It’s work, like cleaning the cat box. Maybe with a little imagination added.

Apps A Platform

For whatever website software or service you use to create your website, WordPress, Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, you will need to do at least a cursory search on “__________  get more visitors on my website” with the blank filled in with the name of your web app or service.

If you search on a blank space, you’ll need to read all my posts before you can leave this website.

As punishment.

Doo-Hickeys And Widgets

You’ll want to know the names and locations of certain tools these platforms provide to help with the tasks I mention below. Not all of them, just the ones you’ll be using regularly.

Like when you describe what’s wrong with your vehicle at the auto repair shop.

The thingy making a noise.

Don’t Complain!

These web apps want you to succeed so that you will tell your friends all about how wonderful they are!

For whatever web app you choose, concentrate on it’s positive aspects.

It is counter-productive to obsess over an option or feature that is missing or not perfekly done on your chosen platform.

Remember to turn on the spell-checj also.

Gideon’s Garden by Tom Stier

Self-Host For The Self-Most!

If you opt for a self-hosted WordPress site, your hosting plan should be at least in the $20/month range.

Business level hosting plans are better able to handle the amount of resources required by your site as you build your initial visitor base.

If you have a budget in mind and would like to hire someone to help you create your website, ask them what would give you the most promotional bang for that budget.

If you have no budget for setting up and creating an initial website on your app of choice, expect to spend hours reading tutorials for your chosen web platform.

You’ll learn a valuable skill that will last for days!

Optimizing For Visitors

Your visitor wants to see what they expect to see on your website.

The imagery and message need to jibe with that expectation.

If they came for a product, they need to see detailed images, information and cost.

Asia Luna by Tom Stier

If they came for high-end design, your presentation and ‘wow’ factor will be a priority.

The requirement for both is a a quick loading, logical, convincing presentation.

Be A Tool

Sadly, visitors will see your website as just another informational tool on the web. A brief stop on their never ending quest for whatever.

That’s why you should only ever ask just your friends how much they love your website!

Being a tool can be discouraging.

Especially if you’ve spent thousands of dollars and sweated decisions over each and every pixel.

Themes And Templates

WordPress has the most extensive choice of page templates (called Themes) of any of the web apps.

WordPress lets you see how your website looks with different Themes before committing to one. Other web services don’t have this feature.

I’m favoring WordPress here, see. Wink, wink.

Keep in mind as you look through the templates and Themes that the highly regarded ones were designed by professionals.

These Themes can represent hundreds of hours of design and coding.

If your reaction is negative toward everything you see, you are probably not being realistic about how websites are used by the public.

Which is Whambam thank you, mam.

The Money Pit

The biggest cost involved in website creation is usually due to a site owner wanting every page to look exactly a ‘certain way’.

If you are a designer, promoting cutting-edge design, this might be required.

But, going against convention can be expensive. You can do it, but human visitors and Google probably won’t care.

When in doubt, or with no design budget, go with a simple template or Theme.

Your images, headlines and body text will become the design.

The Wine Cellar Of Your Website

When Google comes by, they check the basement of your website first.

Is all your HTML properly bundled and tidied?

Does your site look great on a phone and tablet?

Do your pages have title & description meta tags?

Are you paying Google for ‘protection’?

Google wants your website to have title & description meta tags for every page.

If you persist in making pages that only have a video or image on them, you will want to made sure there is at least something entered for these tags.

The individual page title and description meta tags and page thumbnail are what Google and social media platforms use for your listing.

Google is also interested in the content on your site pages, specifically new content that they can match up to a specific search term a specific searcher is specifically searching for.

So, be specific.

Sweet Success

There comes that day when a certain product-poem-picture-post-article-newsitem you have posted on your website strikes a chord with the public.

There is a swell of music. The clouds part.

You’ll know just how well your piece of content is doing because you are tracking analytics data for your website.

Google sends you a congrats email!

You’ve created the teaser link to your website page on social media. You can see who’s coming to your page from those platforms.

People who aren’t family members start sharing your post!

The Formula

You now know the formula that works and have the opportunity to capitalize on that success by doing it again.

Your page is linked to from other sites that have more visitors than you. People click through to read your post.

Some stick around to read more stuff.

Some people subscribe to your site.

And best of all, after having done all the tasks I mention in this article, your web presence is firing on all cylinders, and you are ready, ready, ready to rock ‘n roll!

