TitanOutletStore.com website is built on WordPress to take advantage of the Content Management System capabilities. The website features social media integration, recent listings feed, a blog and feature images. This is the official website for Titan Outlet Store and connects to their classifieds and forum as well as all social media accounts.

Valley Senior Services is the replacement for Fargo Senior Services.

This is a ground-up web design starting with a new domain name. Some of the challenges were creating a custom design to match what the graphic designer created for the brochures, business cards and signs. The website features oversized fonts throughout for easier readability for seniors.

ValleySeniorServices.org web design is using WordPress as a content management system. WordPress was chosen for the ease of use and minimal training involved since several people will be updating the website.

Double redundant navigation will allow any type of user to find their way around. Whether someone is looking by service or county, they should be able to easily find what they are looking for. Just in case, there is a handy site search feature.

On ValleySeniorServices.org, you can find services and senior centers available in seven counties of North Dakota, including Fargo and Cass County.

Switching from a custom designed website to a CMS or Content Management System like WordPress can have many benefits. SEO, easy updates, having a blog as part of your website and not having to buy software are a few. A huge benefit is keeping the content separate from the design. You can change the design later without changing the content too much, thereby not affecting your search engine rankings or inbound links. The best part is you can still have a customized design.

There are a few things you should know before deciding to switch to a WordPress CMS, especially if you have purchased Dreamweaver to edit your site in-house.

This is a brand new site.

Your website will be different.

Nothing will remain of your old site.

Editing and file management will change.

Images and linked documents will be handled differently.

You don’t need Dreamweaver anymore.

New hosting may be required.

There is a learning curve.

Are we clear?

Good.

Be aware that your file structure may change. If your pages were all at the root level before, they will be in an organized file structure with WordPress. This means old links will need to be updated and some pages may need to be placed differently or go away altogether. All pages now can be one click away from the home page through the drop down menu navigation.

The way you create page-to-page links will change. The ability to browse for a page or drop a target on a page to make a link are gone and will be missed. Instead, open a second browser window or tab to the page you want to link to and copy the url from the address bar. In the edit window of the page you are creating the link from, select the text, click the link icon, paste the link.

Images and linked documents will be handled differently. If you use numerous PDFs or other attached documents that need to be removed from the server regularly, this needs to be made clear up front. One folder can be set up to contain all linked documents to make clean up easier. If you do not set this up from the start it will not be easy finding and deleting old files because you no longer have the option to find orphan files or broken links. These features of Dreamweaver I would really like to see built into WordPress.

You will no longer have to open Dreamweaver for every little change. You can make changes through the admin panel by logging into your web browser. This is good news for people who have had to drive to work through bad weather just to post the weather cancellations. The admin panel is easy to use but has a slight learning curve. It is closer to Word than Dreamweaver, but resist the temptation to revert back to Dreamweaver.

Adding images is easier. With WordPress you can easily add images or image galleries.

It is easy to add pages and posts. You will be able to do most edits on your own. Navigation is still handled differently from website to website, but you may by able to add new links to the navigation on your own just by adding a page.

When the internet first started out one of the ways if not the only way to get an online presence was to have a website. In order to do so you needed to know HTML which was rather difficult but people who managed to master it produced beautiful websites. Combined with good content those websites became a hit. Today however things have changed and in order to have an online presence a business or individual does not have to know HTML.

When blogging was first introduced a few years back it gave people a way to talk about their various experiences. They were purely information based so search engines really loved indexing them. Soon businesses began to catch on to the idea of blogging and now there are blogs that look a lot like websites minus the complication of setting them up and later maintaining them.

One of the biggest problems with a normal, conventional website is that in order to update, change or add stuff to the website you need to know HTML. You need to first edit the page then make all the appropriate back links work and then ftp back the pages to your server. Even when you are using an expensive program like Dreamweaver things can get complicated as your website grows and you need to add more stuff like a subscription box, flash objects etc.

With a blog you don’t need to know HTML because on the back end it’s supported with a CMS system like WordPress. Adding pages, posts, and plug-in to your blog is as simple as installing a program on your computer. Also changing the design of your blog is as easy as uploading it and changing the theme. This makes maintaining a blog much more time efficient and less prone to errors.

Plug-ins make it easy to get the most out of your WordPress blog. There are various categories of plug-ins that range from SEO plug-ins, to subscription box plug-ins etc. However installing too many plug-ins is not recommended and this is why it’s really important that you stick to the basic set of plug-ins which will work perfectly for most bloggers.

