback Required

When searching for a good WordPress theme to use for your blog or business website, it is wise to get a premium theme that the designer doesn’t require you to link back to his/her site. Linking back means you leave a link in the footer of your site pointing to the template site or its affiliate site from every web page of your site. So, if you have thousands of web pages, your site will give away thousands of backlinks just like that, thus, diluting the link juice your site gets from other sources. Your site will not reap the full benefit of incoming links, because it is sharing it with the template site or its affiliate site.

There are dangers of linking to a site you can’t entirely trust. If the WP template site engages in something illegal or something that is against the guidelines of major search engines, your site will be in danger of being penalized, because your site is linking to it. In the eyes of search engines, backlinks are seen as votes of approval. Are you sure you approve of those sites you link to?

I used such themes for a while when I wasn’t entirely aware of the implications. Then, I woke up! I searched day and night for a perfect blog theme that was search engine-optimized, very customizable without requiring me to tweak some codes and one that is private label (not demanding a linkback). I was dismayed as you are now to find out there was none available.

At that stage I got a professional web designer friend to design an easily customizable WP theme that would be private label, search engine-friendly and packed with all the best bug-free WordPress plugins necessary to operate a blog successfully. My friend went to work and after just two weeks, a new blogging theme emerged that saved me from linking back to the template site.

Look for a cute WordPress theme that incorporates all the necessary tags needed to optimize sites for search engines, color changing function, optimal advertising placement, no linkback required from users, the flexibility to install it on multiple domains, amongst other things. This is the type of WP theme I strongly suggest you get, because you deserve it!

Shopping Cart Information For Website Owners

By Randy Roedl on January 20, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

Shopping Cart Information For Website Owners

Do you own a Website and are considering a shopping cart? Would you like to know all there is to know about shopping carts? Keep reading to find out some very useful information that will help you decide if you need a shopping cart and what shopping cart features would fit your Website. A shopping cart that is used on a Website is actually a series of scripts that keep track of the items your cyber customer is interested in purchasing until they are ready to checkout.

The shopping cart itself does not handle any of the financial transaction, but really just holds the items that the customer has selected for purchase until they are ready to actually make the purchase. The information about the items they have selected is then passed on to a secure connection or payment gateway, which is a separate service from the shopping cart. The payment gateway service then takes over by handling the requested purchases thought the financial networks whether you have a merchant account to handle credit card transactions or you use PayPal or some other software payment management system.

When deciding on what shopping cart is right for your business (Website) you will run into a lot of shopping cart applications. Two of the basic types of choices you will run into when it comes to shopping cart applications is the free shopping cart versus the premium shopping cart.

Before you start looking at shopping cart applications you should make a list of what you want your shopping cart to do. You should also know what your budget is for your shopping cart. When deciding about shopping cart features you should consider your current needs and your future needs. You should have room to grow in your choice of shopping carts. If your shopping cart won’t grow with your business then you will find yourself making a change in shopping carts down the road and that change will cost you time; time that is precious to your business. Free shopping cart options:

You can find some really good deals when it comes to free ecommerce solutions such as the basic shopping cart that PayPal offers. The basic PayPal shopping cart can integrate with many of the payment gateways and merchant accounts and PayPal are accepted all around the world. There are no monthly fees with PayPal and you receive free fraud protection and you will not have to worry about charge back fees.

PayPal offers Website owner’s easy to use tools that make implementing the PayPal shopping cart a snap. Other free shopping cart software includes Zen Cart™, 1FreeCart, and AgoraCart. There are many different premium shopping cart software out there including but not limited to Shop-Script, Mercantec Softcart, 1ShoppingCart Pro, and X Cart Pro. Choosing a premium shopping cart software can help your business because many of the premium shopping cart programs allow you to accept checks, COD, and other methods of possessing payments; which gives your customers payment options. Some premium shopping cart programs will include wizards that help you to build your web page even if you don’t know HTML. They may even come with templates and other tools that will help you to set up your online store.

