CAKE Web Services Blog

One of the best enhancements we can make to a business website is an active blog.  A separate and distinct “sub site” that allows you and your team to rapidly publish your expertise to the web.  We have found the best results separating the blog from the main website, which contains more static content.  Of course the two sites are linked together, so as your blog content drives traffic, your main website (and your conversion rate) benefits.  The more active and dynamic nature of the blog will encourage user interaction, sharing and return visits.  The fact that you can have it separate (but connected) from your “static” website means you can rapidly deploy a blog, without having to completely overhaul your current website.

So why blog??  Content!  Establishing your expertise will drive more traffic and business to your website.  Content is the fuel for your online marketing efforts, both with your potential customers and the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.  It just happens that the same thing which elevates your ranking with human website visitors, also elevates your search rankings.  If you don’t need to market your business and reach out to your customers, you can stop reading here. Read more…

If you’re new to blogging and WordPress, you might be struggling to customize your blog or find more ways for your sparks of genius (aka blog posts) to be found.  Below is a short list of must-have plugins we use on self-hosted WordPress installations.

The plugins listed below assume that you do want your blog to be found.  They also assume you have started a couple services that help you “push” your blog out to the world:

• Twitter:  A feed for everyone!
• Bit.ly:  Twitter posts are short by design.  When your blog “pushes” a link to your Twitter account, you don’t want your new Tweet to get overwhelmed by the blog link’s URL.  Unless you use another URL shortener service, signup for Bit.ly’s free account.  They’ll issue you a special API key to enter into the plugins that work with their URL shortening service.  Add click tracking to that and Bit.ly is a must have!
• Google Feedburner:  Both Twitter and Feedburner are essential tools to help you widen your circle of influence and “push” updates to followers.  They’re both free and very easy to set up.  Google’s Feedburner service even has an email subscription service that will allow you to place “Subscribe” links on your blog and/or website, then subscribers can receive automatic email updates every time you post something new to your blog. Read more…

One of the most frequent challenges we face with clients is what I’ll refer to as “furniture moving”.  All the cosmetic little tweaks that are important, but also take time and resources from SEO and visitor conversion work.  The logo the needs to be 4% bigger, the new photo of the company president that looks almost exactly like the current photo but MUST be replaced before moving forward, or the website design they sweated over 3 years ago and are reluctant to change, even though it’s not ranked well with search engines and doesn’t convert the few visitors that find the site by mistake.

The best looking website in the world won’t achieve your business objectives if it can’t be found and doesn’t effectively “funnel” visitors into taking action with a purchase, a phone call, form submission, or even a Twitter follow.  If the website doesn’t help you move the ball forward, all you’ve done is build a static piece of corporate vanity to place up on a shelf and be admired.  Like the emperor’s new cloths, everyone you ask will tell you how fantastic your new piece of art looks…  Except for paying customers. Read more…

Anyone who’s ever used Joomla has noticed sometimes it’s difficult to properly place a Joomla module in its position. Sometimes the module order for a given position seems orderly, and sometimes there are numerous modules all assigned the number “0″ (that’s ZERO), closely followed by one each in the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, etc… positions.

That’s not a big deal, until you try to re-arrange the module order.  Try changing the order on a “zero” Joomla module and you’ll find the finished results on your website front end don’t always match the order you need. Read more…