Technology, ya gotta love it

So I signed up for Kajabi today to see what the hype was all about and to see if it was worth the effort and expense. First let me get this out of the way right now, you won’t find any affiliate links in this Kajabi review. This is not one of those thinly disguised reviews meant to get you to click the affiliate link so the author can make some money. With that out of the way let’s get to it.

What is Kajabi? Kajabi is a few things but the bottom line is this, it’s expensive web hosting with some very nice tools. I’m sure Andy Jenkins (One of the developers) wouldn’t call it that and probably won’t be too happy that I call it that, but in the end that’s exactly what it is.

But it is much more that just hosting and in the end that’s what your paying for. You can also say that Kajabi is an all in one tool for publishing a complete sales/membership site. You can create squeeze pages, sales letters (sales pages), a member community akin to a forum, create and publish a course and deliver all your content through your admin panel, and you can integrate social networking into all of it. You can create a complete sales funnel with upsells, downsells and everything in between. You can set up your content (course) to be published based on the length of time an account is live. In other words you can drip out content every x number of days or weeks so you don’t give everything away as soon as someone signs up. Currently there are 4 themes you can use though they all look very similar. You can create your own themes but you do have to have the know how to do that. There is a built-in theme editor that allows you to change the colors and backgrounds and it is very easy to use. The tools are very cool and designed well and easy to use. You really don’t have to be a techy to get any of these things accomplished. There is an extensive video library to walk you through all the tools and features and the videos are all very well done and easy to understand. Everything about Kajabi is polished and detailed and in the end it is a very nice set of tools.

There are also a number of additional modules that will be available in the future. One is a blog module that will allow you to publish a regular blog but what kind of features it will have is unknown at this point. The other is an A/B split testing feature that is supposed to be and I’m sure will be push button easy to use. If you watch the video at Kajabi.com you’ll hear this stuff for yourself.

So am I blown away by Kajabi? Yes and no. Yes it’s a cool set of tools and very easy to use and in fact does deliver on all the promises of the sales video and sales page. There is not one thing that is promised and not delivered here. Before I go on to tell you why I will not be staying with Kajabi here’s what you get:

For $99 per month: All plans below also carry a $99 setup fee:

• 1 Full featured project – Read as 1 product to sell
• 500 Portal users – Read as 500 paying members of your course/membership
• 25 GB’s of bandwidth with $0.48 per GB overage charge
• 10GB’s Storage
• 1 Admin account
• Upload your own videos

For $199 per month

• 10 Projects
• 2,500 Users
• 50 GB’s Bandwidth
• 20 GB’s Storage
• 10 Admin accounts
• Krunch Media Encoder – This enables you to create videos viewable on iPad/iPhone
• CDN Network – The use of Amazon s3 content delivery network

For $299 per month

• 30 Projects
• 100 GB’s Bandwidth
• 50 GB’s Storage
• 10,000 Users
• 50 Admin accounts
• Krunch Media Encoder
• CDN

So who is Kajabi good for? Kajabi is for someone who has their own product and who knows how do drive traffic to their site. This is designed for ease of use and a newbie marketer can use it to set up a sales funnel very easily but at the same time unless you have a load of money your willing to spend on traffic or you have experience in driving traffic through social media or article marketing it will not help you sell a thing. There is no way that you’ll be able to drive traffic through organic search results. The one glaring omission is any kind of SEO capabilities of Kajabi. Yes you can create content but most if it will be hidden behind a membership meaning that search engines will not be able to see it therefore they will not index your content. Other than a meta title I so nothing else that can be used for SEO purposes.

I said in the beginning that Kajabi is expensive hosting and that’s not 100% accurate. You cannot for instance use anything other than Kajabi. So if you wanted to use WordPress for your blog that is not an option. And as far as I know you can’t have your own IP address. To me this is an important point. Consider this, everyone who signs up for Kajabi is an internet marketer, everyone is selling something. Everyone at that IP address (whatever it is) is going to be selling a product. Google will know this and they may penalize you for it. Not necessarily directly but you can be sure they won’t be sending you any kind of organic traffic. Google’s mantra is “Relevant Content” and they have no way of knowing whether your content is relevant if it’s hidden behind a membership module.

When you create your project the URL (or address) will be youproject.kajabi.com. If you want to use your own domain name you can but you have to change some A records and point the domain to the Kajabi servers so you can have yourproject.com.

So, to wrap it up. Kajabi is a very cool and complete set of tools that will allow you to create sales funnels and a community of users (members) but only if you know what your doing in terms of marketing and have the ability and know how to drive massive amounts of traffic to make it worthwhile and to see any kind of success. Kajabi will not do anything for you if you don’t have a following or are not experienced in driving taffic.

