WordPress Twenty Eleven theme

As a single-person company and solopreneur, I can empathize with other small businesses, start-ups,  and individually owned-and-operated companies. I understand that cashflow is often an issue and you might not be able to afford all those things for your business that you’d like.

This shouldn’t prevent you from having an attractive, basic website that can serve as a starting point and a foundation on which you can later build as your needs grow and your budget allows.

The newest version of WordPress comes with a very attractive, standard theme (i.e., a pre-made web template) named Twenty Eleven that can be easily modified to meet your needs. Click here for a live demo of the Twenty Eleven theme. If you’d prefer to work with one of the many free and premium themes and templates that are available on the web, I’ll gladly help you with their installation and implementation as well.

Budget website development packages

For the budget-minded company or individual, we currently offer two levels on our discount web design services. See below to learn which best suits your business needs.

Level One Budget Web Design ($497) includes:

• Domain registration (if required)
• Database creation/set-up
• WordPress upload & installation
• One unique header graphic
• One unique background graphic
• Inclusion of existing company logo (logo design is a separate fee)
• Up to three information pages
• One contact page with Web form and Google map
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• WordPress Content Management System training
• One month of post-launch technical support

Level Two Budget Web Design ($897) includes:

• Domain registration (if required)
• Database creation/set-up
• WordPress upload & installation
• Three unique header graphics
• One unique background graphic
• Inclusion of existing company logo (logo design is a separate fee)
• Up to nine information pages
• One contact page with Web form and Google map
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• WordPress Content Management System training
• Two months of post-launch technical support

Services and options can be added, modified or removed to create your own budget website package. Please contact me to discuss your requirements.

Other WordPress themes available

The outward appearance of the Twenty Ten theme can be modified to suit your needs while still maintaining its underlying framework. If you require a more traditional website, it can also easily be made to appear less “blog-like”.

In addition to the Twenty Eleven theme, Carlson Web Design & Consulting can upload any of the free or premium WordPress themes that are available on the Web. I’d be happy to recommend some good WordPress theme resources if you’d like, and I plan to soon have a number of themes of my own available on this website. Stay tuned!

Wait — can’t I just do this myself?

Of course you could download your own WordPress theme, upload the files, set up the database, configure all the WordPress options, and select the correct plug-in applications.

You could perform these tasks yourself, but they can be quite difficult and time-consuming if you’re inexperienced or not particularly technically savvy.

Get your site set up right the first time — call a pro!

There are many intricacies involved in configuring your website, and if done incorrectly you can have difficulties further down the road. I can guarantee that your site will be set up correctly the first time so you’ll have a solid a foundation on which to expand as your business grows.

And remember: if you hire me you’ll also receive post-launch technical support, WordPress training, and search engine optimization (SEO).

If you think you’d like Carlson Web Design to set up your small business/solopreneur website, contact me for more information.

Why you need a blog!

As I mentioned, a blog fosters increased communication between you and your customers, which is always a good thing. Also, if your company’s blog gains a reputation as being a useful resource, it’s an excellent method of getting people to frequently visit your site and link to it! And inbound links to your website are a BIG factor in achieving a strong search engine position.

Contributing regularly to your blog by posting articles about new developments within your company and your industry also helps you to establish a reputation as an expert in your field.

Your company blog builds trust!

Studies have shown that the average person may visit a website numerous times before purchasing that company’s products and/or services. Those repeat visits to your site are one of the most important factors in increasing your conversion rate — i.e., your visits-to-purchases ratio (whether that purchase is made directly online or via a telephone call to your office).

Having a blog that features useful and current information about your products, services, and industry causes those prospective customers to want to return to your site and gives them an opportunity to get to know and trust your company. As you know, building trust is essential to the sales process, and, of course, one of the primary reasons for having a website!

What is WordPress and who uses it?

WordPress is a free, open-source software platform with a massive, worldwide community of devoted and talented developers.

Companies using WordPress for their blogging platform include such behemoths as Sony, Ford, Intel, and Ebay. Other large organizations and popular brands that are WordPress users: The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, Wired Magazine, The New York Times Blog, CNN, Ben & Jerry’s, Samsung, Playstation, and many more.

Two flavors of WordPress

I use the self-hosted version of WordPress for all my clients’ websites, meaning that I download all the required files from WordPress.org, then upload these files to the client’s web server, set up the database, install the software, and configure and customize it according to my client’s specifications and requirements.

WordPress development is a separate discipline in and of itself, and it takes a good amount of experience and knowledge of PHP, MySQL databases, and front-end coding technologies such as XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Custom WordPress development is what I do for my clients.

WordPress also offers a free service called WordPress.com that allows you to set up a WordPress blog in seconds, but has some limitations and is far less flexible than the self-hosted version of WordPress. One of the primary drawbacks to the WordPress.com service is that you can’t use your own domain name (or web address). Your blog’s web address would look something like this: http://xyzcorp.wordpress.com/.

