It is critical to update the WordPress software and plugins in order to avoid security breaches and website hacks which target older versions of WordPress. My eBook gives you a basic website security checklist and an overview of what’s needed to keep your site up-to-date.

Right-click here to download your FREE eBook

BENEFITS: This is your “home base” on the web. All marketing efforts (online and offline) are like playing the field in baseball—the object is to get to home base. If you want to maximize your success online, you MUST have a good website that communicates your strategy.

WordPress is a free, Web-based software program that is a great choice for Entrepreneurs looking to build and maintain a website or blog. It is “scalable” so you can start small and expand with your business growth. Blogging gives your brand a voice on the web and great search engine optimization (SEO).

The easiest way to build your website is to build it a little at a time. Start by focusing on your simple strategy: you fastest route to income, your ideal client and the next action step they should take.

DOWNSIDE: While it’s easy to maintain, trying to do setup if you are not a technical person can lead to hours of frustration and big mistakes. Blogging does take commitment to keep up-to-date.

The video below gives a good overview of what a blog is and how they have changed the way we share “news”. However, we do recommend you use a self-installed version of WordPress, not WordPress.com as the video mentions if you are going to be blogging for business.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI

WordPress is built on 2 different types of content: PAGES & POSTS

PAGES are static content that is like a traditional website, containing your company information, product, services and more. While this information is important, to use it with social networking sites, you need to manually create links to the content. Readers also might not notice you made an update to this content.

• This website displays this information across the top blue bar.

POSTS are typically news or commentary-style content which are presented as latest entry first, organized into archives automatically. This is the “blog” format, but businesses can use this to present latest news or product updates. Use blog posts for frequently updated news and events.

• This website displays blog categories across the grey bar.

How posts work:

Posts automatically creates a “RSS FEED” that can be pulled into other Social Media sites. This means that your updates can be pushed out to your entire social network with NO EXTRA WORK!

• Archives of content created automatically
• Create content to be posted at a later date automatically
• Easily cross-reference content

WordPress allows you to create relationships between posts so your readers can find and read related content.

Blog posts may be displayed in multiple places on your WordPress site, exposing your readers to the content in different ways. This makes it more likely they will find what they are looking for!

You can organize content by:

• “Latest Posts”
• “Related Posts”
• “Categories”
  • High level classifications, think of this as “umbrellas” of related information
  • Built into the navigation structure
• “Tags”
  • More granular than categories. Another way of cross-referencing.
  • Best when tags are used multiple times (try not to tag if you will only have 1 item with that tag).
  • Think of tags as a form of interactive yellow pages. The tag link takes you to a collection of posts tagged with that keyword.
  • Tags can link to a generated page such as your searches do, listing all of the posts on your site related to that specific tag.
  • Tags should have short one, two, or at the most, three words.
  • Tagging gives you topical search capabilities for your site that are a middle ground between categories and all-out search, but it shouldn’t replace categories entirely
  • Use tags to give your readers an at-a-glance list of the keywords YOU find most important.
• The differences between Categories & Tags
  • Categories don’t help search engines find information. Tags help search engines and tag directories catalog your site.
  • Posts are usually in one to four categories. A single post can list as many tags as you want.
  • Categories and Tags BOTH can link to a generated page such as your searches do, listing all of the posts on your site related to that specific keyword. This makes it easy for your users to find information quickly.

WordPress is a free, Web-based software program that anyone can use to build and maintain a website or blog.

While it’s easy to maintain, trying to do setup yourself can lead to hours
of frustration & big mistakes. Let us help!

Your website will grow with your business and be easy to update!

WordPress is a scalable way to build both small and large sites—with or without a blog. Use it to build a simple brochure-style website, a business blog, an eCommerce or a multi-level membership site. Plugin to the latest social media sharing tools, post photos, videos and link to your email newsletter or special offers. It includes a simple-to-use backend that allows you to make edits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdvEdMMtNMY

WordPress is a free, web-based software program that anyone can use to build and maintain a website or blog. It was originally intended as an easy way to set up a blog. But, thanks to the efforts of a large “open source” community of programmers working to extend and improve its capabilities, it is now much more. New improvements are constantly being added that will keep your business up-to-date with the latest in technology, without having to do an expensive redesign.

Build a “home base” to connect and engage your customers quickly & easily:

Here’s a brief peak behind the backend of WordPress
All WordPress setups include our basic training designed for non-technical people!

All websites by Virtuallinda are built using WordPress

WordPress Features

A plug-in is a small bit of code that sits on top of your WordPress installation and increases the functionality of your website in some way. Plugins allow your blog to have more features and to do more than it could when you first installed it. Most plug-ins are written in the PHP scripting language and add an additional feature or function to your website. TRANSLATION: Experts in computer programming are creating little bits of code that will enhance your website. These are free or “premium”, which cost a fraction of what you would pay to have this custom-built.

Plugins integrate seamlessly with WordPress so there’s no messing with your WordPress code. That’s another great thing about plug-ins. They don’t actually affect your original WordPress install. They reside separately and interact with WordPress. I do however, recommend that you hire an expert to help you with this. Adding too many or plugins from unreliable sources can slow down, break or open up your website to being hacked.

