Heads up! This is a long post about budgets, with the goal of providing more transparency in the website design field.

When it comes to website budgets, I tell many prospective clients that their budget should be based off of the following question:

What short-term and long-term business goals are you trying to meet and how important is your website in helping to achieve these goals?

It’s not a groundbreaking approach, but another way of looking at it is this: if your website is going to impact your bottom line a lot, don’t be afraid to invest in it. On the other hand, don’t invest a lot into something that won’t bring you a return that makes sense.

After you’ve thought about how important your website is to your business’s success, now it’s time to get concrete numbers going. Which, unfortunately, is not an easy thing to do.

So after all of that, here’s my goal with this post: to shine a little more clarity on how to arrive at a budget that will enable you to launch a successful website which meets your goals and objectives.

Budgets. Vary. Wildly.

Often, potential clients are very eager to get a “price” for a website. The best analogy I have for this situation is buying a car. Imagine going to a dealership and asking “How much does a car cost?”. You’re going to get a lot of questions before you get a price, which is the same in the website world. Do you want this used ’98 Camry over here in the corner or a brand new Mercedes with every option available under the sun?

I will be the first to say I understand that most people have never bought a website before and don’t know if their budget should be $2,000 or $20,000 (the answer is, it depends!). But, any web designer who is in this business to help their client’s businesses grow shouldn’t be handing out the same flat-rate number to each prospect that sends them an email.

It’s not responsible and is a telltale sign of a website churner (maybe I’ll submit this definition to urban dictionary):

Website Churner (noun):

A freelancer or organization who competes on price and relies on volume to produce websites with little thought given to the end-result, business goals, or the client’s bottom line.

Budgets Determine Quality

And before we get into real budgets and case studies, I should throw out a disclaimer and say that design is not a commodity. I’m going to use some actual numbers (yes, real-life dollar figures) which may surprise some of you, and will seem shockingly small to others. Either way, I feel like it’s important to remember that one person’s or company’s work is valued in different ways by different people, so website pricing is at best an art form built on top of years of experience, and at worst the outcome of a mad scientist’s experiment.

Really what I’m trying to say is: you get what you pay for. Websites are no different.

Big agencies like Happy Cog won’t touch a website project for less than $100k. Yep, that buys a house in lots of places in this country. You can get someone from odesk.com to install a free WordPress theme for you for $200, probably. And then there’s everywhere in between. And I do mean every price point between $50 and $100k. Welcome to the insane world of the website market.

Spend Money to Make money

Would you invest $10,000 if you were reasonably assured to make $20,000 as a direct result of that investment?

What percentage of people do you think would answer yes to that question? 90%? 99%? 100%?

Yes, those numbers are fictitious and yes, it depends on what “reasonably assured” means, but the line of questioning here is the important part. A website is an investment and just like any investment it’s important to try and come up with a Return on Investment (ROI) number that makes sense – before a single line of code is written.

Any transaction needs to have an upside for all parties involved, especially for the client. If you meet your goals, you’re happy, and happy clients means more work for us.

The financially astute among you might question the financial upside part of the equation. Namely, what is the likelihood of meeting that revenue goal? What happens if we don’t meet it?

And that is exactly the type of thinking that needs to take place to come up with the right number. I’m not saying a website should cost as much as its ROI, but it would be silly to think that a website that is going to generate $50k for your business next year should cost the same as one that is going to generate $500.

In terms of likelihoods, this isn’t an easy problem to solve. There is of course no guarantee with anything, but the fact remains that trying to launch an amazon.com with the budget of a brochureware site is not going to meet any goals at all.

Budgets Shouldn’t Always Be Big

As someone who sells websites you might think I’m always going to push for the bigger budget option. Well, that’s not exactly true.

If I sell you something that doesn’t make sense for your business, nobody wins. I sell solutions and value, not technology and websites.

For example if your goal is to increase your retreat revenue this year by 50%, it makes more sense to spend money to make money as the quality of the website is going to be completely tied to meeting your goal.

On the other hand you’re just trying to get a simple brochure site up that talks about what you do, then your website isn’t as vital to your business success so you don’t need to invest as much.

Here are some real-life examples of different types of websites and some reasonable budget ranges to think about. These budgets are indicative of professional freelancers and small agencies, as generally speaking my audience doesn’t include larger companies who can afford $25k and up agency websites. Scale up accordingly as your scope, audience, and requirements increase.

Case Study: The Ecommerce Site

Background: Established yoga studio or lifestyle company with potential for online retail sales.

Website Solution: Custom design, branding, WordPress theme and WooCommerce integration

Budget Recommendation: $8k to $15k depending on factors like custom code, extent of design needs, logo design, social media support, automated email marketing integration.

Case Study: The Travelling Yoga Teacher

Background: Yoga teacher with a large following that puts on their own teacher trainings, workshops, retreats and other events.