For search engine purposes, you really want your blog to use your domain name, as such: http://www.xyzcorp.com/blog. Alternately, rather than having a blog section of your website, the site itself might be a blog, like http://www.xyzblog.com.

Having your site’s blog hosted elsewhere and carrying a different web address just draws traffic away from your main website and divides your efforts. Your blog or the blog portion of your corporate website should use your own domain name, as illustrated above.

Limitations of using a free, “non-self-hosted” blogging service

Other disadvantages to using WordPress.com or other “non-self-hosted” solutions, such as Google’s Blogger (which also has the handicap of not allowing you to use your own domain name), are:

• You cannot run a custom theme — Meaning that if I create design for your site, your blog will look nothing like your company’s website because custom designs can’t be transferred — and this does not help to establish your company’s brand! And that’s poor marketing.
• You can’t work directly with the blog’s PHP code — PHP is the programming language on which WordPress is built, and if I can’t work with it, the amount of customization we can make to your blog’s functionality is essentially nil.
• You can’t upload plug-ins! — Ouch, that one really hurts a lot, because there are tons of great plug-in apps for WordPress. Unfortunately, they can’t be used with the free version. Photo galleries, video and audio players, calendar systems — none of these are available to you. That alone is a good reason to go with the self-hosted version and have it set up by a professional like myself.

The customized, self-hosted version of WordPress is the right solution

I believe that setting up a blog using one of the free services available, such as WordPress.com or Blogger, is a reasonable choice for an individual amateur/hobbyist blogger or a student.

However, if your requirements are greater, you need more options and flexibility, and your budget allows (it doesn’t have to be very expensive, depending on what you want) a custom blog design offers the following advantages:

• Your company blog will be optimized for the search engines and part of your primary website address/domain.
• The blog’s performance and functionality will be customized to your individual needs.
• Your corporate site’s branding and layout will be seamlessly integrated with your blog.
• A tremendous choice of ready-made plug-in applications are available, allowing you to further extend your site’s functionality.

Static websites are out! Blogging is the way of the future

Yes, at the minimum you need an attractive and well-organized website that presents some basic information about your business. This would include your introductory Home Page, and perhaps an About Us page, a Contact page, and another page or two describing your Products and/or Services. A static website that includes your basic company info is what’s commonly known as a brochure site, and every business should at least have that (although you might be surprised to learn how many companies still don’t even have a basic brochure site).

The problem with a static site that’s rarely (if ever) updated, is that it doesn’t give people a reason to return to it and to get to know your company. Furthermore, most business owners want their site to perform well in the search engines, but that’s extremely difficult unless you’re adding fresh, keyword-rich content to your website on a regular basis.

For example, say you have a law practice specializing in employee rights and harassment suits. If you blog regularly about the subject, perhaps writing articles discussing changes to employee rights and harassment laws, case studies, etc., you have an opportunity to work a lot of relevant content into your website — content that contains valuable keywords and keyphrases.

Search engine crawlers absolutely love to find and use this content for the purpose of ranking your site, and Google (which commands about 75-80% of the search engine business) just eats this up. Thus, blogging is extremely helpful — in fact, it’s almost a requirement these days — in achieving a solid search engine position and driving potential clients to your website.

Go to a professional blog designer — Call Carlson!

I hope I’ve given you enough reasons to consider blogging and to consider having your blog designed professionally. Regardless of whether you plan to have a site that’s entirely a blog, or if you want to add a blog section within your existing corporate site, having it professionally designed and customized will benefit your business.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to learn more.

However, business owners often don’t have the time or inclination to update their website and would prefer to outsource the task. When that’s the case, we’re more than happy to take over these duties. In addition to general content updates, our website maintenance plans include:

• Weekly database back-ups
• Calendar System integration & updates
• File attachments (Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel)
• Adding new pages from existing design template
• Editing web page content
• Automatic generation of new site navigation
• Photo Gallery installation, set-up and updates
• Add/change/optimize images
• Preview work before uploading it to the web
• Link to other sites

It’s important to keep your website’s content fresh and up-to-date, both to keep your customers coming back and to help your search engine positioning. If you don’t have the time, know-how or desire to do these maintenance chores, Call Carlson!

Our web maintenance plans vary and we offer discounts based on monthly, quarterly, bi-annual and annual contracts. Call or email us for further information.

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves examining every element of your site to make sure it will be ranked highly by the main search engines. If you target the right keywords, you will see a big difference in the amount and quality of traffic you receive.

Beware of the SEO snakeoil salesmen!

The SEO business is notoriously rife with companies and individuals who make outrageous (and untrue) claims, guaranteeing their clients’ websites will rank in Google’s and Yahoo’s top three spots within a week. Here’s some advice: if anyone tells you something like that, end the conversation immediately because you’re wasting your time.

