Bill Forsyth was referred to me by my banker, and I haven’t looked back.  What I was seeking was a website developer, but what I got was even more.  At our first meeting, it was apparent that his expertise went beyond computers.  Bill has a very calm commanding presence.  He listened to every challenge I had confronted and explained how he could help propel my business forward.  Everything Bill says is purposeful and well thought out.  He didn’t give me any quick-fixes.  In retrospect, I may have been looking for that. Great things don’t happen over night, and Bill has brought his broad base of knowledge and many years of experience in relationship building to me and my business.  What I have now is a solid business, and hopefully, a friend for life.

J. DeAngelis

Let’s take dogs for example. That is a very broad term with many topics to get distracted. You must filter that down, sift it, be concise and to the point. That being said, let’s say we are going to have a site focused on dog clothes. Now we’re getting closer!

Let’s take it further. Let’s filter it to dog collars. Now we’re really getting defined. So for the sake of learning, let’s say our site is about dog collars. We can now focus on a more defined subject.

For your home page you would likely talk about what your site is about, selling, finding or making dog collars. Mention everything about your site in a vague way. Once that is complete, you would then break down other topics about dog collars, creating a separate page for each.

For example, you might have a page with small leather dog collars for sale. On this page, you would talk only about small dog collars made of leather, nothing else. You could mention a few breeds of small dogs and discuss the thickness of their fur and how it might affect them with leather collars, but you need to stay focused on leather small dog collars. You can go into colors, shape or whatever, as long as it’s leather and for small dogs.

Another page might be for fabric small dog collars. Basically the same as leather, except you don’t discuss leather. Just fabric. There may be many types of fabric such as man made, cotton, silk or whatever. Colors, dog breeds and all of the same as above.

Your next and subsequent pages will keep with the same pattern. Do medium dogs, then large dogs. The key is to stay with a specific type of dog collar per page and talk only about that.

When you design the pages of your site in a hierarchy order like this, the search engines eat it up! They can understand what your page is all about, leading to higher positioning on the search engine results page, thus leading to more clicks to your site because of focused page content!

A CMS like WordPress puts all the know-how of best practices, ease of management & distributed authorship in your hands instantly. You can setup authors, editors, administrators even engage with your visitors via comments per post. These features along with many others provide an excellent industry standard way to manage your content without the costly up-front expense of development, testing and deployment. Here are a list of just some of the cool features WordPress provides:

Full Standards Compliance: WordPress generated code produces content that adheres to the W3C standards. This provides the maximum benefit of browser interoperability with both the latest and greatest browser and support for older browsers as well.

No Rebuilding: WordPress changes the game when it comes to rapid software development. Changes are instantly available. No rebuilding and redeploying the site just update, save changes and you are done. The changes are reflected instantly.

Pages: With the pages feature you can easily manage non-blog related content such as contact information, hours of operation or services list. The pages are fully customizable and even skinable so you can ensure a unique uniform design for the look and feel of your site.

WordPress Links: A huge driver in search engine optimization (SEO) is of course link maintenance. WordPress makes this administrative task a breeze. Just open the administration section, select, create, manage and maintain all your link lists in one location.

WordPress Themes: In order to provide a unique presence on the internet WordPress has a feature rich theme system which streamlines the design of your unique look and feel. Even the smallest blog can appear professional and unique within seconds. There is a huge selection (1000′s) of fully customizable themes. These themes are placed in a queue so you can instantly change your look and feel for holidays or whatever your need is.

Full Trackback and Pingback integration: Nothing moves you faster up the search engine ladder than links back to your site. The faster you build your link network the better. WordPress offers a simple way to manage those cross-blog links without having to track them in a separate tool.

These features and many others make WordPress a powerful resource to get a great start on a blog. Now go produce some killer content.

It’s quite the handy service, you can connect up to 250 user at a time. (Let me know if you ever have a meeting with 250 users, I’d like to see how it works.) The host and client software works on both Windows and Mac. You can allow other users to take control of your computer. At this point, you can’t switch the presenter in a meeting. But hey, it’s free. Have them start their own meeting and join them.

It’s a phenomenal service and it is very handy. I’m curious to see how the business model develops. For those of you who were around at the beginning of LogMeIn, they offered a lot of functionality for free and then once they got you addicted to the service, they started breaking off and charging for odd groups of features. I’d be curious if Join.me will be following in the same footsteps.

In the meantime, it’s a phenomenal tool and now you have no excuse to ever have to spend 2 extra minutes trying to figure out what somebody else is talking about, they can show you in less than a minute for free!

In no particular order, Here are the plugins that seem to make it into every site we build:

Redirection – Manage redirections and keep track of errors
This plugin manages 301 redirections and keep tracks of 404 errors – and all this without having to be knowledgeable about Apache.htaccess files. This plugin also tidies up any loose ends your site may have – a very useful application if you are migrating pages from an old site.

WordPress Database Backup – Backup your core WordPress database tables
This plugin creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. The backup can be saved to the server, downloaded to your computer or email the backup file to your specified email address.

All in one SEO pack – This plugin optimizes your WP blog for Search Engines
This plugins is extremely customizable, but it is amazingly powerful right out of the box. It can help ensure that the search engines are seeing the information you want to be seen.

Contact Form 7 – An easy to use contact form
This plugin offers simplicity and flexibility to designing your form and mail. You can manage multiple contact forms as well with this plugin.

Contact Form 7 to DB Extension – store your contact form results
An extension to the Contact Form plugin that can save contact form data to a database table. This can protect you from the frustration of lost emails.

