“I had to do it… after years of reviewing and preforming over 100 wordpress installations and SQL configurations – I had to come up with my top ten wordpress plugins.  Below are my top ten as of January,  2012 as they have relevance to your basic essential ten plugins that will get you started with SEO and performance.”   - Sheri House, Owner of Houseink

1.)  CONTACT FORM 7 (FREE)

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

2.)  SEO ULTIMATE (FREE)

SEO Ultimate is a powerful all-in-one SEO plugin, available free for WordPress bloggers. Take control of your on-page SEO with user-friendly settings and tools for optimizing your titles, meta data, robots tags, canonicalization, autolinks, post slugs, and much more.

3.)  GOOGLE SITE VERIFICATION (FREE)

Verify your blog with Google with only a couple clicks! No need to copy and paste tokens anymore; this plugin makes calls to the Google Site Verification API to automate the entire verification process.

4.)  GOOGLE XML SITEMAPS (FREE)

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

5.) WP SEO DOMINATION

With WP SEO Domination Installed on your blog you can! You may have heard of one of the most popular SEO plugins out for WordPress called “All-in-One SEO”. It is a great plugin, so do not get me wrong, but it only works for optimizing just the very basic SEO elements of your web site. Those elements being your meta title, meta descriptions, meta keywords, etc.  That is roughly just 20% of what your web site needs in order to rank higher in the search engines. WP SEO Domination allows you to optimize each page one by one for the search engines by letting you know how well your on-site optimization is. In fact, WP SEO Domination uses the same inspection checklist as the major search engines use when scoring your web site.

6.)  FACEBOOK LIKE PLUGIN (FREE)

The WordPress Facebook Like Plugin adds a Facebook “Like” Button to your blog posts. It increases your visitor engagement instantly! This plugin adds a simple and easy to use Facebook Like functionality with admin options to change the location of Facebook Like button, font, show faces, use the box with count as well as other cool and useful options. Visitors “liking” your content automatically posts them as shared item on their Facebook profile with a thumbnail of your site’s image post. Pretty cool! The Like button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website.

7.) JETPACK by WordPress.com (FREE)

Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.

8.)  TOTAL BACKUP (FREE)

This plugin backs up a whole WordPress site and its database into a zip file.

Click the “Site Backup” button to start the backup. While backing up, the site is in the maintenance mode. Completed with no problem, the back up files are listed up. Backing up is a kind of heavy process, so too many files may cause timeout errors.

9.)  SPAM FREE WORDPRESS (FREE)

Spam Free WordPress is a comment spam blocking plugin that blocks 100% of the automated spam with zero false positives. There is no other plugin, or service, available for WordPress that can claim 100% accuracy with zero false positives, not even Akismet. Manual spam is blocked with an IP address blocklist.

10.)  USERNOISE MODAL FEEDBACK / CONTACT FORM (FREE)

Usernoise is a “just works” modal contact / feedback form. You will not need to change even a line of code in your site.

The process was not easy and took several weeks of reading up on screen printing, emulsification, building frames and many trips to the hardware store as well as  silkscreeningsupplies located in Vancouver, Washington.

The first couple of steps were easy.  Editing the photo in Photoshop CS5 – through desaturating the image and increasing the levels resulting in a sharp positive image also known as: Tusche-resist or ” positive!’ method.  After getting the image ready I was on to the next step of printing the image onto a transparency. Since the image was larger then 8.5 x 11 – I had to cut the image into four quadrants and print them out individually – then piece them together to make a large poster size image for my screen-mesh/frame.

Next it was onto my lighting table and Emulsification – a messy job but fun when I saw the results after pressure washing the chemical off. PRESTO – the positive of the image washed off – and now I was ready to PRINT!!!

Below is the final end results of the spring bike ride trip  – downtown.  I think it payed off What do you think?  Post me a comment and if you have questions please feel free to contact me via my contact form.   I cannot wait till the next print – coming this fall along with two paintings!  Art show April 2012.

Communication: Communication will become easier when you choose a web design firm that is within reach. If you are selling services or products, the content of the website has to be modified every now and then to highlight new offers or promotions. Sometimes it is impossible for you to explain your requirements through emails. So, it is better to have face-to-face communication with the web designers. Mobile phones can help, but sitting down at a table and discussing ideas is the best communication tool available.

Personal Attention: With the local web designer, you can hope for prompt and personalized service when you call or email. It helps in building a good business relationship. When companies spend money for web design, they also want to feel comfortable with the people they are hiring to do the job. If they are not satisfied with the web page, they can communicate with them comfortably to get the changes made.