Furthermore you can accomplish pretty much everything Kajabi does with Easy Video Player 2(EVP2) which is launching in a couple of days and Wishlist Member which is a great WordPress plugin that allows you to create a membership site and allows you to drip out content the way Kajabi does. Yes it’s a bit more work to set it up with WordPress and EVP2 but economically it makes more sense to me. Consider that you can get EVP2 and Wishlist Member for a total of about $200 while it would cost you $200/month to run a site off of Kajabi, does that make sense to you?

Bottom line, if you are an experienced internet marketer and know how to drive traffic, have a solid product, are willing to spend money on traffic then Kajabi is for you, if not then it isn’t and you should look at other solutions.

If you want to extend your reach to the web, whether for business or personal needs, Page.ly is a no brainer. It’s an all in one hosting solution that will get you up and running FAST. It’s extremely reasonable, has a bunch of nice features, and for the most part is completely worry free. You can spend hundreds to thousands to hire a developer (Yeah even me) to get your WordPress site designed and set up, but if you can read some simple directions and click your mouse, you’ll be able to get it done with Page.ly. Rather than me just ramble on take a look at the video below.

Okay so now that you’ve listened and read all these different opinions and “facts” (You did right?) let’s discuss the ramifications of all this. The question as to whether a theme (Thesis or any other) must be released under GPL is…most probably. Yes anyone on the side of GPL will say definitely but until a judge decides this in a court of law I personally can only say “Most probably”. But let’s put all that aside.

Matt Mullenweg, who by many accounts is a really nice and likable guy is under tremendous amount of pressure here. His back was pushed against the wall very publicly when Chris Pearson pretty much said “Sue me, I’m not changing anything”[paraphrasing]. What should Matt do now? This is not an easy decision to make. No one, not Matt not Chris not anyone wants to go to court and possibly spend millions of dollars to just prove a point. But does Matt Mullenweg have the option of not going to court? His decision can have a profound effect on not only the WordPress community but open source software as a whole, and that’s dangerous.

Imagine for a moment that Matt decides to be the bigger man and just walks away from this debate. By doing so he opens the door wide open for other developers to do as they please, “Screw WordPress and Matt they are not going to do anything anyway so I’ll release my theme/software/plugin/OS/Application under any license I damn well please”. People will do what they want if they are not help accountable. Not only that but if Matt Mullenweg decides not to pursue this it could be taken as a sign that he may not be 100% convinced that he can win. If that’s the case then maybe those that say that themes are not GPL are right after all.

The losers in all this would be the entire WordPress community and the end user especially. Open source works, GPL works, it must defended and stood up for. Take a look at any closed source environment like Windows. How many completely free applications and programs are available? Now look at Linux. How many completely free applications and programs are available? If you really aren’t aware you can download and use thousands of Linux based applications free of charge. There’s even an app inside any Linux distribution that allows you to search and install apps right from your desktop. That’s the power of open source, it gives us, the users, freedom of choice as well as freedom to create, recreate, improve upon and redistribute without any fear of reprisal, for that is the whole point of GPL.

I’m not arguing whether themes are GPL or not here, my point is that this needs to be resolved and developers and the community need to know that what they are doing and how they are doing it is in fact the right way.

Automattic the parent company behind WordPress.com and other applications has received millions of dollars in funding from such heavyweights as True Ventures, Polaris and The New York Times (as well as some others). You can bet that these companies are watching closely to see how Matt Mullenweg handles the situation. Now don’t all jump on me, I’m not saying that Thesis is going to have a million dollar impact on WordPress by not abiding by the WordPress license agreement, but Matt’s investors are going to want to see him act decisively and aggressively. His decisions can have a profound effect on future investors and how he is viewed as a businessman at the head of a multimillion corporation.

As I said before this is not a simple decision for Matt Mullenweg to make and I think Chris Pearson is savvy enough to know this. It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out.

What do you think?

P.S. For those that are curious I will be moving to another theme as soon as I decide on which one to use. It’s not because I think Chris is wrong per se but since I am using WordPress I feel that I should respect the community and use a GPL licensed theme. I’m hoping this is only temporary.

Okay I know this is waaaayyy off topic for my blog but I just had to mention it this morning.

Did you catch Chris Brown’s performance on BET during the BET Awards and his breakdown during the singing of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”? First of all let me say that his performance was pretty darn great, especially when he sang “Billy Jean”, even the moonwalk was phenomenal.

But when I see performers start crying during performances or speeches a lot of times it feels forced and self serving. Now I’m not saying that he faked the whole breakdown thing but I’m not sure how genuine it was. As a professional performer I see no reason to not show some emotion but in essence he stopped singing and gave up on the performance. I can surely understand when a performer might get emotional during a tribute performance as he was doing, but as a professional you suck it up and get through it. That would have been the greatest tribute.  That’s just how it came across to me and how I feel about it.