Website Solution: Custom design and WordPress theme with event registration and payment integration.

Budget Recommendation: $6k to $12k depending on complexity and options such as online courses or downloadable products.

Case Study: The Ambitious Yoga Teacher

Background: Teaches weekly classes full-time (or almost), the occasional workshop hosted by a yoga studio, and private lessons in their area. Doesn’t need registration but is ambitious and wants to create visibility and a brand that can grow.

Website Solution: Semi-custom WordPress theme with a solid design, including logo, and user-friendly ways to show and update their schedule.

Budget Recommendation: $4k to $8k depending on factors like an online schedule tool and logo design.

Case Study: The Part-Time Yoga Teacher

Background: Teaches weekly classes part-time, with the occasional private lesson. Budget is a concern and yoga is more of a passion than a way of making a living.

Website Solution: Semi-custom WordPress theme (or an off-the-shelf template) that is customized slightly to give it personality. A solid contact form and weekly schedule.

Budget Recommendation: $2k to $5k depending on specifics. Other possibilities for this include DIY options like Squarespace, a purchased WordPress template, or a managed, hosted service like Yoga Launch (shameless plug – coming soon!)

Summary

Everyone is different. Every website is different. Every designer or web design agency is different. But the good ones will work with you to figure out what budget makes sense for you, your business, and your needs. If they don’t, and they offer you a set price before hearing what you need, I’d think twice about working with them.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this approach and if it makes sense to you, especially for folks who don’t live in this world constantly.

Not Offering Event Registration and Payments Online

Most yoga studios offer once-off workshops, trainings, and special events in addition to their weekly class schedule. Options for registering and paying for these events range from “pay at the door with cash” to “integrated ecommerce solution” and everything in between. Having an online system for taking payments and managing these events is invaluable.

Event Registration Solutions

WordPress. If you’re using WordPress, check out The Events Calendar along with their Easy Digital Downloads extension. You might have to get someone with experience to integrate this for you if you run into problems, but the upside of having events and payments on your own website will become apparent when you see how it affects your efficiency and attendance. Going this route also means you’re free to choose whatever payment processor you’re comfortable with (Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, etc), and keep customers on your site.

Mind Body Online. If you are a Mind Body Online customer, you have a couple of options. First you’d create the event in Mind Body Online. Then create the event on your website (using an events plugin or your website builder’s tools). Finally, paste a link to your MBO event (how to: create deep links to Mind Body Online)  and just copy and paste the URL in your website’s event. Students will visit your site, view the event on your site, but checkout/register through MBO.

HealCode. Another way to show your Mind Body Online event is to use a service like HealCode and its event widget. This will generate a list of events on your site as well as creating the deep links to the event in your Mind Body Online account. Then customers will go through the same checkout process as above. The benefit of this route is only having to create the event in one place (MBO), not on your website.

EventBrite. A final option would a completely separate service like Event Brite to just handle your event listings and payments. This is more costly than the others but it definitely takes care of a lot of the housekeeping and maintenance associated with other options.

No Current, Up to Date Class Schedule

You’d be surprised at how many yoga studio websites make their class schedule difficult to find, difficult to understand, or are completely out of date. Some students want to know up-to-the-minute info (like if a class will have a sub), while others just want to make sure the Hot Yoga class they want to go to tonight wasn’t changed to a Yin Yoga class two weeks ago.

Again there are a couple of options here, in order of awesome to least awesome:

• Use HealCode to show your up to date Mind Body Online class schedule. If you use MBO, this is probably the route you should be taking as it means a seamless integration with your current schedule. You only have to edit in one place (MBO), and visitors won’t have to leave your site.
• Keep your website updated with its own class schedule. This can be tough to do if your WordPress theme or other content management system doesn’t allow for you to make changes easily and frequently. If you’re using MBO it also means you have to remember to make changes in two places.
• Create a link to your Mindy Body Online class schedule. This pulls visitors off of your website and disrupts their experience. It’s more professional to have visitors stay on your site the entire time (just like when paying for an event or product).
• PDF of your class schedule. This is an offshoot of the second option, and if it’s really the only way you can get a current schedule out there, it’s better than nothing.

No New Student Offering

Not all of your website visitors have been to your studio before, and some of them have never done yoga. Making these visitors your students should be high up on the list of your website’s goals.

Ideal Scenario: You have a package such as $30 for 2 weeks unlimited yoga for new students. Prospective student sees your New Student Offering, purchases online, and everyone is happy. This can be done through Mind Body Online by creating a new student package and then posting a link to this page on your website in a prominent location. Better yet, on a dedicated New Student landing page that also has a contact form (see below).

If you don’t use Mind Body Online, then you’ll have to find a way to work with your system to make this work.

Second-best Scenario: You at least have a New Student page with relevant info, along with a contact form which encourages students who have never done yoga before to ask questions about what their experience will be like. This form ties into your email marketing software that sends a follow-up email containing a discount code to use when they come in for their first class. HealCode does a good job of handling this, it’s called their Prospect Form.

