10 Reasons Why a Website is a Good Thing to Have

Posted on September 22, 2009 by keyalea

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1.  More people than ever rely on the internet to get information.
People are entertained, find ideas, plan their vacations, decide where to eat and purchase items online.  By having a presence on the internet, your business and/or ideas can be found.

2.  It’s personalized.
Having a website allows you to create your own personalized information and be in control of it.  When you have a website, your business information is personalized with your pictures, text, contact info and social networking options.

3.  It can bring you business.
A website is a tool that can bring you business. Consider this scenario: one business has an optimized, good-looking website, whereas another business has a website that looks outdated and has broken links. Which business are customers most likely to support? (A true confession: I have done internet searches to decide where to get my hair cut.)

4.  It increases productivity.
If you have a website that has good information about you and what you do, instead of answering phone calls about where you are located or what you hours you’re open, you can concentrate on productivity.

5. A website is dynamic.
It allows for an interactive experience by linking to other sites, other information, by showing pictures, video or audio. When you have new information or products, they can be uploaded to your website for the world to see. It also can allow others to subscribe to your content, comment and/or contact you.

6. It’s relatively inexpensive.
Consider that a static, unchanging yellow pages-type listing with only your business name and number with a box around it, will be over 500 dollars for one year. Also consider that people aren’t using that service as much any more.

7. It can be done quickly.
If your site assets (text and pictures) are ready, in a few days your completed website can be online.

8. It gives you control.
It puts you in control of your website and content. If a Content management System (CMS) is used, it can allow you to quickly access, manage and update your site, without having to know any code or have special software installed.  If the internet can be reached, you can control your site assets.

9. It’s fulfilling.
While some people have a website for business reasons, others have a website to blog. There are many different types of blogs, some people blog to share findings or answers, while others do it to express themselves, associate with an online community and contribute to the online conversation.

10. It’s cool.
Okay, it’s a somewhat glib reason, but you have to admit, it’s kinda cool to say, “Visit my website at ihaveawebsite.com.”

Having a website is an, asset, a tool and an investment. Contact us if you’d like to talk.

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Changing the Link Order

Posted on September 21, 2009 by keyalea

Here’s a bit of code that allows you to order the links in the sidebar in a self-hosted wordpress site.  Ordinarily, they would show up ordered alphabetically – which may not be what you want.

It was originally posted on a wordpress.org forum by Pinoy.ca and it works marvelously, but I changed one line from descending to ascending. The original code is second. It’s published here on and not on the thread because it was closed.

function widget_links_args_filter($args) {
	$args['orderby'] = 'rating';  // Sort links by rating
	$args['order'] = 'ASC';      // ascending
	return $args;
}
add_filter('widget_links_args','widget_links_args_filter');

I put the code into function.php and now the sidebar links are order in their assigned order. Here’s the original code.

function widget_links_args_filter($args) {
	$args['orderby'] = 'rating';  // Sort links by rating
	$args['order'] = 'DESC';      // descending
	return $args;
}
add_filter('widget_links_args','widget_links_args_filter');

Hope it works for you!

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Help Your Customers Find Your Business

Posted on September 20, 2009 by keyalea

If you’re an independent business owner who is wondering how to start negotiating the internet world, one of the first things that you can do is sign up with Google’s Local Business Center.  It’s easy, it’s free, and is a valuable first step toward establishing a web presence.  When people carry out an internet search, if you are registered with Google’s Local Business Center, it helps people find your information. It also gives you tools, such as the ability to create coupons that customers can print out, and gives you access to statistics that help you to learn more about your customers preferences. See their short video below to learn more about the Local Business Center.

1. To start, go to Google’s Local Business Center and sign up to get a google account. If you already have one, sign in and skip down to number 3.
2. Choose a username and password to set up the account.
3. To to www.google.com/local/add to start adding information about your business. You’ll need to put in the name, address, phone number, website, services, hours of operation, payment options and place your business on the map. Google will verify your business name, as well as allow you to upload pictures and video of your business. Shortly after submitting your business information, in order to verify the information, an automated services will either call you or send you a letter (takes up to three weeks.) I always opt for the phone call. Have your phone nearby, because you’ll usually receive a call within a few seconds.
4. Write down your verification number and enter it in the form to verify your business information.
5. There you have it. (Remember to regularly sign back in and make necessary changes to your information, create coupons and see your site statistics.)

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Why It's Important to Blog

Posted on September 3, 2009 by keyalea

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Blogging serves different functions for different people. What it does for everyone, regardless of the range of topics, is that it gets their presence out into the world. There are many different kinds of blogs. Some blogs are more personal than others, like blogs on the experience of raising children, while others can be based on trouble shooting technology, or even on how to make good pasta.  While the subject matter may differ, all blogs allow a type of sharing to take place, they allow people to have a voice and can show up in various internet searches. The more you blog, the more your presence is out in the internet world.