What do you think? Watch the video on this page and let me know what you think about the whole thing.

This isn’t part of my multi part series of articles on business blogging but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be, I just didn’t plan it this way. You can read part one Creating Designing and Structuring a WordPress Blog for Your Business and part two The Use Of Color In Design after your done with this one of course:)

Initially I thought I would write a quick little tutorial and howto and be done with it. As I sat here thinking about what I was going to write and started working on an outline I started thinking how my answers can impact the SEO and subsequently traffic to anyone who takes my advice. If there’s one thing that’s been proven to me over and over is that what might work for me may not necessarily work for you, so with that in mind I decided to do some research and confirm what I knew. I still thought I was going to write a quick but good post and be done by lunch. The more I researched the more it became evident that quick was not going to happen. I began delving deeper and deeper into different aspects of SEO and even though I started with the dreaded “noindex” or “index” question I started moving off into different directions researching different SEO principals and practices. By about 5:00pm or for you worldly types 17:00 I realized that what I was going to do was write a detailed WordPress SEO Guide and that it was going to take me some time to do. So with all that nonsense out of the way, lets get to it.

General SEO Principals

First of all lets all understand that there are no hard rules, nothing is set in stone. Like I said earlier what might work for me may not necessarily work for you. There are a number of factors that determine your sites SEO and whether it’s good or bad. Also please keep in mind that this post and everything I talk about here refers to SEO as it pertains to WordPress based sites. Yes some things are universal to any site but for our purposes the discussion here is WordPress SEO.

Permalinks

After installing WordPress this is the very first setting you should decide on. You can pretty much have any kind of permalink structure you want but the most common are;

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ and /%postname%/

Either one can work for you. The overall thinking behind just using post name is that it’s the shortest and therefore believed to be the most search engine friendly and also the most easy to remember. But keep in mind that your decision will have a direct impact on the decision to index or noindex your categories (more on this later). For a long time I used post name only with good results but it can be a negative because it doesn’t give any reference to time. I have read a number of posts on different blogs that just used post name and didn’t publish the date the article was written making it difficult for me to decide whether the information I was reading was current and relevant. This is something you have to decide on your own, but if you write about current events or technology or anything that is relevant at a given point in time you might want to consider using at least one date parameter or at the very least publishing the date of your posts. On this blog I decided to try year/month/name to see how it performs.

Canonical URL’s

I’m not going to go into details on this one except to say that canonical URL’s tell Google which URL should be indexed for a given page. A lot of themes have this functionality built in but if your doesn’t you can get Joost de Valk’s excellent canonical url plugin from WordPress.org. You can also read more about it on Yoast.com.

[off-topic. I have a newsletter that I send out occasionally with important information about WordPress and related content and any time there’s a new post. You can subscribe here and stay updated, it’ll open in new window or tab]

The Dreaded “noindex” “nofollow”

What to do, what to do? This single setting is the one of the most disagreed on aspect of WordPress SEO and probably the most misunderstood as well. The answer to the question, “Should I “noindex” my categories?” is…It depends:)

It depends on how you set your permalinks. If you use category based permalinks then you shout NOT noindex, in other words, so we’re clear here, yes you want to index your categories. If on the other hand you don’t use category based permalinks then you can noindex your categories. After reading hours upon hours about this subject I came to a couple conclusions. One, is that it doesn’t matter so much anymore because Google is getting pretty good at understanding WordPress blogs and their structure and, two, it’s not entirely clear on whether indexing your categories will produce duplicate content. Different people have gotten different results with this setting so it behooves you to try and test things and see how it goes. Also, if your category page displays the full post instead of the excerpt then you also want to noindex categories and you’re better off having excerpts on your archive pages also.

Lets look a bit deeper. Your posts live in 3 different places (Again, depending on your permalinks structure). When you first publish your post it’s on the home page and presumably gets indexed within minutes, depending on the frequency with which you publish new posts. It also lives in your chosen category and in your archive. When Google indexes your post upon publication the URL that Google will have for your post is yoursite.com/post or whatever your permalink structure is. Theoretically if your permalink structure is /date/postname Google will follow your post link and it will  see it as yoursite.com/date/postname and if you do index your categories it will see the same post as yoursite.com/category/postname in theory having the same post with two different URL’s hence duplicate content. Whether this is factual and true is debatable but this is why you would want to noindex your categories and archives. If you are using a date based permalink structure you would probably want to index your daily archives.

