visit the website

This is another exciting project I worked on for Shane&Peter Inc. Zillow has an overall brand that we worked within to create a cleaner, more modern feeling style site. We also took a look at the content on the current blog and surfaced the most important features and stories, making the site more easily navigable by users.

As one of the two lead designers I was responsible for designing concepts of the site, detailing the final design, developing design direction, and working to make sure design elements stayed consistent across the entire site.

Or, read one of these:

1. AP College Football Website
2. Comfort Inn Website
3. Gold’s Gym Blog

Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

Blogging takes time, commitment and hard work.  But it can be a worthwhile investment and reap great rewards for yourself and your company – if done well.  The question most bloggers (including some of my clients) end up having is  have is, “How can I get more traffic to my blog?”

This is not an exhaustive look at how to get more readers, but here are 4 good ways to get started:

1. Write Great Content

It doesn’t matter how flashy your site looks or if you post 5 articles a day – people read blogs for the content.  Make sure your content is high-quality information that the niche you are writing for cares about and people will come to read it.

Tip: Use Google Analytics to see what pages and posts people are reading the most as well as what keywords they were searching for when they came to your site.  Write more content accordingly.

2. Post Consistently

How often you post is up to you.  But don’t leave your readers guessing if you’ve given up on the blog.  Make it obvious how often your blog is updated and make sure you stick as close as you can to your timeline.

Tip: Future-post!  Prewrite a few great articles, then change the publish date on them to the future (super easy to do with WordPress).  Viola!  You’re already on target for posting consistently in the next few day or weeks.

3. Guest Post

Write somewhere other than on your own blog.  This helps new, more and different readers see what you write about, and if they like your post enough they will click through to see your blog.  Ideally you should guest post on a blog with more visitors than your site has, and with readers that would want to learn about the same general topics that you write about.

Tip: Make sure you read the blog that you are submitting an article to.  Get a feel for the writing style, length, and content.  If you don’t know where to start, try guest posting on blogs you like to read often anyways.

Check out the spike in visitors the day one of my clients guest-posted on a bigger blog.

4. Participate

Blogging is all about sharing information, ideas and opinions.  Make sure your sharing doesn’t stop when you hit Publish.  Engage your audience continually to build a sense of community around your blog.  Reply to comments on your own blog and go comment on other blogs.  Use social media to interact more directly with readers.

Tip: Make sure it is easy to leave comments on your blog.  If the form takes too long to fill out, or if it is obvious the blogger doesn’t respond to comments many people won’t waste their effort.

Some further resources for getting more traffic to your blog:

How to get traffic for your blog by Seth Godin

13.2 Easy Ways to Build a Thriving Blog Community from Men with Pens

9 Things to Do To Make Sure Your Next Blog Post is Read by More than Your Mom at ProBlogger

Or, read one of these:

1. Guest Blog Post on Creating a Healthy Work/Life Balance
2. When You Should Not Blog
3. Gold’s Gym Blog

visit the website

I’ve worked with best-selling author Kay Kenyon for a few years helping her keep her older, static website updated.  When the time came to make a change to a site that she could easily update herself we were both ready to move forward.  Kay’s new site incorporated her blog, which had previously been hosted elsewhere, directly into her new website (and even importing all the old posts).  The new, merged site serves as a one stop shop for her fans and for beginning writer’s looking for tips from Kay’s blog posts.  Kay’s new site prominently features ways to connect with her via her newsletter, on Facebook, and at her live appearances.  The navigation was kept extremely clean and adds a useful twist of following you down the page.  Kay was overjoyed with the new design and her visitors find the new site to be beautiful, easy to navigate and very useful.

Or, read one of these:

1. Patrick Ward PhD Website
2. The Human Condition Website
3. e3 Website

For the past few months the Gold’s Gyms of the Wenatchee Valley have been doing a great job of connecting to their members in a variety of ways, and not only while they are at the gym working out.

The Gold’s Gyms have been updating their blog often with great fitness and nutrition tips, as well as lots of overall wellness advice.  But as the year began Melissa Schwab, a Gold’s Gym member, began blogging on the site about her experience trying to lose weight and get in shape as she participated in the Gold’s Gym Challenge.  Hits to the site and comments on the posts are way up as people are excited to hear about someone’s experience from the trenches.  They get to hear about the highs and the lows, the good times and the bad – told with the power of a personal voice.