No Email Signup Offering

An email marketing list is super important, even for brick-and-mortar business like yoga studios. You’ve got to be able to communicate with your students for promotions, discounts, new offerings, special events, and to build community. A great way to grow your email list is through Content Marketing, which in its simplest form goes something like this:

So for a yoga studio what might good content marketing offerings look like? You can use a mix of quality yoga-related content and other incentives like discounts to grow your list:

• Creating a yoga practice during a busy work week
• 10% discount on apparel in our shop
• Free week of yoga for new students
• Audio meditation mp3 read by one of your teachers

If you’re not using MailChimp for your email marketing lists already, it’s pretty easy to integrate one of their forms on your website. Just create a welcome email with a link to your free offering in it, and you’re good to go.

Hopefully there is at least one takeaway here for everybody running a yoga studio website. To some they’ll be obvious no-brainers, but for others, I hope you see your class sizes grow!

Where to begin? Since images and photography often shape the mood of a website, start by visiting TheInspirationGrid.com, a great resource for photography, branding ideas and design visuals. You can also check out Pinterest.com, where you can create your own mood board with images found around the web or browse existing pinboards based on keywords. For example, do a search on Pinterest for “website inspiration.” You’ll get a slew of ideas and start to acquire a good sense of what visual styles you like and don’t—from images and mood, to layout, color, and font combinations.

Learning your visual likes and dislikes is critical when it comes to website design—and an important step in developing your own online personality. Collect appealing images and design ideas, either on your pinboard, or in a Word file or other location. Voila! You’ve officially begun to map out your site.

Color

Next, because color is a major design factor in its own right, do some “hue research” at ColourLovers.com. Get inspired and focus your preferences by browsing colors, palettes and patterns. Also, cruise Colour Lovers’ color-driven blogs, trends and forums to discover more eye-grabbing ways to engage your web audience. You’re bound to find more than a few ideas that capture the look and feel you want for your site. Add them to your pinboard or Word file.

After studying images, pinboards, and color and setting aside current faves, dive into the world of typefaces. For a winning collection, head over to fontsinuse.com. Considered a paradise for typography nerds, this site serves up a fresh crop of gorgeous current fonts you can easily sort by industry, format or typeface name. Try on different font sizes and combinations and pair them with the images and colors you’ve gathered. Your “map” should be taking on more focus and depth, as you make decisions on these finer details.

Inspiration

Now that you’re familiar with visual design tools and have made some informed decisions to pinpoint your style, zoom out to regain a larger perspective and further explore site design possibilities. For more website-specific inspiration, check out:

• Site Inspire

  An excellent resource for modern website inspiration, with filters to find websites by style, industry and other options.

• Awwwards

  Another high quality website gallery, with an emphasis on forward-thinking designs and layouts.

• Mediaqueri.es

  An online gallery of responsive (mobile-friendly) websites leaning towards clean and modern design.

Use the information you glean from these sites to revise or add to your map. And . . . that’s it! If you’ve invested time and thought in the steps given here, your pinboard or Word file should be a vision of your dream website. Whether you build the site yourself or have it done by a designer, you’ve taken a huge step towards bringing the end result you want to life.

Hey, you’ve waited a long time to get moving on your site. Pick up the tools suggested here to finally put one foot in front of the other—and go from vague design concept to full-blown and fonted-out cyberspace expression.
After all, you have some great ideas.

Now’s the time to get them down on paper (real or virtual)—and maybe even bring them to life.

This brings up a challenge:

Good Design is Easier to See Than Good Code

The design itself is the first thing we see as a website visitor and needs to be first-rate, taking into account important considerations like business objectives, branding, and marketing strategy. The design is visual and right there in front of us. It’s real and ready to be critiqued as effective or not.

On the other hand, the code that actually brings a website to life (HTML, CSS, PHP) are behind the scenes and out of sight. Unless you know how to look into these things, you’re at the mercy of your web developer to deliver a final product whose code is at the same level of quality as the design itself. So how can you be sure you’re getting a solid product?

Let’s Define ‘Quality Code’ First

• Valid, organized, and up to date HTML and CSS
• Follows modern web design best practices
• Website loads quickly and looks good on all devices
• Code is semantic and easy to update by other developers who have never seen the code
• If using WordPress – PHP coding standards and WordPress best practices are followed
• Plugins used are well-maintained, secure, and chosen carefully
• Aaaaaand a ton of other technical stuff that should be done right

More Importantly, Here’s Why Good Code Matters

• Security – it’s possible that no website is hack-proof, but solid code and best practices make for a good start
• Ease of updating, especially in case you need to bring on another developer
• Your site is less likely to break as web browsers change, meaning less maintenance costs
• Accessibility for those with disabilities and on older, outdated browsers
• Performance – good code makes your site load faster and more likely to rank higher in search engines
• Flexibility – as your business model shifts your site will be cheaper to work with in the long run
• Ease of updating yourself – a good, customized CMS will make your site easier to maintain for you, the client, with no knowledge of  code

How Can I Make Sure my Website’s Code Is Solid?