This part is pure speculation and my opinion and should be read as such. Google is master of the search, I’m pretty sure most would agree with that. Their mathematical calculations are way beyond my comprehension but it’s fair to say that it’s very sophisticated. With the huge number of WordPress blogs published every single day and new ones created on a daily basis I have to believe that they are well aware of how WordPress handles content. Google’s main points of contention are webmasters who try to skew results into their favor with artificially inflated content amounts and sites that promise content but don’t deliver. I myself have seen blogs with a large number of tags, categories and pages that lead to the same content. To a user that’s frustrating and not helpful whatsoever. This is what Google is trying to minimize. (more of my opinion later, I don’t want to get sidetracked here:)

nofollow is a lot easier to explain but I think people have a misconception as to what it really means. When you use the “nofollow” attribute it’s like saying “I don’t want this link to get any link juice (or pagerank) from me”. If you’re linking to a resource you published in the first place why wouldn’t you want to pass on some pagerank? If that is not your intention then you should use the nofollow attribute on a link by link basis. But the biggest thing most people don’t get is that nofollow was created by Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen in an effort to curb spam comments and spam in general. That’s what it’s for, period. It’s not meant to be used to stop Google from indexing or giving pagerank to anyone. Consequently it has no effect on your SEO but can have an effect on the page you are linking to. By default WordPress uses nofollow in all readers comments. If you would like to explore nofollow some more you can do so at Wikipedia.

WWW or no WWW?

This is one of the most common offenders of duplicate content. Most people don’t realize that you can get to a domain regardless of how you type the URL into the address bar of your browser. Whether you type www.site.com or site.com your still going to get where you want. The problem is that Google sees this is 2 different addresses and therefore treats content the same way. So if you have a post called “Flying Choppers” and don’t have your site set up properly, Google will index www.yoursite.com/flying-shoppers/ as well as yoursite.com/flying-choppers/ giving you duplicate content where in reality no duplicate content exists since it is the same article.

To fix this issue is pretty simple. All you have to do is a 301 permanent redirect to either a www domain name variant or non www, it’s up to you. To keep things as simple as possible you can use a redirection plugin for WordPress that you can download from WordPress.org. There is another more technical way of doing it by editing your htaccess file and if you’re inclined to do that you can follow this tutorial.

Internal Linking

Proper internal linking is an integral part of any SEO strategy. Google likes when the information on your site has an orderly flow to it and is easy to navigate. Aside from Google it also makes it easy on your visitors when you link information in a logical manner. There are a couple of ways to put this into practice.

First, you can simply link from the latest post to the previous post to the post before that and so on with additional links to important and pillar content. In theory you should be able to navigate to every single post you’ve ever written starting from your latest one without using the nav menu.

Two, there is some belief that you should link posts in the same category only creating a kind of silo structure. When I first read about it I was a bit skeptical but upon further research found there might be merit to this. The idea is that you link within the same category only creating a “theme” for your information. This actually makes good sense to me. So lets say you have a blog dedicated to cats. You might have a category for cat health and you might create sub-categories like cat diabetes or cat cancer and so on. Then you might have a category for cat diet with sub categories like cat food or cat snacks and so on. So now Google will see that your main theme is cats and your sub themes also all relate to cats therefore giving you the benefit of related keyword search results. So lets say you’ve been optimizing for cat care and cats as pets for your keywords. But now when someone does a search for best cat snack or feline care you should be in the search results, in theory, and of course based on the quality and relevance of your content. Like I said before, this is a theory and I haven’t been able to come up with any statistics but I feel strongly enough to tell you about it.

I’m not saying that you should restructure your site, please don’t, but consider it for your next project. In the meantime I’m going to continue researching this and will post any results or statistics I find. I have seen a couple different WordPress plugins that are supposed to create the silo structure for you without changing anything to your theme or design. I’m not going to link to them because I don’t know if they work and they are expensive. One is $57 and the other is $97 neither has any statistics or results posted to back up their claims.

As a last word on internal linking make sure that you link all your posts to other posts paying close attention to related content. The more you can link to related content the more Google and your visitors will love you. Make sure your best content, stuff your really proud of, is linked to regularly.

Titles and Descriptions

This should be self explanatory so I won’t spend a lot of time on this. All of your titles should contain the keywords that you want to rank for. You should do keyword research to find out what the best keywords are for the article you’re about to write. I have seen a lot of folks just wing this and wonder why they aren’t ranking for their “chosen” keyword. Example – Steve the blogger writes an article about diabetes but names his article “Steak is Yummy” and doesn’t do a good job of using the right keywords in the article. You can guess the outcome.

Descriptions are just as important as your title. The description should be no more than 160 characters and should clearly explain what the article is about. Remember that the description is what the searcher sees when your result is shown in the serps so you want it to be an attention grabber.

