One of the things I mentioned a few posts down about wordpress, is the plugins. O my. The plugins. There are soo soo many, and I plan to write about the ones I come across that I love the most.

WPTOUCH is my first fantastic plugin.

With millions and millions of iphones out there, many people, including myself, like to catch up on their blog reading through the phone itself.  Now you can format your Wordpress to be on the iphone just like an application with a simple plugin.

WPTOUCH is so simple to install and configure. You simply install the plugin and edit the preferences for how you’d like your blog to appear on the iphone.  Thats it.  Your done. No messing with coding or anything of that nature.

If you’d like this installed, but aren’t familiar with installing and setting up plugins, you can contact me for a quote.

Otherwise, you can find this plugin here.

Enjoy!

One of the #1 things you can do for your e-commerce website, alongside a professional website design, is your product photography.

Customers are used to shopping for items in stores where they can touch, feel, smell, and handle products before they buy them.  With the online shopping industry booming, customers want to be able to shop from the comfort of their own home, but want to know exactly what they are getting.

The closest thing to resembling the connection between product and customer, I believe, is great product photography.  You want you customers to be able to see your product in use, different angles, etc.  They want to see the vibrant colors in your products as you see them in person.  Give your customers a chance to experience the product before they even purchase it.

Product photography also shows that you care about your products.  That you are in it to win it. You are telling your customers that you make quality products and they won’t be disappointed.

I hear a lot, that product photography is expensive. Trust me… I understand! However, know that you will receive a return on your investment once you start making sales.

Some tips to find a great product photographer:

1. Check your local craigslist for photographers in your area. You may find a great photographer just getting started with their photography business that need some items to put in their portfolio, thus possibly providing you a great deal.

2. There are lots of resources online, but I would first exhaust all photographers locally. When you work with someone locally, you cut out the shipping costs, and can be saving money on that portion. You can also possibly provide your own models to the photographer, if you’d like your own children in your images. All around, going locally will save you time and money.

3. Can’t find someone locally? Let me know and I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction.

I usually recommend that your product photography be completed before your website is designed. You want your website design to bring out your products and not take away. So having at least some sample images of your products before the website design, is a great way to getting started with your e-commerce business.

There seems to be a stream of people transferring from Blogger to Wordpress lately.  With that comes tons of questions.  This is my attempt to help to answer as many as I can.

What is the main difference between Blogger and Wordpress?

Blogger is a free blogging platform that is provided by Blogger.  Wordpress is a self-hosted blogging platform that allows the user to install plugins (analytics, social media, many many more! ) in to your own host.  There is also more capabilities in the design functionality as well with drop down menus easily manageable by the blogger, and many more.

But the #1 reason here, is the plugins!

The only Con, I would say, is that you need to know a tiny bit of html.  The widget feature in WP isn’t as simple as Blogger.  So you’ll need to know a bit of html in order to place your ads, graphics, etc.

Will I loose my posts from Blogger or Can they be imported into WP?

WP has a great import tool.  It will import all your blogger posts and comments into your new WP blog.  I have had a few issues with the import not importing all the comments if you have thousands upon thousands, but I do my very best to pull everything over.

What about all my subscribers via RSS and email?

If, when you first started your blog, you signed up for feedburner for your blogger feed, I can easily update this to your new wordpress feed.  However, if you’d never signed up for a feedburner account and have stayed on your blogger feed this entire time, I will not be able to transfer your feed.  This means you will loose your subscribers.

Can I forward my old blogger url to my new wordpress blog?

To the best of my knowledge, we are unable to point your blogspot.com address to your new domain.  The blogspot address is owned by blogger and can’t be forwarded like a typical domain.  ( If someone knows how to do this, and I am wrong, please let me know! )

The best thing to do here, is to put up a last posts stating that you have moved.  Your blogger blog will always remain live unless you delete the blog entirely, which I don’t recommend doing.

Will my widgets/gadgets transfer over?

They don’t actually.  They have to be transferred over manually.

