At a cost of $75 to $100 you can add on a Paypal compatible shopping cart to your Wordpress Content Management System and sell with very minimal start up costs. Also, going with a Paypal Standard payment option means you won’t have to pay hundreds for an SSL Certificate while still accepting Paypal account payments and credit cards through the Paypal website. Sounds good? I think so. If you’re interested in cart with your Wordpress CMS, contact me today.

If you’re looking for a web hosting deal, check out Powweb, the web hosting company I use for all my websites and recommend to all my clients. You Powweb hosting account will have unlimited bandwidth and email accounts, and they’re Wordpress compatible which really works well for my sites since that’s what I work in.

You’ll also find that Powweb is having a sale through July offering $3.88 a month web hosting for the first 12 months. You won’t find a deal like that very often, so don’t miss out.

Anyhow, back to my story. After informing my client that I don’t offer any SEO services for my clients, I got to looking around the net to see what other companies / freelancers are up to. You should be able to do it as well, just search Google for SEO, search engine optimization, Affordable SEO, and so on. You’ll find a billion and one search results, and if you’re really serious you’ll contact a company from the top 10 results. If they can get themselves to the top of a highly competitive racket, with other companies who claim a specialization in SEO chances are they can help your business and it’s search rankings.

Ok, we’ve narrowed that down, what’s next. Oh yeah, be prepared to pay a couple grand a month as well.

But wait, you say, thats a lot of money?

That’s right, which is why I’d personally never go for a SEO company for any of my websites, because they do just fine for free. One of my favorite SEO practices that anyone can do, on their own for free is to populate your site with keyword rich content. The second tactic I use, at least in the past when I actually had time to actively promote my sites was finding “do follow” blogs relevant to my site content. The last strategy that I employ is clean website coding, which is fairly easy since I’m quite comfortable editing a Wordpress CMS. Clean coding moves your content further up the page, making it more important in the eyes of search engines.

Utilizing those FREE SEO tactics probably won’t push you to the first page of any competitive search terms, but will put you on the right track and give your sites free traffic. Try it and see before you shell out thousands of dollars for an SEO company.

Wordpress was primarily used as a blogging platform; it organized posts, allowed for easy uploading of images or video, provided interactivity for site visitors, had a million and one addons to customize your Wordpress blog, and was (and still is) a good source of extra income from paid blog posts & sponsored links (Google Ads, Yahoo Ads, etc.). What pushes Wordpress over the top, at least for me, is that no knowledge of web design languages or coding is necessary to maintain the site. The backend admin panel on a Wordpress blog functions in a manner similar to a word processor. Sounds nice right?

Recently, a trend has been building using Wordpress as a CMS. Now you can use a Wordpress engine to power any site, with all the benefits available to blogs. It does take a little more to get a site started on a Wordpress CMS due to the fact that you’ll want your website to be unique. Bloggers using Wordpress can find many free themes online for their Wordpress blog, but I can almost guarantee that you’ll find a dozen blogs using the same theme. Not very unique at all.

So, to sum things up: A Wordpress CMS provides a powerful, user friendly website that does take a little knowledge to develop, but doesn’t tie you to a web developer to provide updates. Very Nice!

Is old news, at least that’s what one of my facebook friends commented on my excited status on my long overdue upgrade from Photoshop 6.0. Well, I received Photoshop CS4 from E Value yesterday, promptly installed it, and got to work finding interesting brushes to play with! I was like a kid in a candy shop, that much fun!

Well, after finding quite a few free Photoshop brush sets at Brusheezy I whipped up the image above. While it may be “old news” to some I think I’ll enjoy using Photoshop CS4, especially at half the price of original retail. This is very exciting news, at least too me!

I think I should first start by saying that there are some very talented web designers out there, building beautiful Wordpress themes. Most of them provide a basic theme for free! All a blog owner needs to understand is how to download and upload a theme package combined with a working knowledge of their blog admin panel. That’s it, you can find a theme you like, upload it on your server and you’re good to go. Most designers are also available for hire if you want to customize one of their themes.

Sound good right? In theory it is, but you might run into a few snags if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

1. Free themes sometimes contain affiliate link code written into the site by the developer. This can include text links or banners, so check out your theme thoroughly when you go live to make sure no hidden spam is thrown at your site visitors
2. If you opt for a free theme I can almost guarantee you’ll see half a dozen sites that look exactly like yours. Even with the vast number of free Wordpress theme sites on the net, there are even more bloggers who are using up the themes.
3. A link will almost always be required back to the developers site, in my eyes not a huge deal. If you want to have a super unique site and make it a little harder for perspective competition to mimic, a link back the person who designed the theme can be a bit annoying. That’s why I code my own Wordpress themes

That being said, I still think Wordpress is a great engine of almost any site! So, get out there and find a theme that works for your blog. Or, feel free to contact me if you’d like a 100% custom Wordpress theme at a good price.!

Ok, let me break it down for you. At any given time Companies will post job offerings on Craigslist. Usually those jobs are paid gigs whether you’re looking in the part time offerings or the food / bev / hosp section. Two major exceptions are jobs posted in web design or computer gigs. One can regularly find jobs posted in the tech sector portions of Craigslist where “well to do, expensive” web design / marketing companies are seeking someone to work for them free of charge. Sometimes college credit is offered, other times you’re expected to do it just for the prestige or to build your portfolio. Pretty weak!

This month I’ve seen more of these ads than usual, and here’s a video I like to email the companies who are seeking free labor. It’s more of a “what if I tried this in the real world” envisioning of a scenario that often takes place in the web design world.

I could not be happier with Matt’s design for my website. He created a beautiful, functional website and asked for my input and feedback every step of the way. I was delighted to see my vague website design ideas translated into an actual site–and he made it look better than I had even imagined! In addition, my website was up quickly and at a very reasonable price. I highly recommend MT Spaces webdesign.

You can see Letitia’s website, Integrative Tarot if you’d like to check out the live site.

When I recommend web hosting to my clients I usually send them to Powweb. Powweb only costs $4.88 a month, has unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, forums scripts and is Wordpress compatible. That last fact, Wordpress compatible, ranks really high on my list of criteria for a web host since I design custom Wordpress content management systems for my customers in Western Massachusetts, Southern Vermont and the Hartford Connecticut area.

So, if your web host isn’t performing as well as you’d like, limits the features you can use, or is way too expensive check out Powweb today.