The post Task 1: Optimize Your Website For Visitors And Google appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

That Safe and Restful Sleep, Sleep, Sleep…

In the 90’s, I had clients who taught me a thing or two about the importance of spending the time on researching what was needed to attract visitors to websites.

At the time, I was mostly struggling with getting web pages to look just right in those prehistoric days of web design!

I’ve had clients hire (and fire) so-called search engine gurus who would claim to know all the tricks for getting their site on the fabled “First Page of Google Search!”

Sad to say, the techniques they used were often based on some defect in search engines’ algorithms that eventually were corrected.

For the clients who are successful, I’ve learned there are really only 5 tasks that worked then, and work now.

Success Defined

Success is mostly about staying with a schedule of tasks and being ready for the fruits when they come.

It’s about not getting hung up on aspects that don’t translate to increased visitors.

For one client, success is an ecommerce site with modest sales for many years, until a better payment method, tutorials with yours truly, and isolating in place came along.

For another client, it was years spent tweaking  content on their site as they gradually shifted their focus to a career that became their main source of income.

Other clients became Influencers (before the term was actually coined). They posted daily on topics they were interested it. They were not out to sell anything directly, but by becoming well-known in their particular niches, opportunities emerged. Opportunities such as collaborations, public speaking events.

You’ll see that these success stories share the word years. It’s a hard sell for someone in a hurry!

The 5 Tasks

1. Optimize the website for Google and for visitors
2. Add new content to the site on some regular basis
3. Use social media to bring traffic to the site
4. Monitor visitor stats
5. Offline advertising and activity

In spite of Google’s indifference, I do great design!

A Stunning Design

You’ll notice that the list does not include “Have a stunning website design.”

Being a ‘web designer’, and having that be the search term people find me on, it does stick a bit in the craw.

The number one priority for people and bots visiting your website is to find what they want as fast as possible.

They appreciate a clean, intuitive presentation. After that, they will stay if there is more of what they like.

Boxes flying in from the left, boxes flying in from the right, a movie playing in the background, 10 slideshows, they are outta there!

In my next article I’ll be going into more depth on each of The 5 Tasks For A Website That Works For You, and expanding on what each task entails.

The post Intro: 5 Tasks For A Website That Works For You appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

These are some reactions to the decision by WordPress to have a block page builder they are calling ‘Gutenberg’ become the default page editor starting in WordPress 5.0.

These are reactions to the Plugin version of Gutenberg that has been made available prior to the functionality being included in ‘core’ WordPress. Core means it will be one of the default interface screens in the Dashboard.

The Sky Is Not Falling

However, WordPress will still make the standard editor available as a free Plugin for people who do not want to use the Gutenberg editor. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it.

Some of the reviews come from developers who work with WordPress. These folks tend to abhor any addition to WordPress that they see as non-essential to the base function of the software. So, there will always be resistance, especially to something they see as a ‘design helper’.

Rank And File

Brochure slideshow by Tom Stier

And some reaction is coming from users who have been comfortable making Pages using the default page editor and trying out an in-progress Plugin version of Gutenberg. From the 2.3 stars rating for the Plugin, it’s apparent that some bugs are still being worked out.

The impetus behind this change to Gutenberg seems to be a desire by the main dev team of WordPress to compete with with commercial do-it-yourself website builders.

If that is WordPress’s strategy, Gutenberg has a way to go before it can compete with visual page builders such as WP Bakery and others already available as Plugins for WordPress.

Building an a interface where one can drag elements, like images and video, and columnar layouts onto a blank webpage has been a dream of all the website builders going back to Dreamweaver and Adobe Go-Live.

In our experience, page builders are fine as long as you don’t drop an element inside another element (or two) and then find the page goes wonky! In those cases, your remedy is to correct the HTML or start over.

Change Is Good

Our take is that Gutenberg should be a fine intermediate step for WordPress users who might want to display two or three columns in their Posts or perhaps a full-width  image with a text overlay. It’s fun to tart up a Post that way.

We are here to help folks decide if they want to use Gutenberg, and if they do, we are ready to help them master a few moves they would like to add to their ‘bag of tricks’.

This will be a step forward for WordPress and we look forward to the development team polishing any rough spots.

The post WordPress Makes a Change – Welcome Gutenberg! appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

WordPress was originally designed for blogging, but has since evolved into a full content management system. It’s a simple matter to add a new Post, and since adding other content types, such as Properties (for Realty Themes), Portfolio (for Gallery Themes), or Products (for eCommerce Themes), use the same interface, it gives the owner the ability to do as much of the work populating the site as they want.