Let’s look at this question from both a potential client’s point of view, and an existing website owner’s point of view.

If You Already Have a Website

First off, validate your HTML and CSS. Some errors are fine. In fact, part of pushing the envelope with new technologies means that the validator won’t recognize some of the newest properties and vendor prefixes that are used in HTML5 and CSS3. That’s fine. But if there are tons of errors in either the HTML or CSS validation, you might want to have your previous developer or a new developer take a look to make sure everything is ok.

Secondly, if your site is slow or other problems consistently arise, have someone take a look. Most good web developers will charge very little to peek under the hood and make sure there are no glaring errors. Some good tools for checking on performance bottlenecks are pingdom and yslow.

If You Are Thinking About Hiring a Web Developer

The keys here are reputation and examining past work. Finding a developer who has a reputation for doing quality work and is knowledgable about web standards as a whole is essential for getting quality code for your project.

Secondly, it’s important to know what kind of systems they have in place for their content management system – how easy do they make it to update the content of the websites they build? Are you going to need to call them every time you want to make a little change somewhere?

Third, what kind of relationship do they have with their existing clients? Ideally you want someone that is available in case any issues come up and will stand by their work if problems arise. Testimonials and references are a great way to gauge this.

Some Possible Questions to Ask a Developer You’re Thinking of Hiring

• Do you follow W3C specifications for your HTML/CSS and what browser support do you offer? W3C standards using valid HTML5/CSS3
• Are your sites responsive? (They better be…)
• Validate some of their projects! If there are a lot of errors (5 to 10+), ask for clarification.
• If you’re using WordPress as a CMS, what customizations do you make to the admin and how? (Developer Tip: custom metaboxes and custom post types are important)
• What are your criteria for choosing plugins to install and how might you modify them? (Again you’re looking for future-proof modifications and high-quality plugins that have been updated recently)
• How do you ensure that your sites will perform well? (Image size optimization, minimize number of external resources, CDN, reliable hosting, etc)
• If using WordPress, who do you recommend for hosting? (They should be recommending a managed WordPress host, possibly from this list. If not, they should have a solid reason for it. Notable exceptions would be Amazon or VPS hosting if running a larger website)
• How do you handle WordPress security, backups and updates? (This is why managed WordPress hosting is key)

This is only the beginning of ensuring that you are getting a well-built custom website, but it’s a great start!

There are a ton of WordPress contact form plugins out there, all with different levels of features, support and pricing. I’m going to eliminate free plugins from this post, simply because the quality of code and support you get for a premium plugin is just hands-down worth it.

A Quick Rundown of Gravity Forms

It’s only fair to start with an assessment of Gravity Forms, which is the most highly visible premium contact form plugin out there. Gravity Forms is solidly built and has a ton of features, but you need to spend $200/year for its most useful version. For some that’s no big deal, but for others it’s a factor. The basic version ($40/year) offers little other than basic forms, and its mid-priced offering ($100/year) adds features like Mailchimp, Aweber, and a captcha add-on. Not terribly exciting.

Where it really delivers value is the Developer’s License ($200/year) which gets you a bunch of add-ons ranging from PayPal, Authorize.net and Stripe, to Zapier, signatures and user registration. But again, this is $200 per year we’re talking about which can be a tough sell for some. In fairness, they do offer a renewal discount so it’s not quite as expensive as it sounds.

Here’s Why I Prefer Formidable Forms Pro

Formidable Pro is similar to Gravity Forms in terms of functionality, but it has a pretty major price difference along with lifetime updates, good support, and the ability to modify its functionality significantly.

Formidable Forms is Better Value

There is a free version of Formidable Forms, but I don’t recommend it (for one thing the free version doesn’t save form entries to the database). A much better option is paying the $47 for Formidable Pro which gets you lifetime updates.

Lifetime. Updates.

Lifetime updates are pretty rare in the premium WordPress plugin space these days. Usually, like GF, you have to pay a yearly fee. You only get 1 year of support for this price, but you can purchase continuing support for $24/year after the 1st year.

Its Features Compete with Gravity Forms

Again there might be some features that GF does a better job with (Stripe integration is a biggie), but for most users Formidable Pro will handle their needs. Here are some highlights:

• Drag and drop form builder
• Entries are saved in the WordPress database
• 12 add-ons including: Mailchimp, Aweber, user registration, paypal, signatures
• Advanced features form features like conditional logic, HTML5 inputs and AJAX submission
• Zapier integration means you can do just about any kind of API integration you can think of
• Have users publish custom posts with your forms
• Create (multiple) custom email responses and templates to show off your data
• Create charts, graphs and custom reports

The Unlimited License is Awesome

If you have more than one WordPress site or are a developer, the unlimited license for $70 more allows you to install the plugin on unlimited websites, still with lifetime updates. You also get Priority Support for the 1st year. This again is a great deal for a premium WordPress plugin.

