WordPress is an online, open source website creation software written in PHP and MySQL database code.

At first, WordPress was primarily used to create a simple Blog website.

Today, WordPress is the most popular tool used to create and manage websites for small to large sized businesses, non-profits and universities. One does not have to know web code in order to create or update a WordPress website.

WordPress is, by far, the most popular open source, Content Management System (CMS), used by approximately 75 million websites.

A content management system, or CMS, is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website – like content – without needing to know anything about programming.

In non-geek speak, WordPress is probably the easiest and most powerful website content management system (or CMS) in existence today. Users can quickly and easily learn to update the content on their WordPress website by logging into the site back-end, or Dashboard, and adding text content or uploading new images. WordPress software is free to install, deploy and upgrade. Thousands of free and commercial plugins and themes are available at WordPress.org.

WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website!

People often confuse WordPress CMS software with WordPress.com. WordPress.com (often referred to as self-hosted WordPress) is a free blogging platform that uses WordPress CMS software.

WordPress.org is a website where one can download the WordPress CMS software to install on a computer and where one can find thousands of free WordPress plugins and themes that are easy to install on a WordPress website.

If one owns a domain then WordPress CMS can be installed for free by most web hosting companies. Install a free or commercial WordPress theme, and a new WordPress website is created.

To update the look of your new WordPress website, a new theme can easily be installed. The existing webpages, text and images, stay in place so no content is lost. With an HTML coded, non-Wordpress website, this is not possible and updating takes a lot of time, work and expense.

Your website is often the first impression that a new customer will see and you want to make sure it is a great one!

Your website should reflect everything you want customers to know and remember about your business.

Successful websites meet the needs of your customers. Your website should load quickly and customers should be able to find content with ease. This means your website is user friendly and the navigation menu makes sense. Web pages should not be buried more than 2 clicks from the homepage. Research has proven that upon every click from the homepage a website will lose 50% of the original site visitors.

Responsive Design

A great website should easily be viewed on a desktop computer, a tablet or a smartphone. A responsive web design will automatically adjust the size of the screen to fit the device. Pages, posts, slideshows and images should load quickly.

Minimalism

A great website should showcase the content, not the site design. A website that is too heavy in the design aspects will detract from the products or services presented. Just like in print design, “white space” is good. Within the fist 3 seconds of viewing your website, a visitor should get a good idea of what your business does.

Relevant Content

Content is King! Make sure the webpages on your website contain text content and images that are relevant to the topic. Make sure you have enough text on a webpage so it achieves a higher SEO score by using relevant keywords or keyword phrases in the text content.

User-Friendly Navigation

The navigation menu on your website should make sense. Content should not be more than 2 clicks deep on any menu. Separate your services and list as top level pages or categories so these are easily viewed on the main menu without using a drop down. Avoid using a top level “Services” category with a drop down. This will make it easier to navigate your site and find content. Make popular content visible on the homepage with a “read more” link to a webpage with more details.

Many of your competitors probably have a great website. Examine their techniques to drive website traffic to specific webpages.

Hire a professional web designer with marketing experience to create your new website.

A website is not just an informational, online brochure. It is not just code. A great website should appeal to the customers you want and be visually attractive with your advertising message.

Target the Right Customers

Everything from the website colors, layout, menus and webpages should reflect your business. A great website is memorable! Customers will remember a great website and return more often.

Expectations are high for website visitors and a poorly designed website can turn off customers. A poorly designed website can reflect upon the quality of your business and services.

In choosing keywords for your business, it is very important to put some time and thought into researching the right keywords. There are free tools online such as the Google Keyword Research Tool and Wordtracker that can help find keywords relevant to your business.

Keyword examples are:

• plumbing services Raleigh NC
• plumbing repairs Wake Forest NC
• plumbers Raleigh NC
• Raleigh NC Plumbing Company
• water heaters Cary NC
  

These tools can be useful for getting insights in how many users are searching for a given keyword or keyword phrase, and how much competition there is for a particular keyword online.  This analysis can provide a realistic idea of which keywords or keyword phrases should be used on your website and how effective these will be in marketing your website online.

This is especially important in making sure your website has a high ranking in Local Search Results. Local Search Ranking is extremely important if you have a competitive business in the Raleigh NC area and you want your business to be listed on the first page of search results.

In the Raleigh area, Google extends it search results in a 50 mile radius of the city, called the “Raleigh Geo Zone“, so other smaller towns such as Wake Forest, Cary, Apex, Holly Springs, Morrisville and Chapel Hill  are included in this 50 mile area. It is crucial that your website contains webpages and keywords that list the smaller, local areas that you want to target for new customers for your business. If you want to target a city within the Raleigh Geo Zone, then you must have your website optimized with the proper keywords that name that city.

The right keywords for your business are used in the text content on your website. And keywords are also used for image descriptions or “Alt Tags” for images. It is important to have the right balance of keyword frequency on a single webpage for it to be indexed properly by a search engine. Keywords show the relevancy of a webpage to a keyword topic.

However, keywords should not be overly used on a webpage as this will result in a penalty from the search engine and diminish a webpage’s search ranking. “Keyword stuffing” is the excessive use of particular keywords on a webpage. An SEO professional knows what is the best use of keywords for your website so as not to incur ranking penalties.

As your online competitors are also using similar SEO techniques, the correct use of keywords on your site becomes more important in order to position your website ranking higher than your competitors sites. Page ranking may change over time due to this factor.

Blue Sky Creative will research and add the website keywords that will work best to bring traffic to your website. An experienced and knowledgeable website designer can make sure that your new website is built to achieve a higher search ranking.

