Some businesses provide quality products and services but because they do not display these the best way possible on their websites, they lose out on so many prospects and leads that visit their plain unattractive websites.  Sometimes they will rather explain with long lists and bullets, their great quality of work and why you should consider their services.  Why not let an impactful photo portfolio display do all the work for you much more effectively?

At Heatherstone, we accomplished such a feat with a previous client “First Impression Hardscapes”.  If you take a look at their website, you will notice that before any additional clicks, you already can visualize their work quality and testimonials of previous clients.  You are probably almost sold before doing anything else after landing on the home page.

When you have an occupation or business in fields like photography, interior designing, event planning or painting …that can possibly provide you with a great portfolio of your work, it is best to use the most attractive and effective website themes to display your talent.

A HUGE tip, invest in great professional photography of your services because low quality or low grade photography could end up hurting rather than helping in this case of home page  portfolio displays.

You want visitors, who in most cases could be leads to become new customers, to immediately see your great quality work and be mesmerized to your attention to detail and delivery of high quality service or product.  You want them to be immediately impacted by the great photography of your portfolio in sliding widgets, flash banners, interactive slideshows that could display each previous work and its details.

A well customized home page with such imagery is very effective to marketing your business and can increase phone call or email inquiries dramatically because your visitors have seen your high quality standards of delivery without any additional clicks through your website.

Image Source - Designzzz

A website theme that could accomplish such goals through its design is the “Exposure” WOO theme on woothemes.com.

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within this theme:

• A hugely unique completely widgetized home page, where you can set exactly what posts you want to display, as each post is a widget.
• Incredible post image gallery management, with options to display your images in a post in a variety of ways, including small/medium/big thumbnails using javascript scrollers
• Layout control of your imagery in the archive, attachment and single pages, with a custom settings panel in each post to overwrite these controls with post-specific layouts
• A dedicated blog section to your site, accessible via the navigation with it’s own template to display blog posts differently to photo posts
• Banner ad management via the theme option’s panel
• 22 delicious alternate color schemes to choose from and select in the theme option’s panel

Contact us at Heatherstone and we will advise and guide you through selecting and designing your next website to fit your company.  Just like we did for First Impression Hardscapes, we will make sure your design increases the impact that leads to a quicker sale for your business.

Call Aaron at

1.888.716.1521

or

overton@heatherstone.com

for assistance with your next website design

Medical practitioners like physicians and dentists
As a business with the eventual goal of phone call inquiries and setting medical appointments, you want to circle the attention of every visitor to end up making a phone call or setting up a medical appointment. Using the right placement of text content and website features could accomplish a website that works for your business and grows your bottom line.

Your website should:

• have customizable submission forms for customers to easily schedule appointments and receive confirmations via emails or provide your office staff information to call each lead.
• interactive widgets linking social network profiles to website display contact information easily on all pages of the website provide medical advice to engage visitors and increase their loyalty to your service and the ability to push medical content to all other online social web profiles

News and media professionals – The Journalist
As a journalist, your blog must have the ability to display your professional profile in a customized and interactive interface. You should also have the ability to:

• Stream news feeds and headlines in a banner that are of interest to your readers and visitors
• Display video and pictures of occurring and occurred worldwide events
• Support online advertising through widgets and more
• Have the ability for viewers to easily submit news links, images and videos

It is also necessary for easier access to categorize articles into sub-headings like business, world, finance, sports, entertainment, and music. Headlines are also necessary and a vital key that immediately hooks the viewer. Take a look at the woo theme “Editorial” and see
how the customizable homepage, featured post slider, recent news module among other features accomplish this goal.

Photo Credit - BusinessSuccessGoals.com

The Author – Personal brand
An author can increase interest in his blog by having a great profile with personal details either on the customizable home page or on the interactive slider widgets.  As a personality brand, you should:

• Implement customizable widgets that could keep visitors busy interacting with your brand and message throughout your website.
• Grant them the ability to share and further distribute your website content increases your search engine optimization
• Connect social content from other websites and profiles of the personality are great features that could be used to make visitors interact with the personality’s brand
• Never hold back on adding additional features and plug ins that give an extra interactive look and feel to your overall brand

Take a look at the “Chapters” woo theme and see how this creatively keeps visitors engaged easily with its graphical book style theme, post bookmark, custom typography and post navigation.

Every profession has its suitable website theme with features, plugins, widgets and customizable typography that could fit your business. When used effectively, this could make your website work for you instead of you just working on your website and getting no leads or results for your bottom line.

For further inquiry to website design and development direction for your busines and company or individuality, contact Aaron via email overton@heatherstone.com or phone by calling 425-301-2423.