My function in this process can be just in the conceptualizing & setup process, or more if the site owner doesn’t want or have time to do continual content addition. They are then free to use my services or not depending on how much time they are willing to spend learning WordPress.

Peter Barrett Sculpture by Tom Stier

Starting your WordPress website

First, you’ll need a domain name, then a hosting account & WordPress installed on your hosting account.

I can host your site on my Managed Hosting. Managed means I monitor your hosting daily and deal with any issues with the service, usually before it becomes a site-down problem. You can find your own hosting, if you prefer.

Next, I’ll install WordPress on your hosting account, along with my favorite group of WordPress Plugins. I’ll create  a one page placeholder site showing your business & contact information, with one full image. This is important to do as soon as possible to begin indexing by Google.

GoDaddy, for instance, will use your domain as an advertising page until you establish a site on your domain.

The placeholder site can then have it’s design replaced with a Premium WordPress Theme, usually with no interruption in the site visibility.

Go Premium

A Premium WordPress Theme is a great bargain compared to designing from scratch. Premium Themes typically represent hundreds of hours of design and coding work, and display your text, product and images beautifully.

I still marvel at the typography on some of these Themes after years of seeing sites with ‘dot matrix’ personalities.

The process of selecting a Theme with my assistance is done at my hourly rate. We can meet at your local place of business or a internet cafe to do this. Wi-fi is required. Or you are free to research and choose a Theme on your own.

I have 12 years experience in working with WordPress Themes and have a pretty good sense of what are the better Themes, and who are the more reliable Theme developers.

The selection process can take as little as one or two sessions, then we should be ready for the Theme license purchase (between $50 – $100 paid directly to the developer) and then for the install & setup.

Home sweet home

The home page for most Premium Themes is typically the most complicated setup task. For example, when I look at most websites, I see several content areas in the typical home page.

At page top is the global site Header which usually contains a business logo, location and contact info. Below that is the site global horizontal navigation. Global means it appears on every site page.

Under the Header is a still or image slider that displays sliding images linked to Posts or Products the site owner wants to feature. Sliders are tricky because visitors will usually only tolerate one or two slides before moving on (or down or off the site).

Below that are Widget areas featuring several advertising-style images in a grid. These give a visitor an immediate visual hint of what the site has to offer.

Lenoxology Store by Tom Stier

Visitors rule

Imagery is important because visitors don’t  really ‘read’ a website. They give it a quick scan to confirm that it is what they thought the site would be. If they don’t see that it is, they leave within seconds.

Visitors don’t like to be hit with long complicated lists of links, all seemingly with the same priority.

They also don’t drill down though pages and sub-pages on a site to find something.

Prioritizing is usually a problem with mature sites, having hundreds of Posts, Pages or Products. The solution is to keep it simple and use Social media and WordPress tools to direct users to just a few items that you want to feature on a continuing basis.

Posting the page link to a specific page or product on your Social media is a great way to get visitors to look at what you want them to look at on your site.

The post The Best Way To Start Your WordPress Site Is To Just Start appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

A Responsive Redo

More and more visitors to your website are viewing the site on a phone or iPad sized screen.

While this can be an acceptable way to view older websites, and all the viewer needs to do is ‘squinch’ in or ‘swipe’ across to see all the text and images, Google is seeing a site that is NOT ‘ Responsive design.’

And Google has decided to actively punish non-responsive websites by downgrading them in their search listings. They offer a handy test so you can check your site out.

Google wants to list sites that are legible with no squinching and swiping!

Fortunately, you already have a WordPress site, and since the content and display are separate in WordPress, all you need to do to make your site responsive (and Google happy) is to switch to a Responsive Theme!

A new Responsive Theme for your website could be done in three different ways.

1. WordPress Themes have become such complex software that there is now a whole world of Responsive Premium Themes with great design & typography PLUS many options for personalizing a site as your own. I have a service called Premium Theme Support & Setup to help my clients discover, install & personalize these Themes. Premium Themes have a small (under $100) license cost & more importantly, a dedicated developer supporting the product. I now recommend this route.

2. Find a Free Responsive Theme and APPROXIMATE the design of the current site or switch to some new design you’d like to implement, using a free Theme’s more limited (compared to a Premium Theme) options & style settings palette.

3. Switch the site to an “off the shelf” Free Responsive Theme with even less options & style settings changes. (NOT RECOMMENDED – BRANDING DISASTER!)