Let’s review a few types of functionality that you may want to add to your website:

Photo Galleries

Plugin to allow for albums of photos with ease of admin management. Galleries can be used to show events, before/after of your work, sample work projects and more. Images can be displayed small (thumbnails) then enlarged to show details.

My website uses two different plugins. The first adds a carousel to add rotating thumbnails in my web design section. This enhances the text area by showing a snapshot of my ability. I also have a portfolio with larger samples of my work. Plugins make creating and managing images EASY – you can upload the original image through the backend interface and it will be resized for you. You can change the order and details. This is a huge time saver on trying to do this manually!

Videos

Can be added to pages or posts with ease, or incorporated into the design elements. The easiest way to add a video is by first uploading it to YouTube, then “embedding” it into your website. Plugins can make this easier—rather than having to generate the “embed code” from YouTube, you can use the link to the video along with a few “short codes” (a little bit of text that will then display the video like you want).

Audio / Podcasting

Plugins make it easy to display an audio player on your website. This is a great way to include a welcome message or repurpose live talks, webinars or teleseminars as part of your sales process. Podcasting is more advanced, it is distributing audio or video content via RSS 2.0, or Atom. Podcast clients such as iTunes allow listeners to subscribe to your RSS/Atom feed and automatically download your content to their portable audio players as it becomes available. If you are doing a radio show online or on air or want to enhance your blog, this can be an option for you.

Digital Access Pass (DAP) – OUR FAVORITE MEMBERSHIP PLUGIN!

Digital Access Pass (DAP) – Membership sites made simple! Take your existing (& future) content and turn it into a completely automated, recurring-revenue generating membership web site…using “content dripping”, email autoresponders, and a built-in affiliate program. The tech features of this plugin and support are fantastic. We highly recommend!

• Sell 1 product, or hundreds.
• Create 1 membership level – or Multiple (unlimited).
• Sell 1-time products, or recurring-subscription programs.
• Even use DAP to sell live events and coaching programs.

Wishlist Member

Wishlist Member - If your business is ready to build a simple membership site, we recommend using Wishlist Member. WishList Member is a powerful solution for creating an online membership site – all built using WordPress as the core content management system. It’s easy to control access to your content, accept payments, manage your members and so much more! It works great for simple sites. For more complex sites, we recommend Digital Access Pass (DAP). Our consulting can help you determine what your needs are.

Search Engine Optimization

ScribeSEO WordPress Plugin – Professional writers, bloggers, affilate marketers & entreprenuers can all benefit from this WordPress plugin that makes SEO copywriting simple! Quickly create search optimized web pages, blog posts and press releases. You need content that attracts the people who are looking for what you have to sell, and search is a huge source of motivated buyers. Now you can make web content work for your business, instead of the other way around.

eCommerce

Use PayPal or a fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

Calendar

The simplest way is to add events to your blog as a regular post. A more advanced feature is to promote your networking events with a calendar. There are many plugin options available if you need to display as listings, months or both. Our team can work with you on a custom solution.

Advanced User Registration

Use a custom-branded login page. This is a great option for membership sites.

And many, many more!

Contact us to discuss your needs, and we will provide a custom quote!

1. Separation Between Style and Content

It allows you to have a total separation between style and content. In practical terms, this means that, while all the page and post content is contained in a MySQL database, all the files that decide what the site looks like and how the site functions are contained in a WordPress Theme located in the themes folder in your installation.

That means to change the look and/or functionality of your WordPress site you are actually only making changes to your theme. While this is rather “easy”, we still recommend that someone with some technical knowledge should be the one handling these changes. We do recommend starting with a Premium Theme and having our team do some minor customization.

And so it follows that while Social Media Works is working on what the site looks like, our clients can start filling the site with content without either of us interfering with the other. It also means that when you are working on a site design or redesign, you can work on a dummy site and then upload and activate the new theme only when it is finished, avoiding the whole “site under construction” problem of the past.

2. Update Multiple Pages at Once

Navigation elements across your ENTIRE site will be updated automatically, unlike the way sites used to require updating manually.

3. Build a Blog, or a Whole Website with WordPress

WordPress is a free and open source blog publishing application. We highly recommend using WordPress as an addition to your company website, or to revise your static brochure style site.  This website runs on WordPress. It is quick to build a simple site, and it can easily be expanded and content rearranged as you grow.

4. It is a Content Management System (CMS)

WordPress acts as a very powerful content management system (CMS), storing images, audio, video, pdfs and other documents for easy insertion into your pages. This scalable model can be used to build a simple brochure-style website, a business blog, an eCommerce site or a multi-level membership site.

5. It Creates a “Feed” of Newest Content

The blog portion of your website will also create a “feed” of content that is like a news feed of the latest information that you published.  This is very essential to social media integration.

6. WordPress Increases Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A site running on WordPress is optimized for easily publishing and changing content. Fresh, unique content is essential for getting good search engine rankings. A brochure-style website that is never updated will be ignored by Google. Additional Plugins may be added to help boost your rankings and check your content in real-time for keyword relevance.

