This article is a guest post written by Adam J. Blust.

When you’re building a website, it’s easy to get distracted by the technology. Which WordPress theme or framework will you choose? Will the site have video? How will it connect to social media? What about responsive or mobile design?

All of this is fascinating, even fun. But what sometimes gets lost is the most basic question of all: Why does this site exist?

I’ve spent years making sites for clients, mostly small businesses and non-profit organizations. And it still amazes me how many clients haven’t thought through the basics: Who is my audience? What do they need and expect from my business? And how can my site give my audience what they need? Until you answer those questions, a website project is just playing with pixels.

Continue Reading »

Everyone nowadays wants to speed up their site to every millisecond, as it provides best user experience by reducing your site’s load time making it more search engine friendly and helps in search rankings. There are many ways to make your WordPress blog or site load fast, like using W3 Total Cache plugin to improve efficiency of caching of the files, using CDN to serve images from multiple locations and also some server tweaks. Some are free to use and some may cost you in bulk.

One of the free option (currently free in beta stage) available from Google itself is the PageSpeed service. You may have used the Google PageSpeed online or the browser extension or Mod PageSpeed for analyzing and improving your site performance.

Continue Reading »

Until today, there are many cases where people don’t take good composition into account when using images on their website. This happened because they are ignorance in how to use and include thumbnails with good size and composition.

Much remains to underestimate the role of image thumbnail in a website. Apparently, the image quality is very important for a website, especially for websites that display photos like a gallery or photography website. One of the reasons why user is interested to visit a website is the quality of the image thumbnail. Copy-writing is an intrinsic part of web design, but it can easily be brushed aside for a beautifully shot photograph or well drawn image as our brain can interpret picture much quicker than text. 

Continue Reading »

I could never stress out enough the importance of regularly backing up a WordPress website, especially true if it makes money. Hopefully, if you are a business owner who is also a WordPress user, you feel the same way as I do. You don’t want to drive a car without a spare tire, do you?

To help you do the job, I’ve covered some backup services that will backup the entire WordPress website ( the database and the site itself) and store them securely so that you can re-install them and roll backed to your post in no time if the site is compromised. They  also provide you with other services like upgrading your versions, controlling your data, migrating to a new server and more.

To find out which one works out the best for you, you have to give them a test. If you are a small business owner who doesn’t have a tehcnical support, you can create a duplicate of your website to test on.

VaultPress

VaultPress is a WordPress backup service by Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com). Starting at $15/mo, VaultPress will provide realtime, continuous (up-to-the-minute) backup and synchronization of every post, comment, image, video, audio podcast, plugin, theme, revision and dash­board setting across at least two separate cloud services (including Amazon S3).

Continue Reading »

This article is a guest post written by Jim Kinloch.

In 2008 I attended a seminar by the Conversion Rate Experts. Here was what I was looking for, a way of looking at all the online/digital disciplines and focusing these techniques into creating the very best performing Websites.  I was hooked and since then I’ve been a CRO evangelist and committed online geek.

This article is aimed at Websites with less than 10,000 unique visitors per month.

Continue Reading »

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may sound like rocket science especially if you are a newbie to being online. Although it sounds like an official and technical term, but the fact is it isn’t too hard for beginners to learn and apply.

However, SEO is time consuming and needs to be continually addressed. It is something that needs patience and constant practice. But, given the right knowledge, you can understand the basics. In fact you don’t really need to understand more than the fundamentals.

Continue Reading »

There’s no doubt that the trend of accessing the internet via mobile devices is exploding. From iPhones and Android phones to iPads and Kindle Fires, more and more mobile devices are used to access the Internet. The IDC forcasted that by 2015 “more U.S. Internet users will access the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices”.  We are more and more moving to an age of smaller, faster, machines that we incorporate into our everyday lives.

Continue Reading »

This is a guest post by Wil Webs.

Let me begin with a confession. I am a theme freak. Yep! Since I have started working with WordPress, I have seen tons of themes. Apparently, I am also a control freak, because I prefer versatile themes that allow me to setup the theme – and therefore the website – my way. No matter how flexible a theme is, sooner or later you might hit the boundaries of what is possible.

When that happens, you could decide to have the theme customized by the theme vendor or find a professional web designer to do so. However, based upon experiences with custom software that road usually implies reoccurring costs, lacking documentation, leading to even more costs. Not a pleasant picture.

Continue Reading »

The following post is a guest post, authored by Tiyo Kamtiyono.

It have been three days since Facebook applied timeline to all Facebook Page where you all as marketers promote your products or services.

The new look of the page will bring along new opportunities that you can use to give more exposure to your product/brand/organization (I will simply call it brand from now on), but on the other hand it can crash down your brand if you fail to optimize this new design. So in this post I will tell you about 7 tips to use the new Facebook page design right way. I divided them into two optimization categories, design (1-4) and interaction (5-7).

Continue Reading »

When you have an online-based business web analytics should be your best friend. When you’re running a website, you would like to know how well your site is performing. The metrics will show you detailed reports so you can identify which works and which doesn’t, which is important if you want to recreate the success.

Fortunately, you don’t need expensive software or a degree in statistics to measure your site’s success. All you need is Google Analytics. It’s free and easy to use. Check out here on how to get started with Google Analytics.

But with so much information available at your hand, how do you determine what metrics you should be tracking?

Continue Reading »

In the age of the customer providing a great customer experience is vital in today’s online world, even more with the presence of social media. Social media bring transparency to many business functions and customer service is often the main highlight. When an unhappy customer write a complain on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, it is out there for everyone to see.

ColorLabs & Company is a small, bootstrap company and we try to give the best result we can get out of our tight budget. One thing that we always keep in mind is never to bite off more than you can chew.

We make small changes along the road to service improvement, rather than starting again from scratch and making huge investments in a ‘big bang’ approach. This way we can achieve improvement without being heavily focused and distracted from other aspects in our business, such as WordPress theme development.

On this article I am going to share with you what happens behind the curtain, what ColorLabs do in term of support management. All for the sake of keeping customers and prospects happy when they seek help.

Continue Reading »

We all have had those days. The days when the minute hand of the clock seems to running so fast and you can’t seem to stay on task. And when you do start work, it seems to be a struggle to come up with anything that has quality.

Being in the WordPress theme development business where creativity is one of main selling point, I can’t count how many hours of life have been spent in front of a computer screen looking for inspiration but the result is still not good enough.

Although rarely, there are also the days when inspiration hits us and we can create a lot of high impact work in a short span of time, when we feel we can do anything and go anywhere for awhile.

Continue Reading »