Question: Why do you build your custom designs on premium frameworks like Genesis or Thesis? Aren’t your developers qualified to build WordPress themes from scratch?

Answer: Yes, we are qualified to build WordPress themes from scratch.

Here’s why we don’t choose to do so:

Consistency of support

We’ve been building WordPress websites since 2008, and as a result, we support a couple hundred of them for our clients. When the underlying framework is built with the same structure, it’s quicker for our support team to troubleshoot, fix, and make changes to these legacy websites, no matter how different the designs may be on the front end.

By contrast, if we had built each of those sites from the ground up, each would have its own unique code footprint – not good for keeping things supported as WordPress continues to change and evolve.

Which brings us to…

Future-proofing

There are an uncountable number of “free” WordPress themes out there (or cheap ones) that look good to the layperson. However, if you peek under the hood at the code, many of them would make an experienced WordPress coder nauseous. The fact of the matter is, a lot of free themes are school projects and resume builders for kids who then move on and don’t look back.

The premium framework companies have a vested economic interest in keeping their frameworks up to date with the latest WordPress changes. They get their hands on the new versions of WordPress before they get pushed out to the rest of us, and work to make sure they’re up to speed with the changes so the frameworks don’t break.

As a matter of fact, they even drive changes within WordPress. For example, WooThemes came up with an awesome menu/navigation functionality – and it became a standard part of WordPress in 2010.

Segregating design files from core theme files

A lot of random themes out there build tons of functionality in, but it lives within the theme itself – meaning that if you change themes, all that cool stuff magically disappears – and it may have been cool stuff you built your entire site around.

High-quality frameworks keep the design stuff separate from the nuts-and-bolts function stuff, and allow plugins to fill in the blanks. This reduces the chances that changing themes, skins, or running simple updates will accidentally nuke your site.

So – rather than viewing starting every project on a premium framework as “cheating,” we view it as future-proofing our clients’ websites and streamlining our business so we can provide top-shelf support for years to come.

Affiliate Disclaimer

The post Why we start every website with a premium framework appeared first on Rowboat Media | Legal Websites | WordPress-Based Website Designs.

If you’ve managed your website for very long, you’ve probably wanted to change some permalinks, get rid of some outdated pages, or make a long ugly affiliate referral link into something pretty and easy to remember.

Editing your .htaccess file to add redirects can feel scary (and annoying, as it involves FTP, text editors, and techie knowhow.)

Some WordPress themes, like Genesis, include redirect fields, but they require that each redirect have a page – which can clutter up your dashboard with pages that aren’t really pages.

However, there are plugins that make this super easy - the most common is the Redirection plugin, which has been downloaded over 1.2 million times. I use it myself and it generally just works. One caveat: it hasn’t been updated since 2012, but it’s pretty simple functionality that probably doesn’t need updating that often.

If you want something “fresher,” you could try the Redirects plugin, but it’s only been downloaded 5,000 times and I haven’t tested it, so your mileage may vary.

Here’s how the Redirection plugin works:

After you install it, go to your Installed Plugins list. Find the Redirection plugin, and click Settings.

You’ll see this:

The Source URL is the one you want people to be redirected from. This might be an old link you’ve changed, a link to a page you’ve deleted, or a new link you’re creating to mask a long, ugly affiliate link. For example, if you’re a WPEngine affiliate and you want your affiliate link to be mydomain.com/wpengine, then you put /wpengine in the Source URL field and paste the “real” affiliate link into the Target URL field. The Target URL field is also where you put in the new link – it could just be / if you want it to return the user back to your home page.

If it’s an external link, don’t forget to put in the whole thing, starting with http.

After filling that in, just click “Add Redirection” and, as always, TEST.

Happy redirecting!

The post How to easily redirect pages, posts and affiliate links in WordPress appeared first on Rowboat Media | Legal Websites | WordPress-Based Website Designs.

The cool thing about WordPress is that it lets you easily change, update, and generally tinker with various parts of your website without having to get a techie involved.

The terrible thing about WordPress is that it lets you easily change, update, and generally tinker with various parts of your website without having to get a techie involved.

Here are two mistakes commonly made by just “regular folks” while “improving” their WordPress websites:

Changing page/post permalinks

After you’ve been blogging or creating page content for a while, you might learn a few things – like how a well-thought out permalink for your pages can help a bit with SEO.

