Theresa Sheridan Enterprises

New Blog Feature – “Ask the Geek Girl”!

Theresa — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:35:08 +0000

It seems like folks are frequently asking me questions about how to do this, or how to do that, whether it’s about web design, Facebook, or simple computer questions. Since I seem to be doling out answers pretty regularly, I thought that this might make a good feature for my blog. Not only will it give me ideas for future posts, but by posting the answers here, it will help out others who might have the same questions as well.

I’m sure you might be wondering exactly what makes me qualified to answer your questions, and I’m the first to admit that not a day goes by that I don’t learn something new, but I’ve been playing around on computers since the days of the Commodore 64 (yikes, I’m old), I’ve been dabbling at websites and graphic design since 1998 and I currently work part time (yes, the freelance gig is not self-supporting yet) for the IT department in the town that I reside in. I’ve picked up just a few things there from my fellow computer geeks.

So, here’s how it will work:

You can email me at this address with your question – theresasheridan@yahoo.com
Your question can be about web or graphic design (html, css, graphics, layout, etc), blogging, social media, Search Engine Optimization, or general computer software/hardware questions. I won’t be providing training sessions here, just answering general questions if you’re stuck somewhere and need a little help, however some questions may lead to future blog posts and tutorials with much more in depth information.
I will be choosing one question a week to answer and I will post the question and answer every Friday on my blog. The person who provided the question will of course receive a link back to their site or blog, if applicable.

Okay, so let me have ‘em, I can’t wait to see what ya’ll come up with!

Farming for Links?

Theresa — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:57:00 +0000

How to grow your own quality backlinks….no farming involved!

It’s common knowledge by now that external links (also known as backlinks) to your site are a critical factor in determining search engine rankings. The more quality links you have to your site, the higher ranking you will get. I stress the word ‘quality’ here, as backlinks can be found anywhere, but quality backlinks are a little harder to come by.

So, what about those emails you keep getting asking for reciprocal links from other sites? Some may be legitimate, but most are not. Most will be from what is known as a ‘link farm’. According to About.com the definition of a link farm is as follows:

“A link farm is a website set up with the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity of other sites by increasing the number of incoming links to those sites. They are typically made up of long lists of unrelated links.”

Some link farms are just networks of unrelated sites all linking to each other. These days, search engines want relevant links and will penalize sites for linking to or from a site that it considers a link farm and will remove link farms from their directories altogether. If you rely on organic search results from search engines, pay attention to where your links are coming from.

How then, do you get quality backlinks to your site? Here are a few good ways to increase the number of backlinks to your site:

Do your keyword research, and use these keywords to find other sites in your niche. Look for sites that are timely, relevant and provide quality information that people will use. If appropriate, ask a relevant site for a link back to yours. You will also find directories in your niche in your search, so be sure to get your site listed here. These should be industry-specific directories, so not considered ‘farms’ in this case. Some will offer free links, so take advantage of these first. It goes without saying that you should submit your site directly to the major search engines and directories such as Yahoo, Google, and DMOZ.
Search for, visit and comment on industry related blogs and forums. You will be able to post a link back to your site or blog in your comments and this provides a great avenue for backlinks and getting more traffic to your site in general.
Repurpose your blog and newsletter articles by posting them on article sites. A short bio about you will be posted with your article, providing another backlink.
Use the Firefox add-on tool SEOpen to see who is linking to your competition! Find your competitors’ sites and see what sites are linking to them, so that you can possibly link your site as well.

For a little website checkup, to see exactly where your site needs some help, check out HubSpot’s Website Grader. This tool will provide you some invaluable information about how and where you can improve your site for maximum SEO, usability and performance.

Do you have any other good resources for backlinks? I’d love to hear about them, so please share!

Building your Brand

Theresa — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:51:46 +0000

The Do’s and Don’ts of Successful Business Identity

Whether you’re just starting a business, or you’re working on improvements to an existing business, establishing a successful business identity is crucial. An “identity” includes everything from graphic images (i.e. a logo) and colors, to your tag line or slogan, and even a photograph of you, depending on your industry. One will become associated with the other, and vice versa.

