Do you think you need a website but you are not very sure? Maybe you just have a small business and you never thought about hitting a wider market but let’s be honest – in the ever-growing world of business you need a website to exist. A website is your online business card.

6 Reasons Why You Need a Website

1. Whether your business is large or small, whether you directly work with people or not, whether you plan to sell online or not, you need a website to access a world of infinite possibilities.
2. If you want to be taken seriously, then you must have a professional website that will talk the business for you. It’s like an answering machine that always knows what to say.
3. If you build a website, you can also build a community for people who you can constantly update with the latest products or services. This way, former clients can become current ones.
4. If you find a great position to place your website on (and I’m not just talking about page ranks), you would be surprised where you could find amazing collaborations. Success leaches on success.
5. You can always request feedback from your clients/readers with a simple and honest e-mail. The quickest way to make your food delicious is by asking your clients what flavors they like.
6. A business to die for will always need a website. Your competitors already have one!

In the world of business, the bottom line is that websites are cheap to build, maintain and they generate income.

Need a Website? Start with WordPress

WordPress is an open source blogging platform that over 25 milion users choose to work with when they need a website. So, yes: it’s extremely popular. What makes it so great? This CMS (Content Management System) is powered by PHP and MySQL but you can work around it without editing PHP or HTML coding. If you do not have any experience with website building but you want to promote a business, an idea or just yourself, then WordPress is the place where you want to start.

8 Benefits for Working with WordPress

1. You choose your own domain name. For example, awesome.com sounds more confident than awesome.wordpress.com
2. You get a lot of free plugins to play with – Google XML Sitemaps, Contact Form, All in One SEO Pack, Google Analytics for WordPress etc.
3. Every site needs a theme. “Pretty colors” is the first thing the user sees when he visits your website. WordPress offers a multitude of free themes as well as more professional ones.
4. Get a free WordPress design or buy one (for a small price), and mold it to your needs.
5. FREE. The term “open source” says WordPress is free to work with. You can at least give it a shot because it will not cost you anything.
6. User-friendly. Even if you do not have the first clue about website building, you can explore the world of WordPress and get to know how stuff works.
7. SEO-appealing. Since Google has been verbalized, your website solely relies on its algorithms to be found and read. WordPress has a remarkable reputation in the eyes of search engines.
8. The community of developers is large. Whether you want a banner, a logo, a plugin that’s never been seen before or just someone to play with the coding, you can always count on WordPress developers because their numbers and expertize are constantly increasing.

If you need a website built in WordPress and are thinking of the do-it-yourself concept, then you’ll need some guidelines, tips, tutorials and general information regarding the WordPress world.

Alice Marsden would like to present you a new website that concentrates on the WordPress-based environment. It offers free easy-to-follow tutorials, plugins and general tips for all WordPress users – http://wpideas.net

Author: Alice Marsden
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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WordPress photoblog differs from a traditional blog in the fact that it gives more relevance to images than to words. In photoblogs, images can be displayed in many ways, from simple layouts to complex galleries. You can rent a suitable host, install a photoblog software, configure everything, solve problems that may arise, search a suitable theme and install it, or you can just have it all with one click at Flickr or Deviantart, etc.

What’s the use of bothering so much creating a WordPress photoblog? The difference is mainly in the images ownership. Only if you post your images on your own server, you can have absolute control over them, but if you post them on one of those online communities, the image is not yours anymore.

There are quite a few photoblogs systems and, although each one stands out from the competence for some particular function, there’s one that has lots of features and a great demand. This is WordPress Yapb. WordPress photoblog works perfectly well with Yapb. It provides additional data and functions to themes, so that you can turn any theme into a photoblog, without any additional coding.

Photo Q is another WordPress plugin that turns your blog into a photoblog. You can mass upload photos because Photo Q storages pictures and gives you the decision to manage how you want your pictures posted. You can even set up an interval for posts. It simplifies and automates your photo posting process.

