PhotoDropper - Get beautiful, creative commons licensed images for your blog, without ever leaving WordPress. This plugin gives you simple, fast and free access to images that you need to keep your small business blog interesting, and it’s faster than uploading your own photos. A credit is automatically applied to the bottom of your blog post to credit the photographer. 

WordPress SEO - WordPress is great out-of-the-box for SEO (search engine optimization), but this plugin kicks it up a notch, by helping you write content that helps you get found in search engines like Google. It helps you add things like SEO titles and descriptions, and analyzes your keyword use. 

TinyMCE Advanced - WordPress adds some functionality to the post/page editor, and also lets you customize what you want to see in your editing area. We use this to minimize the editor so it’s less cluttered & confusing. This plugin can also allow you to stop WordPress from removing certain HTML tags by default (ie. line break) as this can be quite annoying! 

NextGen Gallery- Add a slideshow or photo gallery anywhere on your website and manage images/thumbnails with this handy plugin. 

Share Buttons by AddThis – Automatically add social sharing buttons to your blog posts, making it easy for readers to share your content via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. 

Gravity Forms – This is a paid plugin, but it’s worth it! For complex forms, from event registration to product ordering, this is hands-down the best form plugin available for WordPress – Nearly 60,000 users (and growing!) can’t be wrong.

FooBar - ($14) Add a notification bar to the top of your website to show announcements and promotions, or encourage newsletter sign-ups. 

Spam Free WordPress – Avoid those pesky spambots with this plugin. 

Bulletproof Security – Save yourself the stress and let this plugin secure your site. 

Events Made Easy - Promote and accept registrations for your events with this plugin. Give your visitors the details they need,  and even accept registration fees via Paypal. 

What are your favourite WordPress plugins? Is there a super-powered plugin we just have to add to this list? Let us know in the comments! 

We’ve recently begun offering starter websites for small businesses who are just starting out, or who want to get online in a fast and affordable way. As a new business, getting online and being visible in search engines like Google is your best bet for finding customers.

Did you know: 97% of searches for products & services begin online?

Many local business owners think that advertising in the local paper or the Yellow Pages will give them all the visibility they need. But, think about how many ads you see every day.

• How many billboards do you pass on the way to the office?
• How many ads really stand out for you in a local paper that is full of them?
• When is the last time that you searched for a product or service in the Yellow Pages?

The marketplace is changing. Small business owners are making the shift to online marketing. Traditional advertising costs are extremely high when compared to online marketing with a website. Just one ad in the local paper can cost over $400, and the Yellow Pages? Forget about it. $1500 for a tiny ad amongst hundreds of competing ads – how can that be effective? That’s where websites for small business come in.

Google is where it’s at now. Savvy small business owners are looking for ways to get their business online in a fast and affordable way. Our new starter websites for small business are perfect for small business owners. For just $47 per month ($197 sign up fee), you can have:

• A professional website design that uses your colours and logo
• An easy to update website that you can manage yourself, no IT guy required!
• Hosting, maintenance & all the no-fun technical “stuff” taken care of
• Help with updates, if you don’t have time to do them yourself (additional $30 per month fee) 
• A website that’s ready for mobile, search engines and social media integration
• Personalized service & marketing tips to help you grow

We love small businesses – we have one ourselves! Our favourite projects over the years we’ve been in business have been with small business owners who have turned their passion into a way to make a living. We love the excitement and dedication that it takes to start a small business, and we’re passionate about helping these businesses grow.

Our websites for small business are designed to meet the needs of the startup business owner, or those who want to take their business to the next level. When you start a business, you’ll usually find that most of your first customers come from word of mouth. You can enhance the power of word-of-mouth marketing and kick it up a notch, by getting a website for your small business, so that interested customers have a place to find out about what you do. It’s easy to share websites with friends through email and social media, so that word of mouth network you’ve begun to build can grow with the help of your website.

Learn more about our websites for small business, or sign up today!

But, for Apple to innovate the way it has, there have been a few casualties along the way. In the case of the new and fabulous iCloud service, this means that iWeb, Apple’s basic website builder, is out.

When Apple’s new service, iCloud was announced in 2011, no one knew if iWeb created sites would survive the transition. As it turns out, Steve Jobs himself answered the question at the time “Will I need to find an alternative website builder and someone to host my sites?” with one word “Yep.”

So where does that leave you, if you’re one of the small business owners who did the quick & dirty iWeb website thing? Well, you have until June 30th to find a new hosting company for your website and get your files moved over, so it’s time to get a move on!