Many sites may be using a completely custom designed WordPress Theme, built from scratch way, way back when a WordPress Theme consisted of maybe 12 files total. Now Themes can have hundreds of files powering all those cool functions.

These custom Themes, while they may be durable, have limited options for updating the code to keep up with the constant changes in hosting software, security, compatibility, or changes like responsiveness.

Bottom line is Google says to cut out all the squinching and swiping. And we must be responsive.

The post Google Says “No More Squinching & Swiping!” appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

• The base WordPress software that powers the site Pages & Posts
• Themes that determine the design and display function your visitors experience
• Widgets & Plugins that add additional function – contact forms, calendars, galleries, social sharing..etc.

The best feature of WordPress is that it has a private Dashboard area where the site owner can login to add & edit Posts & Pages.

We use WordPress for most of the work we do for our small business clients.

We install & setup the WordPress software into your existing or our Managed Hosting service. The advantage of our Managed Hosting is that we take care of all the setup & interaction with the hosting provider, which, frankly, has never really become a consumer understandable product.

The site then has the default Theme and the initial 4 simple pages of Home, About, Services and Contact, or equivalent. “Simple” means each page will consist of a few paragraphs with a few images and text supplied by you.

Then it’s time to really ‘brand’ the site as your own.

The part of your site that the public sees is called the Theme. The generic Theme will have a plain website layout, your name in the header, a sidebar where your Posts links will be listed, and your page content to the right or left of the sidebar.

WordPress has virtually unlimited design options available via (to a limited extent) Free & Premium Themes. For instance, Premium Themes designed for brochure or presentation sites tend to be visually rich, with unique layout options and cool effects. These Themes have good ‘wow’ factor.

For Theme design, the process falls roughly into two price tiers. In the process we call Free Theme Selection & Setup, the client tells us generally about the look they like for the site via examples of other sites, and we would select an appropriate Free Theme for them. We’ll add an existing logo to the site header and make any other changes available through the Theme Options panel to personalize the site. This process typically costs a few hundred dollars.

We have an OPTIONAL process called Premium Theme Selection & Setup. If you’d like us to collaborate with you in determining what is the best presentation for your business, or you have very specific design requirements and would like to have a choice between several designs, it would be best to engage in a Premium Theme Selection process.

During the process, we present choices, explain the benefits of the various choices, set the (usually) extensive Theme Options that Premium Themes have, and perform any tweaks that can be done via the Themes custom style panel. We can also provide a completely custom design to your specifications. It sounds like a lot of work, but ends up costing far less than creating a Theme from scratch.

The initial setup of WordPress includes a Contact Form and an SEO Plugin that automatically creates meta tags Google needs for search results. Then, like Themes, WordPress has available a world of Free & Premium Plugins that add function to your site. Examples of this are social sharing Plugins, ecommerce Plugins, gallery Plugins etc. Some can be installed and setup within approx 2 hours, others, such as ecommerce Plugins have quite complex setup and take 4 or more hours.

We enjoy offering complimentary advice & tips to my clients throughout the process. Completely custom design & coding is a very expensive process to undertake, but WordPress has made affordable design and coding available through free & reasonably priced premium Plugins & Themes.

The post WordPress Explained appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

There was a time when creating a website was something that only someone who understood html could do. A web page was made in a program like Dreamweaver and uploaded to a web server via FTP. A page was designed to look well on the screen the average viewer would be using.

Website owners now want to be able to make changes and add new content to their websites themselves. Website visitors want new & engaging content on the sites they visit.

A website needs to display legibly on a smartphone. Visitors want to share a page they like on their social media news feed. To accommodate these desires of both owners and visitors, websites needed to become software themselves.

So, for the website owner, adding or editing content on their website has actually become a LOT simpler! All they need to do is login and enter their page, post or product content.

This is why we recommend using WordPress and a Premium Theme with good responsive design and appropriate function for small business websites.

“What is a Premium Theme License?”

WordPress calls the public-facing design of your site the “Theme.” This defines the way the website looks when someone visits your domain whether by computer, smartphone or tablet. In WordPress, the design is separate from the content.

Because of the constant state of change that is the web, and the function visitors expect, it is essential that a WordPress website stays updated with the latest versions of WordPress and also the latest version of the selected Theme.

While WordPress has Free Themes available, increasingly they are limited in options and function as Theme developers use them just as a teaser for their better Premium versions.

We search for Premium Themes supported by a quality Theme developer who shows a commitment to keeping their Themes updated.

