Becoming an affiliated wooworker means that Woothemes has recognized all of the great Woothemes WordPress website theme customization and design work we have put together over the past two years. We are excited to be included with some great design agencies from all over the world in the affiliated wooworkers directory on the woothemes website.

Why do we use Woothemes so much in our projects?

Woothemes builds plugins, themes and extensions for WordPress. The greatest benefit to using products from Woothemes is their ongoing dedication and support of their products and the centralized framework on which they are all based. In a nut shell, it means that all of the sites we build with Woothemes products receive frequent security updates and enhancements. This in turn helps us sleep better at night knowing that we have the additional support, documentation and community that exists around the Woothemes products for our client’s websites. To date the Woothemes user community has grown to almost 300,000 and continues to expand each day. They aren’t going anywhere any time soon!

Some examples of our Woothemes work:

Designing & Building Successful Websites is What we Love!

We can build and design a website to suit just about any need, industry, goal and situation. The Woothemes part is simply to provide a stable and reliable foundation for your project so we can pour more time and effort into building the custom experience that best suits your online customer base and less time creating the foundational functionality for your website every time we start a new project. We take great pride in the digital platforms we produce and measure our success by how your business grows and expands as a result of our digital platforms and strategies.

The bottom line is we can provide a lot more bang for your buck today than we could have just two years ago. It’s amazing and exciting. If you are in need of a new or updated online presence I highly suggest you fill out our website development request form or give us a call at 603-924-1978 so we can discuss your project options.

1. You will need to make time for creating content

This seems like an obvious point to bring up first, but I am continually amazed at the common misconceptions we encounter when we deliver the final site to our clients. You know you need a website, you know you need to be active and have the ability to publish information in timely and agile fashion. But when push comes to shove and because the website has never been a regular part of your company’s marketing flow it can be easy to simply continue to let it just sit there unattended. With the addition of any good content management system to your website your marketing activities need to change. Work process flows need to be updated so that all of your marketing programs are working together. For example,  when that new information from your catalog or brochure goes to print, you need to be ready to publish all of that information on your website as well. A simple way to stay ahead of this is to plan ahead and create a content schedule for the first 6 – 12 months for your website. This includes content, completion dates and who is responsible for publishing. It’s amazing how much more efficient you can be when you bring accountability into the equation. Make a plan and stick to it!

2. You will need a program to edit images

Nobody likes to read a bunch of boring text without something fun to look. Any decent content management system will provide the ability to upload and place images into your website. But without any previous website editing or publishing experience how are you supposed to know what to do? Here are a few simple tips and tools to help you out. Put your graphic designer hat on and get started adding some graphics to your content:

• You will need a program to edit your images. Something that will allow you to crop and re-size your images properly for website viewing.
• Inexpensive programs you can use: Photoshop Elements ($99) or GIMP (FREE)
• ALWAYS make sure the images you upload to your site are not more than 72dpi (resolution)
• ALWAYS make sure the images you upload to your site are not larger than 50K (file size)

You can make these edits easily using one of the two tools I have mentioned above. The key is that you are keeping the images modest in size and their download sizes as small as possible because that will make the browsing experience fast and enjoyable.

3. You need to be ready and willing to learn some basic search engine optimization techniques (SEO)

Page titles, Meta Descriptions, Meta Keywords, Link Text, Alt-Tags and Headings are the basic building blocks for solid search engine optimization on any website. Now that you have or are planning to have a content management system for your website, you need to manage this aspect of your website content as well! The basic idea to keep in your head when dealing with all these moving parts is: “What is the one keyword or phrase that I want people to be able to find in this piece of content and how does that relate back to my overall website” If you remain focused on that simple thought when writing your content, then the optimizing of your content should come naturally simply because you are writing and publishing your information under a focused content direction and goal. Keep your focus, don’t over stuff your posts in a spammy fashion and just write what you think would be logical and you will be just fine.

4. You will need to learn how to properly link things

One of the most important tools you will have at your disposal when working with your new content management system is the ability to link your content together. Sounds like another obvious thing to point out, but I see it all the time. There’s lots of new information on a site and none of it connected. Dead ends everywhere! The objective of your site is to share your products, service and expertise and keep your reader’s attention as long as possible. The more you are able to link all of your new content, the more options you will be providing your visitors to experience your information. You will also be building lots of great search engine optimization for your pages by providing search crawlers more ways to connect your online real estate together in a relevant fashion.