Support

Speaking of support, I’ve personally had great experiences with the small team at Formidable. I’ve received prompt responses, and even extra-mile stuff like custom code examples. After your first year, you can purchase another year of support. Most people won’t need this though.

Summary

If there is a specific integration that Gravity Forms offers that you need (Stripe and Campaign monitor come to mind), go for it. You won’t regret it. It’s worth the money and their support is supposed to be solid. But, if you can get the job done with Formidable Forms, try it out. Their code is well-documented and easy to work with, and their support is very helpful in suggesting ways to get things done with their plugin. For a ton of people this is a cost-effective and elegant solution.

What is Your Time Worth?

WordPress is like a nice car – it needs maintenance. And maintenance takes time. Using a hosting company that eats, breathes and sleeps WordPress and takes care of this stuff for you (for cheap) just makes sense when you look at it from a time=money perspective.

WordPress is a fun car to drive, but if you neglect the basic maintenance that it demands, the repairs are going to make you wish you never bought the thing in the first place. Here are the big four things that managed WordPress hosts can provide.

Here’s What You Get With a Managed WordPress Hosting Company

Security

Increasing the security of your website site is the number one reason to spend a few extra bucks a month for a better host. It will save you headaches and dollars in the long run. While WordPress security has improved drastically over the years – and with tens of millions of sites using it, it had to improve – there are still things that can be done at the server level to keep your site safer. Managed WordPress hosts generally take care of things like:

• limiting login attempts (to prevent brute force attacks)
• malware monitoring and removal
• strong password enforcement
• database prefix renaming
• server settings optimized for a WordPress installation

Backups

Backing up your site goes hand in hand with Security, but integrated backups at the host level makes restoring your site much easier. Usually you can just login to your control panel, click a couple buttons, and you’re done. Some hosts will even take care of this for you. But the bottom line is that your database and website files need to be backup on a regular basis and there’s just no getting around this. May as well make it seamlessly integrated with your hosting account.

Updates

Updating the WordPress core is like an oil change for your car. If you ignore it for long enough, things will blow up. A good managed host will take care of updating the core for you, and you can even let them update plugins if you want. The good thing about a reliable WordPress host is that if an update goes wonky, you can always quickly restore your website to it’s pre-update glory very easily.

Caching

Your website’s speed is a feature, just like the font you choose or the image that is on your homepage. Google takes speed into account for their search engine rankings, people will ditch your site if its too slow, and generally speaking, WordPress ain’t the fastest goose in the gaggle. Since WordPress generates your website’s content by getting data from a database and then showing this data to your visitors, it can get a touch slow if you’re not careful. A good WordPress host will cache your website’s content in a way that removes the first step, which means your site is snappy and a pleasure to browse.

So Which Host Should I Choose?

That’s a loaded question, mainly because I have no idea what is going on with your website or what your plans for your online presence are. There are some great resources out there to make a decision though, starting with a quick run-down of some popular managed WordPress hosts on my site:

WordPress Hosting Resources

Chris Lema has a more detailed account of some good managed WordPress hosting options, and echoes the sentiment that no host is right for everybody. And a quick list for posterity:

• Siteground
• WP Engine
• Flywheel
• Media Temple
• Synthesis
• Pagely

Here are some other things to consider while you are mulling over this decision:

Ecommerce

If you’re running an ecommerce site, you’ll need SSL, which means extra security for your customers. All hosts charge extra for this, but look out for WP Engine who requires you to be on their $99/month plan in order to get SSL (this can be a good deal if you need a high-powered no-nonsense host, however). PCI-compliance is another issue to ask your potential host about.

Streaming

There are a ton of ways to serve up audio and video files to your visitors (Soundcloud and Vimeo for example), but if you are self-hosting this content you should probably have a CDN. This will drastically speed up your site since content will be cached and served from a different server which is located closest to your visitor. Some popular options are amazon s3 or Cloudflare CDN, but its possible that your host could do this for you automatically (like Flywheel does). Either way, you want to get those large files off of your main server and onto a CDN. Make sure that your host can accommodate this for you.

Blocked Plugins

Some managed WordPress hosts have a blacklist of plugins that they don’t allow on their servers. Usually hosts are trying to just minimize conflicts between their own caching processes or blocking plugins with known security issues. This won’t affect most websites, but definitely check out a host’s disallowed plugins before you sign up, just in case.