Ideally, before you open up shop, you will have established your identity, so that you’re ready to greet the world and they will know who you are. If this is one of the areas you missed, it’s not too late to establish it now and build on that identity and set yourself apart from the other soon-to-be lesser knowns.

As I mentioned, there are several components to the identity of a business, and several items that need to be established before deciding exactly what that identity will be.

• Who’s your target? Will you be marketing to 20 something’s or grandparents?
• Know your value –

- What skills do you offer that others don’t?
- How will you benefit your potential customers?
- Do your services fit your intended market?
- Are you stressing the value you provide over your competitors?

In other words, get a clear picture about what it is you do, how you do it, who you do it for and what you ultimately want your company to be.

How will you develop your brand?

A logo is the symbol that will represent you, your company and what it is you do and stand for. Hire a professional graphic designer that can help you make the most of this. If done well, you can be known just by the symbol, without even the name of your company being present. We all know Nike’s logo, don’t we?

Colors can play a role in an effective brand strategy as well. Keep your color scheme consistent throughout your branding efforts. From your website to business cards to printed materials, the color scheme and aesthetics should be consistent so that your brand will be easily recognized and identified.

If you choose to use a photograph to help market yourself and your firm, choose that photo wisely. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a professional portrait, however if you can afford it, do it. The photo should be pleasant, without distracting surroundings, and you should be dressed appropriately to your business. Eventually your photo will be as recognizable as your logo, so use the same photo in all your marketing materials, including your social media marketing.

Write an elevator pitch. This is a short and sweet version of what it is that you do….short enough that you could say it in the time it takes to ride an elevator. This can then be shortened to use as a tag line or a slogan in conjunction with your logo.

Have business cards and a brochure professionally designed. Use your logo, your slogan, your colors and tie it all together, showing who you and your company are. The brochure can take this a step further and portray your photo, as well as photos of your work, your store or business location and a detailed explanation of what you do and how you will help your clients. Use your logo and slogan to have letterhead, folders and other printed materials made as well. The idea here is to put your logo and your business name in front of people as often as possible.

Build a website or a blog. In this day and age, a business without an effective website won’t be in business for very long. Again, be consistent with your theme, your color scheme, your logo and photos. Have your site professionally designed, and use a copywriter if necessary to put content on your landing pages that will compel your visitor to contact you and buy from you. A website is also the place to put client testimonials, surveys, portfolios, services, free product offers (such as e-books or reports), newsletters, video, audio and more.

Building a successful brand isn’t rocket science, but it is necessary. Be sure to make this a priority and build your own brand, before you’re out there in the world and others are branding you.

No related posts.

10 Website Design Mistakes to Avoid Like the Plague

Theresa — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 23:09:05 +0000

As much time as I spend on the internet, I frequently run across sites that, in my humble opinion, could use some improvement in a few key areas. The internet is probably the single most important marketing tool that businesses have these days, and to not use it to its full potential is a waste of time and valuable bandwidth.

To that end, I have listed out several of the infractions that I’ve noticed could be improved on various websites, and how I would improve upon them. Using these tips, my SEO tips and the wealth of additional information that is available on the internet, slowly but surely, you too can reap the rewards of a successful website and business.