So you go back into your old pages and blog posts, and start editing permalinks, adding keywords to the default titles WordPress assigned when you created them.

BAD IDEA!

What happens when you edit a post with the permalink mydomain.com/5-tips-for-spring-pruning and change it to mydomain.com/5-tips-for-spring-rose-pruning?

If your website is set up correctly, Google will have indexed your original post within a few days (or even hours) of its publication, at the original location. Then let’s say you change it.

Google won’t necessarily know you’ve changed it, and someone might search “spring pruning tips” and find your great article. With the outdated link.

Which means, when they click the link, they get a dreaded “404 not found” error. Even worse, if your post has been linked to by other gardening blogs, you may not even KNOW how many outdated links are out there.

Repeated 404 errors can hurt your Google rankings, plus potential readers never make it to your site in the first place.

Never change a permalink without redirecting the old link to the new one.

If you want to implement your knowledge to make better permalinks, stick with using that on NEW content – not previously indexed content.

Deleting a page without setting up a 301 redirect to somewhere else

As you mature in your online presence, you may look back at some of the old stuff you wrote and cringe, and want to reach for the delete button.

ANOTHER BAD IDEA!

For the same reasons outlined above, deleting a page or post can result in more 404 errors.

Never do this without setting up a permanent (301) redirect from the old link to, at least, your home page, or to somewhere else that better answers the question.

If the subject is still relevant and it’s your answers that are out of date – add an update to the old post and leave it up. People appreciate that and it lets them know you’re keeping your eye on the ball.

The post Two simple website mistakes that hurt SEO appeared first on Rowboat Media | Legal Websites | WordPress-Based Website Designs.

This morning, I got an email from a local no-kill animal rescue. They do an amazing job with fundraising, and as a result they’ve got a larger budget than most and can make an impact that is felt throughout the community. I’m on their email list, and I just gave them $50 without even slowing down to think about it – as fast as my mouse could click, the money was there.

Why? Because they told me a story that mattered.

The email included photographs of Duke, a 3-year old St. Bernard who was found severely malnourished (he’s all liquid eyes and giant feet), with his coat matted to the point that it all had to be shaved off.

Duke has heartworms, and they said his treatment will cost $500. The email included a big button that said “Help Heal Duke.”

My first dog, a black laborator retriever named Lucky, died when I was only about 8-9 years old, from heartworms. I remember it like it was yesterday – the grief, loss and RAGE I felt. One day he was there in the back yard as he had been all my life, my constant companion, and one day he was just…gone.

I’d be damned if I was going to let this set of eyes and feet named Duke suffer the same fate.

Bringing the macro down to the micro

Now, the truth is, if I didn’t give money and other people didn’t – if they didn’t get $500 or more from that email, Duke probably would have gotten his treatment anyway, from the regular budget, which would then be depleted by $500.

I’m not REALLY under the illusion that I personally saved that dog’s life. And yet I am, because they wouldn’t have a budget if it weren’t for individual donors who were moved for some reason, any reason, to give. I knew my emotions were being triggered, and I didn’t care. I stopped what I was doing and took action.

“Give to our annual operating budget which helps 500 animals per year” just doesn’t move people to action like “Help save THIS animal, RIGHT NOW. You. Yes, you can do it, on a level that feels do-able.”

Not just for non-profits

Sure, you say – but I run a roofing company / law firm / widget factory. I don’t have stories of cute fuzzy wuzzy aminals to share.

That’s where you have to get creative. Your business fills a need, makes an impact in some way. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a business for very long.

Give some thought to how you can break down the big picture of what you do into the small victories you participate in for your customers and clients, every day.

Then share. I can’t wait to read your stories.

The post How to personalize your business with storytelling appeared first on Rowboat Media | Legal Websites | WordPress-Based Website Designs.

Have you ever pulled up a link on your phone while you’re out and about, only to end up emailing it to yourself to look at later on a bigger screen? I have. Dozens of times.

And if you’re like me, when you get back to your desk and sit down to answer email, where actual clients are clamoring for a piece of your time, that interesting or informative link is WAY down on the priority list, whereas it could have been great to digest the information earlier when you were sitting in that waiting room.