Content is the Key

You can do all of the above perfectly but if your content sucks then it won’t make a bit of difference. As a matter of fact the simple truth is that you shouldn’t worry so much about all that other stuff but instead just concentrate on your content and everything else will fall in place.

Before you write a single word you should do your research so you know what keywords you should write for. However, with that said you should write for your readers first and worry about keywords last. It’s a lot harder to write naturally when you’re concentrating on a set of target keywords trying to figure out ways to fit them in. As a rule of thumb I use my keywords two to three times in the first paragraph, once or twice in the middle paragraphs and again once or twice towards the end (Based on a 500 word article).

When you write about something you care about or know a lot about it’s very easy to write good naturally well written content. When you care about your subject it always comes out in your writing and your readers can tell. I write my articles in full first and then edit them to include the keywords that I want. That way I know my articles come from the heart first and even after doing some editing they should still be good.

I don’t know what else to say about this, I just want to impress upon you that your content is what will get you the backlinks you want and need to raise your pagerank. No one wants to link to poorly written stuff, there’s no reason to.

A quick word about images. If you use images in your posts remember to optimize them also, something that a lot of bloggers fail to do. Make sure to rename them from img001.jpg to something just a bit more descriptive. Use alt text and create a caption. Do this with every single image you use and you’ll see improved pagerank and traffic. To be honest I don’t always to this either but it does have it’s benefits.

Plugins Sitemaps and Final Thoughts

I don’t promote using a whole lot of plugins but there are just a few that can help you in your SEO efforts and make things a lot easier.

There are two SEO plugins that I recommend. All In One SEO is probably the most used SEO plugin and very easy to set up. For most blogs the default settings are good enough but make sure they jive with your permalinks settings like I mentioned earlier.

Greg’s High Performance SEO plugin is an excellent alternative and gives you a whole lot of control over every single aspect of SEO. There are over 100 settings you can tweak to get the most out of your SEO efforts. It may be a bit too much for some but if you have patience and want fine grained control and are willing to read the FAQ or do other research then I highly recommend this excellent plugin. It’s also coded very well and actually very light weight.

Robots.txt is indispensable. One way that you can help Google index the things you want is by using a robots.txt file to point them in the right direction. You can also keep spam robots out if you know what to put into your robots.txt file. To find this information you can use Clickability an excellent tool to create your own robots.txt files. Keep in mind too that if you make it easier for Google to find your most relevant stuff and stop them from crawling useless pages, like your login page, they will more than likely reward your efforts.

Finally you should submit a sitemap to Google and the Google XML Sitemaps Generator plugin is the easiest way to do it. The nice thing about the plugin is that it will update your sitemap as needed.

Some good themes have a lot of the above functionality built in to them. Thesis for example is the best theme for SEO and you don’t need to add any special plugins. Make sure your theme isn’t hurting your efforts.

WordPress SEO is a lot more than just a few settings. It is strategy that needs to be implemented and tweaked over time. WordPress SEO should not become a burden or your focus. The most important part of any SEO strategy is your content. The best way to grow your pagerank is to get backlinks and that should be your focus. Find blogs in your niche and start working them by leaving good relevant comments. When your write pillar content make sure you get the word out, the more people read it the better chances of picking up some good backlinks.

Test your noindex settings. Set your categories and archives to noindex wait few hours after publishing a new post, copy a sentence from within your post and put it through Google search. If you see it in the results you are good to go. Check again for posts that are a few days or weeks old.

Optimize your images, link your posts, especially the good pillar type content and research your keywords before writing anything.

But most importantly have fun. What’s the point of having a blog and writing about your favorite subject if you get all wrapped up in the technical SEO stuff and lose focus of what’s really important?

If you disagree with anything I said please let me know, if you found this helpful please let me know, post a comment, tweet it and share it:)

Resources and Additional Reading

Google Webmasters Blog

Matt Cutts On WordCampTV

Google Webmaster Central

seomoz.org

SEOBook

SEOChat Forums

SEOForums

And of course SEO services is just one of the services I provide. If you need help or get stuck just drop a support ticket at our help desk.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function use_codepress() in /home/content/46/5420546/html/wp-content/themes/thesis_17/lib/admin/admin.php  on line 42

Codepress is a Javascript based syntax highlighter that the Thesis custom file editor uses to highlight syntax used in the editor. In WordPress 3.0 it has been deprecated and no longer used due to browser incompatibilities.

The solution is pretty simple:

Just follow these steps and you should be good to go.