As to the iWeb software itself, you can still use it as long as you have an older Mac with it installed. If you buy a new Mac, it won’t come bundled with iWeb. Soon, you’ll find that trying to run an outdated version of iWeb on your new system is a no-go, so it’s time to move on.

So, what’s the business owner on a budget to do?

Finding a new web host

If you decide to work with a web company like us, they’ll usually take care of hosting for you.
If you’re going at this alone, there are some great web hosts out there who offer service & support for only about $80 per year, plus your domain (around $15), which works out cheaper than what you were paying for MobileMe. We use Site5 and we have nothing but good things to say about them. You could also try Bluehost, DreamHost, or MediaTemple.

What about the site?

The best thing you can do for your business at this point, is to use this opportunity to move to a CMS system, preferably WordPress. Why? Because you’ll finally have a website that can grow with your business, that’s easy to use and update, and indexes well in search engines. It’s time to move to your own domain and take control of your website instead of having one with search engine problems, or one that’s covered in ads from some other freebie website builder.

We’ve designed a starter website package that works really well for people in this boat. For $49 per month, you can get a professionally designed website that’s easy for you to update and use. Your domain, hosting & email is covered, and you get access to marketing tools that will help you grow your business. We send you content reminders every month, and we can even do the updates for you, for a small additional fee ($30 per month). It’s easy to get started, low cost, always secure, updated & maintained, and we tweak the designs as we go so that your site never looks outdated.

Take the end of iWeb as an opportunity to do something big for your business, at a very small cost, and upgrade your website. If you don’t have design or web training, building your own site can be more hassle than it’s worth (and a poor site is a major detriment to your business!) Let’s face it, any site that you create in a freebie or self-builder program will never look as good as a professionally designed one. You can sign up today for a starter website with us, and be up and running within a couple of weeks. Let’s get started!

Here at Chemistry Communications, we build most of our websites into Content Management Systems (CMS). Our chosen CMS is WordPress, and this is what we use for most of our sites.

What does a CMS Do?

Content Management Systems allow anyone with a computer and an internet connection to make changes to their website on the fly. Simply log in to your CMS using your web browser and your provided username and password, and you can use an interface much like a word processor, to change the text and images on your site. When you’re done making changes, click Publish, and your changes go live. Easy, right?

We give all of our clients a tour of WordPress and show them how to use it, but for the most part, they pick it up right away, without specialized training, because the interface is so intuitive.

With a CMS, you can:

• add & change text
• add & change photos
• create new pages
• add & edit links
• maintain a blog
• have multiple users

…and more!

Why doesn’t your site have a CMS already?

Content Management Systems are relatively new technologies, and I’d hazard a guess that if your website wasn’t built within the last four years, (and sometimes even if it was…) it’s probably not using a CMS. A lot of sites are also not using a Content Management System because it tends to cost a bit more and require a professional to code your site for a CMS. If you were on a very tight budget when you created your site (or if you built it yourself), that’s another reason why you might not be using one.

Does your site need one?

Most likely, yes!

If you have your own website, shouldn’t you be able to add to it and make changes as you please? Of course you should! A CMS will make this possible for you, no need to wait for a designer or developer to do this for you.

If you don’t update your website as often as you should, because it is difficult, or because you have to get a web developer’s help, then your website’s content (and you customers) are suffering because of this lack of a CMS.

If you want to grow a site, perhaps by adding pages or new features, that’s also easy to do using a CMS. You don’t need to do a redesign, just add pages as you need them, or have a new theme coded if you’re tired of the design. Your content stays as it is.

What are other website owners doing?

Well, WordPress powers over 14% of  the “top 1 million” websites and is the most popular CMS on the internet. It even powers some very popular sites, like Ford’s Company Blog, Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, Mozilla, and Ben & Jerry’s.

If you’re ready to take ownership of your website, or if you need a site and want it to be accessible and easy for YOU to use, get in touch.

We’ve just finished a website project that was a little different than most, because this one was a nicely done site to begin with, subtle use of animations, good content, well organized, lots of nice features and so on. So why did we have to redesign it?

Two reasons:

1. The clients had no access to their own site. Everything was as their designer had left it over a year ago, they couldn’t even change a few words on their own! They had to ask him to make their updates, wait for them, then pay for even the smallest change. An integral part of a successful business site is frequent, quality updates, so this just wasn’t working!