You upload your picture, enter any desired information about the picture, and Photo Q generates an automatic post with this information. You don’t need to remember any special post formatting instructions. It is extensible to almost any WordPress theme and it even comes preset with some of the most popular WordPress photoblogs. It also includes EXIF support, watermarking, batch editing and different image sizes.

You can also have a WordPress photoblog with Pictorialis. It is an easy to use image publishing tool, easily customizable. It is an Open Source application and it means that it is completely free to use and modify. As it is licensed under the GPL, you will have to adhere to it. WordPress photoblog also benefits from many photoblog plugins.

Try to use the ones whose options aren’t confusing and which have the maximum compatibility and flexibility. They should be simple and easy to use. Among other functions, they can offer nice effects, a simple slideshow that shows random photos or an archive page for your pictures.

There are many PHP and Javascripts available to create photo galleries, such as the following:

• fMoblog – Upload and display images from your cell phone.
• Gallery 2 embedded in WordPress using the WPG2 Plugin
• GRAND Flash Album Gallery – multi category flash skin based photo gallery with powerful admin.
• CodEasily.com – Lazyest Gallery – Automatically includes galleries uploaded by ftp
• PhotoJAR – Adds numerous features to the built-in Wordpress gallery
• PhotoSmash Galleries – User contributable galleries that add images to the WordPress Media Gallery. More info at plugin homepage
• Page Flip Image Gallery – 90 day trialware–other versions require payment. GPL Version
• Piwigo with PiwigoMedia to insert photos in your posts and PiwigoPress to display thumbnails in your sidebar
• w3images gallery – add an useful and costumizable Images Gallery to your WordPress
• Zenphoto – +WP plugin

WordPress photoblog is the best option for designers, photographers, illustrators and anybody who likes to showcase interesting pictures online. WordPress is the best CMS platform and allows people to upload and publish photos with an easy to use interface, as well as visitors to comment on photos. You can now learn more about WordPress and photoblog with this interesting free video course -> WordPress Genius Lessons

Small Business Expert and Entrepreneur, Ann Blanch, has helped hundreds of businesses, authors and experts just like you to be anything but blah. For unbeatable, sure-fire ways to market your business fast, so you can build traffic, targeted leads and profits, visit ProsperityManual.com

Author: Ann Blanch
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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The about us section of Drupal.org, the official website of Drupal says “Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.” Today’s website owners and webmasters prefer the popular CMS technology to host their websites. Drupal is one of the pioneers in providing the technology to the web world.

Tens of thousands of people and organizations have started using Drupal because it is easy to host manage and maintain Drupal websites. Especially those who wish to update their content regularly without any complex jobs involved find Drupal an excellent technology. It is easy to find enhancements for Drupal all over the internet. Drupal has a robust frame and great security measures that can be beneficial for website owners.

There are a number of service providers that provide Drupal templates at affordable prices. A simple search in the internet can give you scores of web template providers competing for your order. A closer look at these websites will give you how cheap it is to obtain a Drupal template. Most web template providers offer a number of free stuff along with their templates. Some of them even provide you with a free hosting service for a limited time.

Earlier you had to purchase every website template for a huge sum, today the trends have changed and these web template providers offer memberships at a very low price with which you can access and download thousands of website templates including Drupal templates free of charge. However, if you are not familiar with coding, you will have to rely on the customization services provided by the vendors. Usually if you download a template from a particular website, they will offer attractive packages for customization too. If you like to compare prices and quality you have the freedom to choose your service provider.

There are also programmers available for hire that can customize your Drupal templates. If you aren’t good at programming you can avail the services of freelance programmers to modify or set up new functionalities to your website. While these programmers charge on hourly basis, you can also negotiate on per functionality basis. Once you are done, you will have a great performing website with the least of expenses.

There is yet another kind of Drupal service growing rapidly in the industry. This is about integrating Drupal themes of your choice to your website. You just have to design your theme and send it to service providers. They slice it and code it manually to suit your website. By this you can create your own Drupal theme within hours at unbelievable rates. You can locate these service providers in the internet by simply typing PSD to Drupal.

