Lisa Marie Designs » WordPress

Client Website Launch – Congrats to Bennett & Gail of IAWR!

Tarja — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:48:36 +0000

International Association of Women Runners

After many phone meetings, lots of hard work from all involved and a good number of belly laughs (one of the many reasons Bennett is a great client is his sense of humor), I am pleased to announce the launch of the “International Association of Women Runners” brand new WordPress website!! www.IAWR-connect.com

Congratulations and best wishes to Bennett and Gail!

WordPress as an Intranet?

Lisa — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:17:18 +0000

Annie over at Community Public Relations (a FANTASTIC Phoenix PR firm) asked me yesterday whether WordPress has a plugin and/or back-end function that creates an intranet, in addition to a CMS website.

We’re working on some projects together and it’s one of the pitch points that clients are looking for in a custom WordPress website package. I’ve been doing some research and found that a few people are using WP as an intranet, but it seems like they’re just cobbling together a bunch of existing plugins for calendaring, inter-office communications, etc. If anybody has wisdom or experience to share re: specifics on setting up a WP site as both CMS and an efficient intranet? I’d love to hear from you!!!

wpNamedUsers

Lisa Marie Designs Launches a New Client WordPress Website

Lisa — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:56:00 +0000

Lisa Marie Designs just launched a brand new WordPress website for Laurie Edwards-Tate of At Your Home Familycare!

Laurie is one of my long-time, much-loved clients with whom I have worked on everything from her very first website to creating an industry-leading online learning center. She recently told me that although she was an admitted technophobe (her words, not mine!), she knew that she wanted to move forward with her website as well as her social media strategy. We came up with a plan, sorted out the details and moved ahead. In 2 (very busy) weeks, we carried over all of her previous website content, built a new WordPress site, added some blog posts and got her off and running into the wonderful world of Web 2.0!! Welcome Laurie, I hope you find it a hospitable, growth-promoting and life-affirming place to be!

View the new At Your Home Familycare website »

Interested in having your own WordPress website? Wondering what that process entails? Curious about budget range? Get in touch »

New Client WordPress Website!

Lisa — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:03:08 +0000

Newly Designed WordPress Website!!!

I recently designed a WordPress site for my dear and longtime friend, Tess, who is the owner of PhoenixUrbanArt. Her company offers temporary tattoos and face painting services at parties, events, faires, etc. Super fun and waaaaay cool talented folks!!! One of my favorite parts of being an entrepreneur is being able to work with people I know and love.

View the website here » http://phoenixurbanart.com/

New WordPress Theme

Lisa — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:45:47 +0000

Yaayyyy!!! I’ve just installed a new (to my site, anyway) WordPress theme and I have to say, it was one of the nicer ones I’ve worked with! Thanks to Geek with Laptop for the lovely “Autumn Forest” theme (which I bastardized in my usual mad-scientist-creative-artsy kind of way). It was thoroughly coded and designer-friendly, which is not the case with all WP themes. *hmmph* Enough said about that. Have I mentioned lately how much I loooooove WordPress?!? I had a tremendous amount of fun updating my site and I hope you enjoy it.

And, if you do, and would like your very own customized WordPress website, please let me know. I will happily answer any questions you may have. You can present your self or your business on the web in a way that not only feels good and is SUPER-cool, but is also affordable, flexible and easily accessible for updates and maintenance.

Welcome, Conscious Joy Coaching!

Lisa — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:41:42 +0000

Lisa Marie Designs (that would be me) just launched the brand new custom WordPress website of a dear friend (and now, client): Joy Rigberg of Conscious Joy Coaching. It was a blast to work with her on the site, we have a great collaborative rapport and she is very pleased with the finished site. You can see it for yourself at: http://consciousjoycoaching.com. Thank you Joy!!