2. Their site was entirely designed in Adobe Flash, or more specifically, a piece of software that emulated some of Flash’s capabilities and created Flash files, but which couldn’t actually be edited with Flash. The only way this client could have updated their own site was to buy this software and figure out how to use it, something they didn’t have the time to do.

There’s another couple of problems with Flash. You may have heard about Apple’s recent decision not to support Flash on the iPad or iPhone. If you were to view a Flash-based site on these, you would see nothing but a blank page with a question mark on it. Not good! Search Engines don’t index Flash sites well, so if your content is inside and Google can’t get at it, your site doesn’t rank well. For a business site, it’s really important to be easily found in search engines, so we had to take care of this.

Luckily, the new site we produced stayed close to the original site in design and function, we just built it a different way so that the client could make updates, it would index in search engines, and was visible on mobile devices.

There are many other reasons why a website should be redesigned. Here are some other issues we commonly run in to:

Lack of Updates
Many sites, like the one we just worked on, don’t get updated because the site’s owners can’t easily update it. If your website isn’t working on a Content Management System (CMS), it should be. This way, you can make changes to the text and images, and even extend the functionality of your site on your own, quickly and easily.

Intro/Splash Page
Unless there’s a really good reason for it (like you need to restrict your site to a certain age group, or warn of adult material before a user gets into your website), a splash page is not a good idea. Users hate them and will often leave before they even get to your site’s content. Search engines can’t get past them, making it very difficult to rank well. Most of the time, they serve no real purpose but to place a barrier between your visitor and the information they came for.

Usability Problems
There are many possibilities here. Some of the most common include: difficult to use navigation, unorganized content, no easy way to get in contact, long registration forms, hard to read text, and so on. If it’s difficult to use your site, visitors will leave.

It’s Outdated
The web is an ever changing medium, and users have come to expect certain features. If your site was built in FrontPage in 1997, it’s obvious to your visitors. If the site was built using Word, ExpressionWeb, iWeb, Website Tonight, Intuit Web Software, Wix…or any of the other software tools that are intended for very basic starter sites, it show, and your site isn’t giving you the power you need.

Check your Copyright date – it’s one of the first signs that your site isn’t current. Other things you want to avoid are using frames/tables for layout, slow-loading page, and websites that are aligned with the left edge of the browser window so that there’s a big white gap on the right side.

Design is a big one. Even if you don’t think design is important, your visitors are judging you by it, so it is! Have a look around at other sites and get a feel for current design standards and trends. You don’t have to overdo it, but try to make sure your site has a modern feel. Chances are, if your site has had the same design for two years or more, it’s time for a change.

SEO Problems
And there are many, like bad coding practices, poor title/meta/alt tags, choosing the wrong keywords (or not writing your content with keywords in mind), poor architecture and more.
If your site isn’t showing up on the first few search engine results pages for related keyword terms, you need help with SEO, period.

Missing Information and/or Lack of Quality Content
Frequent, quality updates are so important for two reasons. First, if your visitors come back to your site after their first visit and there’s no new information, they know there’s no reason to come back. Second, your search engine ranking is affected in part by how current your content is. Stale sites lose their ranking quickly. Missing information will simply frustrate your visitors. Make sure they can find what they are looking for by using devices like good navigation, search facilities, FAQ, sitemaps and so on. Also make sure your site’s content is well-written, free of grammar & spelling mistakes, and easy to scan.

You Designed it Yourself
Sorry to be harsh, but chances are if you designed your website yourself, you need to call in outside help. You might say “But, I get compliments on my website all the time!” Sure you do… from your friends and family (whose job it is to pump you up), and people who don’t know the web, or who have worse websites than you do. It’s the people who aren’t making these lovely comments (who are leaving your website before they bother to get in touch with you), that you should really worry about! If you don’t have design training, it doesn’t look as good as you think it does. People who design their websites themselves often do so in freebie webpage builders or in software that wasn’t meant for professional design, and it’s obvious just to look at these sites. If you designed the site yourself, it’s very likely that you’re too attached to it – get some perspective from someone who knows the web.

Your Competitors’ Sites are Better
Of course, you can’t worry about everything your competitors do, but you should keep an eye on them, especially online. If your potential customers compare you to them based on what they find on your website, what will they find? If your competitor’s site has a better design, improved content, or higher search engine rankings, you need to level the playing field.

If you don’t know what’s wrong with your site and think it might need a redesign, or if your site looks anything like that scary thing at the top of this post, contact us about a new site. you really can’t afford to wait!