Evolve Systems Blog

With rising paper and printing costs, now is a great time to strengthen your online marketing program. No matter how many hours you have invested in making your website look fantastic you still need to help people find it!

While there are many, many ways to bring people to your site, today I want to suggest advertising in directories. Take advantage of as many free directories as you can. While they may be small, they tend to have more of a niche audience that is really searching for what you have to offer.

Here are some leads to get you started:

Chamber of Commerce. If you are involved in a chamber, find out if they have an online directory! If they do, make sure you are listed and that the information is up-to-date.

Yellow Pages (Online). Search for your business at www.yellowpages.com and see if the listing is accurate. Ours certainly isn’t! It does take up to 30 days for this information to be corrected, so be sure to check your listing periodically to ensure it is actually updated.

Google Maps. Did you know you go to www.maps.google.com and just type in a business name? The information that pops up is editable, so make sure it reflects your business well! Also make sure that your industry is accurate. Why? You can type an address into Google Maps and then search for “pizza” or “bed and breakfast” around that location. Make it easy for people to find you!

These are a couple of free options. There are many others if you want to invest financially, some of which are industry specific. For now, invest some time in getting the word out and then build your directory marketing based on the results you get. As always, remember to ask new clients how they found you!

There is no right or wrong order to writing a post in WordPress, but we’ll start from the top and give you the step-by-step details for filling in each of the blanks on the Write Post panel. [[|right|thumb|WordPress Admin Options Writing Panel]] WordPress has two post editing modes, basic and advanced. Typically, the basic mode is the default for writing new posts, but that can be changed with the When starting a post option in the Writing Options SubPanel of the Options Administration Panel. We will take you first through the basic post screen and then the advanced.

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Basic Post Editing Screen

Your Drafts 

Drafts are posts that have been saved rather than published. If you have posts you have written and saved, thereby creating a Draft, they will be listed above the Write Post title. Click on the title link to open that posts’ Write Post edit screen, edit the post, and when you are ready, click Publish and it will be released to your site and to the world.

Title 

This is where you enter the title of your post. You can use any words or phrases. Avoid using the same title twice as that will cause problems. You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hypens/dashes, and other typical symbols in the post like “My Site - Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”. WordPress will clean it up for the link to the post, called the post-slug.  

Software that provides a method of managing your website is commonly called a CMS or “Content Management System”. Many blogging software programs are considered a specific type of CMS. They provide the features required to create and maintain a blog, and can make publishing on the Internet as simple as writing an article, giving it a title, and organizing it under (one or more) categories. While some CMS programs offer vast and sophisticated features, a basic blogging tool provides an interface where you can work in an easy and, to some degree, intuitive manner while it handles the logistics involved in making your composition presentable and publicly available. In other words, you get to focus on what you want to write, and the blogging tool takes care of the rest of the site management.

WordPress is one such advanced blogging tool and it provides a rich set of features. Through its Administration Panels, you can set options for the behavior and presentation of your weblog. Via these Administration Panels, you can easily compose a blog post, push a button, and be published on the Internet, instantly! WordPress goes to great pains to see that your blog posts look good, the text looks beautiful, and the html code it generates conforms to web standards.

If you’re just starting out, read Getting Started with WordPress, which contains information on how to get WordPress set up quickly and effectively, as well as information on performing basic tasks within WordPress, like creating new posts or editing existing ones.

“Blog” is an abbreviated version of “weblog,” which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles or other Web sites. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.

Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all manner of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts.

Generally speaking (though there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:

• A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
• An archive of older articles.
• A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
• A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a “blogroll”.
• One or more “feeds” like RSS, Atom or RDF files.

Some blogs may have additional features beyond these.

Well, if any post is going to be in the Uncategorized section, this is it.  Happy Father’s day from all of us here at Evolve Systems, to all of you out there in the world.  I am going to take a 1/2 day off, once I finish this post, and go relax by the pool over at Greg Ochs‘ house.  (My father-in-law).  He and his lovely bride, Janice, are hosting a nice poolside get together with the family.  Jared Ochs and the lovely Miss Amanda will be joining us, as will Erika Vail (Ochs) and perhaps a few others.  Dr. John Vail will not be in attendance due to a fishing contest. (Good Luck!)

Have a Happy Father’s Day

Evolve Systems is pleased to announce the addition of our new blogging system.  We are using the WordPress system of blogs for several reasons.  From WordPress themselves:

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.  More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.”

Over the next few posts we will talk about BLOGS, CMS and all sorts of other things that will tell you a little bit about what we are doing with the technology, and more importantly, why.

Don