The truth about getting a good SE ranking

The truth is, getting a favorable position in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing is usually an ongoing process. This process  involves monitoring your site’s statistics, learning how people are finding your site (or determining why they’re not finding your site) and making continual adjustments to its content, structure, meta tags and keywords.

Don’t give up — a good or even great SE ranking is within reach

Using my tried-and-tested methods, you’ll usually see an improvement in your search engine ranking within a couple of weeks. To reach a goal of say, a first-page ranking for a specific key phrase, may take a bit longer but can usually be achieved within a few weeks to several months.

Some of the factors that affect search results include:

• Keyword-focused anchor text from external links — External links, also called inbound links, are other sites that are linking to your site. The wording used within that link is important. If it contains key words or phrases, it’s that much more powerful. For example, if the link reads “one of the best Italian restaurants in Northern New Jersey“, that’s a lot more potent then something like this: “For the best Italian restaurant in Northern New Jersey, click here.” See the difference? One link contains valuable key words and the other doesn’t. And that makes a BIG difference to the search engines.
• External link popularity — The popularity or relative authority of site that is providing an inbound link to yours of great importance. For example, if you’re an architectural firm, having a link to your site from The American Institute of Architects (AIA) website is going to count for a lot more in the eyes of the search engines than if, say, carlsonwebdesign.com links to you — not that that’s a bad thing, but you see what I mean. The AIA obviously has a lot more “link juice” within its field than my website does.
• Keywords and Key Phrases within the Title Tag — The title tag is a part of those XHTML documents of which the pages of your website are comprised, and it resides near the top of those documents in between the <head></head> tags. Yes, I know this is techie-talk, but it’s really not terribly complicated stuff. This is actually a relatively easy fix and does a great deal of good for your search engine positioning, yet most sites miss this. The title tag does not appear directly on the pages of your website, but generates those words that you see within the browser bar at the very top of your screen. Often it says something very obvious and completely useless to the search engines, like “XYZ Company — Home Page”. This title tag should contain keywords, NOT your company name. If you have to have your name in there it should be last, as so: “Bergen County plumbing companies, north Jersey plumbers, plumbers in NJ — XYZ Plumbing Corp” (without the quotation marks, of course). The title tag is the first thing the search engine bots read when crawling your site, and you need good keywords and keyphrases in there. For futher information about optimizing the title tag for better search engine results, click this link.
• Competition for a specific keyword/phrase — Keyword competition has a major bearing on your site’s chances of getting a top SE position. I’ll explain this concept further by way of example: I had a client who sold a very specific product for which there was little competition; less than a dozen other companies manufactured this product. Thus, it wasn’t a great challenge to see to it that his site ranked at the top of all the search engines. Shortly thereafter, I obtained another client, a law firm, that wanted to get at the top of the first page of the search engines for the key phrase NJ law firm. Big difference, as you can see. There are quite a few law firms in New Jersey, and as I’m sure you can imagine, NJ law firm is quite a competitive key phrase.
  In the case of my law firm client, I advised that we focus on a specialty and specific geographic area. After asking a few questions I learned that most of his clients were local, in Bergen County and the surrounding north Jersey and southern NY state region, and his practice specialty was in divorce law. Still a competitive niche, but a lot more feasible than “NJ law firms”. The lesson? If you’re in a competitive market, drill down to your niche market and work on making headway there. Once your site’s been around for a while and you have a good number of websites linking to you, then you can start expanding to a wider audience. A word of advice: getting a lot of visitors to your site is not as important as getting targeted visitors — i.e., people who are in your area and looking for your specific services.

Do you need professional help (with your SEO, I mean)?

Each of these four search engine factors that I mentioned above are vitally important, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg and I don’t want to turn this section of my website into a tutorial. As Sean Connery, one of my all-time favorite actors (along with Chuck Norris, of course), said in one of my all-time favorite films, The Untouchables: “Thus endeth the lesson.”

Suffice it to say that there’s a lot to this constantly-changing field of search engine optimization and Web marketing, and there are many large companies that charge very big dollars to provide this service — as well they should, if they’re doing a good job. Because it’s all about Return On Investment, right? If you’re paying your SEO specialist $2000 a month and they’re bringing in $5000 a month of website-generated business to you, then that’s a good ROI, correct?

However, I can understand a company not wanting to commit such large financial resources to something as difficult to guarantee as SEO. That’s why I prefer to start with a low monthly fee (quarterly commitments are discounted), giving you the opportunity to see if I’m worth my salt, as the old-timers used to say. If you feel that I’ve done well for you after three months then at that point we can discuss a plan that is suitable to your needs. That’s as fair a system as I’ve been able to come up with, to both my clients and myself. If you’re interested in talking with me or receiving pricing, contact me at by phone or email at your earliest convenience.