What if YOUR website was the one that got emailed, and then subsequently forgotten? That’s what we call a missed business opportunity.

If you have a truly mobile responsive website, you can avoid missing out on that potential client.

What a mobile responsive website is NOT

A mobile responsive website is NOT a separate website, on a different domain (usually m.yourdomain.com), that is stripped of all but the most essential information. The problem with separate mobile domains is that Google sees them as separate domains, which means all that effort you’ve been spending getting good search rankings for your main website – lost on an “m-dot” domain. You have to do the work twice.

A mobile responsive website is NOT a genericized plugin like WPTouch stuck on your site so that people on a mobile device will merely see a list of blog posts. These are also notoriously glitchy. Have you ever tried to look at a website on your desktop and gotten the mobile version by mistake? Not fun.

What a mobile responsive website IS

A mobile-responsive website is the same site – same links, same content – on every device. The only difference is that it is coded such that it will automatically resize its various elements for whatever size device it is being viewed on – whether it’s a 1200 x 800 monitor (the most common worldwide at 19.5% market share) or a 320 x 480 smartphone (11.4% market share). Of course, device size market share remains fluid, and probably changed while I was writing this sentence, which is what makes an adaptive design more important than ever. Resource: Global Screen Size Diversity infographic.

Back in 2008, the folks who make web standards in an attempt to keep it from being a code-monkey free-for-all out there recommended the “One Web” approach – that is, making “as far as reasonable, the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using.” We are just now seeing the results of that today.

Not just the latest technology gimmick

If you’re like me, you’ve been around the block a few times. You’ve seen website fads come and go, including the evil Flash intro. Untold millions of dollars sunk into silly animations that actually keep people from getting to your website so they can spend money with you.

Mobile responsive isn’t just a gimmick, however – it’s the closest thing to future-proofing I can see, in a world that’s moving toward an infinite number of sizes of mobile, touchable interfaces.

Mobile responsive websites by Rowboat Media

Below are our three latest mobile responsive projects – and two out of three are repeat clients, which is our favorite kind of client in the whole world.

How mobile responsive affects development cost

While it’s rapidly becoming the standard, mobile responsive DOES increase the number of hours, and the skill level, put into both design and development, so you can expect it to cost a bit more than a standard, non-adaptive website, say 20-25%. But if having to pinch and zoom and scroll and email a link to themselves causes you to lose a client – isn’t it worth it?

The post Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Responsive Website appeared first on Rowboat Media | Legal Websites | WordPress-Based Website Designs.

When 2013 arrived, I was asleep. My 102 degree fever had finally broken, and I had begun the laborious process of stringing disjointed hours of rest together like beads on a necklace.

Now I’m staring at my ruthless to-do list with something less than optimism.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen colleagues, mentors, and others posting the seemingly required list of goals and aspirations for the New Year, along with the ever-popular prediction posts, which go something like this: “If you don’t do these 5 things in 2013, you’ll end the year worse off than when you started.”

In Western culture, January 1 has become something like the starting pistol at a horse race – you load into the gate with prancing, nervous beasts and attempt to keep them under control through that moment of tension before, “Bang!” And they’re off, running as hard as they can (or, with a wise jockey, being held back like crazy to hold a pace) for an arbitrary finish line. Depending upon the length of the race, the commentators will be discussing which horses have the most early speed, and which ones have the stamina to go the distance and outrun the sprinters.

For those of us who, for whatever reason, didn’t end up loaded into the gate with the rest of the sprinters, it’s very easy to feel like we’re hopelessly behind and will never catch up. If you’re a business owner, that feeling can be multiplied a thousand-fold, because your resolutions are likely much more ambitious and financially crucial than getting to the gym on a regular basis.

So. Today is January 3rd, and I just realized it’s Thursday and not Friday. Which is actually a bonus, because it means I’m not as behind as I thought!

In a few weeks, we’ll be posting some of the changes we’re making around Rowboat Media for the new year – new offerings, new ways of doing things, etc. In the meantime, it’s one foot in front of the other.