At the same time Gold’s Gym staff ramped up work on the local Gold’s Gym Facebook fan page. And fan numbers and interaction there jumped significantly too.  Staff created contests like “Post a picture that best says Strength to you,” kept Challengers and members updated on important times and events, as well as just providing a space for members to interact and support each other online.

To top it off the Wenatchee Valley Gold’s Gyms cross-promoted the blog, Facebook page and corporate site – all linked to each other and displayed in-gym.  Members now have a great network online to get information about they gym, receive free fitness advice, hear about other’s experiences and get to know one another.

Your Person-ness

That’s one reason why writing a blog  can help your online presence so much. People get that personal voice.  They want to know that your company is more than just a big factory churning out goods. With a blog your personality comes through, and so does your person-ness.  That’s not the only reason for a blog, and they certainly take time and energy to do right, but showing customers who you are is important.

But maybe even better – what are you clients and members and customers saying?   That’s what people really want to hear about.  How often do you buy something online without reading at least a few reviews first (witness the power of sites like Yelp)?  Being involved in social media – having a Facebook fan page or Twitter account, allows for a centralized hub for discussion about your company.  Just like Melissa’s blog, that involves people hearing the good and the bad.  But it involves people, and it involves hearing – both of which are good for your company.

Take a minute to think about it.  How could a blog or social media help you say something?  Or, how can you use those tools to let others talk about you?  How could you harness the power of a personal voice?

Or, read one of these:

1. Gold’s Gym Blog
2. Inner Circle Gym Website
3. 4 Ways to get More Traffic to Your Blog

What makes WordPress even better is the great variety of high-quality plugins that add all sorts of increased functionality to your website.  WordPress.org hosts a great database of thousands of plugins you can install with one click on your own site.  Most plugins are created for free by awesome coders helping make the world a better place.  They deserve serious thanks.  (So if you are a coder who has created a free WordPress plugin – THANKS!)

In my use of WordPress to create websites that connect my clients and their markets I’ve come across a few that are indispensable.  These plugins can be added to your site whether you are a professional developer or hobby blogger.  These plugins stand out to me because they:

• Are easy to add to the site
• Have customizable options
• Integrate seamlessly with the WP admin panel
• Are easy to add custom design to
• Are easy for clients to understand and use (when needed)

(see this article about what makes a good plugin in general)

So, while not an exhaustive list, here are some of my favorite plugins:

Akismet

Somehow the evil spam robots of the universe have even figured out how to leave spam comments on blogs.  This can get annoying if you are constantly being bombarded with comments that aren’t real.  Akismet is the fastest way to shut off the spam-flow.  After installation I’ve never seen a spam comment get into the system.  Nice!

Google Analytics

Okay, I honestly don’t use a plugin to add Google Analytics to my sites, I do it by adding code by hand.  The point is that you need Google Analytics on your site no matter how you get it there.  Analytics gives you an incredible amount of information about visitors to your site – where in the galaxy world they came from, what they were looking for, what they looked at while on your site, and much, much more.  If you aren’t getting in-depth reports on your website traffic you need to reconsider what you are even doing with your website.

Google XML Sitemaps

One key to ranking well in search engines is to make your website easy for them to crawl and index.  This plugin creates a sitemap for search engines to see what content you have on your site, then submits it to the search engines for you! How much easier can that get?

WP sIFR

The bane of website typography for designers is the fact that we’re limited to using a very small number of fonts for editable text.  sIFR is a solution that uses Flash-based fonts to dynamically replace certain text.  This increases the number of fonts you can use like, a hundred-fold.  Looks way better and stays indexable by search engines.  This plugin makes the process of adding this great functionality to your site painless.

Lightbox 2

Images opening in their own lightbox window on top of the current page is way cooler than them opening on their own blank page.  Now adding this feature is a three step process: add the Lightbox 2 plugin, add your images, tell them to open (individually or as a group) with Lightbox.

Sociable

One of the best ways to spread the word about your blog or website is to let other people do it for you.  Sociable automatically includes a widget at the bottom of your chosen posts and pages for people to share your site via social media.  You can choose from over 99 different media sites – add as many or as few as you’d like and make sharing easy on your readers.

