When she came to me she already had a website for her company, Creative Expeditions, but wanted to add a blog where she could provide both a great resource for her existing clients and attract new clients by showcasing her ideas and ways of working. Making changes to her core website was not easy so an add-on blog seemed like the best solution.

Adding a WordPress blog appealed to Inge because

1. she had read how websites which have regularly added fresh content are favoured by search engines who keep revisiting to catalogue the new additions and
2. she needed a section of her website that had an easy-to navigate content management system so she could quickly add and change content for her current and future clients to access.

The challenge for me as a website builder was to match the blog section “Focus and Flow” to an already existing website.

Inge's original website

First I installed the WordPress blog in a folder called “blog” on Inge’s existing website host server and Inge placed a link from her core website to the add-on.

Inge chose a simple theme – in this case, Who’s Who from Elegant Themes. I then set about changing the colours, fonts and other elements to match her existing website as closely as possible.

This is how the template looked before I monkeyed around with it.

There was a lot of code-fiddling and many questions posted on the Elegant Themes support forum to get this theme to work in exactly the way we wanted it to. Eventually we came up with something that integrated nicely with the other part of Inge’s website. Since Inge is trained in graphic design she was very specific about what she wanted the blog to look like and where she wanted the elements to be positioned. It’s great when someone knows exactly what they want – it makes the end result so much more satisfying when you get it right.

Inge's blog: Focus and Flow

Inge’s blog “Focus and Flow” is a wealth of great tips and resources, not just for use in the corporate environment but also for anyone with a drop of creative juice in their bodies. If you’re stuck for ideas, need some inspiration or triggers for that next direction in your work, check out Focus and Flow.

Add-on Blog is a post from: Kvetchco Inc. - delicious websites for all

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Click on the player below to see WordPress.tv’s short video explaining the new features of this latest version of the WordPress software.

I especially like the new help access and the very neat menu manipulation features.

Make sure you upgrade to the latest version by clicking the link when it appears in your Dashboard. Gold and Platinum clients can watch a video on how to upgrade their version of WordPress and their plugins here. If you have forgotten your password please contact me.

WordPress 3.0 is released! is a post from: Kvetchco Inc. - delicious websites for all

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Last night I was in a bad mood (I was filming a commercial all day Monday and so yesterday I had post-performance blues) and instead of eating my own body-weight in Cheetos I decided to do something practical – revamp my personal website.

I’d been feeling for a while as if my website looked a bit cluttered and, well, purple. Now don’t get me wrong – I love purple (half my wardrobe is purple), but I was kind of tired of it overwhelming my blog.

PURPLE! THIS WEBSITE IS PURPLE!

I wanted something cleaner, quieter and well, just different! It was time for a change and luckily for me with Elegant Themes I can download and install as many different themes as I want on as many of my websites as I choose for only $20 a year. Bargain!

Sleek and clean - me likey.

I chose the PersonalPress theme (a fairly new one from Elegant Themes) – Nick has gone back to basics to create a theme for an upfront blog instead of a the more static designs he’s favoured recently. PersonalPress is designed to be used with WordPress 3.0 (which is still being Beta tested) so I manually installed 3.0 in order to use all of the features. I like how the pages have taglines created in the new WordPress menu options.

Disembodied head - nice.

I had to re-colour my tagcloud widget and the next job is re-colouring my table that I use for my resume. But I managed to get a lot done last night and am rather pleased with the results. What do you think?

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I first came across the Authority Black Book last year and tore through it. I’ll be brutally honest with you – for the first time ever I really and truly got to grips with social marketing and understood how to build traffic to my website using strategies I never knew existed.

I highly recommend that anyone who’s interested in understanding what all those terms at the top of this article mean download a copy and start learning how to make their website into an authority presence.

This book really is a free resource and doesn’t come with strings attached – you can sign up for a monthly subscription to a whole gigantic website full of information at Blog Success, but if I were you I would just get your head around the Authority Black Book first! Click here to download the book.

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There’s nothing better than getting a referral from a happy customer. And I’d like to reward that happy customer for talking up my business and bringing me new clients – after all, nothing sells better than a testimonial!

As a way of saying “Thank you” to all of my customers I am thrilled to announce the Kvetchco Inc. Customer Reward Program. Any of my past or current clients who refer a third party to me for a website will now be awarded $100 CDN when that third party becomes a Platinum client. Just be sure to let me know if a friend, relation or colleague is getting in touch with me! All monies will be paid via PayPal, minus any applicable fees.

There’s no better time to become a website client – experience for yourself how great my products and services are and then refer your friends – you could end up getting your website for free!

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The PURE System of Personality Typing is a program I developed following ten years of experience in the corporate training world. Three years ago I recorded a comprehensive set of training CDs and along with a 100-page workbook I had a pretty nice product. It was designed to appeal to small business owners who can’t afford thousands of dollars for a training company to come in and overhaul their business communications.

At that time I was heavily involved in local business groups and sales were good. Then my circumstances changed as my acting work really took off and the PURE System took a back seat.

A couple of weeks ago a woman who had seen one of my presentations got in touch with me requesting a copy of the system. I suddenly realized I had a potential goldmine on my hands and couldn’t believe I hadn’t built a proper website to promote something I’d put so much work into. After all, it only cost me the price of a domain name from GoDaddy – my business package hosting from Hostgator allows me unlimited domains hosted on one account (and also unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space) – what was I waiting for?

