WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are thousands of developers all over the world working on it. It also means that is free to use for any website you want, without paying license fees. Hundreds of available plugins extend what WordPress does, so the actual functionality is almost limitless.

When it comes to CMS, the vast majority of small business owners do not need a full feature e-commerce website or a complex online community website like Facebook. The vast majority needs a simple CMS where they can:

• update the content as often as they want
• add how many pages they want
• insert photos
• add news
• write posts in a blog
• have a full feature photo gallery
• have members that can sign up
• have a simple online shop
• have a custom contact form that protects you from spam
• have search engine friendly optimized website
• have a feed aggregator like RSS or Atom
• create a custom real estate site

Wordpress handles all this and much more. Why would we need something else if Wordpress works perfect for almost all of our job requests? Why give someone who needs a Civic for his teenage daughter, a Cadillac?

Before you go to someone else for your next CMS project ask for a quote here. Chances are $1500 will get your website up and running on Wordpress. Well, we don’t talk so much as the other guys, yes, but we can save you $10,000. How about that?

Our experience with WordPress is recognized by the professionals. Our work was featured on many galleries showcasing Worpress Powered Sites.

We really like Wordpress.

More than that, businesses that never had big budgets for advertising, start advertising online on Google and Yahoo for as low as $10 per day.

Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing can have a big impact on a small company online presence. But if you are looking for the best results, you need to know how to setup a PPC(Pay Per Click) campaign.

First, you need to consider the area you are targeting. If you are doing Air Conditioning and Heating in Raleigh area for example you want to show the ads only to people located in Raleigh area. You wouldn’t want to pay for online visitors from Charlotte, because you wouldn’t go there to fix their AC.

Then, you need to know how to select keywords properly so they will attract most of the potential buyers but in the same time exclude people who browse just for fun. For example if someone wants to advertise for Web Design in Durham you would want to exclude people who are looking for “free web design”, “free templates” or want to “learn about web design”.

One other thing is the quality of your content. You have to choose keywords that are significant for your content. This means that your website should be optimized for search engines. If you have an old website, that uses old technologies, it will be harder for search engines to properly categorize your website and your quality score will be lower. This means you will have to pay more for clicks.

Your ad content is very important also. You wouldn’t want to get lost, so using words that have a real impact is important. Your best price or a feature like “Free Inspection in Raleigh” would definitely attract visitors. Just be careful so the content of the ad is MATCHED by your website content.

Internet advertising and Pay Per Click is becoming a business by itself.

We only setup campaigns for clients that design or re-design their websites with us because it is a real hassle to do campaigns for websites not optimized for search engines. A small business needs potential clients and not Digg.com kind of traffic. The budgets can be as low as $10 per day and you will really attract clients.

But what if your ideas and information do not fit with the template layout? Are you able to modify the coding behind the site, to make it work the way you want? As easy as it may seem, sometimes is complicated even to insert a meta tag, to modify the title tag, to enlarge a text block or to insert a menu bar. Customizing a template(or a Wordpress theme) requires knowledge and experience.

Many people are using free templates. Chances are that several websites are using the template you have chosen. Your site looks like a copy of several sites. To modify the color scheme, that works perfect for that particular template, you really need design skills. To insert great looking icons or images in your template, you need advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS and image editing. No mater how hard you try, the overall feel of the template will remain. Attention spans are very short and if you’re not grabbing your visitors attention in 2 to 3 seconds of getting onto your website they will move on. The last thing you need is that template feel.

When building a website you need advanced knowledge of SEO to create the proper website architecture in order to have the maximum exposure for search engines. If you don’t know how SEO works, your website will not have any visitors from search engines.

For some, an website template might be all that is required. For others, it is simply not worth it. If you want your website to stand out in the increasingly competitive marketplace and have it’s own identity, you really need the help of a good web designer. Sometimes for as little as $499 you can get a profesional website that you really deserve.

• They are not user friendly
• They do not respect usability rules
• They do not respect the web standards (valid CSS/HTML)
• They are not optimized for search engines
• They do not have a good identity

Well-known Internet marketing companies advise real estate agents to offer value on their website like MLS Search, buyer and seller reports, info about a specific neighborhood and so on.

From experience I can tell that if a person wants to search for homes they will use established well known sites like realtor.com, fmrealty.com, remax.com, etc. They will not use small websites for searching. The same when they research, they will use zillow.com or the county tax bill records.

A small realtor website will never be able to compete against a big, established one that spends millions in web design, development and advertising.

All real estate agents want to present themselves as exquisite invaluable help in the process of buying a house. Excellence and experience are the words used most by realtors. How do realtors show this to their customers? An exquisite, top of the line website that uses the latest proven web design trends and technologies will definitely show their deserved online identity. They shouldn’t focus to much on virtual tours, search for homes, neighborhood reports and totally miss the point of excellence on the web. Real Estate agents should show their clients that are able to reflect their business philosophy in everything they are doing.

