With so much time spent engaging electronically, people are becoming increasingly visual—but far less attentive. As a small business owner, this must influence the way you communicate with your customers. Your message is no longer enough; it needs to be delivered in a dazzling and delightful manner. That’s where professional graphic design can help. The right designer or design agency can take...


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We first began working with Joann Mercer while she was using a free WordPress.com blog. At first, her concerns were more structural (e.g. when should she use "tags" vs. "categories," and how should her site be organized?). We conducted several training sessions to get her comfortable with the WordPress dashboard, so that she could begin providing a steady stream of updates to her subscribers. Within...


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This post is a VERY IMPORTANT read for anyone who administers a facebook fan page for your business or brand! If you haven't heard already, facebook announced last week that the Timeline layout - which has been an optional update to a facebook user's personal profile for some time now - will be pushed to all facebook business pages (fan pages) at the end of this month. When we previewed some of our client...


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Through our partnership with WordPress Help Live, I've personally had the pleasure of working with Dr. Marvin Sadovsky when he needed some help getting started with his WordPress site. In the offline world, he was already a well-respected author and sought-after speaker in his management consulting field. In the online world, he'd experimented with a few other Content Management Systems (CMS) but decided...


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When creating a website or a blog for the first time, one of the first questions to answer is whether to go with a free blogging service such as WordPress.com, Blogger, or Tumblr, or a self-hosted Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress.org, Joomla!, or Drupal. There are pros and cons to each option, and your choice should depend on several factors, discussed in detail below. I will start...


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Using Google AdWords to run your online advertising campaign appears to be easy enough. Just create your account, set your budget, create your ads, select keywords that match your ads to potential customers – and off you go. The advantages are many, not the least of which are the ability to target your ads to very specific locations and customer interests, the flexibility Google AdWords allows to change,...


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We began working with Ms. Miller in July as she was starting nearly from scratch with a new business idea and little more than a domain name registered with WordPress.com. Her site's content, brand identity, and marketing ideas were in draft form or buried inside her own head. It was a pleasure to work with Ms. Miller from such an early phase and, within five weeks, to launch a full-fledged website...


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I laughed out loud when I read that heading in the article I'm about to share with you, and you will too after you know what a "bleed" is in the context of the printing industry. As a business owner working on a print project, terms like "bleed," "safe zone," and "trim area," sound a bit foreign. Reading the following article will help explain some of the industry jargon so that you can communicate...


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This tutorial was made for Charlie's Nursery and Garden Center by Amy Pospiech. I'm going to explain how you can easily change the header image of your sub-pages based on a feature that I have custom-coded into your WordPress theme template. I'll first take you through the image creation and uploading steps, and then I'll show you how to make the one change within WordPress itself so that it'll...


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Color theory includes elements of art, science, and psychology. In this post, we will whittle it all down to a few points that will be relevant to your new brand or re-branding efforts for your business, but the underlying theme is that color creates meaning, and it should be used with purpose and intention. Selecting the Right Color(s) for Your Brand Identity First of all, you want to make sure...


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