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.”

The major search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, all have primary search results, where web pages are shown and ranked based on what content the search engine considers most relevant to online visitors. These organic search results are shown when a user uses a keyword or keyword phrase to search the Internet.

Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms (or keywords), as opposed to paid, sponsored online ads. Non-organic search results include pay per click advertising.

With organic search results, payment for link placement isn’t a factor, as it is with paid search ads such PPC, pay per click listings such as AdWords from Google.

Using the correct search engine optimization techniques and the proper keywords for your business services or products is essential to achieving a high search engine ranking for your website. This converts into more visitors to your website and more business for your company.

Blue Sky Creative designs every new websits to achieve a higher search engine ranking using site meta titles and meta descriptions. Choose a web designer with advanced knowledge of SEO techniques to help you achieve online success for your business and find local customers!

• What kind of visitors are you expecting on your website (income, interests, gender or age)?
  This question helps you to understand better the potential visitors and plan the website design and development.
• Please list the names of two or more of your competitors and describe how are you differ from them?
  Your new website will be compared to a lot of other sites. Your new website should be memorable and stand up from the crowd.
• What actions do you want visitors to take on the site?
  A new website can sell products, provide information, ask a visitor to make a phone call or fill out the form.
• What is your deadline for completing the site and your budget?
  Many clients have unrealistic expectations. You should have a clear realistic schedule and budget.
• What features should be used on your website (contact form, pictures, video, etc.)?
• Please list the names of three sites that you like and what do you like about them?
• Do you have any color preferences, look and feel for the website?
  Websites generally coordinate or match the colors of your branding, in your logo.
• Who will be the contact person for this project and what will be the turnaround time?
• What do you NOT want on your site in terms of text, content, color, graphic elements?
• Who will be responsible for maintaining the website and how much time he or she would have for it?

Businesses are switching to WordPress CMS to create and maintain their company website!

Used by over 74+ million websites, WordPress is the most popular blog software and website content management system in use today!

WordPress provides a higher site ranking with search engines like Google than a regular HTML or CSS website offers!

This alone is a reason to switch! If your business has many competitors online, then you should consider the SEO advantages of having your website built using WordPress.

WordPress is a free, open source CMS, online content management system and is browser compliant and mobile ready!

WordPress has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations. WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters that provide for proper formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes) are also included.

Reasons To Use WordPress For Your Small Business Website

When it comes to your small business’ website, which would you choose?

• A basic website requires that you are a computer programmer to make even simple updates to your site’s content, and would have to be completely redesigned if you decide it’s looking a bit outdated?
• Or one that is created using software that costs you nothing, has content in a structure that lets you easily update it yourself and has hundreds of professional templates available so if you think the look is outdated you can replace it with a new one in less than 5 minutes?[/list]

Meet WordPress CMS

WordPress, originally used solely for blogs, has morphed into an incredibly powerful Content Management System you can use to easily and inexpensively create a very professional and functional website for your small business.

Here are the benefits to using WordPress for your business website:

• It costs nothing! Not one penny! Most web hosts offer WordPress as a free, one-click add-on to your hosting account. Quick and easy to setup!
• Ease of Use. Using WordPress is really quite simple. Yes, especially for the technically-challenged among us, there will be a little bit of a learning curve. However, there’s no shortage of quality WordPress tutorials online to help you get up to speed quickly. Once you get the hang of things, adding content is a snap. It’s no more difficult than using a word processing program. And you don’t have to know how to write code or do anything vaguely technical in nature to maintain your site.
• Themes. Think of a theme as a template. It will change the look and feel of your WordPress site. It can also change the behind-the-scenes workings of your site to provide additional functionality. You can choose from thousands of different themes – some are free, some you have to pay for. And if you can’t find one that quite suits your requirements, you can hire a designer to create a custom theme for your WordPress site. With themes, it’s easy to get a clean, professional looking site without paying a lot for custom design work. And if one day you decide you don’t like the look of your site – no problem. Find a theme you like better, activate it in WordPress and you instantly have a new look and feel to your site – all without having to change the posts or pages on your website.
• Plug-ins. A WordPress plug-in is software that extends the out-of-the-box capabilities of WordPress. Plug-ins, which are extremely easy to install and update, can do things like improve site security, fight spam, let you track visits to your website, automatically backup your site, improve search engine optimization, and much more. And the vast majority of plug-ins won’t cost you a penny!
• Search Engine Love WordPress! Google (and the other search engines) love WordPress. Using WordPress can give your search engine optimization efforts a big boost. And if you take advantage of some of the SEO-related plugins available for WordPress, the search engines will really think your site is #1!
• Tech Support. While WordPress itself doesn’t have a tech support crew you can call or email, don’t worry. There’s no shortage of places to turn to for help with your questions. WordPress.org has a very active forum where you can search for answers to your questions or post questions to the community. There are also plenty of other sites, blogs, message boards where you can go for advice. Or, you can hire a WordPress expert to help. Bottom line, whatevery issue you have, an answer is not far away.
• Control. When you host your own WordPress website, you are in the driver’s seat. You can easily update content, add new pages or posts, give the site a facelift and much more without being at the mercy of a web programmer. And if you did want to hire someone to assist you in updating your website, there are plenty of qualified people around who can help.

So there are strong benefits for using WordPress for your small business’ website or blog. Without a doubt there are reasons why you may WordPress may not work for your situation and hiring a programmer to develop a custom site is the best option.

However, for the needs of most small businesses, WordPress provides a combination of functionality, flexibility and cost-effectiveness that is tough to beat