1. Use FTP to connect to your site.

2. Find the location mentioned in the error message i.e. wp-content/themes/thesis_17/lib/admin/admin.php

3. Download admin.php to your desktop and open it using any editor of your choice

4. Just comment out line number 42 (mentioned in the error message) by adding two forward slashes at the beginning of the line:

//if (use_codepress()) add_action(‘admin_print_footer_scripts’, ‘codepress_footer_js’);

5. Upload the updated admin.php to the wp-content/themes/thesis_17/lib/admin/ and you are done!

Remember that this is just one of the services that we offer so if you need some help just fill out a support ticket at our help desk.

This is the second in a multi part series of articles on creating and building a business blog to extend the reach of your business. If you missed part one you can read it here –Creating and Structuring a WordPress Blog For Your Business.

Design Decisions

Design is very subjective and therefore not easy to make recommendations for. What may appeal to one person will not appeal to someone else. What one person finds pleasant another might find boring. The key is to design for usability, speed and identity.

My mantra is “Less Is More” and that’s how I try to guide my clients. Now that doesn’t mean that a design can’t be beautiful and have great looking graphics, the point is that your site has to be easy to navigate convey your message clearly and “speak” with your voice.

How do you do all that? Careful planning a good designer and patience. Of course you don’t have to use a designer and you can do it yourself, just take your time and research everything. There are many different resources you can use for ideas and inspiration. The first and one of my favorites is Smashing Magazine, you’ll find a ton of information on design, themes, best practices,examples and a lot of good advice. PSD-Tut’s is another one of my go-to sites when I need some inspiration or when I crave a new tutorial. It is mostly a Photoshop tutorial and howto site but you can walk away with some very good ideas. Another good web design stop is Net-Tut’s, yes they are affiliated with PSD-Tut’s but they have a different focus and look at other aspects of web design. At Huzzer Magazine there’s a good list of fifteen different websites to inspire ideas and creativity.

Color Considerations in Design

The use of color on websites is a never ending point of disagreement among designers and marketers alike so it is something you should give a lot of consideration. I like dark colors and textures, not really suited well for marketing but pleasing to look at if done right. Statistically speaking the majority of people prefer to read black on white, that is to say black text on white backgrounds, but I also think it really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you are going to publish a lot of readable content then yes I agree you should have dark text on a light background. If however you will mainly promote your product or service then I believe you do have some leeway, but as a rule of thumb, keep it dark on light.

You can also use colors to drive your visitors to specific actions on the page, like an optin for a newsletter (more on this later) or to a video or set of images or links. Color is also very helpful in creating your identity or voice. If you were to study art, you can always recognize a particular artist’s work because they apply their style, their voice, to every painting they create and you can do the same thing if you use color the right way. If you already have a brick and mortar business and already have a color scheme for your business cards and stationary it would be a good idea to extend it to your site to make it instantly recognizable to your existing customers.

When I create a WordPress site from scratch I try to relate a color to a product and work outwards from there. For example, let’s say Coke Cola came to me to create a blog for them. The whole world knows the red and white Coke Cola can or logo and it would be foolish of me to use beige and brown to create their blog, that just wouldn’t make sense. Or let’s take Levi’s jeans, blue denim, red text on beige for their waist label and a red on white Levi’s logo on the little pocket tab on the jeans. With Levi’s I can use a number of colors to create a compelling looking blog but I would stay within the recognizable brand colors they use on their clothing. If you go on over to the Levi’s site you’ll see a great use of different colors to make their site look very unique. Also take note of the dark background because that’s exactly what I meant when I was referring to using dark colors if promoting products or services. Coke Cola on the other hand created a great looking light colored site with splashes of bright red. These two sites give you a great example of how one site looks great because it’s dark and the other looks great because it’s light.

The Layout

The layout of your blog is just as important, if not more important, than the colors. This is where a lot of people fail miserably. First of all design and layout are two different things. The layout is how you structure different elements on the page and design means style, the colors and typography you use to create your identity. First of course you have to decide what elements you want to have on your page, especially your home page but also remember that you will have other pages and what might be a good idea for the home page may not necessarily be good for an inside page. That’s one of the reasons that most WordPress themes will have multiple page templates giving you more control over how your inside pages look and how the content is presented. You can also install some plugins to give you even more control over your sidebars and widgets. (I’ll get into plugins later in the series)

When working on the layout I use my most trusty tools, pencil and paper. It’s a lot easier to conceptualize and design your structure using visual aids and to me a simple legal pad and pencil is the best place to start. Once I geta rough outline of what I want to accomplish I then move on to other tools like Photoshop and Mock-up or Wireframe applications. One of my favorite is called Pencil (Ironic huh?) it’s a free application you can download or use as a Firefox plugin. Using an application like Pencil gives you the freedom to create the exact look you want. If you decide to hire a developer to install your WordPress blog for you it’ll make it a lot easier to convey your wants and needs if you create a mock-up of what you envision first.