Email

You’re good at what you do, so you focus on that, not hosting your own email right? Well that’s the theory of many dedicated WordPress hosts out there also. They do WordPress hosting plain and simple, and leave it up to others to handle email. I personally agree with this, especially since it means that you are much more free to move hosts if the need arises (have you ever tried to move your email from one host to another? Bleh).

There are a ton of options for third-party email hosting, from Google Apps to Zoho to a plain old Gmail account. You can also consider buying a relatively cheap hosting plan for $5 or $10 a month just to use its unlimited email accounts (pro tip: google “pointing MX records to different host” for more info on how to do this).

Good luck and happy hosting. Feel free to ask about a particular host in the comments and if I know something about them I’ll try to be impartial!

Miles Davis was an undisputed master of creating space in his improvised solos. His music sounded deceptively simple and effortless. Whatever came out of his horn seemed so honest and fresh, like he was having a fireside chat with himself on stage. Decades later his music continues to draw us in, timelessly calling us to anticipate his next move.

Music is not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.Miles Davis

Simplicity and space are important in design.

In design terms, the function of space is well-documented. It helps us understand information better and encourages us to focus on specific parts of a design. Simplicity isn’t the end all be all of design or music — complexity has its own benefits — but it is sometimes overlooked as a basic, integral part of the process of creating things.

But effective simplicity can be difficult to achieve.

Effectiveness, of course, can mean lots of things. Sometimes simple just won’t help the musician (or artist, or web designer) achieve their goal. But it seems to me that focused simplicity usually helps. If we’re creating a website where the goal is to have a person click on A and then click on B. If we create websites that are too complex, we won’t be able to even find A in the first place.

Going back to jazz for a minute, here’s a breakdown of how the effectiveness of musical simplicity can evolve as a musician grows:

1. Beginners

Beginners use simple phrases with lots of space because that’s all they’re capable of. Melodies are played as written, without embellishment or flair. Solos are basic and without complex rhythms or phrases.

2. Learning

Then we learn more notes, more passages and more rhythms. We fill up the space with sound. But, something isn’t quite right. The music now feels a little cluttered, perhaps forced in places.

3. Mastery

Like the beginner, the master comes full circle and plays his melodies in a simple way — but soon another level is revealed. Just when you’re not sure if this musician is really a true master…he strays. An off note here, a syncopated rhythm there. An improvised melody is artfully woven into the fabric of the song.

The space allows the complex to thrive.

And right when this complexity has built the music up to a fervor pitch — it’s all simple and spacious again. The master used space and simplicity to allow the complex to thrive.

Usually, less is more.

By keeping his true abilities closely guarded, the jazz musician amazes. For a designer, this might be translated as protecting against the tendency to over-design. Or more importantly, to not lose sight of what’s truly important for a project’s success.

Does the simplicity (or lack thereof) of this design serve the project’s stated goals? That might be the most important question to ask when analyzing whether or not a design is too complex. Just as a true musician listens and responds to the music itself, designers respond to each project in the moment.

And after asking those questions, if complexity is truly what’s needed for the project to succeed, just don’t tell Miles Davis.

To determine if your designer should customize a template or build a one-of-a-kind site for your business, you need to know the difference between the two and what you’re paying for.

What’s the Difference between a Template and a Custom WordPress Design?

In a nutshell, it’s the difference between having a more generic look and feel versus a thoroughly branded online experience. It’s also the difference between spending upwards of five hundred dollars for a web presence versus thousands of dollars for a dynamic online marketing tool.

Both site types have their place, but appeal to different audiences.

For a newer or smaller yoga business on a tight budget, a template can be a fantastic option. But for an established yoga studio, whose strength lies in differentiating itself from competitors, a custom site is often needed to fully capture the business’s image and underscore its reputation for quality, reliability and trust.

Template Sites: Choose a Theme and Plug In Your Info

With a WordPress template, you can quickly create a professional but basic web presence. Think of it as an online business card that points people to your company and provides useful information about your products and services.

Some premium WordPress themes help jumpstart the layout and style of your site, saving you time and decision-making. For example, Yoga and Health & Wellness themes—with their soothing colors and often minimalist vibe—are designed with the wellness community in mind.

To buy a WordPress template, visit a site that sells them, such as WooThemes.com or ThemeForest.net. Your web designer can help you narrow your choices and select a template that suits your business and style. Prices for the themes generally range from $75 to $150, plus whatever your designer will charge to help with installation and customization.

Once you’ve bought and downloaded the template, your designer can customize it with your images and other content, and activate any available functionality. Purchase a hosting account and a domain name and voilà! Your business website is born.

Custom WordPress Design: Build from the Ground Up and to Your Specifications

With a custom site, it’s a whole other ballpark. Instead of fitting your business concept into a predefined template, everything—from navigation to layout, to graphics to functionality, to image and content placement—is per your specifications. Style, logos and colors reflect your brand, and everything ties in seamlessly with any existing marketing materials.