Visited links that don’t change color. This is a simple step to take, and it helps your visitor keep track of where they’ve been around your site. Now, I’m not necessarily talking about your main navigation here, but the links you place in and around your site, linking to other pages, external web sites, photographs, etc., in addition to the text navigation you might have at the bottom of each page.
Not enough interest and dimension to the site. Remember how when you were a kid and all you wanted to do was look at the pictures? Well, things haven’t changed much, and we still need other elements worked into the text to engage us and keep our interest. A page full of words is overwhelming and boring, and will probably lead your visitors to click off and go somewhere else. Great photos and graphics are easy to find on stock image sites, so spend a few bucks and greatly improve the readability of your pages.
PDF files for reading text. Now, as important as Search Engine Optimization is, most things are better off in HTML, as opposed to a PDF file. Not only does it keep your reader in your site, but you can fill that text with keywords and phrases that you’ve optimized your site with. Of course, if the information needs to be portable or is a form of some type, by all means, create a PDF document, but be aware that web spiders can’t crawl PDF documents.
Fixed font size, or too small of a font. Let’s face it, we’re all getting older and the old eyeballs just aren’t what they used to be. There is nothing more frustrating than digging out a magnifying glass to read content on my screen, so set up your CSS to use flexible font sizes, as opposed to fixed. If that doesn’t work for you, then at least make your font size large enough (at least 12pt.) to be legible by those of us approaching the half-century mark and older.
Bad page titles. This one really gets me! Not only are page titles KEY to your SEO practices (they’re the first thing to be crawled after your domain name), but it will help your visitor keep track of where they are, especially if they have multiple tabs open in their browser. Nothing is worse than looking up and seeing “Home Page”, or “Page Title Here”, instead of “Affordable and Reliable Carpet Cleaning | Sacramento | Joe’s Carpet Cleaning”.
A non-dedicated URL. As inexpensive as it is right now to register a domain name and purchase a hosting account (this can be accomplished for approximately $70 a year or less), there is no longer any good reason for going with a free service. With the free services, you’re forced to use their templates, which are less than professional, and your SEO efforts will suffer tremendously by not having your own URL. Show your professionalism and give your customers the confidence they need to purchase from you and not someone else.
Pages are not optimized. Slow page load times lead to a higher bounce rate (visitors exiting your site from the same page that they entered on), so be sure to optimize your images and your code for faster loading times. Don’t load your page with too many unnecessary images, and stay away from busy, gaudy page backgrounds. Your visitors will enjoy their experience on your site much more, if you do.
Splash Pages. Another pet peeve of mine. To me, these fall into the same category as those annoying monster truck commercials, fingernails on a chalkboard and infommercials……you get the idea. It is non-stop scrolling and scrolling to read all about a certain product and how great it is, and miles of scrolling later, you finally get to the bottom line. If I land on one of those pages, I leave immediately, so it just leaves me to wonder how many other people are as annoyed by those as I am and finding somewhere else to cruise?
Tables, tables, tables. Now sometimes tables are necessary, but they are no longer necessary for page layout and because of the excess code they create, they can increase page load time and moderately hinder your SEO, so my advice is to avoid them, if possible. Learn CSS, or find a designer that knows it already so you can spend your time making money instead of fiddling around with your website.
No call to action. Websites are all about business and converting visitors into customers, so why would you leave out the all important call to action? Give your visitors a reason to contact you, then make it easy for them. Let them know exactly how to do it, and while you’re at it, offer them something really cool in exchange for making contact with you. Undoubtedly you have some knowledge they would benefit from, so put that in the form of a downloadable report or an E-book and offer it for FREE, in exchange for a name and email address. You can then follow up with them, or perhaps send them your newsletter.

Clearly, a well designed, professional looking site goes without saying, but that’s a topic for another day!

What are some of your design pet peeves?

Get my FREE E-Book, “Website Magic – Quick Fixes to Improve your SEO and your Website”

Theresa — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:31:45 +0000

I’ve recently put together an E-Book detailing many of the ways that you can greatly improve your Search Engine Optimization as well as the aesthetics, functionality and conversion rate of your website. Both of these items are very important to any business venture and it is well worth your while to devote the time needed to improve in these areas.

Just fill out the form below to receive the link to download your free copy of my e-book today!

Using Google Alerts to Monitor Content in your Niche

Theresa — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:37:18 +0000

Day 10 of the SITS Girls 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge is about setting up alerts to monitor what’s going on in your niche. There are several alert services available including Twitter, Blog Alerts, and Google Alerts, the service that I currently use. Today’s challenge is to set up these alerts, if we haven’t already done so, and begin to monitor the activity based on the keywords and phrases we choose. This information can provide you with valuable insights into industry happenings, where your site ranks on search engines, and can give you lots of new ideas for future posts, which is what I find really valuable.

