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.

Original article By Bianca Male

Search Engine Optimization is very important to businesses and their strategies.  This is when you make your website easier to discover to people as they browse the internet and search on search engines.

In this post we discuss 10 Basic SEO Tips that are critical and very important to your business growth.  We achieve this by showing you how we implemented search engine optimization for our client Grove Printing (www.groveprinting.com).  By looking at the diagram you will see how we labeled each technique to increase search engine optimization.

Grove Printing Example

Below we share the first 3 and you have to click on the link to read the last 7 tips written by Bianca Male from : http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/217483

1. Monitor where you stand
You won’t know if your SEO efforts are working unless you monitor your search standings. MarketingVox suggests that you keep an eye on your page rank with tools like Alexa and the Google toolbar.

It’s also important to check your referrer log regularly to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they’re using to find your site, according to PC World.

2. Keywords, keywords, keywords!
You should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms — how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it?

The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords, PC World notes.

Beware: Putting ridiculous amounts of keywords on your site will get you labeled as a spammer, and search engine spiders are programmed to ignore sites guilty of “keyword-stuffing.” Be strategic in your keyword use.
3. Link back to yourself
There is probably no more basic strategy for SEO than the integration of internal links into your site — it is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages, SEO Consult says.

You should make it standard to link back to your archives frequently when creating new content. MarketingVox advises that you also make the anchor text search-engine-friendly: “The more relevant words point to a page, the more likely that page is to appear in search results when users run a query with those terms.”

As with all other SEO approaches, be sure your links are appropriate, and be careful not to cross the line into excessive linking — you don’t want your visitors to get annoyed.

4. Create a sitemap

5. Search-friendly URLs

6. Avoid Flash

7. Image descriptions

8. Content

9. Social media distribution

10. Link to others

Our SEO example from Grove Printing:
http://www.groveprinting.com/event-rack-cards/

We wanted to add an optimized page to promote rack cards printed for events, a significant product for Grove Printing. Notable items include the prominent placement of the keywords in headers, body, links, and image title and alt tags. While still including useful information and a call-to-action (order now!)

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

Feeling frustrated that your work is taking up more time and getting more disorganized? Online tools can greatly improve your productivity. Let Heatherstone teach you with our Online Tools slideshow!

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

Do you wish you understood the importance of SEO, keywords, and how to use the basics? Does free website traffic sound out of your reach? Or maybe you just need a little refresher on SEO. Let Heatherstone teach you with SEO 101!

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

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

How can you turn random online travelers into loyal customers? What keywords should you target? Is your message clear? Know how to network to success? Want to know the answers? See our slideshow.

Need more help? Contact us at consult@heatherstone.com or 888.716.1521

Your by-the-numbers approach to marketing online. What is it worth to convert a visitor? How will you achieve conversion? How will you get visitors to your site? Want to know the answers? See our slideshow.

Need more help? Contact us at consult@heatherstone.com or 888.716.1521