Blogs can help businesses and self-employed people because every blog post is a way to bring people back to your website. Think of your own habits on the internet. When you want to find something, what do you do? Most often people carry out an internet search. It could be a text, image, video or anther type of search. Let’s say you have a question about how to transplant a tree in your yard, but you don’t know what kind you should get or even how to do it. So you do a search = strong trees for arid climates. The search site returns its list of what it found. (I did this search today, and in the top 10 search results, only one was from a commercial tree growing and selling site. The rest were various articles put out by researchers or about-type sites.) If you knew about tree-stuff (and most likely if you had a small business dealing with this, you would) and if you shared this information in a blog, the person searching for this information may come back to your blog and website.

Blogging can be beneficial for all types of businesses and organizations. If you’re a photographer and post a pictures that you’ve taken on a daily blog (and tag and title your posts correctly) when people carry out image searches, every post potentially can bring viewers back to your website. Sometimes people are just looking, but that’s how it goes for any storefront. Here are other examples of how it can benefit business owners: if you have a ski or bicycle shop, you can blog on you favorite experiences on the mountain or about different routes in the area. That way when people are looking to visit your area, they already have found your blog posts, know of your shop and will likely visit. If you have a beauty salon, both women and men, constantly search on the internet for ways to make them look better. Create tips on your blog and people might give your shop a call.  People spend a lot of time on the internet and use it to find information.

There are other things to know about blogging. Just because you write a blog post, it doesn’t mean that people will automatically call you.  It takes a while for people to find out about your blog. It also needs to be done somewhat consistently. In this way, it gives people a reason to subscribe and continue to read your posts. There is also the issue of spam, but there are also ways to prevent it from getting into your comments in the first place. Also keep in mind that when you blog or put anything on the internet, you are putting information in a very public sphere. If you have proprietary information and you want to keep it private, it probably shouldn’t be on the internet. Other information can have certain restricted licensing rights, while others may be a part of the Creative Commons which allows creators of content to specify what can be done with digital content.  This is a very short primer on why it’s important to blog, as there are many other aspects to it, so it’s just a short, basic article.

Overall, blogging can help increase your visibility by giving you the ability to get your ideas, whether its your favorite recipes, style tips, information on your area, how to plant trees, how to take good photographs, change your oil – etc, and your information out to people who are searching for it.  This way, your business and your ideas can be found.

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WordPress Comments

Posted on August 31, 2009 by keyalea

WordPress supplies a very impressive architecture for setting up a website, blog or a combination of both. I use and appreciate it every day. On one site, however, the comments were not working and as I went through the process of trying to figure out why they weren’t working, I wanted to throw my computer out the window. I would click on the comments button and nothing at all would happen. I did, however, trouble shoot and was able to isolate and identify the problem. This is what I did to get my comments to work.

There are two versions of this story. There’s the short version, and the longer, step by step version.

The short version of why the comments weren’t working had to do with permalinks and about something that I had done in one of the permalink windows to cause this to happen. Permalink customization can be accessed just under where you create the title of the post or page, or by going to settings – permalinks. I have been working with WordPress 2.8.4 and a potentially easy fix is to look at how you created the permalink structure. WordPress makes it easy for you to customize posts and pages, but in doing so, you also have the ability to mess things up. The beauty is that you can figure out the problem and fix it. (Code is indeed beautiful.)

And here’s the long version of the process that I went through to get my comments working. I had originally tweaked with both css and php files, so I didn’t know if one of these changes was the culprit. I also routed the posts to another blog page and created a static home page. I had set up other websites and the comments were working just fine in the other sites, so it was something in this particular site that was the problem.  This is the process of troubleshooting that I went through.

  1. Downloaded other themes and previewed whether or not comments worked in them. Comments in all the other themes either did nothing or went to a 404 page, but most of the time nothing happened. My problem did not take me to a blank white page.
  2. Tested the same comment feature with the same theme in other sites that I had set up. Comments were found to work with the same theme in the other sites.
  3. Searched out answers on the WP.org forum, only to find that many of the threads involving comments not working were unresolved and closed. I did take all the advice and added and tweaked various bits of code throughout the site, but nothing got the comments working. By then my code was getting fairly sloppy.
  4. Came upon the realization that the best thing would be to totally reinstall. Was bummed out, did a few more searches and came upon this. The author, Ian Stewart is a WP Rockstar and wrote the Thematic Theme. It was at this moment that the answer was out there, and that I had the ability to do it.
  5. Did a backup the text on a text editor, wrote down all the assets and plugins that I was using, then manually deleted all elements of wordpress through the control panel. Started a clean install.
  6. Started working toward a finished website by downloading the theme, creating pages, embedding assets, reinstalling plugins and widgets I was previously using and tested the comments functionality along the way.
  7. Realized that the permalink structure and messing with it had stopped the comments from working. I had edited and customized the permalink to text, but in doing so, had somehow route comments to another page (in this case, the about page). I changed them back to the default permalink structure and comments started working. This can potentially really mess up a site if a lot of posts and pages are created then the permalink structure is changed, but in this case, it was in the rebuild, so in choosing one of the default wp way of setting up permalinks, the second day and name setting (settings – permalinks) I was able to keep the page name within the webaddress-permalink, and got comments to work with posts.

That’s one way of getting comments to work!

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