Really good shopping cart software will even help you to keep track of your inventory and generate reports for you. A good shopping cart will also include a shipping tool that will calculate shipping costs based on parameters that you set and may even link to common shipping methods such as FedEx. Another valuable tool that shopping carts have is that they can calculate tax. Some premium carts will even let customers view previous purchases, which comes in handy for those repeat orders. A premium cart can even help with affiliate programs, coupons, gift certificates and other incentives that help to generate sales. Many premium shopping cart programs offer protection by encrypting information, and by processing credit cards through reputable processing services or by allowing customers to use the program without having to download cookies.

How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

By Randy R on September 25, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

It’s a nightmare scenario. You go to your website only to find a nasty message from a hacker bragging about hacking your site. And nothing else. As far as you can tell your content is gone and you can’t even find a way to log into your WordPress dashboard.

Would your business survive your website being shut down, even temporarily?

It Happens

That’s exactly the situation that my friend of mine found herself in recently.

Fortunately we were able to help her out, rescue (most of) her files and get her back up and running relatively quickly. But that isn’t always the case.

Turns out she could have done some things to better protect herself. Fortunately she learned her lesson well and she’s in much better shape today than she was before the attack.

Have You Really Been Hacked?

A lot of times people come to me saying, “”My site’s been hacked,”” when it really hasn’t. With WordPress sometimes plugin conflicts can cause issues that seem to the user like a hacker has messed with something. This is most common when upgrading to a new version of WordPress if a plugin hasn’t been made compatible with the new version yet.

While that can cause your site to crash, it’s not caused by hackers.

Not only that, but most of the sites I’ve seen that have been hacked weren’t just taken down by them. Most of the malicious hacks I’ve seen involved injecting some code into the site, usually with the end goal to redirect site traffic to some other website.

The Symptoms

Without going into the gory details, my friend’s case was a little different. Her site actually showed an all white screen with an error message along the lines that a plugin conflict might produce and the hacker just wanted to crash her site. Turns out he was into stealing something else.

When I did some troubleshooting I was able to get her site back up and running in fairly short order. In her words:

I must add here, that it only took Chris 45 minutes to decipher and fix what was a rather sophisticated hack!

While I’d never promise to be able to recover a hacked site that quickly, I do have a good track record recovering hacked WordPress sites.

Protecting Yourself

Here are some things you can do to minimize the chances you’ll end up getting hacked and maximize the chances to fully recover quickly should your site crash (for whatever reason).

1. Use Strong Passwords.

I honestly think this was my friend’s biggest mistake. Again in her words,

This is what got me – I just used numbers and letters and the password was – well – kinda obvious.

Make your passwords not only hard to guess, but make them more difficult for sophisticated hackers to break as well. Randomly mix in special characters (found on the number keys with the shift button) as well as numbers and upper and lower case letters. Strong passwords make a huge difference.

Both WordPress and cPanel will tell you how strong your password is. Stronger passwords offer better protection.

The trouble is, having strong passwords also makes them harder to type in. That’s why I use 1Password to manage my passwords on my Macs. I can use really strong passwords and I don’t have to remember them or type them in. 1Password will auto fill web forms for me. It’s the best of both worlds: good security & user friendly.

2. Keep Your WordPress Updated.

One of the most common ways WordPress websites get hacked is because their owners don’t keep their software up to date. What happens is that older versions of WordPress can have known security weaknesses. These weaknesses are fixed by newer releases of the software.

But if you don’t update your software, you leave yourself exposed.

This also holds true with plugins and themes. Besides, the newer versions of WordPress make keeping everything up to date remarkably easy. There’s not much of an excuse to keep you from updating things.

3. Backup Regularly and Often.

A good backup can cover for a ton of other issues by making it possible to revert back to how things were before your site crashed. When it comes to WordPress you need to back up your

Database
Theme Files
Plugins
Media Uploads

There are several different plugins and services to handle backups of your WordPress site.

But the point is backup early and backup often!

Bottom Line

I don’t believe any site is completely “”hack proof.”” A determined hacker with enough resources can break into most anything. Just watch an episode of NCIS!

But if you do these three things you will greatly reduce your risk of being hacked and make it much easier to recover if you do run into a problem.

