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.

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.

I do know what I do, however.

This post focuses on Tom Stier/Promote Globally, so I will not be mentioning any client names. Also, I don’t wanna get in trouble!

Many years ago, a web developer designed a site page by page in Dreamweaver. Now, with WordPress, a website IS the software.

Site owners can add and edit posts or pages if they have the time or inclination to do so. This has moved some of the work I used to do to more of the set-up, function, troubleshooting and strategy areas.

Elsewhere on this site I talk about the whole social media/website posting synergy, so I won’t go into that here. In a nutshell, if you build a website, they won’t come until they see a link to it on social media.

Communication is essential, and I do a lot of it. I respond to client-related emails continually through the day. I’m happy to answer a quick technical question, then some discussions develop into step by step tutorials or my preparing detailed options for the best way to implement some function or strategy. I’m a fan of getting verbal discussions preserved in an email thread. Email & phone interaction takes up several hours of a typical workday.

Last month in web development

I’ve enjoyed an association with a New York City-based online retailer going back almost ten years. The continuing work for this retailer involves collating product information – descriptions, pricing, and images preparation – from several manufacturers, then populating the retailer’s online shopping cart. The site owner is preparing another project for which I am creating branding, and consulting with him on social media strategy for the project.

I built, host & maintain several sites for an alternative education initiative. Last month I created a new education program page, updated registration forms and the connected payment processors, and updated an integrated site bulletin board. The organization has a dedicated social media/eblast person and we coordinate when new posts are added on the site.

For a health services website, I created a banner (Client reaction to first pass: “It is just right!”) & information page for a fundraiser, and reconfigured the site home page to include the new banner. We also set up a new Facebook page for the organization and, as Admins of the new page, created the first post.

For an author, I updated their website header, re-configured the home page, and added a banner w/rotating testimonials to help promote a new novel.

For a small press publisher, I fixed problems with PayPal orders not completing, isolated a php version mismatch, and updated their site & shopping cart software. They asked that I do the same on another site they owned.

For a commercial artist, I did the WordPress, Theme & Plugins update on her site. One of the downsides of using any dynamic website software is that the base software and additional bits of coding (Plugins) sometimes don’t get along. This is why you always backup before updating.

Last month also saw the same variety of work done on sites for another author, an intuitive, a land conservancy and an opera composer!

The business of business

When you are in business for yourself, you have to keep bringing in business. To that end, I prepared two estimates last month. One of them was quite involved, going through a few re-configurations and then meeting in person with the organizations’ members.

Billing for work that is done is also essential. I spend some time every day notating work and populating invoices. Yawn.

I host sites, so there are occasional maintenance interactions with my server providers. Hosting has become much more reliable than it was in the past, and we are very happy with our current choices.

My domain name provider, however, began sending renewal notices for my domains to somebody who should not have received them! Many phone calls were required to get them to stop doing that.

So, that’s what I did last month…oh, almost forgot, I may have also done a LOT of lighthearted, persuasive posting on Facebook for my favorite candidate for President

Make sure you voice your choice!

The post Tom, What The Heck Does A Web Developer Do? 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.

We are always happy and quick to do so, but sometimes we find the request does not take into account all aspects of how website additions work best both for human visitors and for Google.

Which leads us to the often received “Please Add This Poster To My Website” request!

Graphics are important to a website. They provide an immediate visual clue for the visitor telling them “I’m in the right place!”

When they are placed within Posts on your site, they make a page of text like this one more visually interesting.

However, some things that you’d like the graphic to do, such as stand on it’s own to communicate an event or some other information, will only be partly successful if you just post the graphic by itself.

This is especially true of a poster graphic. These graphics tend to have much of their information in very small print. And Google has trouble reading text in an image.

So, by all means, post your poster graphic! But make sure that all the information in the poster appears in real text next to the graphic. That’s right, real text for all of it.

This will also help Google to ‘know’ that the this text has a close relationship to the poster graphic.

Happy posting!

The post Please Add This Poster To My Website 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.

So, to put the nice pictures on a web page, I found software that made it easier to see visually how the page would look when it was published.  I also discovered that the software I was using was writing something called html to do this.

When the software started writing crazy html that Mr. Web Browser did not like, I found that I had to figure out how to understand and change the html for Mr. Web Browser.

Fortunately, there were many other people on the web that knew a LOT more than I did about these incompatibilities. I read many pages about these issues and learned all about the very popular Mr. Internet Explorer Web Browser.

I feel this was a point where many graphics people said to themselves “I like making nice websites, but my pages look weird on someone else’s computer. So, I’m outta here.”

But, I’ve always loved art and gadgets equally, and so was even more drawn to it when I found that one could make little functions that would work on a web page. Like a counter, for instance.

To be continued…

The post Tom Stier’s History of the World Wide Web – Part One appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

We are happy to announce another successful WordPress content management makeover for local graphic design service tgo.com! (Love those three letter dot com domain names!)

For this redesign of tgo.com owner Rose Tanenbaum’s web site, we created WordPress template files from her InDesign layouts. We then implemented  a cool gallery and slideshow module, and a navigation system.

The best part is that Rose, who had never used WordPress before, was impressed with the its simplicity and power. She is now able to manage her portfolio images using the site Dashboard.

Check out her site to see some really great graphics!

The post WordPress Conversion For Graphic Designer Website appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

It is a Dashboard-enabled website, and the owners are adding their own text and image content.

For this project we worked closely with designer Julia Brine, translating her layout grahics and type styles into the template, and configuring all the dynamic functions, like the widgets (the “not fun for the average user” type stuff) …

The post Garden Designer Website appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.