I’ll leave you with what my friend and kick-ass entrepreneur Traci Knoppe posted about New Year’s resolutions:

“I’ve seen the usual 2013 goals, resolutions, etc…. I never make New Year’s resolutions. I figure if I want or need to do something, or change something, if I can’t do that instantly at any moment I notice the need; waiting until a “new year” isn’t going to be likely to spur me on to make it happen. So I resolve to do/change what I need to, when I need to – even on a Thursday evening.

Don’t wait until the New Year, Monday morning or even tomorrow morning – resolve at any moment to change your focus and direction.”

Our only point of power is ever NOW. No matter what the date on the calendar.

Now to make the most of the fact that it is, indeed, Thursday.

The post Crawling into the New Year appeared first on Rowboat Media | Legal Websites | WordPress-Based Website Designs.

This is Part 4 of my comprehensive walkthrough and review of Scribe 4.0.

(Check out Part 3 – Link Building.)

Finally! I’ve made it through all the main feature areas of Scribe 4.0 to the last one, Site Connections.

This one isn’t over in the edit area like the other three – instead, you have to go over to the left-hand WordPress menu, and under the Scribe menu, choose Site Connections.

You enter your keyword phrase and click the button, and you get a site score from A-D, telling you how difficult it will be for you to get people who own a higher level of authority for that term to link back to you.

I got a B, which is pretty impressive given that YouTube SEO is fairly tangential to what the Rowboat Media website is all about. It said “you have a lot of connections, but need more for this phrase.” By connections, they mean backlinks.

Who are these people with the authority?

In theory, Scribe will return a list of sites which rank for the chosen keyword, along with any contact information they can find on the admin of the site – email address, phone number, etc. so that you can consider engaging with them. I saw this work in the webinar. However, on the evening I was running this test, repeated attempts produced the blank results shown and the following error:

I wasn’t terribly chapped about this, because I know the functionality is brand new and it involves pulling and aggregating data from a remote location – therefore, lots of points of failure. Plus, I feel that Scribe is so powerful even without this new feature that it didn’t really matter.

Scribe will also show you people who are influential in social media for that phrase, including their Klout Scores. Unfortunately, when I clicked the first couple of links, I got 404 errors. Again, I’m sure the kinks are getting worked out:

Conclusions About Scribe 4.0

All in all, I was incredibly impressed with the new features Scribe has added in my absence, and with how it has taken what seems like a really “soft” subject – content marketing and relevance – and found a way to quantify many aspects of it with hard data, and suggestions driven by that data, that are easy to understand.

We all have to become content marketers rather than “keyword optimizers” in the new world of search, and Scribe does a great job of leading writers through that. I would venture to say that instead of handing one a fish, it gradually, through repeated use, teaches one how to fish off the content marketing pier.

The Copyblogger crew states that it could take about a week and a half-dozen posts to really get the hang of how it works – I suggest it could take less, especially if you’ve read an introduction like this one.

You can use Scribe on as many websites as you like, with a single API key – the only limiting factor is the number of evaluations in your plan.

All subscribers get both the plug-in and access to the web interface.

More information, plus a 30-minute demo video, is available on the Scribe SEO website.

Scribe 4.0 Review – Part 1 – Keyword Research
Scribe 4.0 Review – Part 2 – Content Optimizer
Scribe 4.0 Review – Part 3 – Link Building

Affiliate Disclaimer

The post Scribe 4.0 Review, Part 4 – Site Connections appeared first on Rowboat Media | Legal Websites | WordPress-Based Website Designs.

This is Part 3 of my comprehensive walkthrough and review of Scribe 4.0.

(Check out Part 2 – Content Optimizer.)

Scribe 4.0′s Link Building Tool is deceptively simple, which is why this is the shortest of the four posts in the series, and yet quite powerful.

We all know that crosslinking within our own content is extremely important. It helps engage your readers further by encouraging them to keep clicking and digging deeper into your website, and that time on site and number of pageviews are metrics that Google tracks closely. But how many of us can remember that we wrote a post two years ago that would be a great candidate for crosslinking to today’s post?

That’s where Scribe comes in.

Using the pulldown menu in the Link Building box, you choose a keyphrase from your content and click the Research Button. Scribe gets busy for a few seconds and then returns a list of pages it feels would make sense for you to link from:

Wow, I forgot some of those were even out there! Not only that, it will tell you the level of authority and number of links those pages already have.

