1. Domain Name Registration
The first thing that you will need to do is register a domain. You can have more than one registered domain name, and likely during the course of your business will have many. I have 10+ now. I like to explain that registering your domain is like registering your address with the Post Office. You can register your domain with a company like GoDaddy or NameCheap or browse to find other domain registration companies. You can also register your domain with your web host.

2. Web Hosting
A web host will be where all of your files are stored that makes your site look pretty. Think of this as your actual home. This is where you live, and a web host is where your website will physically live. There are many great hosting companies out there. You will want to look for one that uses a cPanel to help users navigate the system. You should also be careful not to sign-up for the highest end of a package. You will likely be presented with many different plan levels like: shared hosting, dedicated hosting and VPS hosting. If you’re just starting out, it quite likely that you only need shared hosting. You can always add on as you build. Think of the hosting like this:

• Shared hosting: This would be like living in an apartment building. You live in your own space, but you may share services like laundry machines and parking lot. Rent fees would be less than a mortgage.

• VPS hosting: This would be like living in a duplex home. You live in your own space, but have a home that is joined with another. You would have your own laundry service and you would have your own parking garage. Because this is a home, it would be higher lease than renting, but less than a mortgage of a full home.

• Dedicated hosting: This would be like your own private home. You own everything. And because of this, a full mortgage and other costs, this would be higher.

Some recommended hosting companies include Hostgator, Bluehost, Green Geeks. Once you setup your web host, the next step that you will need to do is point your domain registration to your hosting service. This is done by changing the DNS (domain name server). Your web host will provide you with likely 2 domain server addresses, make sure that you put them in the appropriate spots. Think of this as you going to the post office and telling them that you have moved and where they now need to forward your mail.

3. Install WordPress
Now you’re ready to install WordPress. Because you have a web host that uses cPanel, this is relatively quick and painless to do with a program like Fantastico. A word of caution when it comes to creating your username. I highly recommend that you not use the default “admin” for the username. I found out the hard way that when you do this, it is easier for a hacker to hack your site. All they have to do is run a bunch of combinations for the password.

4. Choosing a Theme
Your WordPress installation will likely come with two free installed themes. You can choose to use these themes, find other free themes or use a premium theme that you customize. This site and the sites that I build for my clients are created using a theme called Thesis. It was built to be ripped apart and customized. Many themes out there are difficult to change, but Thesis was designed by a designer who knew that people want to have a unique looking site and not one that comes directly out of a box. If you like Thesis, and would like more help learning how to set it up, then I highly recommend BYOB Website as he has awesome tutorials for both Thesis and Genesis frameworks. I am personally a member of the BYOB Website and highly recommend the very thorough and detailed videos he has. Even if you decide that you don’t want to code your own site, you may find the free tutorials helpful when you begin to work with a web designer. BUT, if that is still more than your ready to take on yourself, you can contact me for a no obligation quote.

Now go get on that horse and ride into the sunset

Is that what you’re asking?

A 404 page, according to Wikipedia is described as

The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested.

Alrighty then. Now in layman’s terms (aka how Janice describes it).

Have you ever got back a piece of mail from the post office with “Address Unknown: Return to Sender”?

Well, essentially this is the same thing on your site.

It happens when someone follows a link that has since been removed from your site, or if they attempted to type it in from memory and perhaps had a typo.

A 404 page is often one that is left un-branded by the web owner. This is your opportunity to have some fun with it. To help guide them back. That you’ve taken the time to be aware that bad links happen.

Here’s what mine looks like:

And here’s what one of my client’s looks like:

You can see that there is the opportunity to use your own voice. There are also a lot of other creative ones out there.

A way that you can test to see if you have one on your site is to type in your URL into your web browser followed by a forward slash ” / ” and then a random bunch of characters that you know is not a real page.

It could look something like:

cowgirlupwebdesign.com/iwafhoi3

If you don’t have one, speak to your web developer about getting one.

CowgirlUp!

I often get the frustrated emails from clients asking me to fix it. I usually just pop in to the HTML area and insert a br code after the line and clean up the p tags and send them on their way.

And then I discovered this little short cut. – I think that you’ll fall in love with me

Instead of pressing the Enter key when you want to drop down to the next line, you press and hold the Shift key first, and while holding you hit Enter and voila your cursor just popped down one line in your editor.

This can be especially useful if you are using a Headline tag to highlight a bunch of text and want the line breaks to be specific. Before it would create a bunch of padding before and after each line as that is what the headline tags are supposed to do.

Let me know how it works for you.

What does that mean to you?

Does it mean that you add posts / pages of content?

Many of my clients think so. But that’s not the answer.