Your designer starts with the goals and preferences you have in mind—like having a teacher directory, a multi-author blog, and coding that will make your site easy to edit, social media friendly, and fully responsive (so that it resizes to fit any screen). Once you’ve decided exactly what you want, and how you want your site to look and interact with visitors, the building begins.

Between your input and your designer’s artistic and technical skill, you end up with a one-of-a-kind website that’s visually stunning and highly functional. It showcases your brand’s unique appeal, products and services, which adds value and drives business.

Plus, since you’ve designed your site to contain exactly what you need — and nothing you don’t — it loads fast and runs smoothly.

When a Template Will Do

A template is often sufficient for businesses that are just starting out and/or have little to no branding. If you need something online while you grow your clientele and map out your business plan, a prepaid WordPress theme will save you time and money and get your name on the web now.

On the downside, because you’re constrained by color schemes and other design limitations, you face the challenge of fitting your concept into someone else’s web design.

When Custom Design is the Way to Go

With a custom WordPress site, you can stand out from the crowd in a way that completely captures your business’s personality and offerings. This is especially important for larger wellness companies that have an established name within the industry.

Besides really branding things up, your designer can also add advanced functionality that lets clients better engage with your business online. Examples include interactive forms, calendars, class registration and site-protected (i.e., member only) pages.

The Bottom Line

When choosing between a WordPress template or a custom WordPress design, budget is obviously a factor—but not necessarily the deciding one. To determine which site type is better for your business, ask yourself:

• How visually impressive do I want my site to be?
• How important is branding to my business?
• How important is it for my site to have advanced functions?

If your answer is “very” to any or all the above, it pays to invest in a custom WordPress theme.

If you have no branding, are just starting out, or only need a basic online presence, save money with an off-the-shelf WordPress template. A good web designer can customize it to reflect your business and still make you look like a pro!

This is a continuation of my series of articles that looks at WordPress plugins I use on every client site I build.

WordPress is Already Pretty Good with SEO

With some minor tweaks, WordPress allows site owners to create clean URLs without the clutter that other content management systems can add. It’s also relatively easy to optimize things like title tags, RSS feeds, and descriptions. Using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast takes things a little further and I consider it to be a must-use plugin for every WordPress installation. The plugin was developed and is maintained by Yoast, a respected developer in the WordPress community, and the plugin has been downloaded over 10 million (!) times.

There are a few things to touch on before discussing the plugin. If you don’t take care of the following two issues, installing the plugin won’t help your SEO very much.

Check your site visibility

In your WP admin, go to Settings > Reading and make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is NOT checked. If this is checked, search engines will ignore your site.

Check your Permalinks

Go to Settings > Permalinks and use Post Name. If your site is using a custom structure or you are in doubt about this option, please check with your developer before making a change.

Now onto the plugin itself.

Installing WordPress SEO

• In your WP dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New
• Search WordPress SEO and click Install. Make sure you are installing the plugin developed by Yoast since a lot of options will come up.
• Activate the plugin and return to the admin.

Check your wp_title() call in your theme

One activated you’ll have a new admin menu option titled SEO. Go to SEO > Titles & Metas. Under Title Settings, if there is no warning, you are good. If there is a warning, the plugin needs a piece of code in your header.php file to work properly. The plugin will automatically overwrite your titles, but I’d recommend adding the code because it makes things slightly more efficient.

Editing header.php

You only need to do this if A) the plugin tells you to and B) you know what you’re doing. Open up header.php in your child theme (or if you’re using your own custom theme which won’t be overwritten by theme updates, edit the theme directly) and look for:

wp _title('some stuff might be here')

Replace this bit of code with:

wp_title('')

If the process of editing a theme is foreign to you, contact your web developer to make this change since even a small formatting mistake can break your site.

Main Settings

Moving on to the rest of the settings on this page, here’s what my General tab looks like. Copying these settings should be fine for your site.

General settings for WordPress SEO

Title Tags and Descriptions

These are the first thing someone sees when searching for your site in Google, and search engines take notice of them just as much as people do. Here’s how to make sure yours are optimized.

Edit home page and blog page Title and Description

On SEO > Titles & Metas, you’ll see links to edit the home page (front page) and blog page’s titles and descriptions. These will take you to the Page edit screen where a new box will let you customize the specific SEO settings for that particular page. This metabox will appear on every page and post from here on out.

Title – use your main keywords  (55 characters)

If you own a gluten-free, vegan dog treat bakery named the Woofery in Kent, Ohio, a Title like this is perfect (we’ll discuss your business model later): Gluten-Free Dog Treat Bakery in Kent, Ohio | The Woofery. Google uses about 50-60 characters in their titles and they recommend shooting for 55.

Description – use keywords but keep succint (156 characters)

The meta description is the supporting cast, describing what you do in a little more detail, eg: We provide gluten-free, vegan dog treats baked with love to the Kent, Ohio area. We use only organic ingredients to make the best tasting dog treats.