Since every business is different everyone’s needs will be different but keep in mind when designing your blog layout that your content is the most important part of your blog. Most businesses that use WordPress for a blog or as a CMS, will have a home page that describes the business or product and have a separate blog page. If that’s what you plan to do then concentrate on what you want your visitors to know about your business or product. If you could only choose one thing about your business or product that you could showcase or describe, what would it be?

Next, what do you want your visitors to do? Obviously if you’re selling a product you would want them to click a “Buy” button. Think about that, how will you highlight or showcase your product? If you’re offering a service do you want them to fill out a contact form or maybe call you? No matter what it is that you want them to do it has to be so clear that they don’t have to wonder what to do next. You have 5 seconds to to make this happen, if within 5 seconds it’s not clear to them there’s a good chance they will click out. That may sound like an exaggeration  but I assure you it’s a fact that if a visitor to your site doesn’t clearly understand what to do within a very short period of time they will move on.

The bottom line is this, you want your most important information to be above the fold, meaning that your most important content should be visible and not have to be scrolled down to below the bottom of the browser window.

Your Optin Form

One of the most important parts of your layout is your optin form. This is a mistake that a lot of people make when creating their first blog or site. You must understand that when people are surfing the web and gathering information they are unlikely to buy from you on their first visit. Statistics show it takes seven times seeing your offering before a they buy. Gathering your visitors names and email addresses gives you the opportunity to market to them through email and remind them of your product or service. Now that doesn’t mean that as soon as you get their email address you email them seven times and your going to make the sale. You have to cultivate a relationship, email them some valuable information, keep them informed about changes in you industry or to your products and as you cultivate a relationship with them then email them about a special sale or offer, just as a “thank you” for being on your list. But email marketing is big part of doing business online and deserves a lot more attention than a paragraph, possibly a series of articles (hint hint). Sign up with an autoresponder service like Aweber as soon as you have your site ready to go live. Please don’t wait or ignore this like so many people do who later come to regret not working on this very important aspect of online marketing.

Summing It Up

Blog design doesn’t have any set rules you have to go by but rather more theory and concepts than anything else. You have to research, find inspiration and use common sense when designing your WordPress Blog. Always try looking through the eyes of your visitors; Is what you’re designing going to make sense to someone when they land on your home page? Is your information clear and concise? Is your blog pleasant to look at? Does it convey your personality or business ideals? If you have a mission statement it’s a good idea to let your customers know what it is so consider publishing it on your site’s “About” page.

Design is very personal and while you should seek out help and advice you should also make sure that it represents what you want it to represent. I hope all of this makes sense to you but if you check out the sites I referenced and read more about web design and usability I’m sure you’ll come up with the right combination of content, layout, colors, bells, whistles and whatever else you decide on.

Up next I’ll discuss WordPress Themes and traffic. Originally I planned on covering themes and traffic in this article but it turned out to be a lot longer than I expected and I’m assuming you’ve already had enough:)

I’m only going to show you how to use basic HTML to style your text but for more detailed tutorials and to further your knowledge you can take a look at W3Schools.com at their excellent free tutorials.

Basic HTML

To style text colors and alignment you can use the values below

This is just a tiny example and how to and there is a whole lot more to HTML than this very basic tutorial and I urge you to head on over to W3Schools.com to take some of their full tutorials, you’ll be glad you did.

There are a number of things you need to decide before even thinking about installing WordPress so lets take them on one by one.

What is Your Goal?

Of course the simple answer is, to attract new customers. However, that’s not what I’m referring to here. What you need to decide is what kind of information do you want to present to your visitors? Do you want to use your blog as a lead capture? Do you want to sell something through the blog, a service? A product? Or do you want to provide information that would be beneficial to your customers and visitors?

You also have to determine who your audience is going to be, who you should be targeting. This is very important and something that a lot of businesses just starting out seem to overlook. They try to make themselves attractive to a very wide audience which in and of itself is okay but the problem is that there are other websites that are already established in your niche and have a head start on you. You have to drill down and target a smaller subsection of your general audience. For example: Let’s say you sell classical music cd’s. You wouldn’t want to try and target the general music listening audience but rather classical music lovers. You can probably drill down even further. You may know for example that the average age group for classical music lovers is 40 to 65, they more than likely make over $100K per year and so on. These are the kinds of things you must know before creating your blog. Please keep in mind I used the numbers just as an example and have no idea if those statistics are correct.

If you want to use your blog as a form of lead capture, how will you do it? People today are not fast on the draw when it comes to giving up their email address and name so you have to give them a reason to want to do it. Decide this ahead of time, what can you offer that would have enough value for someone to want to give you their contact information?