Don’s sweat the small stuff, practice makes perfect!

I realize that working on website content can be a very challenging and sometimes scary prospect for new content developers. Many of you who are using these new CMS platforms have had almost no formal online writing or design training, and that is OK. Working with a CMS like WordPress or Joomla is like learning any new piece of software, it takes time, repetition and patience. Stick with it, have fun and you will be posting and linking content like a pro in no time! If you would like some personal tutorial time give us a call at 603-924-1978 or fill out our quick request form we are here to help!

At FirstTracks Marketing we are business people who also happen to be very good at website design and development. Our process for developing a website solution for your business is built on exactly that…YOUR BUSINESS. This might sound extremely obvious to some but we see it all the time in our line of work. People get way too bogged down with the technology side of web development and lose site of why the site is being built in the first place. We start with “why” you need an effective online presence and stay focused on your business strategies.When you work with us to build a new website or overhaul an existing website we go through 4 key steps with every project:

1. Learning about your business
2. Assessing your challenges and goals
3. Creating a strategic plan to achieve those goals
4. Assessing and implementing the proper technology package to achieve your objectives

In our process the technological aspects of the project come last but certainly not least.

The more we know about your business, what your needs are and what you are trying to accomplish the better we can and execute a solution that is going to meet your needs and deliver the results you are looking to achieve. It is this methodology that sets FirstTracks apart from other website development operations. We want to know everything about your business; your customers, how you and your employees work day-to-day, etc. The we apply our business experience, design expertise and programming know how to make your website the most successful part of your business it can possibly be.

How can we help your business be more successful online?

Give us a call at 603-924-1978 or fill out our website development request form and we can get the conversation started. There is no cost for our initial consultation and assessment. We can’t wait to start helping you reach new levels of access and visibility online.

These are the 10 WordPress Plugins Your Website MUST Have

1. WordPress SEO – hands down THE BEST search engine optimization plugin around for WordPress
2. Askimet – the standard for spam protection for your blog and an absolute must if you are allowing comments on your blog
3. Admin Menu Editor – allows us to customize the admin dashboard interface for our clients projects based on what works best for them
4. Better Internal Link Search – make the default WordPress search actually useful by searching everything and not just post titles
5. Dynamic Widgets – Need to customize where your sidebar widgets display? This is the best plugin for that.
6. Google Analytics Dashboard – Puts your website traffic stats directly on your WordPress website dashboard
7. Simple WordPress Back Up – Provides regular complete database backups of your WordPress website
8. Login Lockdown – Keeps the riff-raff out of your dashboard
9. Gravity Forms – Hands down the #1 forms plugin for WordPress and worth every penny for a developer license
10. WP-Optimize – Keep your WordPress site running smooth and quick with this handy plugin

Now there are lots of other plugins out there. As of today, there 21,098 plugins in the wordpress.org plugins directory. There is a lot of great stuff out there to help make your WordPress website really pop and do lots of fun and exciting things. We hope you find the list we have provided useful to help make your WordPress site more secure and run more smoothly. If you are looking for help with your WordPress website please give us a call at 603-924-1978 or fill out our website development request form and we can get started helping you improve your website today!

I like listening and that’s interesting coming from someone who also loves to talk. Still working on the listening thing and being in a profession (marketing & business strategy) that has more than it’s share of talkers, I can say we all have a lot of work to do.

The Client Meeting

I’ve had two initial meetings with a new client recently and here was a man who was running a business that started in 1856 and his tenure was approaching its 30th year. Not much this guy and his company hadn’t heard and seen. The most important human trait I know is EMPATHY. What was he looking at across the table? What was he listening to and was any of it meaningful to him and his business? “Please be quiet” was mantra..ing on my internal hard drive.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T

I like this company, its products and it’s market. I think we can help but after 156 years in business it just might be a good idea to listen. Let the learning come. People have been buying this product way before I and my FirstTracks Marketing Group dropped by. Sure, I have a business to run and a payroll to feed but so does he. We can be in this together and I want to be kicking back across from this interesting person years from now with both of us feeling good about how his customers truly love his product, service and company. Be quiet, be meaningful and the business will come. Sometimes slowly and sometimes fast but it will come.

Be quiet, empathize and care.

We’d really like to listen to you. Give us a call. 603-924-1978 or contact us and we’ll call you.