This is important, because linking back to your brand new page from a page that already has high authority can help to confer authority onto the new page. Sort of a halo effect, if you will. By using this method judiciously, you can help boost new content in the search rankings faster than it would be all on its own without the additional authority cues from the older content.

If you click a suggested page, Scribe will pull it up with the suggested location for a hyperlink in yellow.

As you can see, Scribe highlighted the title of the post. That wasn’t going to work, so I found a way to create a link elsewhere.

You can lather, rinse, repeat with various keyphrases in your document if you wish. I chose to stick with the most important one.

I can’t wait to run this one on all of my old content, over time, so my site can be as crosslinked as an Aspen grove.

In Part 4, I will go over the Site Connections feature.

Scribe 4.0 Review – Part 1 – Keyword Research
Scribe 4.0 Review – Part 2 – Content Optimizer

Affiliate Disclaimer

The post Scribe 4.0 Review, Part 3 – How to Use the Link Building Tool appeared first on Rowboat Media | Legal Websites | WordPress-Based Website Designs.

This is Part 2 of my comprehensive walkthrough and review of Scribe 4.0.

(Check out Part 1 – Keyword Research.)

After completing the Keyword Research section, I moved on to the Scribe Content Optimizer, to see how well I had optimized for my chosen keywords for my Simple SEO for YouTube Videos blog post.

First, I was required to fill in my Post Title and Meta Description in my SEO plugin below the edit window. I use Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin for this.

Interestingly enough, I had forgotten to do this for this blog post, which was posted some time ago – something I always do. Scribe 4.0 is already forcing me to be more mindful in my publishing. Once I did that, I could click the Analyze button.

The Initial Analysis

The first thing that comes up is a site score of 52. Luckily this isn’t high school chemistry class, because rather than getting an F, Scribe informs me that “this page is a good match for your site for terms like youtube and youtube video.” The yellow color of the score means I’m not doing too badly – I wouldn’t want it to be red.

Keep in mind that this score varies from page to page on your website, because it is comparing that page in context with your site. According to the very long webinar I listened to, any score above 50 is pretty good.

Also featured on the page is a Search Metric diagram, which plots the keywords Scribe picks on the graph based on search metrics and copy style. I got one keyword over in the “A” section, but I left behind “SEO” in the “B” section. I’d like to improve that. Most of the ones hanging out down in the D section aren’t relevant, so they’re exactly where they belong.

I can scroll down to see the keywords Scribe felt were significant in the post.

Then I clicked the Page Analysis tab – not too shabby for a first go-round – I got an 88, and it’s an encouraging green color.

Scribe suggested that I might want to work “SEO” into my content a few more times, and that I needed at least one hyperlink to the page to relevant terms.

The tags tab will suggest items to turn into Post Tags, which it will (thankfully) automatically add to your post if you like. I edited these for relevance and let it create the tags, although I don’t really use them on my site because they don’t seem to be important to Google. This was more of an, “Um, OK” kind of thing for me.

The Help tab contains a document with best practices and definitions of some SEO terms that may be unfamiliar to those who are learning.

Improving my score

I followed the suggestions Scribe made, and found 2-3 more locations where I could work in the phrase “SEO” along with YouTube, and added “video” one extra time. For the hyperlink, I used the Link Building tool (discussed in Part 3 of this review), which found another post I had written on embedding YouTube videos into a WordPress website. I linked to the older post from my example post, and vice versa, and ran another analysis.

Lo and behold, I dragged my site relevance score up by two points with the changes. I suspect it was due to crosslinking the other YouTube post, because it would have told Scribe that this isn’t the only time we discuss YouTube.

The page score went from an 88 to a 100 by working the word SEO in a couple of times, and linking to a post on how to embed a YouTube video. When I saw that big green 100 come up, I grinned like a kid.

So far, this has taken me less than 5 minutes (a bit longer to get the screen grabs) to make some easy, minor changes to soup up the SEO of a single page of content.

In Part 3, I’ll go over the Scribe Link Building tool – which is SUPER important for those who have more than 5 blog posts and can’t remember what they’re all about!

Scribe 4.0 Review – Part 1 – Keyword Research

Affiliate Disclaimer

The post Scribe 4.0 Review, Part 2 – How to Use the Content Optimizer appeared first on Rowboat Media | Legal Websites | WordPress-Based Website Designs.