Google Analytics for WordPress – easily track your site statistics
Easily ensure that your Google Analytics code is on every page on your website for most accurate statistics. This plugin uses the new asynchronous tracking method leading to faster load times for your webpages, enhanced data collection and accuracy and elimination of tracking errors.

Google XML Sitemaps – Generate sitemap enabling search engines to index your site
This plugin generates a XML Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WP blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN search.

Smart Youtube – Easily embed YouTube videos
Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization, like removing suggested videos.

WP Email Login – Log in to your WP account using your email address
This plugin allows you to log in to your WP address without using your username. This comes in handy if you have a really bad memory or a lot of users!

Simple Local Avatars – Add an avatar upload field to user profile field
If the current user has media permissions, this plugin allows the addition of an avatar upload field to the profile. It generates requested sizes on demand. Just scroll down to the new “Avatar” field after editing a user profile; the plugin takes care of the cropping and sizing.

WP-Password Generator – No more hassles creating new or insecure passwords
Now administrators can save the trouble of using a separate password generator appliacation or spending time to come up with a clever and secure password for their new users. The WP Password Generator plugin creates unique 7-16 character passwords by simply clicking on the “Generate Password”.

The Events Calendar – Rapidly create and manage events
The Events Calendar plugin allows you to quickly create and manage events using the post editor. Features like Google Map integration and default templates such as a calendar grid for streamlined one click installation are available. This plugin also works seamlessly with EventBrite if you want to publish your events or collect payment for them.

My Link Order – Set links and link categories in order
This plugin helps to set the order in which links and link categories appear in the sidebars. It uses a drag and drop interface for creating the order. It also adds a widget with additional options for easy installation on widgetized themes.

InComment – Track that commenter or check out the results of advertising
This is a comment referrer plugin which tells you the origins of a comment through the comment email. This helps in tracking comments which are not relevant and spammy which is a complete waste of your time.

When putting together your website, be sure that your key phrase or topic is set out throughout the website where it will easily be put together and searched for. Thus meaning, if you are creating a website on how you sell fruit, be sure that you’ve included any key word or topic that would relate to the subject of selling fruit. Whether it is about selling bananas, mangos, or other various fruits, the key goal is to have your website found because you are selling fruits.

All in all, it is very important to keep your site simple and to the point. The biggest hint of information that one can keep to their mind when creating a website is this; when you are searching for a website and you put in the search phrase inside the search box, do you sometimes find yourself viewing tons of websites that really aren’t about what you are looking for? The goal is, to have your site be at the top of the list due to its relevance to the search. Nobody wants to have their website come up on page twenty two of a thousand.

Keep your website simple and to the point on one subject, and you will avoid having any problems with your website and you will be towards the top and headed in the right direction.

Over the last couple of years, Droid has turned out to be an interesting series of phones. In my humble opinion, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Verizon couldn’t get the iPhone, Droid probably would have never gotten the foothold that it has. Droid did a phenomenal job of filling the hole that the iPhone-less Verizon had in its lineup. such a phenomenal job that it seems Droid has managed to create a better phone than the iPhone.

We’ve seen the ads saying that Droid is better than the iPhone. Friends who had an iPhone and moved to a Droid like their Droid considerably better. So now that Verizon has gotten to start it’s love affair with the iPhone, what does that mean for Droid phones? Will Verizon still push them as aggressively, or will iPhone now be their darling of choice?

Myself, I’ve heard that the Droid Bionic is the phone to watch. Maybe 2011 is the year I finally retire my trusty Motorola Q.

HTML Color Chart:
http://www.tayloredmktg.com/rgb/

Color Wheel & Contrast verification:
http://gmazzocato.altervista.org/colorwheel/wheel.php

HTML Color Codes:
http://www.computerhope.com/htmcolor.htm
http://www.devguru.com/Technologies/html/quickref/color_chart.html
http://www.eligr.com/html-color-codes/

HTML Color Harmonies
http://www.easyrgb.com/index.php?X=HARM

HTML Color
http://www.visibone.com/color/faq.html#combinations

Bonus! HTML Special Characters
http://tntluoma.com/sidebars/codes/
http://www.natural-innovations.com/wa/doc-charset.html
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_symbols.asp

©2009 The Business Identity Factory. All Rights Reserved.
http://BusinessIdentityFactory.com
“Helping businesses define and express their brand”

If too many fonts are used in a document it is hard to read. For example, it would be difficult to read a document that had every sentence in a different font. Using too many fonts can also distract from the content of a document. A reader could end up paying more attention to the fonts than to the content. Using more than one font in a document is acceptable under some circumstances. For example, in a document separated into sections or chapters it would be acceptable to use a larger and bolder font for section headings and chapter headings.

Font should match the tone of a document’s contents. Important information should be in a font with a type and a size that is easy to read. Times New Roman, Arial, Courier, and Verdana are examples of fonts that are easy to read. Most script and handwritten fonts are difficult to read.

Decorative fonts should be used minimally, if at all. Too many decorative fonts in a document make it harder to read and can distract from the content. Some decorative fonts, such as Algerian, are difficult to read.

Documents with fonts that seem to have been overused could be unpleasant to readers’ eyes. Some of the fonts that are considered overused are Comic Sans MS, Papyrus, Bank Gothic, and Trajan. However, some fonts that are rarely used are difficult to read. These fonts are rarely used for this reason. It is best to use fonts that are not overused and are easy to read.

Creating a document using different fonts can be fun. Using the different fonts can make creating a dull document more exciting, but it is important not to get carried away.

©2009 The Business Identity Factory. All Rights Reserved.
http://BusinessIdentityFactory.com
“Helping businesses define and express their brand”