Twitter for WP

Everyone from movie stars to soccer moms is using Twitter these days, and if you’re using it it should be included on your site.  Some Twitter widgets and plugins are big bulky things that look ugly and take up too much space.  Enter Twitter for WP – super clean, simple and small.  You can easily style your tweets to match the rest of your site and then everyone can know what you are doing!

WP List Cal

Lots of people want calendars on their site to list upcoming events, shows, or sales.  However, it can be frustrating for users to see a big blank monthly calendar staring them in the face, where they then must click on each day to see what’s happening.  WP List Cal just displays a beautiful list of your upcoming events, and adding new events is as easy as pie.  Which I think means its really easy.

WP Polls

Adding polls to your site is a great way to get visitors to start interacting with your site – and to find out what they think!  WP Polls makes adding polls to your site a snap. You can insert the polls into your blog posts, onto pages, or have the newest ones show up in the sidebar.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Keep visitors on your site longer by referring them to other posts that they might enjoy.  YARPP uses an algorithm developed by Martians that displays a list of recommended similar posts to the one your visitor is currently reading.  Giving readers more of what they want, and giving you more reads – everybody wins!

So, there you go – my favorite WordPress plugins.  Are you a WordPress user?  What’s your favorite WordPress plugin?

Or, read one of these:

1. WordPress Training
2. Uploading and Linking to a PDF in WordPress 2.8
3. 18 Beautiful Websites built with WordPress

My article on the FreelanceSwitch homepage

I also love helping other freelancers and startup companies and recently thought about writing a helpful article and trying to get it published on FSW.  I spent some time crafting the post and submitted it.  Lo and behold – FSW accepted the article and posted it soon thereafter.  I was/am super-excited to be a part of the FSW team!

Here’s how the article begins:

Remember when you graduated from school or first decided to become a freelancer?  You likely didn’t have much work to show and had to scramble to fill your portfolio.  If you now have a few years under your belt, you’ve probably started to build up quite a collection of finished pieces.

The importance of having a professional portfolio website has been discussed on FreelanceSwitch – it is essential for the modern freelancer.  But how do you decide what to include in your portfolio? If you fill your site with only your favorite work it could be focused in the wrong direction and not attract business.  If you only display giant commercial projects it may feel like a sterile presentation with no heart.  Somehow you need to show that as a freelancer you are both capable in your skills and able to produce high quality, creative results.

I suggest this 5-pronged approach for deciding what you want to include in your portfolio:

Go read the rest at FSW>>

I’m looking forward to a continued 2-way relationship with FreelanceSwitch!

No related posts.

visit the website

There are two Gold’s Gyms in the Wenatchee Valley and they employ almost a dozen personal trainers.  Gold’s Gym approached Apt Design to help them create a web solution that would allow the staff to share their fitness knowledge with the public and to create an online health community.  We designed a fully-featured custom blog that allows for multiple authors, easy commenting from readers, video embedding, polls and more.  The Wenatchee Valley Gold’s Gym Blog is now the premiere website for expert fitness advice and information for all of North Central Washington.

Or, read one of these:

1. Inner Circle Gym Website
2. Zillow Blog
3. Wenatchee Valley Sports Council Website

visit the website

Dr. Patrick Ward is a marriage counselor in West Virginia who had a treasure trove of blog posts with great information about family, parenting, stress and relationships.  What he needed was a blog site that exhibited this great content and allowed his visitors to easily find articles that would help.  Dr. Ward also wanted it to be easy for clients to learn more about his office and practice.  The new website has already propelled Dr. Ward’s site to the top of search engine rankings, provided a clean layout for his blog posts and archives, and brought new customers through his door.

Or, read one of these:

1. The Human Condition Website
2. Kay Kenyon Website
3. Dr. Parkhurst Website

visit the website

The Human Condition is a website that incorporates a blog and podcast exploring what it means to be a follower of Jesus in today’s world.  As they deal directly with heartfelt and sometimes controversial topics the owners wanted a look that reflected the gritty realism of everyday life.  The result is a design that melds Christianity’s past and present and navigation created with the user’s experience in mind.  The site features blog functionality like Most Popular Posts, Recent Posts, and a complete podcasting solution.

Or, read one of these:

1. Patrick Ward PhD Website
2. Kay Kenyon Website
3. e3 Website