Then edit each template

Once you’re done with the home page and blog page, go back to SEO > Titles & Metas > Post Types. Now we’re going to set up shorter, dynamic titles and descriptions for each page, so we don’t have to create one manually every time a page is published.

You can choose from a bunch of variables which can be found by clicking the Help dropdown button on the top right of your screen when on the plugin settings page. Variables like %%title%% should already be filled out.

Here are my settings for Posts and Pages. You’ll notice the Titles aren’t as long as on the home page, but I still try to use some relevant keywords.

You’ll have to experiment with yours to make sure the titles aren’t too long as page names will change in length. Go through and make sure the rest of the templates are optimized for your keywords.

Sitemaps

Besides Titles and Descriptions, Sitemaps are probably the most important feature of this plugin. You can easily control which pages get included in the sitemap, and it organizes your content in a structure that is easy for Google’s robots (and humans) to understand.

Go to SEO > Sitemaps and make sure Check this box to enable sitemap functionality is turned on. Also turn on Ping Yahoo! and Ping Ask.com because why not.

Exclude Post Types

This part is actually somewhat important. If you have custom post types, taxonomies or content which you don’t want search engines to index, this is a good place to start. If you are in doubt, leave these unchecked. I personally exclude media attachments since they are mostly presentational, and exclude other taxonomies that are generated by plugins and my own custom code. Be sure to click Save Changes at the bottom when you’re finished.

Summary

I’ve only scratched the surface of the control you have over your on-site SEO with this plugin. Be sure to explore the options in the WordPress SEO metabox as you edit each page and post. It’s very handy for making sure specific pages don’t get indexed by search engines, and for optimizing each page’s content based on a keyword you define.

If you have other settings that you use that I haven’t covered which are useful, let me know!

I think it’s important to say that WordPress has done an excellent job of hardening its security over the last few years. Like any CMS with powerful functionality, it requires maintenance in order to keep it useful and safe. The developers who work on the WordPress core do a good job of addressing security concerns with each and every release, but it’s important to take some extra steps to help your website stand up to a security attack.

Essential WordPress Plugins for Security

1. Akismet

This is a no-brainer plugin that does a good job of blocking spam from affecting your comments and forms. Sign-up for a free API key through the plugin’s settings page.

View Plugin

2. Limit Login Attempts

This plugin helps to prevent a fairly common strategy for hacking into WordPress sites called brute force entry. A computer will try again and again to guess your password until they find the right one. With Limit Login Attempts, a user (or computer trying to break into your site) will be locked out after a set number of incorrect password attempts. You can configure the number of incorrect attempts allowed and the amount of time that someone is locked out for.

View Plugin

3. WordPress to Dropbox

Not exactly security, but kind of. If you already have a system for backing up your site, then you’re good to go. If not, this plugin could be a good choice. It automatically backs up your database and site files to a dropbox account on a schedule that you choose (daily, weekly, etc) which means your data won’t be lost in the event of a security breach.

View Plugin

4. Securi (premium plugin)

This plugin isn’t necessary for most sites, but if you’re running a membership site, a site with lots of traffic or valuable content, this plugin might be worthwhile. It monitors your site for malware and will alert you if it recognizes an attempt to hack your website. If your site is already affected or becomes affected by malware, it will clean things up.

Note that you can use their free site scanning tool to check for malware: http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/

View Plugin

5. Remove WP Version from Header

I know you are an incredibly diligent website owner and update your website every single time a new version of WordPress comes out. For those of us who are a little slower, it’s important to remove the version of WordPress that is placed into your site’s header automatically. If there is a known security flaw for a specific version of WP, hackers can search your site to see if you are running that version. Removing this information makes their job more difficult. There are plugins that will remove the WP version for you, but it only takes a few lines of code. Place the following in your functions.php file or ask your developer to do it for you.

View the code on Gist.

More Ways to Increase WordPress Security

Plugins can only take us so far. Here are some other best practices that will decrease the chances of your site getting hacked into.

• Keep WordPress core up to date

  Like I mentioned earlier, the core developers do a good job of addressing security concerns with each release.

• Never use “admin” as a username

  If you already are using “admin” as a username, create a new user with admin rights, login as this new user, then delete “admin”.

• Use a complicated password

  Uppercase, lowercase, symbols, you name it.

• Limit plugin usage

  Poorly written plugins can be gateways to your website for hackers. Only use plugins that are necessary, well-written, and updated frequently.

• Update your plugins and delete unused plugins

  Same concept here.

• Consider using a different host

  Some hosting companies aren’t that

• Unique database prefix

  If you are creating a new WordPress installation, consider changing the database prefix from “wp_” to something unique. Do NOT do this on your current live site. Talk to your developer if this is gibberish to you.

If you have any must-have WordPress security plugins, please let us know in the comments.