Will I be able to edit my navigation menu?

I do my best in all my blog designs to keep this portion editable by the client.  If for some reason, I don’t think it would be editable, I will let you know beforehand.

What is the difference between categories and pages?

In blogger, in order to have a navigation bar and have proper links you have to use posts.  This will always show the comments, date, etc as all your other posts do.

With wordpress you have pages for the links like about, contact, etc.  Any of the pages that would only contain 1 piece of information.

Then you have categories which is how you label your posts.  This is the same thing as labels in Blogger.  When your blogger blog is imported into Wordpress, all your categories will transfer over as well.

What are themes and which do you recommend?

Themes are the actual design and functionality of your blog.  When I’m doing a completely custom wordpress design, I like to use the Lifestyle theme by Studiopress.  This theme has lots of great options and features, and I can completely recode this theme however I’d like it.

Another theme I recommend is the Thesis theme.  A lot of bloggers request this theme, so its pretty common.  I do find from a design standpoint that I’m fairly limited with this theme as far as design is concerned.  I can simply do a header and background and change up the colors of the navigation to match.  You won’t see my typical blog designs using this theme, but you will have lots of editing freedom of your own.  Overall, this is a great theme though, so don’t let me steer you away.

Here are some examples of wordpress blogs I’ve designed using these themes:

Lifestyle theme:
Frugal Adventures
My Restored Life
Fistful of Coupons

Thesis:
Happy Homemaker

What are plugins and why do I need/use them?

“Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine.”-Wordpress.org site

Simply stated, but it’s the truth.  There is a plugin for anything you can possibly think of.  Social Networking, analytics, print posts, featured gallery, just to name a few.

You can go here to browse through the list of available plugins.

I generally install up to 3 plugins will all my wordpress designs.

***Do you have a question that you don’t see here? Leave it in the comments and I’ll add it to this posts.***

and in with the new

I thought it was time for a new do to the site, and wanted something super clean.  I go through my phases of color color color, and then I like CLEAN!  I’m so loving this new design, as its easy on the eyes, and there is lots of helpful information directly on the home page.

With the new do, comes some changes to my blogs as well.  I’ve had my personal and business blogs combined for the longest time, and I now feel the desire to separate the 2.  I will have this blog for my R3D updates and all business related news, while my personal blog will still be found at myrestoredlife.com (which is getting a new do as well .  And if you’ll notice, we are now on Wordpress!  I’ve learned a ton about wordpress the last year or so, and I’ve decided to officially make the switch so that I can have better control over plugins, etc.  If you are considering switching from Blogger to Wordpress, I will be writing some posts on this to try to help answer all the questions that are involved with the switch.

Back to work

You can go from this

to this

and feel so proud once it’s complete!

I had decided in my mind that I wasn’t going to go because we simply couldn’t afford the tickets. My husband and I had left both our jobs to be entrepreneurs and do whatever it took to make our own business become a reality. Thus led to 2 years of barely getting by. When I say barely, I mean BARELY! So I knew there was just no way for me to attend. Well on the day of the conference, my husband somehow pulled together the money for me to be able to attend. That night Vicki Courtney was one of the speakers. There was 1 more speaker, but I was unable to hear her because I had to leave slightly early due to my nausea. After hearing Vicki, I was so encouraged and moved and loved everything she had to talk about. I even came home that evening and went to her website to see what else she was involved in and to check out her books.

Well 3 years later, I get an email from Vicki Courtney herself asking me to design her new blog-site for VickiCourtney.com and her Virtuous Alert blog. I was truly stunned to see her name in my inbox! What an amazing work God has done in my life to bring me FULL circle from listening to this woman’s encouraging words while we barely kept the roof over our head. To now, me having a successful and thriving business, and for me to do her site! What an honor!

We just launched her website yesterday, and I think it looks incredible! Well, I’m a bit biased about that you know. LOL. But it truly looks fantastic. Go check out her new site, and enter her giveaway she has going on! Tell her I sent you!