Here’s how it works:

Go to Google Alerts. Here you will be asked to type in a particular search term that you’re interested in. For example, if you’re a marketer, you might type in “internet marketing”. You can select what type of information you’re interested in (i.e. blogs, video, news, etc.), how often you’d like to receive alerts and what email address they should be sent to. You can do this for as many search terms as you’d like.

I’ve already been using Google Alerts for quite some time now. The keywords that I’ve chosen to monitor are -

graphic design
graphic designer
website design
web designer
virtual assistance
Theresa Sheridan
Theresa Sheridan Enterprises

While I haven’t seen any of my content show up in the alerts that don’t directly relate to my brand, I do get great information that directly relates to my business that I can use for Facebook and Twitter posts, as well as information about my competitors and very useful ideas for future blog posts. Any of you that have been blogging for awhile know the challenge in coming up with useful, relevant and NEW information to write about. These alerts are very helpful in providing new inspiration.

Additionally, the alerts I get that relate to my brand have shown me that once I post something on my blog Google is crawling it within 24 hours, sometimes sooner! This is just more evidence that changing your content is key to better rankings in the search engines and vital to your success!

Have you been using alerts to monitor what’s going on in your bloggy world? If so, what are you using and how’s it working for you?

Maintaining Your Own Website

Theresa — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:03:37 +0000

Using Adobe Contribute, Web Site Builders or Blogs to Update and Maintain Your Website

Over the years, I’ve had numerous clients ask me about the possibility of updating their own websites. I’ve typically steered them away from this for several reasons, the first being that most people don’t have the training necessary to be able to maintain their own website. If they did, they probably wouldn’t need me in the first place, which many people seem to forget. Maintaining websites is not as simple as it may look and involves the knowledge of HTML code, CSS, SEO and graphics editing software, to name just a few.

The second reason is that, as a designer, I was very reluctant to turn an unknowledgeable client loose on my designs. Design integrity is very important to me. While a web site represents the owner and their business, that web site also represents me, and I’m not so quick to just hand it over when my reputation may be at stake.

Lastly, and let’s just be honest here, this is my livelihood, my bread and butter, how I pay my bills! Maintaining web sites is a large part of my business so naturally, giving it up isn’t something I’m all that thrilled about.

What I’ve discovered however, is that recent software developments have made it much simpler for clients to maintain their site, without the site losing it’s design integrity, through pre-defined “editable regions”. One problem solved. Additionally, this software is designed for the end-user, so the client doesn’t have to be so knowledgeable about HTML and CSS in order to perform the updates, and anyone with moderate computer skills can master these programs. Another problem solved.

There are three main methods of maintaining your own web site, that I’m familiar with. The first, and probably the easiest, is Adobe Contribute. Contribute is purchased by the client and installed on their own personal computer. It works with Dreamweaver, a popular software used by designers to build web sites The designer creates editable regions within the pages, and these regions can then be accessed with Contribute and edited as needed. The software retails for approximately $200 and it is helpful if the client receives some training from either their web site designer or another trained individual, so they don’t spend countless hours trying to figure it out. If you’ve never worked on any web sites before, figuring out Contribute all on your own might prove a little challenging, but in the long run, you will probably save money over paying your designer for updates.

The second method is using a blog to build a web site There are many different blog platforms available to choose from, one of the most common being WordPress. WordPress has hundreds of different free themes that can be used, so most people will find one to their liking. The admin section of most blogs is fairly easy to navigate and with a little time, users will figure out how to get all their bells and whistles working properly. While you could use a blog for static, informational sites, their layouts are typically much more suited to articles and galleries, as the heading show posting titles and dates. Frequently updated blogs, once found by web spiders, are heavily crawled, which helps improve your rankings and get your site found.