This one people seem to have some trouble with. What action do you want them to take? This may sound simple enough but your design will depend heavily on this answer. Actions can be anything, entering their email address into a newsletter subscription form, buying a product or service, reading a specific article or page, calling a phone number, giving you email addresses of friends (ie: recommending you), using social media to promote your article for you, etc etc etc…Only you can decide what it is that you want your visitors to do once they hit your home page.

Research

Now you have to do your research. You already know about your niche/business so obviously I’m not talking about that. I am referring to keyword research. Before you even decide on a domain name you should, nay, you must do keyword research. A huge number of people don’t do this and end up regretting this important step. Obviously if you already have a website, especially a successful or moderately successful site and you’re just adding a blog to it then this isn’t for you, but for everyone else this is a huge step and yes a big deal. An excellent place to start is the Google Keyword research tool and it’s free.

First you have to make sure that whatever domain name you choose is not infringing on any copyrights or trademarks. I unwittingly did exactly that when I registered my very first domain name for a blog I wanted to do about the Ubuntu operating system. So I say from experience, be very careful when choosing a domain name.

Now, back to keyword research and choosing a domain name. A lot of people try to create cute or funny or creative domain names. That’s okay for some and it can work but to shorten your quest to the first page of Google search you’ll probably want to choose a domain name based on your niche’s keywords. Not only is it a benefit for SEO(Search Engine Optimization) but having a domain name that represents your niche will be immediately recognizable by someone searching for your product. There is more to this but to give you an example, let’s go back to the classical cd’s. If someone was to search for “Classical Music” what would tell the searcher more, theblacknote.com or classicalmusiccds.com? This isn’t a trick question, obviously the classicalmusiccds.com domain would be the one to get clicked if theblacknote.com was the other choice. Of course there’s an exception to every rule and you might be attracted to black notes but the majority of people will click on the most obvious result rather than the catchy one. Once you make a list of keywords group them by importance and relevance. You’ll use this later, trust me.

Keyword research is not just for choosing a domain. Since you are in the research part of your project what you want to do is make a list of keywords relevant to your business or niche. The longer the better. Your going to use these keywords later to optimize your blog to get as much love from Google as possible, so try to think outside the box too. Start with the most closely related keywords and start working outwards from there. There are many sources for how to do keyword research so I’m not going to get into details here since I could write an entire series of articles on keyword research. There’s a great article and list of more keyword research tools at Nine By Blue.

Blog Outline and Configuration

I cannot tell you how many people fail to do this and later have a mish mash of a site with no clear concept of what it’s supposed to be. Once you find a domain name and make a list of keywords, don’t do anything else until you’ve done this. I love my computer, iPad, netbook, notebook and smartphone but when I outline a site I revert to my favorite way of doing it, pencil and paper, and I suggest you do the same. Sit down at a clean uncluttered desk and start outlining your blog:

• Pages
• Categories
• Tags
• Keywords
• Content
• Home Page

For each one of these make create a separate sheet of paper just as you think you may want it on your site. You may struggle with this at first, it’s not as easy as you may think. There are many things to think about and consider. First and foremost you want your site to make sense to the visitor. Any information should be easy to find, pages and categories clearly named, images (if used) to further tell your story, there should be a natural flow to your information. If you really want to delve into this all important part of creating your WordPress blog (Or any site for that matter), I recommend “Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web” by Christina Wondtke and Austin Govella.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when doing this step is creating pages when they should be categories and categories that should be pages. When you make mistakes like these they are very difficult to later fix, I shouldn’t really say difficult, more time consuming that anything else. To give you an example I had a client who had created 4 pages for interviews he did of some prominent people. The correct way would be to create a category named Interviews and publish all interviews to this category. This way if a visitor clicks on the category link he or she will see all the interviews in that category but if they read a page with a single interview unless you post links to the other pages they would never know. It’s also easy to add more interviews as he gets more, but to keep creating pages just doesn’t make sense in this example. As I said earlier this is one mistake that I see over and over so please consider all this very carefully and take your time structuring your blog on paper before you ever install WordPress.

One last thing you should do when doing this step is to refer to your keyword list. Use your most important keywords, the one’s that you want to really optimize for, and base your pages and categories on that list. Also keep the list in mind when working on the concept of your home page. Try to visualize the flow of information from top to bottom and left to right and see how you can use your keywords to highlight or accent a particular part of the page (or blog).

If you take all these suggestions seriously and take the time to do all these tasks, I promise you that your blog will have a much greater chance of success. Today a ten year old can start a blog but only a smart and savvy business person can make it a financial success.

In the next part of this series of articles I’ll discuss design concepts and get you thinking about traffic principals and methods.