The Theme license fee is typically a small amount a Theme Developer requests to support continued development. On some of our recent projects these fees have been under $50. Some developers also charge a small annual fee for optional access to support & upgrades, some do not.

“Aren’t you a web designer?”

We are designers! We have designed and coded websites from scratch, but the complexity and responsive design requirements of a modern Dashboard-enabled website have made a completely custom site an expensive process for small business.

In general, changes that can be done via a Premium Theme’s Options panel are relatively quickly done, changes via custom styles may require interaction with the Theme developer, changes to templates & function files would require custom files from the Theme developer. These are all parts of the process that are within our area of expertise.

“Why can’t I just buy a Premium Themes and do it all myself?”

You can! Our pricing is modular. For instance, you can hire us just to perform the initial install and basic setup of WordPress and take it on from that point. We are always available to help you at our hourly rate.

If you opt for using our Theme Selection & Setup Process, our function will be to connect you up with an appropriate Premium Theme, perform or manage any desired personalization (changing logo, colors etc.), and help you define any customization requests at the developers Theme Support.

The post Why we recommend Premium Themes for WordPress projects appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

Some of the coders I work with are quite gifted in their particular areas of expertise, such as the fine folks over at organizedthemes.com.

WordPress’s core abilities have also gotten stronger in the last few years, and it’s now become one the most popular and easiest to use website tools in the world.

This increased function makes it possible for a website to change so that it behaves like an app on a smartphone or to tie in with the content on a users social media sites.

The feature that most impressed me when first working with WordPress was how quickly someone with limited technical skills learned how to add Posts to a site. Since that time, WordPress has become even better in this function, adding drag’n’drop capability for images and many other improvements.

I sometimes hear complaints about the ‘hypercommunicative’ aspects of online promotion, but when you look at social media, Facebook has been brilliant at getting folks to waste hours of their time watching their friends (and strangers) pearls of wisdom go by. What were folks doing with those hours before Facebook?

I believe the growth of smartphone usage is even more to blame for this state of affairs. People walking down the street with friends, talking on the phone. Now that’s just rude!

This situation has led to higher expectations for business websites. People who go through all the trouble to find you and your work want to know more about you and see what you are up to right now.

I’m a believer in business websites that mix commerce with personality content. That’s why I offer proxy posting services for our busy clients on their websites and social media.

It’s effective because that’s where the eyeballs are.

Success online depends on an ongoing commitment to updating on social media and also a main website. The reality is that busy small business owners find this hard to maintain except of infrequent periods of guilt or perhaps when there is a lack of any small business coming in!

The post Thoughts on WordPress, Social Media and Expectations appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

A flat page non-traditional layout website redo in WordPress by Tom Stier

WordPress started as a blogging tool. As bloggers worked with it, they grew to love the way the Dashboard made the process of quickly adding new content easy and intuitive. Then over time WordPress became one of the most popular general purpose content management softwares in the world.

WordPress provides the same user experience for folks who just want to blog and also for users who want to do that, plus manage items such as their ecommerce and newsletter integration all in the same familiar Dashboard.

This growth has lead to issues, such as the conflicts between Plugins. Some of our time is now spent in tracking down, identifying and resolving these type of conflicts.

The reason for this is that WordPress Themes & Plugins have become more and more feature rich, as the development community plays catch-up with the function and features found on the popular (and more expensively developed) destinations on the web.

This has ratcheted the former simple blogging tool up to a level where website developers depend on continual interaction with Theme and Plugin developers about their products. We are believers in working with committed Premium developers, and in paying the small license costs involved for their continued support and updates.

Themes can add their own layer of design and function onto the WordPress core. Themes have become more complex due to users frustration with the “blog” look of the default WordPress site.

This look is something that did not much bother bloggers, but it is not desirable for presentation style websites.

The Dashboard tools for modern WordPress Premium Themes can give users much more control over presentation options.

All in all, it is a great time to revamp your web presence with a WordPress powered website!

The post WordPress Grows Up appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

To say the desired design was unconventional for a WordPress site is an understatement!

To achieve this, all the site pages were ‘dropped’ into WordPress, so that they could be accessed and controlled from the site Dashboard.

I use the term ‘dopped’ lightly, as each page of the site required a unique WordPress Theme Template!

By using WordPress the new site now has news release capabilities, plus easy addition of new sharing and other functions via the use of WordPress Plugins.

A new, yet not too new, web presence!

The post Website for Local Berkshires MA Food Company appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.