I am working on making this site more up to date with look and feel. Of course it will still beon WordPress. Just revamping the look. Hopefully it will be completed by this weekend.

I can’t stress more on having a wordpress site. Looking at my blog stats I have watched my traffic grow so much. All the stats can be viewed with a few clicks. You know

• Where your visitor came from
• What keyword they used
• Who refered you
• Which pages they visited
• You can endlessly tweak your content to suit your visitors.

You can update and add content in a few clicks as well. And when I am traveling I still update my site.

What more can you ask for? So those of you that have a HTML site and want to change it to WordPress and see some quick traffic and conversions contact me for a quote.

I am in the process of updating a Wordpress manual I created a while ago. Hopefully I will finish it in a week or so. The manual is a couple of versions behind now.

The purpose of the manual is to help people quickly put up a simple self hosted wordpress site. This can be just for your blog or it can be a full fledged small business site or an affiliate site.

In the Wordpress Manual I will teach you how to

• Find a good hosting company to host your WordPress site
• Install WordPress on your hosting account.
• Upload a WordPress Theme (or template)
• Resources of where you can get free themes
• Custom themes
• Must have plug ins
• Writing copy
• Uploading files to remote server
• Inserting images
• embedding videos

And much more….

I will be asking a small price for this manual as I have put in many hours of work.  At a later stage I would like to set up a forum where people who have the manual can discuss the problems they face or solutions etc.

If you feel you are technically savvy enought to setup WorPress and build a website this manual will make it really easy with detailed screenshots and step-by-step guidance.

Watch this space.

I see a lot of searches in my stats with names of cities other than where I live (wellington). I have local clients and clients all over New Zealand.

With email and skype or phone it is so easy to get what you want these days. I have not met most of my customers face-to-face. They usually find me on Google and email me what thery want. I reply to them within a day. Then :-

• We narrow down the specs
• I give a quote
• They tell me if they are happy or not
• I request them to work on the content and images etc
• I start work on the look and feel
• I train them to use the CMS
• They start using the CMS to tweak copy and images

This process is so easy as they get access to the website on my server at once. All they do is log in and make changes. I also teach them to FTP files. They upload the images or PDF documents. How easy is that?

So yeah I do not have to be local to design your website and get it up and running!
Contact Me to get your website with CMS up and running in not time!

Industry watchers predict that overall online ad spending will increase by about 3 percent for the next two years, for a total of about $29.1 billion in 2010. The growth is being driven by search engine advertising (especially pay-per-click), which is expected to jump 13 percent by 2010.

Also growing rapidly is “Web 2.0? advertising (on video and social networks), though it represents only a small portion of the market because advertisers are still grappling with the formats. It is expected to increase by 20 percent – to $1.4 billion – by 2010.

As a small business you need to tap into this kind of marketing to get more revenue. Most of my website traffic comes from the Web 2.0. type writing posts, distributing the posts and having my signature in forum posting etc. This is free but takes a litte effort.

I also use Google adwords to drive traffic to my websites.

So if you want to go the Web 2.0 way I recommend you get your website updated to a one with content management system. I can set one up for you in a few days and can show you how to blog about your business and and tips on optimising your site for Search Engines.

Contact me for your wordpress site and see your traffic grow fast!

Search Engines love wordpress website. Must be the way they are structured and the way you can popularise them.

What you can do with WordPress Sites:-

1. Can be a normal site
2. Can have a blog
3. Can set up RSS feeds to popularise your site
4. Can have plugin to create tags for your content. (These act like signposts for Search Engines)
5. Add content regularly through posts in your blog or articles.
6. Add pictures, embed videos easily
7. Check your traffic stats regularly and tweak your content and posts accordingly
8. Add book mark buttons
9. Add social bookmark buttons (your visitors can bookmark you easily)
10. Set up directory pings. (this kind of blasts your posts to about 200 news aggregators – kind of news broadcasters

Best things is you can do this all so easily once the site is set up.

It is much easier to get traffic fast to your site with WorPress running at the back. Doesn’t this sound ezy peazy?

Contact me to setup your wordpress site. It can be done in a couple of days! And see the difference.

I read a very interesting article today on the BBC website.

The article traced the advent of Internet and how it has grown with a huge impact on the global population. We do banking, shopping, learn, interact with family and friends through the Internet.
Take me for example, I don’t think I can live without the Internet. I make my living because of the Internet- building websites. I learn all sorts of things from financial matters to craft with the help of sites like Youtube. (could not live without Youtube). I keep in touch with family and friends all over the world skyping and through FaceBook. I know a lot more about what is happening in their lives now. I twitter, blog, linkedin plaxo and a whole lot of other stuff for business.

The article states
“The implications of the rapid penetration of the internet are staggering. If current industry estimates prove correct, there will be 1.5 billion new internet users in the next two to three years – just over double the number of current users.” WOW!
The introduction of Internet Protocol (IP) version 6 into common usage means that the address space available to connect devices to the net is growing from 4.2 billion with IPv4 to 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses. With pervasive wireless connectivity, this means everything can talk to everything. (How about that)
Think of the opportunities that will be available! Staggering. You can sell, buy, download, learn, connect even more. You can make a lot of money if you play your cards correctly.

