For most businesses, the decision to make a business website is a large and important step. Whether for direct response or pure branding and identity, there’s a lot that can be said with a company website. Sales can be made, an online identity and communications platform can be launched, and a business that was once only an offline venture can take the huge, and in many cases, hugely profitable, step into online business.

However, all too often a great business website can turn into a letdown. Pages of copy built to sell end up producing very little in the way of conversions. Images that were crisp and clean look to be full of compression artifacts and grime. And most often, and most annoyingly, a design that seems amazing offline just fails to translate, resulting in poor site navigation and frustrated users.

There’s a way around this, however. By using WordPress to make a business website, you gain access to a huge range of WordPress designs that are ready to use. This can cut out the otherwise frustrating process of testing a design for your business, working with a professional, or even hiring a team of web designers and developers to produce your website for you.

There are hundreds of WordPress business templates available, many of which are built to cater to a specific type of business. Some are clean and relatively regal in their appearance, built for legal firms and other high-value prestige businesses. Others are action-driven, built to appeal to direct or response-based marketers and businesses in need of instant results from their online marketing.

The type of design isn’t something that can be summed up an a single-sentence adage; instead, it’s a decision that your business will have to make on its own. Depending on your website’s purpose, it’s best to either present a brand with your chosen WordPress business templates, or to inspire action. Think about how an otherwise tiny difference in the two designs could produce a big difference in your business’s sales.

Alongside the WordPress designs and templates that you choose, it’s also important to consider how it may be helped or hindered by your user’s browser type. Corporate websites that deal with a computer-savvy crowd may be able to choose from among the available WordPress business templates that that incorporate HTML5 and other ‘new’ features. In contrast, direct marketers that appeal to all users may with to leave out advanced features in place of compatibility.

While choosing from available WordPress designs and templates can be time-consuming and relatively stressful when having to make a business website, it can result in large improvement for your business when done correctly. Take the time to stress-test your template before making a decision, as a poor choice could hurt your business’s brand or results. For optimum results, it’s worth thinking long and hard before committing to a single design or template.

Andrea is a Wordpress Virtual Assistant based out of the Denver area of Colorado, yet serves the global entrepreneur.

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Consider your own navigating habits. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a handful of tabs (or more!) open in your browser at any given time. I use a Firefox add-on that shifts my tabs vertically to the left-side of my browser window. So, many times, all I see is the little favicon.

When I go to jump to a new tab, if a site is missing a custom favicon, I have no idea what the site is without clicking or mousing over the tab. It may not seem like much of an inconvenience, but it’s a major fail, in my opinion. Not to mention if you don’t have a favicon for your site, you’re missing out on a quick and easy way to add to your brand.

Here’s a simplified look at the process of creating a favicon:

1. Use an existing logo file or create a graphic from scratch using a generator
2. Reduce the file down to 16×16 pixels
3. Export as a .ICO file (favicon.ico) with your software
4. Upload to the root directory of your website

Ready to create your own? Here are some more in-depth tutorials to give you some guidance:

• Favicon Basics, Mark8t
• Tutorial: How To Create Your Own FavIcon, Essential Keystrokes
• Video: How to Create an Install Favicons, Butterscotch.com

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What is anchor text?

It’s a very powerful website optimization strategy that utilizes keyword links instead of  url links to point to a page or location and are used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to.

Anchor text enhances the relevance of the target page (<– that’s your page) and the inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages in search engines. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps.

The use of this particular plugin encourages external backlinks to your website. Links coming from other URLs should use effective anchor text in order to associate keyword phrases with your  specific internal pages. Using this plugin allows you to control those external links by providing the link AND the anchor text.

Are you starting to see the value now?

The real key in making this work to your benefit is by giving your blog articles appropriate Titles using keywords. That’s another article altogether….

Here’s an extra tip for those that submit to article directories: use anchor text in your Author’s Resource Box.

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It’s not easy for someone with little experience with these applications to install them and start using them fully. Heck, I don’t even use them to 100% of their capability and I have years of experience!

So what do non-designers do? What can you use to modify photos or do basic image optimization when the funtionality in the software that came with your digital camera or scanner is not enough?

Two of my favorite free image editors are Paint.NET and GIMP. I have used both on my second (and third) computers at home or at other locations when I’ve had to work in a pinch. Here are some details.

Paint.NET
Paint.NET is free and has a lot of features, including:

• Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface
• Layers
• Effects such as blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing
• Adjustable brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels
• Simple tools for drawing shapes
• Unlimited history (I love this feature because it means you can undo and undo….and undo.)

I primarily use a Mac for my work and Paint.NET is only avaialble on Windows. But I have installed and used it on a PC, and it’s really easy to use…almost deceivingly easy with the amount of functionality it provides. There is virtually no learning curve here, so I vote this as a must-try for any non-designers interested in doing image editing work.

GIMP
GIMP is probably one of the most used open source image applications. It has pretty extensive functionality and mimics Photoshop in some ways. Some of the features GIMP has includes:

• Painting tools including brush, pencil, airbrush, clone, etc.
• Gradient editor and blend tool
• Unlimited number of images open at one time
• Layers and channels
• Editable text layers
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• Supports all of the major file formats

There are versions available for Windows and Mac. While it does have a lot of functionality, there’s a bit of a learning curve. If you have time to play around, do some tutorials and practice, you can do almost anything that can be done with Photoshop. One major downfall to note, however, is that GIMP doesn’t support CMYK, which makes it a no-go for any print design work. But this is still a very good, advanced (and free!) image editor.

So, have you used either of these? Are you up for giving them a try?

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I read TONS of books and Rob will attest that I buy TONS of books too. He actually had the audacity the other day, to say that I was going to create a sinkhole in our basement with my vast collection. Humph… he just doesn’t get it.

One of my favourite and often referred to books is  by Maria Veloso. I haven’t read another book that has given me so much inspiration or guidance in creating great sales copy for the online world.

One of the best tips she offers is to find a sales page online that you think is really great and effective, and literally sit down with pen and paper and copy it word for word, five or six times. Yep, it’ll take you forever – some of those pages are LONG but you’ll soon start to feel the rhythm of the copy and understand the methods they use and it can become second nature.

This book is chock full of awesome ideas with plenty of examples to get you in tune to write your own dynamic copy that sells!

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