SEO plug-in

The ‘all in one SEO pack’ plug-in is the best wordpress SEO plug-in in the world. This free plug-in is updated on a fairly regular basis and makes it easy for you to optimize your blog for the keywords you are targeting. It also enables you to optimize your blog posts but and other aspects of your blog by simply entering in the terms you want your blog optimized for. There is also new functionality added to this plug-in every now and then which helps to increase the power of this plug-in.

Google XML Sitemaps

Having a site map makes it easy for Google to index your blog. The Google WML Sitemaps plug-in as the name suggest makes it easy to create Google Site maps which are XML compliant. The plug-in is capable of creating sitemaps at a click of a button, the sitemap is also updated in all the major search engines that support sitemaps.

twitMe plug-in

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform which makes it easy for businesses to get the word out about their products and services to millions of people. What the twitMe plug-in essentially does it its tweets your latest posts on your twitter profile for everyone to see. The biggest advantage of doing this is it helps you get lots of targeted traffic to your blog.

In addition to getting more attention towards your business a blog can be used for many other things.  However you shouldn’t loose sight of the fact that you originally established a blog to promote your products and services and you are choosing to do this by providing valuable and useful information. Anything else you choose do use your blog for should just be an extension of what its already used for. This is imperative you want to have a constant supply of fresh traffic as well as high search engine rankings.

Using it to get customer feedback and testimonials

When people usually browse though various product websites they often come across the testimonials which are not very effective nowadays as most people feel that they are doctored to say the least. However when they come across positive comments on a blog they feel that the product is good because it has real people who have really used the product commenting about it. This is why many businesses often have a box below a short description about their product where people can leave feedback about it.

Article promotions

A blog is nothing more than a collection of good articles which people enjoy reading. These articles can be technical in nature or they can be informative about various products and services. You can also use your blog to promote recent articles which you have written on various other blogs, and article directories.

RSS Feeds

One of the most powerful tools and perks of using a blog is its RSS function. With RSS feeds you can virtually send out your blog post to millions of people who will then visit your blog to read more about what you have written. This is an excellent way to get lots of traffic to your blog. However make sure that you write a good three line teaser which will get people to click on the feed and visit your blog.

Today blogging is something that everyone seems to be getting into. Businesses mainly blog because it helps them increase traffic coming to their website, but how does blogging increase traffic? How it exactly works needs to be fully understood before you start blogging. Some experts believe that regular blogging can increase traffic to your website by as much as 250% while others people that you can experience a boost of 500% depending on how effective your blogs are.

Establishes credibility

One of the first things a blog does is it increases and establishes credibility of both you and your business. When you blog about things such as your business, offer useful tips and tricks etc it gives people a feeling that you are someone who really knows what he or she is talking about. This makes it easy for you to sell to them your products and services, because you have already managed to achieve the biggest hurdle in sales i.e. establishing trust.

Makes it easy for people to find you

Even with the millions of blogs out there it’s still easy to get good organic search engine traffic to your blog. With the right set of tools and the right articles you should have no problem getting lots of traffic to your blog which can then be sent towards your website.

Starts a dialog with potential clients

When you have a blog its like a one way dialog where you are saying something in the hopes that someone will hear it. When people do hear and like what you have said they will leave comments, in addition to that they will also check out what you are recommending. However you need to ensure that your blog posts are fresh, useful and thought provoking so that people get involved in it.

WordPress is one of the easiest and most search engine friendly blogging platforms around. Breaking your posts up into categories serve two very important purposes:

1. It makes it easy for visitors to your blog to find and read what they are looking for.
2. It makes your blog easy for search engine spiders to index hence making it more search engine friendly.

By default wordpress creates the first category which I like to call the ‘Root Category’, you can then have many sub categories below that or you can add more ‘Root Categories’ and make a few sub categories below them. The main idea of creating categories is to make your blog easy to navigate for users. I wouldn’t suggest that you make a bunch of empty categories rather start with just one category and as your posts increase you can more categories. I like to keep the posts per category limited to around 5-10 the reason is when somebody clicks on a category they probably just look at the first ten articles. Everything after that is just a waste of time as many people will never find it.

People often get confused between categories and tags. Categories help you group your posts to one particular category, where as tags are used more as identifiers. There are many people who advocate that you should just have one category and then have everything organized via tags. The problem is that this structure will not support a very large blog, its fine for a mini blog but it’s not practical for larger blogs.

When creating categories, make sure you name them accurately. I’m against category names that are larger than five words, because it just complicates your blog. If you can keep the category name limited to just one or two word then that works the best.