7. Easy Integration with Social Media

There are many Plugins (add-ons) that are specifically for using Social Media and pushing out or pulling in fresh content. This includes showing your latest Tweets and adding “social sharing” icons at the end of all content for your readers to share with their network.

WordPress makes web development MUCH, MUCH easier than when I first started building websites in 1997.  But that doesn’t mean that it requires zero technical knowledge.   For this reason, I highly recommend that professionals understand a general overview of the benefits of WordPress, and understand how to keep it updated. This makes it a tool that you can use for marketing your business to your community.

However, your time is not going to be well-spent if you try and setup the technical details yourself.  Chances are, you will make mistakes. This could be critical mistakes.

I had 2 clients upgrade the WordPress software without my team’s help. They ignored all warnings and just clicked a few buttons and bam – their site was a white screen. One of them was left with a site that required 5+ hours to get it fixed (it would have been 15-30 minutes of our time to begin with). The time to repair it was not in his budget so the site had to wait a while before it was up and running. Another had the site down while they were speaking at a national conference.

Don’t let this happen to you.

If these stories don’t scare you, here’s a peak under the hood of how WordPress works. This explains, in plain English, what’s going on.  These days WordPress has theme frameworks that let you bi-pass some of this. However, in order to add on the little bells and whistles that seem to be standard requests from our clients, we do have to dive into these files.

Feel free to breeze over this if it doesn’t make sense!

Graphic by Joost de Valk - http://yoast.com/wordpress-theme-anatomy/

Do I expect this to make sense to most business professionals?  Absolutely not.

That’s why it’s a sensible business decision to outsource the setup and maintenance of WordPress to the Social Media Works team of experts.

We know how WordPress works, so you don’t have to.

Pages (Static Content)

Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static “About” page that you manage through WordPress.  On our website, “pages” are the links across the top gray bar. Pages can be arranged in a hierarchy.  For example:

Posts (Blog Content) = “Your PR Machine”

Content that is presented as latest entry first, organized into archives automatically.  This is the “blog” format, but businesses can use this to present latest news or product updates.  Use blog posts for frequently updated news and events. Posts automatically creates a “RSS FEED” that can be pulled into other Social Media sites, so posts should be used for any content that your target audience wants updates on. This would include news & events, an article series, product announcements, etc.

Organized by “Categories”

• High level classifications, think of this as “umbrellas” of related information
• Built into the navigation structure

Organized by “Tags”

• More granular than categories.  Another way of cross-referencing.
• Best when tags are used multiple times (try not to tag if you will only have 1 item with that tag).
• Think of tags as a form of interactive yellow pages. The tag link takes you to a collection of posts tagged with that keyword.
• Tags can link to a generated page such as your searches do, listing all of the posts on your site related to that specific tag.
• Tags should have short one, two, or at the most, three words.
• Tagging gives you topical search capabilities for your site that are a middle ground between categories and all-out search, but it shouldn’t replace categories entirely
• Use tags to give your readers an at-a-glance list of the keywords YOU find most important.

Differences between Categories & Tags

• Categories don’t help search engines find information. Tags help search engines and tag directories catalog your site.
• Posts are usually in one to four categories. A single post can list as many tags as you want.
• Categories and Tags BOTH can link to a generated page such as your searches do, listing all of the posts on your site related to that specific keyword. This makes it easy for your users to find information quickly.
  http://wordpress.tv/2009/01/14/adding-categories-and-tags-to-your-posts/

Microsoft FrontPage (Expression Web)

If you have been in business for a while and ever tried to build your own website, you probably used Microsoft FrontPage.

Microsoft FrontPage is software that is installed on your computer. It is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor and web site administration tool from Microsoft for the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. It was branded as part of the Microsoft Office suite from 1997 to 2003. Microsoft FrontPage has since been replaced by Microsoft Expression Web and Sharepoint Designer, which were first released in December 2006. (source: Wikipedia)

Expression Web’s main competitor is Adobe Dreamweaver. Social Media Works uses Dreamweaver to edit parts of websites built with WordPress, but our clients do not need software like this to make changes to the content. We have not used FrontPage or Expression Web since 1997 because we found it made changes to the HTML code that we were not aware of, which lead to visual changes on the website that took additional development time to fix.

Building websites manually with a program like this was common but has since been replaced by Content Management Systems (CMS) that enable a company to edit content on your website through a web browser or mobile device.

Technical parts of the website will still be built using Dreamweaver (as that is Social Media Works’ program of choice) as well as Adobe Photoshop.  These parts include graphic elements and file upload for the “theme” (design only as WordPress allows “media” files to be uploaded and managed in an interface).

NOT RECOMMENDED AS A SOLUTION.

WordPress

WordPress is software that gets installed on your webhost and it gives you a web browser interface to edit your content.  This is similar to how Microsoft Word gives you the ability to edit content or your email program allows you to send a message out to the internet.  Instead of hitting “save” or “send”, you “publish” and the new content appears on your website.

The dashboard is the backend system for adding and editing content.  Multiple levels of users can be set, so Admin access does not have to be given to people that are just doing data entry.

• 7 Reasons to Use WordPress to Build Your Business Website

The WordPress Backend = The Software Interface