The article goes on to say
“The internet has proven to be a deeply transformative technology in the developed world, as so it will be for the developing world.
It will be an economically important tool that will provide a mechanism for the development of new business models, previously unknown ways connecting people and communities, new possibilities for the delivery of services, and a feedback loop for the population.”
So true Internet transformed me. I have managed to learn stuff that would have taken me years to access in a library in a few weeks/days. So think about this – do some brainstorming, find out what you are passionate about- create a business out of it, Slowly build it up and you can retire sooner!
Someone searched for wordpress ready sites in my stats today. Once you have an idea contact me and I can whip up a wordpress site for you in a jiffy for a reasonable price.

I realised this morning I have not posted for a while. The reason being – busy building websites and driving traffic to my own sites.

A friend of mine is starting a business. She is not very computer lierate and is not very comfortable using computers.  She came to me and said “  I am starting this business. It needs a website.  I don’t even know how to send an email though”. ( She had just bought her first computer that day).

My reply was “Not a problem. I will get you a simple website that will be a marketing tool for you. I will also teach you how to update your site. You can even have a blog on your site if you want to. ”

I installed wordpress on site and am in the process of building the site. I will give a manual that will walk her through the steps in a simple manner with lots of screenshots. I will train her over the phone as well. I am very confident she will be updating her site in no time!

The reason being Worpress is so easy to use.I have trained people who knew only to switch on their computers. I have met many small business owners who get penalised by Google as nothing has been done to the website in the past 8-10 years.

• Are you a small business with an outdated website?
• Don’t know who to approach to update your website?
• Stuck with content that is no longer useful to your customers?

Contact me and I can set up your wordpress website for a very reasonable amount in a very short time. I will give it a professional look and feel install all the necessary plug ins and train you to update the site in no time!

give me a call 64 4 477 2135

There is a lot of searches for the keywords in my title. Yes I see them at least twice a week on my blog stats.

I suddenly realized the power of that plug in. It tells you where your visitor came from, what link they clicked and what keyword they used to find you! What else do you need?

If you are a small business you need to keep your content updated and fresh to make Google happy. Here is a list of things to do to make Google happy

• More than one page. More like 5-7 pages(the more the better).
• Unique content.
• Fresh content added on the site regularly.
• Adding content regularly helps websites rank well in the search engines and in turn improves your PPC quality score.
• The content needs to be written for humans but also optimized for certain keywords.
• A website with a blog. Google loves blogs. Google has a separate search facility just for blogs. www.blogsearch.google.com
• People read posts and leave comments. This helps your website rank better for relevant keywords.
• Readers will subscribe to your feeds. (Feeds are like newsletters).
• Other blogs will link to your posts. Inbound links is loved by Google.
• A good Goggle compliant xml sitemap.
• Each page optimized for titles, headers and sub headers. (Helps Google find you easier
• Each page optimized with tags – These are like signposts for search engines.
• Privacy, disclosure policy at the bottom

Wordpress as a CMS for business does all the above. I can provide a website that is compliant with all the above points. contact me for more information.

In my last post I talked about spam comments in blogs and how to stop them. I found out my Akismet (spam catcher plugin) got uninstalled for some reason. And that is why the spam was just pouring in.

I uploaded the plugin again and installed. And guess what in the past 2 days Akismet stopped about 30 spam comments! Phew I love that plugin. So if you have a blog and getting a lot of spam comments. Download Akismet.

These days Akismet comes pre installed in WordPress. All you have to do is to register at Wordpress. You will be given an API key. all you have to do is to enter the API key and your Akismet plugin is activated.

Another fantastic plugin is Blog Stats. It is so detailed in giving you where your traffic is coming from how they are searching for you etc. I just love it. The keywords are given to you on a platter. Then all you do is go and write a post or tweak your page accordingly.

Download Blog Stats from WordPress.

You will need your API key for this as well. Happy blogging.

A few days ago I wrote about using WordPress as a content management system. I shifted to WordPress from HTML for pixels because of the plus points given below:

• To integrate a blog into my site
• To update & add articles regularly into my site
• To access it from anywhere (HTML site I need laptop & Dream weaver, filezilla etc)
• WordPress has an inbuilt pinging facility – like a broadcasting facility
• I can comment about someone else’s post in my blog and it will be picked up by the other person’s blog.
• There is a facility for my readers to post comments. The feedback loop is in place.
• in no time I can  add pages, images etc.
• I can set up feeds. Again this broadcasts to the world when I post something new.

How much better can this get?  I have been designing websites for the past five years. Even for someone like me WordPress is so easy to use and has made my life much easier.

So if you are a novice, just think how easy it can be for you. The interface is so easy to use.

• If you can type you can update your website.
• You can blog and get more traffic to your site.
• Get ranked better as Google loves updated content.

WordPress can be used to create a niche site like pixels. It is great as platform to build static site. Don’t think that it is for blogging only. Whatever the size of your site big or small you can use WordPress as the content management system. The plus points are too compelling.