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WordPress Web Design Maximizes Lead Generation by Distributing Content

Michael Cordova — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:27:04 +0000

WordPress Web Design

WordPress web design coupled with powerful content distribution is a major sales lead generation tool. WordPress is a very popular web design and content management system (CMS) platform. It is used to design websites with a high usability factor that load fast and are professional and attractive. Complete custom website designs are possible, and sales lead generation is a major benefit.

One major advantage of WordPress as a web design platform is that WordPress is free. When you consider the many free plugins that allow you to add powerful functionality to your site at no cost and the awesome search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities it is a no brainer to use a WordPress website as your primary tool for lead generation and brand elevation.

When designing a new website from the ground up (a custom website designed by a professional) keep these usability web design factors in mind.

WordPress Content Distribution

The “push” nature of WordPress content publishing and content distribution broadcasts your message to tens or hundreds of thousands of content points – if you configure it correctly. If you regularly post blog articles, search engines will index your content more often. Search engines love fresh content.

When configured correctly WordPress will distribute your content to many authority sites. WordPress distribution points can be:
1.Ping Hub sites that distribute and ping many other Internet content sites and distribution points.
2. RSS feed sites that host your feeds for others to subscribe to. They also host links back to your own site if you write your blog posts correctly. This raises your sites keyword focused search engine rankings if done correctly. See our post on writing content for maximum SEO rankings: http://www.21stsoft.com/how-to-write-website-content-for-top-seo-rankings/
3. Search engines – when you add a blog post the websites sitemap.xml file is updated and the top search engines are pinged causing them to pick up your new content.
4. Social media sites – Facebook recently reached over 1/2 billion members. If your content is pushed onto the wall of relevant friends at Facebook, connections at Linkedin, followers at Twitter you can be top of mind when they are in need of services like yours.

Social Media Sites and SEO

To get the maximum benefit from WordPress content distribution your social media connections must be relevant. Why wouldn’t you want to put your message in front of hundreds of thousands of relevant and interested people looking to buy your products or services?

When your blog posts are linked to categories and tags, the SEO value of your message is increased dramatically thus increasing their visibility in Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines.

In addition, WordPress content is simple to maintain, which makes it an excellent choice for web designers for use with clients who are not technologically savvy.

WordPress should be a serious consideration as your next website sales lead generation tool, content management system and content distribution system.

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Web Design Usability How-To Quick Reference Guide

Michael Cordova — Mon, 03 May 2010 22:13:19 +0000

Web design usability improvements can double sales and visitor satisfaction, and website visitor satisfaction means more return visits. A company’s website is many times the first experience with that company so usability and a quality user experience is critically important to your company’s online success.

Typical websites have usability issues which deter potential clients and customers leaving them with confusion and frustration. It can all be fixed. This how-to quick reference guide is intended for anyone about to design a new website, or those that have a website that doesn’t perform to their expectations.

Usability – The Numbers

* Forrester Research studies estimate that approximately 50 percent of potential sales are lost because visitors can’t find information and 40 percent of visitors do not return to a website when their first experience is negative.
* According to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, website re-design based on usability standards can increase online sales by 100%
* Usability projects can return 5-10 times their cost in the first year.
* A comprehensive usability project can improve website results by 83%. Since your competitors will probably incorporate some of the changes you implemented, this can settle out to 68%.

Page Layout And Structure Usability

* Web design quality enhances credibility – just do it
* Error free HTML (or XHTML) and CSS ensures consistent cross-browser page rendering. A discombobulated website will kill your credibility.
* Whitespace usage increases comprehension by 20%
* Golden Triangle is important. That is the top-left of the page above the fold (before scrolling). Jakob Nielsen’s user scrolling study showed that only 23% of visitors scroll on their first visit to a website.
* Faces not looking at you – if a face image is looking somewhere other than directly at us, we’ll also look in that same direction. Take advantage of this by drawing your users’ attention to the most important parts of your page or ad.
* Search box size counts – 27 character search box shows all search text in 90% of searches according to Jakob Neilsen
* Header and footer should be separated in design from the main body of the page

Website Navigation Usability

* Consistent navigation – make sure navigation appears in the same location on web pages
* Text is king – use descriptive text in navigation links, not images, java applets or flash
* Location feedback – provide the user with information about where they are with headings, breadcrumbs and/or styles in menus. If you use colors then a large portion of your visitors may not be able to differentiate the colors due to color-blindness.
* Sitemaps – provide a visitor sitemap with a website outline and important links
* Call to action or navigation boxes should not look like ads because visitors automatically skip over them
* Homepage navigation placed on the top of the page performs best
** One more extremely important point on text color: do not make any text color the same as the defined background color of a page. This is an old way of hiding tons of SPAM text on a page. If you do this will be construed as SPAM and you’ll be severely penalized by the search engines.