Wait a sec — how about I provide a few examples?

I’ve been successful at getting my SEO clients on the first page of the major search engines, and for some very difficult and competitive keywords and keyphrases. Here are some examples:

• The Dog House Saloon & Grill in Washington Township, NJ currently ranks very highly on Google and Yahoo, which comprises 93% of the search engine traffic (about 82% for Google and 11% for Yahoo) for the key phrases: bergen county happy hours, bergen county bars, live music bergen county nj, bergen county bbq, best bbq ribs in northern nj, and many other sought-after keywords and phrases. Considering how many bars with websites there are in the highly-populated Bergen County region of northeastern NJ, that’s not bad, if I do say so.
• Horseless Carriage Carriers is a nationally known company based out of Paterson, NJ. I did extensive search engine optimization when I redesigned their site, and they currently rank at or near the top of the first page for all the major search engines for such popular key phrases as classic auto transport, enclosed auto transport, classic car storage company, and many other important search terms within their aggressively competitive industry.
• Washington Township Swim and Recreation Club is a project that I did free of charge a couple of years ago for the town swim club to which my family belongs. Currently, it ranks within the top three positions on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for the key phrase nj swim clubs — and for numerous variations of that phrase. To give you an idea of how competitive a key phrase is nj swim clubs, it returns between 11 million and 13 million results on each of the three major search engines. The site I built for them comes up between #1 and #3. Again, not to toot my own horn, but…not bad!

If you want your website to be seen and found by your customers, call a pro — Call Carlson!

The majority of the projects we take on are completed individually by myself, owner and operator John Carlson, although I am fortunate to have a number of talented and trusted graphic designers, illustrators, copy writers and programmers with whom I sometimes collaborate.

Typically, however, I’m responsible for all of the graphic design, layout & information flow, coding, programming, CMS integration & customization and search engine optimization.

Where to get started: How I work

If a prospective client is considering engaging my services after the initial contact, I then employ a three step process:

1. I schedule a consultation meeting with the client to discuss their goals, objectives, design preferences, etc. The purpose of this is to get a clear idea of the size and type of project that we’re looking at and the general scope of work. This initial consultation is typically about an hour long, and may be conducted face-to-face or over the phone. Ideally, all stakeholders involved in the project will be present in order to minimize back-and-forth and facilitate better communication between all involved parties.
2. If the client and I think that we may want to work with each other, I’ll then write up a very detailed proposal outlining all the particulars and specifics of the project  discussed during the initial consultation/meeting. This serves to clarify what we’ve talked about and narrow down and refine the scope of work. In this proposal I’ll also include my fee, exactly what I’ll be doing for the client and the time frame for delivering the finished product.
3. If my proposal (scope of work as outlined, deadline for completion, fee) meets the client’s approval and they wish to hire me, then he/she/they must sign the agreement and return it to me before Carlson Web Design & Consulting begins working on the project. Generally, a deposit of 30% to 50% of the total fee is required, along with the signed agreement at the outset of the project. At this point the services of Carlson Web Design & Consulting have been engaged and the project will begin.

Listen, learn, then design

Before beginning a project I need to learn all I can about your company, your market, your competitors, and your design likes & dislikes. In other words, I do much more listening than talking at the outset of a project.

It’s only when I have clear understanding of your requirements and preferences that can I start I’ll begin the design and development process:

1. Typically, one to three initial design & layout compositions are presented. These comps are simply static images that are created in Photoshop and no actual coding or site functionality is added at this point.
2. Based on the client’s feedback, another one or two rounds of revisions are made and then the final design is created. The number of designs presented and rounds of revisions are dependent on the client’s budget, but this is always spelled out clearly in the contract.
3. The static Photoshop design is “sliced” and the code architecture is created using, primarily, XHMTL and CSS, and often JQuery or JavaScript as well.  I sometimes use Adobe Flash animations, although infrequently because it is not a search-friendly technology.
4. A database is set up and WordPress is integrated to serve as the back-end content management system to facilitate easy site updates.
5. The site is tested against all major, modern web browsers to ensure that it renders correctly and consistently.
6. The website is reviewed by the client, and any final adjustments to the design and functionality are made.
7. Search engine optimization is completed to ensure maximum search visibility; your website is then submitted to Google, Yahoo, Bing, and all other major engines and directories.

Thorough, comprehensive, professional Web design

Carlson Web Design & Consulting offers a level of service and attention to detail that you simply won’t get with most other web design companies and freelancers. The sites I create are attractive, perform well, and thoroughly tested on numerous browsers and operating systems.

The expertise I’ve gained through many years of hands-on experience, ongoing education and commitment to excellence is passed on to every project I undertake for my clients. I do this because I care intensely about the quality of my work, and I truly, honestly believe that an outstanding website is absolutely crucial to the success of your business.

Call today to see how I can help your company get the most from the Web!