Think about your car. If you were to do maintenance on your car, that means that you periodically have to take your car in for service – to have the oil changed, rotate the tires, check the brakes, inspect the undercarriage, and so on.

Maintaining your car does not just mean that you keep putting gas in it and keep going. Well I suppose it could, but at some point, all of those miles will add up and your car will begin to break down.

Well, the same thing happens with your WordPress website. If you keep adding content, and content, and plugins, and content, and don’t do the recommended service updates, your site is going to CRASH.

And it will ALWAYS happen at the absolute worst moments – as with anything.

Maintaining your site means that you routinely do some minor updates:

• Update Plugins
• Update WordPress – hopefully after WP 3.7 this will become automatic
• Remove Spam
• Backup Regularly – Full Database at least once a week
• Check page speed – and review (and implement) the suggestions

Those mentioned above are usually items that most website owners can do on their own. Just like some people are comfortable checking air pressure in their own tires, adding windshield washer fluid, or making sure the oil level is good. These routine maintenance updates usually take just a few minutes and you’re good to go.

There are some, potentially, more complicated maintenance services that should be routinely performed, perhaps by a professional. Think in this case about changing/rotating the tires, flushing your car fluids, or changing the oil – not something that I’m willing to tackle on my own even though I grew up with a dad for a mechanic.

Those same maintenances on your site should look like:

• Clean up posts revisions – those are all of those ‘autosaves’ and they can impact your site load times especially if you have a large blog
• Clean up database
• Delete plugin files – that didn’t get deleted when the original plugin was deleted. It happens, some of these files are hidden and still hang out on your site.)

There you have it. Go log in to your WordPress dashboard and check to see if you have some out of date stuff happening. You can usually tell because there are black circles with numbers beside the item that needs some T-L-C.

And for the bigger project, well you can always contact me if you don’t want to do it yourself – of get your VA / Web Developer to make sure that it’s done for you. It’s likely that you’ll have to pay a little for this service.

I figure it’s a lot better to have a mechanic check my brakes for me then it is to be heading down the mountain and have them go – and YES I know from experience how your life can flash before your eyes. Make sure you get your website checked out – and your brakes too if you haven’t had your car in for service in awhile

Every once in awhile you get the client from hell (or perhaps you’ve been one). You know the ones: can you make the “T” in that sentence bigger? Can you change the colour pink to one shade lighter? Can you move the image to the right 1/16″? Can you …? Can you …? Can you …?

Mostly you feel frustrated by what seems to be petty little needs or changes. (Although if not done immediately the entire World will come to a screeching halt if there isn’t a “comma” after that word in that sentence.)

Maybe I’m being silly, but if you are laughing – even just a little – then you’ve likely had one of these clients, or you’ve been one yourself.

You may have heard of the Horse Whisperer. This person (made famous by the book and the movie) is someone who has figured out that it is necessary to listen to the horse and respond accordingly. To know that the horse is bigger than they, and in order to achieve the desired outcome, there is a need to be assertive without going overboard.

Being a Horse Whisperer doesn’t mean becoming a BRUTE or a BULLY. And likewise, being a Client Whisperer simply means that you are standing up for the client and helping them to achieve their desired outcome.

If you find that you’ve been frustrated by clients, then LISTEN to what they’re saying, and perhaps it’s time for you to update your practices and policies. I know for me personally, I wish to be known as someone who delivers excellent customer service, but when you meet that devil of a client (and you will), you need to stand your ground.

As a web designer, these are some things that pop up from time-to-time. These examples are my own, and what I do about them now, before they become a problem.

There are those little tweaks to a design that aren’t always noticeable until it gets loaded to a website. You’ll notice that there may be a need to change the width of a column, or that there is a slight colour change, or the header doesn’t line up. Those are what I consider to be normal type design changes, and of course those changes are expected to be made as part of the original agreement with the client.

What I’m referring to with this problem, is the client deciding after the site is almost live, that they don’t like the look at all, and want it completely changed. Yes, it happens.

To help you from pulling your hair out, you will want to:

• Make sure that they have agreed to a final design and get it in writing. That will mean that you should physically receive a signed copy of the approved design.
• Clearly indicate in your contract, that if there are requests made to change the look of the design, that these will be done according to your hourly rate.
• Let the client know that you have no problem making these suggested changes, so long as they agree to the hourly rate charge. I recommend getting this in writing.
• Let them know that it’s their decision, you just want to keep them informed of what it will cost them.

Of course, there will be the minor tweak of a punctuation or typo of a word. It happens that these little nuances don’t show up until they are on the screen. No big deal.

But deliberate changes once previously considered final, are not included in the agreed upon package price.