Free blog themes have their limitations however, primarily with the design. Most are only moderately customizable, allowing for pre-selected color choices, header images, etc. If you have knowledge of CSS however, you can customize them more than the typical user. There are themes available for purchase that are completely customizable

The third method that I’m familiar with is to use one of the many web-based site builder applications that are out there such as Homestead or GoDaddy’s Web site Tonight. While I find them limiting, simply because I’m used to doing whatever I want with the web sites that I build, many people find them to be sufficient for their needs. Additionally most services charge a monthly subscription fee so, in essence, you’re still paying to update your web site, and you’re having to take the precious time to do it yourself as well.

The bottom line is this: while there are ways of maintaining your own web site, the only thing that is completely without any additional cost is learning the ins and outs of web site development yourself, which has taken me a decade, and I’m still learning! Technology changes rapidly and I find I’m constantly trying to keep up. Wouldn’t your time be better spent doing what you do best…….earning money with your web site instead of working on it?

The Importance of Email Marketing & Newsletters

Theresa — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:30:46 +0000

It seems that the days of handwriting letters and actually putting them in the mailbox are over. I can’t even remember the last time I received….or wrote, for that matter……a handwritten letter. Some say that’s a bad thing. Others say you can’t stop progress.

Whatever your opinion is on that subject, the fact remains that email has become a staple in everyday living of the majority of Americans. Have you noticed that you don’t receive all that much junk mail in your mailbox anymore? Instead it shows up in our email Junk Mail folder, where we can just delete it and move on. Good for the environment, in any case.

The beauty of email for business, besides the obvious ease and convenience, is that we have the potential to reach thousands of people that we might not have ever had contact with, at a fraction of the cost. We can keep in touch with our existing clients and recruit new clients with considerably less effort.

Before we go much further, let’s talk a little about SPAM. This, of course, is the digital version of junk mail. We all hate it, and we all get it. Because of the increase and annoyance of spam over the years, the federal government has implemented laws to ensure that people aren’t inundated any longer with over flowing inboxes of spam. Called The United States CAN-SPAM Act, the act was put into place in January 2004 to establish requirements for those sending out commercial emails, enforce penalties for spammers, and give consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them. There are 4 basic guidelines, but the bottom line is that you cannot provide any false or deceptive header information or subject lines, an opt-out method must be provided, and your email must be identified as an advertisement. For more information about the CAN-SPAM Act, see http://www.spamlaws.com.

While the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t specifically say that you cannot send unsolicited emails (at least not anywhere that I could find), most companies that provide the interfaces and database management for email marketing have set up their own policies where they do not allow you to send unsolicited emails. This means that the contacts you upload into their database must have already opted in to receive email communications from you. You probably already have a larger network than you realize. Gather up the email addresses of every single person you know; friends, family, clients, business associates, etc. From here on out, every single person you come in contact with is a potential recipient of your words of wisdom. You can also add to your network through Social Media outlets (Facebook, Twitter), placing a newsletter sign up on your website, etc. The list will start to grow.

So, what will you write about? This will usually stump some people for a bit. You might think that nothing you have to say could possibly interest anyone else, but I’m here to tell you, that you do! We are all more knowledgeable about something than someone else, so write about what you know and what you’re good at. If you are a whiz at fixing cars, write about the newest and greatest gizmo that you’ve found. If you are a horse training phenomenon, write about how to teach your horse to drive, or do tricks. One thing that helps me is to keep a notebook. I have pages in my notebook with lists of all the things I can write about. When an idea comes to me, it goes in the notebook. From there, I will start another page to elaborate on that idea and get an outline going. The rest just comes.

Be clear, concise and most importantly, give your reader relevant information that will help them out. Industry tricks & tips, the latest scoop, or even just a great story will keep them interested. Don’t just hit them head on with sales pitches. A good idea is to offer a small promotion in your newsletter that ties in with your key article.

Another tip – when you finally start to write content, write it in a word processing program first, rather than directly in your newsletter. This gives you the opportunity to format completely and then save it as an article for future use. There are many places you can publish your articles online, which will in turn help increase traffic to your website (more about this in a future issue……See, something else to write about!).