Knowing the People: It is better for you to know the person, who is going to pick up your call or read your email. So, you can get an idea about their reliability. You usually don’t hire a local web designer without some referrals. You can see their portfolio to find several other local web sites, they have built and customer testimonials from people you may already know. It will be hard for you to get even the name of the designer, if you outsource your work. They mostly use pseudonyms.

Understanding the Local Community: Your website should reflect an understanding of the local culture and the local business climate. Local web designers often live in the same community as you and can understand your local target market. They know about the competitors and the local market trends. You can’t expect this when your work with an overseas company. It is as if you are speaking two different languages.

Helping the Local Economy: By hiring a local web designer you are keeping your money in the community and that will help the local economy. It will also help you business grow because the local web designer may recommend people they know to use your business.

You can get a website for much less, if you outsource.
But, if you expect good business practice, hire a local web design firm.

Why is it so important? A recently conducted research shows that over 94% of users clicked on a first page result and less than 6% moved to the second page to select a result displayed there. There is a substantial gap between 10th and 11th spots. The 10th spot which falls within the first page grabs 2.71% of total clicks, while the 11th spot which comes at the top of the second page only gets 1.11%. That’s a 143% dip from one position to the next.

As expected the first position has always been the most clicked on location. It gets more than 34 percent of clicks. So, more than one third of the surfers visit the site that holds the first position in Google search. The site in the second position gets only 17 percent. It receives less than half of the importance of the first position. But generally web surfers think that all the sites listed in the first page are relevant to their search term.

Importance of SEO: A user experience research firm conducted a study to find the impact of organic search results and ads. It was geared towards eye-tracking of search users. The findings were quite interesting. All the surfers viewed the organic listings, while paid ads got only 91 percent of viewing. Many users managed to overlook the paid ads and went directly to the organics. This study shows that people hugely believe in search engine ranking more than anything and they have learned to overlook paid ads.

Getting ranked on the first page Of Google for a keyword is not a joke. Without the help of a good SEO, one can never hope to achieve it. So, search engine optimization is a basic requirement for any website. If a company has a good SEO, they can drive a TON of new customers their way that they would not have otherwise had. Because, good ranking in a search engine not only improves your online visibility, but also adds credibility to your business.

Whenever you hire an SEO company, make it sure they use white hat techniques. White hat SEO techniques are time taking, when compared to black hat or grey hat techniques, but its result is long lasting. Some companies use shortcuts to show the owner of the website that how quickly the ranking of the website is improved. But it could lead your site to get banned from the search engines. Basically, white hat SEO gives importance to keywords, original content along with the information not for the search engine, but for the visitors.

Quality: There is one famous Chinese saying, “Cheat me in price, but not in the quality of the product I am buying”. You should make your clients understand that if they compromise their website, then they may have to compromise with their business popularity. So the quality of the website has to be good in all aspects, ranging from the site map to a seemingly simple feature like font size.

Usability: Now there are 5 major Internet browsers ranging between 3% and 40% in market share. The website you design, must work well on all browsers. You may have designed a marvelous website to promote a small business or a start-up. But if the website doesn’t work, then there is a problem.

Be Unique: There is a lot of competition among small businesses. Make sure that you create a unique web design. You can copy anyone’s design and use it as your own. But that is not a professional attitude. The site is basically, to provide information about a product or services of a company. Hence, it should be easy to use and to navigate because visitors won’t enjoy spending a lot of time learning about the functionality of the site.

Information and Purpose: Every business website should have a goal and every page on the website should have a purpose. It can be extremely frustrating for the visitors, if they can’t find the information they want. If it is a website for a restaurant, it should have things like menu, directions or pictures of the cuisine.

Provide Contact Info: People lose by missing out on opportunities to interact with their clients. Provide as much contact information as possible on the website, you design. It is important to have an email address associated with the website. If your client is unaware of its importance, please make him understand the need. Take time to create an email account with the website, if you can.

Creating Forms: For a small business or a start-up, people like to gather as much information about the visitors as possible, but there should be a delicate balance between asking for too much information and too little. Most people don’t want to share information about themselves or like to spend a lot of time filling out a long form. So, the forms should be constructed well to achieve their goal.

These are some general guidelines that can help you, while designing a new website for a small business or a start-up. But there is no set of perfect rules for web designing. It depends on the budget, target audience and business.