Being fresh by definition, a blog can be a great marketing tool today. Real estate agents can use it to build trust and offer the right amount of tips and information a home buyer expects to get when buying a house. It is easy to say “consider my website as your real estate information tool” but it is much better to actually offer this to your customers.

How real estate web design is going around Raleigh and Triangle Area? Are any of the real estate websites comming close to zillow.com the big web 2.0 hottie that is shaking the real estate business? Even if real estate agents do not agree, just remember that their clients, home buyers, made Zillow the success it is in just a couple of years. Is real estate business in Raleigh-Durham area prepared for the future?

The Internet is changing the real estate business fast. Neglecting their websites now can cost real estate agents a lot in the future.

The other day I ran across a local car dealer website. As a web designer I couldn’t help but notice their web page title(the heading Google displays for search results) : “Car Dealer Raleigh NC Car Raleigh Used Car Raleigh Truck Raleigh Car Repair Service Raleigh NC”.

Look at their description meta tag: “Car Raleigh NC Car Dealer of New Raleigh Cars and Used Car Raleigh, Commercial Trucks, Raleigh Trucks and SUVs. Raleigh Auto Dealer of Cars, Crossovers, SUV & More Cars. Raleigh Auto Repair Service to All Makes and Models. “ Is this how you present yourself to your customers? Do you really think that Google does not have algorithms to fight keyword stuffing? Repeating Raleigh so many times in the Title tag and Meta description tag seems to anyone as keyword stuffing. SEO is not just adding keywords to title tags and meta descriptions.

But being the most powerful and accessible HTML tags that a SEO has at hand, it is often the most abused. Google and Yahoo are fighting that. Here is what Google says: ““Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.”

I searched Car Dealer Raleigh NC. The company website was nowhere in the first results. And all the other ranking factors are working for it: the domain is old, established, the website has tons of links even from established national car companies. It really should be in the first results and it is not.

What is the conclusion? Not all SEO companies will serve you a good product. Web Design is still in its infancy. It is not the same kind of business you are used to. Always compare your website with well known internet sites.

Read more about How Web Design achieves Great Search Engine Optimization.

But the quality comes with a price. Sure, if we will charge $10,000 for a website, we are sure the website will get awarded and recognized by the professionals. But is this what the client really wants? He wants a website that works for a good price. You can compare it with buying a car. If you want a good reliable car to commute, you will buy a Honda Civic or a Ford Focus not a Ferrari. Of course everyone will like to drive a Ferrari, but how many are willing to pay for it? What’s interesting is that a lot of web design companies charge the price of a Ferrari for A Honda Civic… and most of the time for a five year old Honda Civic.

Now, another thing to consider is that everyone who knows a bit of HTML thinks he is a great web designer. Many times business owners do not understand why their website does not have any visitors and doesn’t have any results. Web design is all about experience. Design, Usability, Identity, HTML and CSS coding, SEO are all going hand in hand. You cannot have one without the other if you want a good website. Most web designers lack or don’t bother with at least three of these.

If you are not experienced with web design here is a good tip: compare your web designer work with successful websites on the internet like: facebook.com, linkedin.com, wordpress.com, blogger.com. Is their work coming close?

Now think how you met your web designer. Did your neighbor friend recommended him or did you really like his work, presented on his website? Is he really up to the task? If your website doesn’t have results, he probably is not.

Web design quality comes with a price - a good one at Betterimage.org. Try it.

Our experience with WordPress is recognized by the professionals. Our new website design was featured on many galleries showcasing Worpress Powered Sites.

Here is our old design:

So, if you don’t transform your site to make it user friendly, respecting all search engines guidelines, and link the pages properly inside your site, in less than a year your website will hardly get any traffic from your SEO work and might even be penalized.

CMS stands for content management system. It is a software that will allow you to manage your content using an internet browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. You will edit and add information as easy as you compose emails. Every page, heading and paragraph will have the same consistent look and feel. Basically your website will be dynamic. In this way content can be updated as often as you want without any external help. You can update features such as new products or services, update product description, news about your company and so on. This will encourage users to return to your website to view the latest information.

Not so long ago this feature was expensive and was reserved only for big websites with resources. It didn’t make sense to spend lots of money to have a dynamic website. But as everything on the internet is going interactive, as the open source software is getting more and more available it makes sense to use CMS for your website. A couple of extra hundred dollars can save you money and problems in the future.

The ads were design to monetize trafic not to be used by anyone who has an website or a blog. It makes sense for a newspaper site like News and Observer or a TV Station website like WRAL TV, websites that bring value, with thousands of hits every day, to have Ads by Google but for a blog or a personal website with 10 visitors each day it doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t know what people are thinking but it just not worth to annoy your visitors and break your design with Ads by Google for 50 cents at every three days - and this is lucky.

I don’t know what Google is thinking letting sites with less that 500 hits per day having Ads by Google. It poorly reflects on their business model.