For the Inattentive Site Owner

The first thing to consider is the time you have to devote to adding content. If you pick a very “bloggy” style for your site, push out your first three articles, then never touch it again as your day-to-day work catches up with you, you’ll do your business a disservice.  If thinking about adding content to your site leaves you cold and you’re not prepared to hire someone to do the work for you, you will want to minimize the parts of the website dedicated to articles or blog posts or news releases. As big fans of Woo Themes you should be considering those labeled as “Business” themes, like Empire, as that’s exactly what they do.

For the Highly Visual Product

Some businesses have a visually intense product or service where pictures really sell.  Photographers and graphic designers are the obvious examples, but kitchen remodelers, landscapers, event planners, and car dealerships are all going to benefit from a lot of pictures. Seeking out a theme that is dominated by images will serve such business best, though those images should allow visitors to click through to landing pages with text so you still get the benefits of search engine optimization. Looking again to Woo Themes, consider the “Portfolio” themes, like Aperture, when looking to create a high impact, visually compelling site.

For the Subject Matter Expert

Are you a public speaker, author, consultant, agent, broker, or other professional that’s basically selling access to your big brain? If you can share that expertise, you’ll show off your smarts rather than just tell people about it. It takes a commitment to producing new content on a regular basis, though you’d be surprised how well a non-expert can monitor relevant news and write on your behalf. (At Heatherstone, yes, we do that.) To really highlight your knowledge and build credibility, an article-driven theme is just what you need. Woo Themes offers “Magazine” and “Personal” themes, like Gazette, that can be perfect for that kind of marketing.

Dig Deeper, Learn More

Over the next few weeks, we’ll dig in deeper on this subject and take a closer look at each of the above general classifications of themes, discussing the benefits and features of each and how they apply to the right business.

We’re also happy to have a discussion with you directly about your specific circumstances, so email Aaron Overton at overton@heatherstone.com or call him at 425.301.2423 and get some thoughtful insight and clear suggestions on what you can do to build your bottom line, online.

Are you website analytics showing website visitors without giving any results? Learn how to turn random online travelers into loyal customers with our slideshow.

Need more help? Contact yvette@heatherstone.com or call 888.716.1521

What kind of theme should my WordPress use? What can WordPress plugins do and do I need them? What types of widgets are available for WordPress? How should content be posted on WordPress? Want to know the answers? See our slideshow.

Need more help? Contact yvette@heatherstone.com or call 888.716.1521

For our Thinkspinner Innovation site, though, we needed each event to have it’s own booking form, since we’re using Guest List.  The same would be true if you were using EventBrite or some other external ticketing or registration tool.

Digging into the theme, it turns out to be not that hard to add this as an option.  My hope, of course, is that when I bring this solution to the attention of the Woo Theme team, they will update Diarise to include this option.

There are three files in the theme that need update to support the change. First, we need to make the option available in the Theme Options | Booking Form section.

Open the file includes/theme-options.php and change line 33 to this:

That gives us a fourth radio button to select that activates the option.  Next we need to be able to provide that URL in the post, which means updating the Woo options box in the post.  Still in includes/theme-options.php, add the following code, starting on line 558:

Save and close that file.  You can now go to an event post and within that box provide the URL for your external booking form specific to that event.

Next, there are two places where we need to update the display – on the home page in the featured events area and in the header on the event’s own post display.  In both places, there’s a button “Book Tickets” that should go to the newly specified URL.

For the home page, open includes/events-calendar.php.  You’ll be replacing lines 716-718 of that file:

Delete that code and replace it with this instead:

Save and close that file. We also have to update the event page itself, so open single.php. Delete lines 91-93 of that file, which are the same three lines as appear in events-calendar.php as shown above, and replace them with the same block of code I just shared with you.

Check it out.

First, drop this code into includes/theme-functions.php just before the ?> that ends the PHP statements:

Now that you’ve done that, on a page used as a slider, instead of the HTML mentioned in the theme documentation, use a shortcode, which you can place whether you’re in visual view or HTML view.

By default, use this:

That’s not very interesting, though, because the URL is simple “#” and the button’s label is “Label”. It’s good enough, though, if you’re just fleshing out the look of the site.

For a single button, use this:

That will create a button that will go the page with the slug “try” (that is, like http://www.example.com/try) and the button will have Try Now on it.

For multiple buttons, it gets slightly more complicated, but is still easier than the HTML. Here’s how you put two:

The shortcode uses the pipe symbol (|) as a delimiter. So the above gets you two buttons. The first goes to /try and is labeled Try It, the second goes to /buy and is labeled Buy Now.

The delimiter specifies that the word “or” will be between the two, correctly formatted and with a space on either side. The word “or” is the default, so I could have left that off, but I included it by way of example. Using delimiter=”and” would put an “and” between the two buttons.

Some limitations: I didn’t put in error checking to make sure your count, URLs, and labels all have the right number. You have to use the same delimiter throughout, so no “this or that and another” constructions. Still, most of the time, you’ll be using only one or two buttons, they’ll use “or”, and an error message would still mean you’d have to edit stuff, so I figured these were acceptable.