WordPress Behind the Scenes: Security, Content Protection and SEO

Lisa — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:43:02 +0000

One of the many benefits of a WordPress website is that there are so many behind-the-scenes plugins. There are plugins to help secure your WP site, protect your original content and improve your search engine optimization. Want to limit the number of failed logins to your admin panel? There’s a plugin for that! Want to add an auto-generated copyright notice to your blog feed? Yep, there’s a plugin for that. Currently, I’ve got a running list of 12 – 15 of these behind-the-scenes plugins that I install on client sites. This is just one of the MANY benefits to having a web designer set up and customize your WP site!!

A mildly snarky side note: I’ve noticed that these behind-the-scenes issues are some of the areas overlooked by the folks offering “ditch your web designer and build your own WordPress website” seminars. I’ve attended a few of these seminars and gotten some great information, but most of my clients would be hard pressed to navigate the process of setting up and customizing a WP site on their own. I’m very excited to empower clients by enabling them to update and maintain their own WP websites. But so far, I’m finding that the point at which that begins is after the site has been set up.

I’d love some feedback on this post…helpful? too snarky? want more in-depth info? Thanks for your input!

Helpful WordPress Resources

Lisa — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:30:49 +0000

A few of the resources that were quite helpful as I found my way through the wonderful world of WordPress:

WordPress.org – Straight to the source! Whether you’re looking for WordPress website Themes, for Plugins to extend the functionality of your site, or to access their extensive library of information and tutorials, this is a great starting point.
wpskins.org – More WordPress themes. This site has a helpful “Search by Properties” area that allows you to search for themes by features that you want. FYI, do make sure to check the license of any themes you find here, they are not all available for commercial use.
WordPress Dashboard demo - A working demo of a WordPress control panel. Login using “demo” as both username and password.
COLOURlovers™ – Beautiful and easy to navigate site that helps you find color schemes and patterns for your site. I ask my clients to find a few examples of color schemes that they like and send them to me, it’s a very helpful part of the WordPress theme customization process.
GNU General Public License – The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. It is the license under which WordPress is released.

Top 5 Reasons to use WordPress for Your Website

Lisa — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:12:17 +0000

WordPress is an incredibly powerful CMS that is FREE.
WordPress provides good Search Engine Optimization.
Easily update your site without knowing HTML. You can create new pages or edit existing ones using a simple editor.
WordPress.org has themes and plug-ins available for download, giving you access to design themes, calendars, image galleries and hundreds of other features for FREE!
It’s easy to find support. If you do have any problems with WordPress, a simple Google search or a trip to the WordPress tutorials provides extensive guidance.

The Benefits of a WordPress Website

Lisa — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:22:03 +0000

WordPress is a well known blogging tool. But it is also a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that can be used for creating individual and small business websites. A CMS is a tool that helps you manage the creation and updating of web pages on your site.

A website powered by WordPress doesn’t necessarily look like a blog, and it provides a way for you to easily manage and update your own website. If you are able to surf the web and are comfortable working in a program like Microsoft Word, you should be able to comfortably use the WordPress Dashboard.

One of the benefits of using WordPress is that you can have a website AND a blog. A blog is a great way to increase traffic to your website. Regularly publishing content (articles, links, etc.) to your website gives Google more content to search, and provides value to your site visitors. For example, I’m a freelance designer, so I publish articles that provide prospective design clients with helpful information about web design and working with a designer. It’s a great way to provide value to my visitors and also to help my website rank well in the search engines. Also, because the articles I publish contain helpful information, other people link to my site, helping to increase my traffic even more.

When using WordPress for your website, you can set up a static front page that doesn’t look like a blog, and then have a link to an “Articles” area on your site, where you can publish content-rich and keyword-dense articles. This “Articles” area is a list of your blog posts. All you have to do is write and publish a blog post, and the “Articles” page gets updated automatically. WordPress then tells the search engines that your site has been updated. It only takes a few minutes to post an article and Google finds them within a day or less. Then, others can find your website and your business.