7 Big Benefits to Creating Your Next Small Business Website With WordPress

By Randy R on September 7, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

7 Big Benefits to Creating Your Next Small Business Website With WordPress

Which of these choices would you prefer?

A website that requires custom programming costing $3000 or more, requires a knowledge of complex programming languages in order to make even simple changes to the content, and requires a complete redesign (again costing thousands of dollars) if you decide the look is outdated?

Or a website that is built on free software, allows you to easily update content yourself and you can select from thousands of clean, professional looking designs that can be added to the site in a matter of minutes?

No brainer, right?

Meet WordPress.

WordPress, originally used solely for blogs, has morphed into an incredibly powerful Content Management System you can use to easily and inexpensively create a very professional and functional website for your small business.

Here are 7 benefits to using WordPress for your small business’ website:

1. It costs nothing! Not one penny! WordPress is available for download at WordPress.org at no cost – you won’t even have to give up your email address. To host a WordPress site yourself, however, you will need to find a hosting company. That’s generally not free. But it’s not expensive either. For just $5 – $10 a month you can host your WordPress site at any number of quality web host providers. Many of them include Fantastico with your hosting plan which is software that lets you install WordPress in just a few clicks without even having to download the software.

2. Ease of Use. Using WordPress is really quite simple. Yes, especially for the technically-challenged among us, there will be a little bit of a learning curve. However, there’s no shortage of quality WordPress tutorials online to help you get up to speed quickly. Once you get the hang of things, adding content is a snap. It’s no more difficult than using a word processing program. And you don’t have to know how to write code or do anything vaguely technical in nature to maintain your site.

3. Themes. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of themes available for WordPress. A theme is basically a template that changes the look and feel of your WordPress site (a theme can also alter the behind-the-scenes options to make WordPress even easier to customize and use). Some of these themes are free, others you have to pay for. You can also have a custom theme designed so your site meets your exact specifications.

With themes, it’s easy to get a clean, professional looking site without paying a lot for custom design work. And if one day you decide you don’t like the look of your site – no problem. Find a theme you like better, activate it in WordPress and you instantly have a new look and feel to your site – all without having to change the blog posts or pages on your site.

4. Plugins. Plugins are software the extend the capabilities of WordPress to do pretty much anything you want. Using plugins, you can track site visits, add social bookmarking to your site, automate backups of your site, fight spam, create contact forms, improve site security and a lot more. And, with few exceptions, the plugins are absolutely free.

5. Search Engine Love. Google (and the other search engines) love WordPress. Using WordPress can give your search engine optimization efforts a big boost. And if you take advantage of some of the SEO-related plugins available for WordPress, the search engines will really think your site is the bee’s knees.

6. Technical Support. WordPress does not offer tech support for you to email or call with your questions. However, have no fear, there are still a ton of options for you if you have an issue you need addressed. You can turn to the forum on WordPress.org, which is a very active community of WordPress users who are always willing to help those having problems with the software. In addition, there are a bunch of other websites, message boards and blogs that you can turn to for advice. There are also plenty of wordPress experts for hire to assist you. Whatever issue you may encounter, help is always close at hand.

7. Control. Hosting your own WordPress website puts you in control of your web presence. Need to update your content, add new posts or pages? You can easily do it yourself. Want to update the appearance of your site? Find a new Theme, upload it, activate it and you’re done. Don’t like the hosting company you’re using? Find another and move your site – there are plenty of good hosting companies around.

So there are seven strong benefits to using WordPress for your small business’ website/blog. Without a doubt there are reasons why you may WordPress may not work for your situation and hiring a programmer to develop a custom site is the best option.

For most small business owners, however, WordPress will provide all that you need to get a professionally looking website that you, and the search engines will love. It’s a highly functional, flexible and cost-effective option that is hard to top.

Tumblr’s easy and its reblogs drive traffic, but …

By on December 8, 2010 in Randy Roedl

Jeremy Quittner – Many, if not most, entrepreneurs have now grasped the marketing potential of blogging, whether they do it as an added component of a business website or through social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. Blogging lets entrepreneurs advertise their businesses and services by engaging potential customers in a conversation. The latest generation of software makes blogging easier …

Original post by wordpress blogging – Yahoo! News Search Results

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