I got really excited when I took a fresh look at the latest templates from Elegant Themes – Nick’s newest offering (at the time of writing) was absolutely perfect!

The MyProduct theme is designed for businesses looking to showcase their products and services. It has a great feature where you can upload pictures of your products that visitors can scroll through using a series of buttons. You can describe your product features in the tabbed area under the header and outline your services in the four sections below the tabbed section.

A blog is easy to add and I will be doing this in the near future with hints and tips on using the PURE System in domestic and business situations. Looking further ahead, when I have sold all of my physical products, I will be uploading the audio files and offering the system as a subscription service with password-protected areas accessible only by those whose subscriptions are current.

I’m excited to have revived a business model I’d put on the back burner. It only took me a few days to build the site using all of the material that I’d written a few years ago and it only cost me ten bucks to buy the domain name. Elegant Themes had the perfect look and feel for my site and I’m thrilled with how it turned out. What small business idea do you have that could be revived by a gorgeous-looking website?

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A familiar face on the Toronto performance scene, Jeff has many strings to his bow and a few places of his own on the internet already. But what he really needed was a grown-up site that showcased his performance life.

Jeff took a look at websites that I have put together already and at the Elegant Themes website for an idea of what kind of structure and design would fit his new site.

The scrolling boxes were a bit too busy for Jeff

He rather liked the look of The Seahorse Shop, but instead of the scrolling top box with Random Posts, Comments and Lifestream plugin he wanted a Featured Articles slider.

The featured articles slider - a quieter alternative

This way Jeff has more control over the content his visitors see first “before the fold”.

The events calendar and sidebar widget

Another feature Jeff chose was the Calendar plugin which comes complete with an Upcoming Events sidebar widget. A great option for performers who want to let their visitors know when their next show, concert or gig is coming up.

Bad widget!

When I first installed the plugin I had a problem with the widget sitting nicely in the sidebar. The title bar was sticking out and I couldn’t figure out how to make it appear flush with the right-hand side of sidebar. Luckily one quick post on the Elegant Themes support forum was all it took to sort it out – within a couple of hours one of the moderators replied with a bit of code that fixed the problem right away. This is one of the reasons I recommend Elegant Themes to all of my clients – their themes are delicious and their support is second-to-none. I am able to tweak and adjust templates to suit my clients quickly and easily with the help of the technical geniuses at Elegant Themes.

WPAudio - a great little plugin

Being a spoken word artist Jeff needed to have examples of his work on the site and so he uploaded some mp3 files to the server. However, the links for the files opened up another page with a dull, grey player on it. I installed the plugin WPAudio MP3 Player which automatically creates cute little players in the page without opening up a new page.

I’m really pleased with the way Jeff’s page turned out. It draws all of his performance work into a professional-looking web presence where friends and fans can track his upcoming appearances.

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Normally when consulting with a new client with quite different interests that they want to showcase on a website I advise them to break the topics up into two or perhaps three sites, but Victoria’s blogging voice is so strong and the subjects of her blog so integrated that in this case I decided that we should keep everything together.

When she asked me to build a website for her she already had a blog but wanted something a little more sophisticated and better-looking. Here’s what her old blog looked like:

WordPress has an excellent feature allowing you to import a blog from somewhere else so Victoria’s is the first website I’ve built where the bulk of the content was already created – all I had to do was ask WordPress to grab it from Blogger. It took about twenty minutes to populate Victoria’s new site with all of her blog posts. More time-consuming was optimizing all of Victoria’s pictures to look their best in the new website using the thumbnail feature of the Glow theme from Elegant Themes.

I built a montage of images using Photoshop to add to the header and showcase the different themes of Victoria’s site:

and made the image translucent so that the stars from the original Glow theme header would still shine through. I think the Glow theme in green is a great choice for this site and I enjoyed matching up the Twitter widget to complement the gorgeous colour. Compare Victoria’s website to Hoot ‘n Annie’s who have the same theme but in red.

I’m really pleased with how the website turned out – it’s visually very striking and fits Victoria’s personality and subject matter extremely well. If you’re a single parent, cooking enthusiast or environmentalist why not sign up for her blog updates by email? Simply go to Victoria’s website and enter your email address into the Feedburner widget in the sidebar.

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Dave’s original site, DaveSchneider.co.uk, celebrates David’s work as an actor, writer and comedian and is very blog-driven. With a huge Twitter following (of nearly 25,000 at the time of writing) it’s important to have his tweets prominently displayed. The emphasis is on constantly changing content with a lot of video on the blog and topical tweets in the sidebar.

2ActWrite - a traditional, static site

Wulfnoth - a family history structured around a blog

By way of contrast his second website is more of a traditional, static site showcasing the personal coaching services offered by his company, 2 Act Write, to writers and performers.

He chose the same same theme as Bob Woolner’s family history site – ColdStone from Elegant Themes – but since he is not using the theme as a blog it looks and behaves quite differently.

2ActWrite.com is simply comprised of a handful of static pages with a couple of external links to Dave’s personal website and Sandy’s resume. Its clean, uncluttered design presents core information clearly and consisely without any extraneous bells and whistles to distract from the business message.

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