There are numerous services that you can use to host your email marketing campaigns. Mail Chimp, Aweber, Constant Contact and iContact are four very popular services. They offer complete database management and templates to help format your newsletter, along with autoresponders, customizable sign-up forms, and more. These companies also provide all the necessary disclaimers that should accompany your emails, along with handling the unsubscribes and bounces that will naturally occur. If you have a website, it’s a good idea to build your newsletter in the same format as your website, for consistency. This is part of your branding and recognition factor. Your website designer or virtual assistant can help you format a newsletter that will be consistent with your site.

With all that technology has to offer us these days, and with the state of the current economy, now is a great time to take advantage of email newsletter marketing. It’s a great way to stay in touch with your current clients and to expand your client potential for a minimal effort and cost.

The Coveted WordPress Widgets and Plugins I Can’t Do Without

Theresa — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:57:36 +0000

I’ve been blogging for almost a year now. While my blog may not be as successful as some, I see it as a success simply because I’m still here doing it and folks are reading it!

Along the way, I’ve tuned up, re-themed, reformatted and redesigned my blog more than a couple of times, trying to find what will work for me the best in the form of widgets, plugins and themes. I feel like I have it just about where I want it….until of course I run across newer and better widgets and stuff!

In the meantime, I thought it might be worthwhile to share what is working for me, in the hopes that maybe a few of you can also benefit from my trials, and of course, errors.

Theme -

The theme I first started off with, as we all probably do, is the very plain-jane default WordPress theme (or at least it was the default theme prior to the release of 3.0 and the new Twenty-ten default theme. I quickly realized that this was just far too limiting for my over-active brain, so I quickly switched to Panorama.

Panorama allowed me some flexibility in that I could upload a custom header image, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with the background. Their choice of colors wasn’t satisfactory and at the time, wading through all that code was still a little above my capabilities. Before long, I figured out how to get through the code enough that I could change the colors in the navigation and such, but I still couldn’t master the background issue. I started searching around and discovered another theme, Expressivo.

Finally, not only could I change the background color, but I could use an image as well, so I threw up my bulletin board background image, in order to keep some consistency with my graphic design website. Expressivo also provides some other easy customization features such as the font, without going into the code. By this time however, I’d played around with the code enough to make many more changes to the theme to try to make it more resemble my main website, however I still wasn’t totally satisfied. With the release of the new 2010 theme, in particular the Weaver child theme, however, I think I’m set for awhile. This theme is highly customizable without going into the code, which just simplifies things all the way around. Eventually, I’ll have figured out how to create my own theme, so that it will match my website exactly, but I digress.

Widgets -

These are designed to be dragged into the sidebar and provide information and gadgets to your visitors.

Subscribe Widget – Use your own title; displays icons and allows you to set icon size, and customize your RSS, Comments RSS, Facebook, Twitter and Feedburner settings.

Text Widget – I use six of these in my sidebars, for newsletter sign up, RSS by email sign up, linking to my main website, displaying my Amazon.com affiliate widget, my Facebook Fan Page badge, and signing up for my Client Worksheet guide. You can use them for just about anything and a little HTML goes a long way here!

Recent Posts - Kind of self explanatory, this displays my 5 most recent posts on my blog, for at-a-glance reference for my visitors.

Categories - This is a list of all the categories I have placed my posts in, so that if a visitor is interested in a specific topic, they can find everything I have written on that particular topic.

On the home page of my blog, I also display the Archives widget, Facebook Networked Blogs widget, and another text widget for a Google Adsense ad. This secondary sidebar however, is only on the home page so these features don’t appear on subsequent pages and posts (another feature of Expressivo that I liked).

Other widgets that are typically available by default are Pages, Links (blogroll), Calendar (displays a calendar showing dates of your posts), and Tag Cloud (shows the most used tags from your posts, in different font sizes, to indicate which tags see more action). I’ve chosen not to use these for now.

Plugins -

Most, if not all of these are available at http://wordpress.org/extend.

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – Help your visitor promote your site! The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services. Sign up for an AddThis.com account to see how your visitors are sharing your content–which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more. It’s all free–even the pretty charts and graphs. I place mine at the bottom of every post.

Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.

All in One SEO Pack - SEO for your WordPress blog. You can put your post title, description and keywords in at the bottom of every post for optimum SEO. (Also, be sure and read my SEO tips!)

Bad Behavior – Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. This has really cut down on the amount of spam that makes it into my comments.

Comment Reply Notification - When a reply is made to a comment the user has left on the blog, an e-mail shall be sent to the user to notify him of the reply. This will allow the users to follow up the comment and expand the conversation if desired.

Contact Form 7 – Simple but flexible contact form plugin.

Do Follow – Removes the evil nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.

NextGEN Gallery – A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0.

Post-to-Facebook – Provides the ability to quickly post a blog item to your facebook mini feed.

RSS Remind – Remind your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed. I place this at the bottom of every post, just for extra visibility.

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

Subscribe widget – Adds a subscribe widget to the sidebar (mentioned above in the Widgets section).

TweetMeme Retweet Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

WordPress Gravatars - Makes use of Gravatars and MyBlogLog Avatars, places Gravatars, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or MyBlogLog Avatars in the comments section. Uses the comment authors email to display their Gravatar. It also gives the user an Author Profile picture, based on his or hers Gravatar.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.

There you have it! What are your favorite widgets and plugins? Any great ones that you’re sure I can’t live without? Let me know, because I love having the latest and greatest!

Great Online Resources for Any Business

Theresa — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:42:59 +0000

Over the years I’ve collected a list of resources that I use regularly for many things; everything from stock images and design inspiration, to SEO and small business entrepreneurial ideas. These are available on my web and graphic design website, however I’ve also listed them here for you to have easy access. Be sure to bookmark this page to keep them just a click away!

HubSpot Website Grader – Good information that every website owner should know about your site’s performance. Gives you ideas and tips for how to improve that performance.
StartupNation – By Entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs, a great source for small business advice.
Google Webmaster Tools – From keyword help to website analytics to click-through advertising, Google provides too many services to list here that can help you market and improve your website presence. I use these tools extensively, almost on a daily basis.
Google Alerts – email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. You can ask Google to keep an eye out for your name, business, or whatever keywords you choose, and Google will send you an email showing you where these search terms came up.
Press Release Websites – Issuing a press release is a must for new and existing businesses. It’s a great way to let the public know about the new service that you can offer them! This website has a whole list of sites where you can publish your press release for free on the internet. www.rembrandtwrites.com/FreePressReleasePostingSites.htm
Smashing Magazine – the place to be for design freelancers.
Docstoc – Need a form of some kind? This is a great place to find and share professional documents of ALL kinds.
Zamzar.com – free file conversion tool to convert PDF files into Word docs, JPG’s, and a whole lot more!
PhotoFiltre – free image editing software
PhotoScape – another free image editor that offers some different features
OnlyWire.com – automated content & bookmark distribution.
SubmitYourArticle – Article Distribution Service
Ping List – http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ping-list. Automatically notify the world about your blog updates.
MailChimp.com – Free Email Marketing Service
Google Translator – Translate your website into any language you want!
SBA Assessment Tool – This free tool helps you assess your readiness to start a small business.
Google Docs – Word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, etc., at your fingertips and ready to share with the world. Makes compatability issues obsolete, since you can allow others to access the files. Calendars can also be embedded on your website.
OpenOffice.org – Great open source office suite that you can download and install to your computer.
Free Range Stock – A great site for both FREE and royalty-free stock images to use for all your designs.
123RF.com – Another great stock image site, I use this one almost exclusively because their inventory is so large.
XML-Sitemaps – A very easy way to generate XML sitemaps to submit to Google. Once submitted, Google is instructed to crawl your site. You can set them up to crawl for as often as you update your website, which is why it’s a good idea to update your website frequently!

Please check my Resource page frequently, as I try to post new updates to this page as soon as I find them.

If you have any great resources that the rest of us just CAN’T live without, please let us all know! I know I would love to hear about them.