This is Part 1 in a 4-part review of WordPress SEO plugin Scribe 4.0. All four sections will be published over the course of one week.

It’s taken me forever to get around to writing a Scribe 4.0 review, partly because I wanted to listen to a webinar conducted by the Copyblogger crew first. Which was 90 minutes long. Which is against my religion. But I digress.

I’m really glad I did, because the new Scribe is so ridiculously powerful, I would never have quite grasped it if I had tried to just plug and play. Due to all the features, I decided to break my review into four parts so that you, dear reader, wouldn’t have to devote the same amount of time to reading it that I did to listening to the webinar.

While I reviewed and used Scribe shortly after it came out a couple of years ago, I sort of fell away from it as the studio got busier and I grew more lackadaisical about publishing content. What a difference two years makes!

Scribe has matured from a plugin that analyzes the content on a single page for keyword usage to a fully-featured content marketing powerhouse, which analyzes any given page you create against the backdrop of the site it’s on.

Why is this important?

Google Panda goes after random collections of content

Anybody who pays attention to SEO heard about Google’s Panda update in 2011, the shot heard round the world which severely impacted content aggregators like Mahalo and EZineArticles.

However, sites like Copyblogger (the makers of Scribe) did not see their rankings affected at all, because they were already doing content marketing correctly.

Google now evaluates your content in the context of your entire website, to see how relevant it is to the rest of the site’s content. Therefore, a page on one site may be ranked differently than the same page on another site, simply based on how topical it is.

I know I’m going through this REALLY fast, but it’s key to Scribe’s new features.

The end result of this is that the aggregator sites – which previously had authority due to their sheer size, regardless of how low quality or random the content – are no longer ranking as well as they used to. (Example: Mahalo ended up laying off a huge percentage of staff after the Panda update). Google is looking for an overall content focus on a site per site basis.

Because of this, Scribe now generates something called a Site Score, to go along with your Page Score. I’ll get to that in the Content Analysis section in Part 2.

Scribe 4.0, appropriately, now has four major areas of functionality, which I’ll cover in order:

• Keyword research
• Content optimizer
• Link builder
• Site connections

Scribe 4.0 – Keyword Research

The first thing you need to do is decide what keyword or keyword phrase you want to optimize for. After installing Scribe and visiting your edit window, you’ll find a Scribe Keyword Research box on the right-hand side near the top. I decided to use my Simple SEO for YouTube Videos blog post to test-drive.

As you type, the keywords will autocomplete just like Google Search does, so you can see suggestions of phrases you may not have thought of. You can keep with your original idea or pick one of those. I decided to roll with “YouTube SEO.”

Then click the Research button.

You’ll see a list of keyword suggestions, with two columns – a popularity column and a competitiveness column. In an ideal world, you can choose a phrase that has a high enough level of popularity – (color-coded red, yellow, green, with green being best) and a relatively low level of competition. I didn’t really like the stats for my chosen keyword, but I decided to stay with it based on other info provided by Scribe. I clicked the radio button next to it and saved it as the target keyword.

Also, you can click your chosen keyword and drill down into the details – Scribe has found a way to compare your site to other sites already ranking for the term. The score runs from 0 to 100 – the lower your score, the less difficult it will be for you to rank for the term, compared to those who are already ranking. You can even see demographic search data, PPC cost, and search volume. Groovy!

You can then check what’s trending in social media for that keyphrase, for Twitter and Google+, by looking at the appropriate tabs.

While I saw a lot of self-promotion in the first few links, it did show an article by Boxcar Marketing that looked like it was on the same subject – so I could observe how they did their title and metadata.

Finally, you can see how searches for that keyword are trending over time – there may even be seasonal patterns you want to be aware of.

This helped make my decision to stay with the keyphrase, despite the popularity to competitiveness ratio, as you can see the strong upward climb in searches over time. I felt that it was a valuable topic, and, since YouTube SEO is not really the main focus of the Rowboat Media website, I was fine with it.

Scribe 4.0 Review – Part 2 – Content Optimizer

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The post Scribe 4.0 Review – Your SEO Content Marketing Consultant appeared first on Rowboat Media | Legal Websites | WordPress-Based Website Designs.