What clients may not always know, is that the Word formatted document that was sent to their web designer to upload to their site, isn’t done by a simple copy and paste. There is usually a lot of reformatting, because most Word documents have funky little code that gets attached to the copy when it’s inserted into a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.

On top of that, there is oftentimes custom code that is used to get the effects of heading or a quote, and this is again custom, so has to be hand-edited.

To offer the client great customer service, and to make sure that both of you don’t get frustrated, I recommend:

• Make sure that they know that you only want to receive the final copy. Include this detail in your contract, and ensure that they initial beside this on the contract.
• Let them know that you will make changes, per their request, and that they will be done at your hourly rate.
• To help keep the cost low, ask that they only provide you with the changes. They can highlight the original copy and then indicate the change, or some other type of identification that will be easy for you to see the changes.

These are just a couple of hot issues that seem to be on the lips of other fellow designers (and mine too by times).

Well, perhaps it’s not. And that’s ok. {Shocking eh!}

SEO (search engine optimization) has been the buzz-word for internet marketers, and if your website wasn’t SEO then you weren’t making money.

Now, don’t get me wrong, we do need to be found in the search engines, however, spending a bazillion dollars of your marketing budget on SEO may line their pockets full of your dough instead of YOUR pockets.

Even Google suggests that you should…

[Quoted from the Google Webmaster Guidelines]

I currently consider myself in the Little Britches Rodeo of SEO, I am learning my way by watching others, listening to what experts are saying used to work and what they are now saying not to do anymore. Based on that info, I thought I would share some basic tips to help you make sure that your site is Human Optimized and can then also be found in the search engines.

My domain, cowgirlupwebdesign.com has the keyword “webdesign” in it.

But don’t make it all about the keyword. Web Design is not the only keyword I could have used. I also work with Thesis and WordPress and specifically I custom code sites.

I could have ended up with a domain something like: customthesiswordpresswebdesign.com but that would have been crazy – don’t ya think?!

Do you even know what Meta Description is? Well, that’s probably why they used to be written all technical and for the search engines. Just remove the name Meta from that and think of a Description. What would you say to someone – in 20 words or less – about what it is that you do?

This is something that you can do yourself, or have your assistant do. You don’t need to hire out a super specialist and blow gobs of money. But it does take some work and some thinking.

But don’t go with the old adage “If something is good, more must be better.” Don’t over use keywords.

Thanks to WordPress, keywords are easy to add to each and every blog post. You should notice that there is a box in the right hand column called Tags. And in that box is an area where you can write a keyword and/or 2-3 word phrase. You can add several keywords if they are appropriate.

But again, don’t go super crazy. Depending on your blog post style, these keywords will show up at the bottom of the post….see below for the tags that I’ve used for this post.

My goal in writing this article today has been to help YOU. Getting found on the internet is definitely important, that’s how you found me. But if I wrote stuff only to be found by search engines, I’m not really helping them any, they don’t care what I have to say, but you do. And if I can help you be more efficient with your time and your money, then this was a good article.

There are services out there that can do this automatically for you, and I’m all about having good systems in place to make things easier, but sometimes, the personal touch will be worth the effort. Use the technology to help you connect to the various social networking services, but I would suggest not relying fully on technology to handle all of these tasks for you. Sometimes technology flops (unfortunately). And this is also your opportunity to customize your posts to be more – dare I say – human!

One clinician in particular, Richard Winters, said something that really struck me. He said,

Think about that.

Whether you have horses, or dogs, or kids – if you are backing up, you are not standing your ground. You are being guided by their actions instead of guiding them by yours. But we’re not really here to talk about training horses, dogs or kids. This is a business lesson.

Let me share how it showed up for me.

I was at a social gathering a few years ago and the topic of my business came up. At that point, my business was only about 3 months old – it was still quite new.

All was going well until I kept being asked over and over the same question because they couldn’t comprehend how I work with people. I soon found myself in the hot seat and on the defense. I was moving my feet backwards.

But here’s the thing. Just because the horse has your feet moving backwards doesn’t mean that you give up all training efforts.

There were a couple of times that weekend in Ohio, where even the professionals had their feet moving backwards, but they didn’t quit altogether. They stopped and realized what was happening and then tried something else.

After my night in the hot seat, that’s exactly what I did.

First I’ll admit I was mad. Mad because I didn’t have the skills or the confidence at that time to be able to handle the situation. To be able to reply with confidence of what I knew.

I re-gathered my thoughts and what I could have done differently.

I had to revisit what it was that I was trying to help these business owners with. I thought about their business and their language and then I reached out to meet with them again.

I presented to them, in their language, how I could help them with their business. As a result, I was able to negotiate a contract with them.