Text Characteristics Usability

* Dominant headlines will immediately draw the visitors eye
* Headlines first words must grab your attention immediately. If they are keywords then you also get an SEO benefit out of it.
* Headings, subheads, phone numbers and date/times should be used and formatted consistently. Using a logical progression of h1, h2, h3, etc. tags helps the readers understanding of the page information hierarchy and is also a good accessibility feature.
* Standard fonts of 12 points or more maximize reading speeds
* Black text on a white background increases reading speeds up to 32%
* Sentence case (only first word capitalized) is important for reading speed and comprehension
* Bold and italics should be used sparingly, and ideally to emphasize keywords relevant to the topic

Link Definitions Usability

* Blue links are the most standard color for links
* Underline links – this is also standard and good for accessibility reasons
* Visited links should be a different, more pale color
* Link hover color should light up the link with brighter colors
* Red or green links should be avoided due to the preponderance of color-blindness
* Don’t underline text that is not a link
* Don’t show normal text in link colors
* Don’t use bold-facing as a hover effect. Making the font wider will cause the text to re-align.
* Link titles can be used for the hover effect to describe where the link is going – also a great accessibility feature
* Link text should describe the page they are linked to
* Tabindex is a great method for defining logical tabbing through elements
* Menu links should usually not follow the rules above

Writing Standards Usability

* Write for scanning – internet readers don’t read long paragraphs. Keep paragraphs to 3 sentences, group logically and provide ample but not too much information.
* Bullet points should be used as much as possible
* Bold and italics should be used for your most important words. This is also a big SEO factor – search engines take more heed when you emphasize keywords and will consequently rank you higher for them.

Miscellaneous Usability Items

* Jakob Neilsen points out that tests with 5 users will find 85% of site problems and 15 users will reveal them all.
* If you run Google Adwords campaigns then use the free Google Website Optimizer to test your campaigns
* You might also try the Vertster testing tools: http://www.vertster.com

Usability Resources

There are many online usability resources. I recommend the following sites for further research:
Jakob Nielsen’s Website – He is a major usability expert: http://www.useit.com/

US Government Usability Website and Resource

http://www.usability.gov/guidelines/

Smashing Magazine:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/24/10-useful-usability-findings-and-guidelines/

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/05/20/11-striking-findings-from-an-eye-tracking-study/

Other Usability Numbers and Quotes

http://www.optimalusability.com/quotes.php

About the Author

Michael Cordova writes about technology and builds WordPress SEO websites. He has been doing Internet marketing, search engine optimization since the beginning of the Internet. BEFORE YOU GO call Michael at (303) 744-2178 for a free initial SEO website evaluation or contact him from the links above.

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WordPress Tutorial – SEO Optimized CMS Installation

Michael Cordova — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:14:02 +0000

WordPress Tutorial – SEO Optimized CMS Installation

WordPress has proven to be an excellent content management system (CMS). The developer community is extremely active as evidenced in the frequent solid versions published increasing usability, security and features. Its ease of implementing free, paid for and custom themes places it as a star in the open source CMS arena.

We at 21st are mostly concerned with the search engine optimization (SEO) of WordPress so that will be our focus in this post. All of the links point to the pages in our WordPress SEO tutorial describing details of how to accomplish each task.

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WordPress Installation

WordPress installation is easy. Once you download it and create a database it is a simple process of updating a configuration file, uploading all files and you’re there.

WordPress SEO, Usability Configurations

Once installed you have to change some settings and install the right WordPress plugins to use it as your content management system. This effort will allow you to add SEO features to your web pages, notify the Internet community of your content and ensure your pages load as fast as possible. This is good for SEO as well as usability. A high degree of usability ensures the highest level of conversions, and conversions is usually the only reason to have a website.

WordPress Backups

Before you start adding content it is important that you set up backups for your WordPress website. This ensures that you have recourse in case of database or web server problems.