Next time you plan to host a website for your business, consider choosing Drupal as your web technology to gain an edge over your competitors. Since Drupal is one of the modern technologies it is easy to optimize your websites for search engines and make them rank well in search engines. After all targeted traffic and increase in sales is we expect by launching websites.

Neyaz is a professional content writer who specializes in writing content on various topic Web Development, Drupal Themes, SEO and Web Designing topics.

Neyaz
http://www.varshyltech.com

Author: Neyaz Ashraf

It is becoming a lot more easier to create content for your website nowadays especially if you are using the WordPress Content Management System (CMS). This article will share with you how you can start to create content for your WordPress site in a few steps.

After you have installed the WordPress on your server, you are now ready to create some content for your site. In this article, I will share how exactly you can create a website with pages. In WordPress, you only need to know how to create pages if you are creating a pure website. On the other hand, if you want to create a blog, you will need to know how to create blog posts (which won’t be covered in this article).

Once you have logged in to your WordPress dashboard, click on the pages menu on the left and you will see the add new pages option. Select the add new pages option and you will be presented a page where you can start to create content for you site. You can see that WordPress is a very user-friendly software that allows you to create any type of content easily such as text, images and even videos.

With the help of the visual editor, you can start typing the text and uploading relevant images that you want to show on your site. Just a few suggestions here when you want to create content, always use at least one image per page for your website. Web page that make up with only words are boring and tends to make visitors leave. Some visual aids like images or video would be helpful to keep your visitors in your site.

Once you have typed in all your content for a page, you can simply click the Publish button on the right to activate the page.

There are some options you can do before you publish the page as well. One of the options is you can decide what template you want to use for that particular page, do you want to have the side bar with this page? If no, you can select the option – One column, no sidebar under the template option. Another option is you can disable the comments section. This is particularly useful if you do not want people to comment on your pages (which is most of the time).

To conclude, creating content for your WordPress site is very easy and often takes more time to plan than execute. Once you know what are the pages you want to create for your site, it is very easy to use WordPress for the creation.

Tan KC is a WordPress Coach in Singapore who conducts regular WordPress blogging workshop. You can also learn how to create a blog over at KC’s website.

Author: Tan KC

If you’re a graphic designer that has created a beautiful design that needs to be converted into a WordPress themes, you have several options from hiring out a specialist, using an automated service or doing it yourself. Let’s look at the first option.

Hiring out a specialist is the first possibility and you can expect to pay anywhere from $100 to $200 (or more) to get someone familiar with WordPress to convert your design into a template. One thing you should make sure is absolutely clear is whether they’re creating a WordPress 3 series template or not. This series has several new features that is essential for your clients to get the most out of this CMS. Namely, menus and widgets. The WP 3 menu system is VERY easy to use and sidebar widgets are an essential function. But not all conversion specialists guarantee they’re making WP 3 compatible templates, so make sure they do before choosing them to do the conversion.

A second option which may be more usable down the road is a service called Divine. They get a very high StumbleUpon rating which is a fairly good sign it’s a usable service. (I haven’t tried their service, nor am I in any way affiliated with them.) They appear to be in Beta mode, so not all functions will be working as of this writing. There also seems to be a major limitation with their graphic output — all images are exported to GIF format which could result in some very large image files, depending on your design. Even though most people use broadband at home these days, more and more people are connecting via remote connections (phones, iPads) so having a fast download is still essential. If your design is simple this shouldn’t be a problem. But if your design has a lot of textures or photo elements, the download time will be considerable.

The last option is to do it yourself. If you have any experience with Cascading Style Sheets, doing a PSD to WordPress conversion can be a lot of fun! It can also be a bit nerve-wracking trying to find the exact style affecting your design element, but if you use the Firebug extension for Firefox you can usually find the style fast. As someone with more of a design background, I’ve come to love customizing templates for WordPress. The key thing is to find a free template in the WordPress directory that is very close, then make your changes with it, instead of trying to build a template from scratch (which is only something programmers should attempt).

The author runs a company that offers free WordPress training and develops affordable websites to help people get a website up and running fast.

Author: Peter J Harris
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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