WordPress Content Management

Once you have completed configuring your SEO optimized WordPress installation you are ready for prime time. Adding and editing WordPress content is a breeze, and WordPress allows you to do this without any technical knowledge – indeed, the reason for a content management system.

Integrating a Custom Website Design into WordPress

The WordPress community has created many free and low-cost themes that you can use and/or modify for your website. Most of our customers want high-ended custom website designs so we have provided a step by step tutorial on how to integrate a custom website design into WordPress. This is a technical subject and requires that you know php programming.

WordPress Troubleshooting

There are several problems that can show up in this process, so we have added a troubleshooting section to assist you in correcting any web development problems that may arise.

The WordPress Forums are also a great resource for troubleshooting WordPress:
http://wordpress.org/support/

Free Downloadable WordPress Help File

Lastly, we have provided a free downloadable Windows help file that you can use as a reference in your own installations. Here is more info on WordPress design platform hosting.

Please send me a note if you have any additions or corrections to any of this tutorial.

About the Author

Michael A. Cordova has been doing web development literally since the beginning of the Internet. For a free initial evaluation of your website and SEO needs you can call him directly at (303) 744-2178 or email Michael and he will be in touch within 24 hours.

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Web Development to Increase Sales

Michael Cordova — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:14:22 +0000

The art and science of web design and web development

Web Development for a purpose:
* maximum conversions
* maximum leads
* maximum sales
* maximum exposure

This first post on our Web Development Blog provides information for the creation of high-performance websites – websites with high conversion rates. They either increase sales or increase sales leads. Many topics will be detailed, and the entire list is presented in this first Blog post.

Leaving out any single one of the website features listed below can be costly. It can take just as long to create a properly optimized website as it does to create it in an inferior manner. Web (W3C) standards compliance is important to increase search engine indexing of your content as well as consistently rendering your pages and decreasing page load times.

In order to achieve maximum website performance you need to create websites that:

Are highly aesthetic and that fit within your industry
Have fast page load times. Current wisdom is that you have 5 – 8 seconds to convince the visitor that they are in the right place before they hit the back button. Any longer than this you take the risk of your visitor leaving before the page even loads.
Contain persuasive, benefit-oriented content to maximize conversions. This cannot be underestimated. Content written by professional copywriters ensure that your website captures the visitors attention, moves them through a call to action into a conversion funnel to a sale or conversion – complete a form, send an email, pick up the phone and call you, etc.
Have error-free web (W3C) standards compliant code. This ensures consistent cross-browser rendering. If your website looks freakish because a browser can’t render your pages sanely and as intended, then you’ll lose your visitors complete confidence. W3C compliance also allows the search engines to separate page code from its content so your message can be recognized and ranked high in the search engine results pages.
Have a high degree of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This process starts with an extensive keyword analysis that includes the keywords that are actually being searched on today.
Undergo Competitive Analysis – what keywords and features/services your competitors websites focus on, who links to them and what advertising they are paying for.
Have an extremely high degree of usability. It is all about sales and profits. If you have a website that is pretty but difficult to understand and navigate then you’ll lose a percentage of sales, sometimes a huge percentage.
Are Accessibility Standards Compliant – Section 508, W3C WAI, and WCAG Priorities 1, 2 and 3. This means that visitors with disabilities will easily be able to use the website. This is required for all websites built for the US Government or its agencies.
Are continually tested and updated to maximize conversions. We use Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising as the last step in the website optimization process. Split-testing and multivariate testing techniques take conversions from less than 1% to 7 – 25%! This means a 700% – 2,500% increase in sales by monitoring and updating your website!
Undergo optimized website promotion in the top Internet properties so the prominence of your website is recognized by the search engines and you are found at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for your targeted keywords. Timeframes for these results vary directly with the amount of effort put into it. We have seen results in 30 days.
Incorporate analytics to track website progress – it’s very important to see the fruits of your labor.
Use a Content Management System (CMS). Using a CMS allows the website to be completely maintained by you or a non-technical person by incorporating a content management system like WordPress or Drupal. You need to be able to shift with the market, and a CMS can be invaluable in making website updates.

If your website doesn’t utilize every single one of these features then you cannot expect to get the best results from it.

Future posts will focus on each of these items individually so you can build high-performance websites.

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