Audience Audit, the leader in Audience Segmentation Research, needed a platform to not only introduce the agency’s services, but also as a channel to introduce their new segmentation products to the market. We quickly decided on the Studiopress Genesis Streamline theme, due to its responsive design and how easily it is to organize content for readers.

“Marketing Press is always a pleasure to work with, in every respect. Smart but without the giant ego of some developers, the team works with clients to achieve their vision in the best way possible — with careful attention to their interests, and thoughtful recommendations based on their expertise.”  - Susan Baier / Principal, Audience Audit

Services Provided: WordPress Development

The Audience Audit site was a pure collaboration. Susan Baier supplied us with all the site’s content and Stephanie Liebold of Bold Avenue designed the icons and color palette. As if that wasn’t enough, a good friend of our company Chris Lee, pitched in and gave this project a technical assist in a pinch. Sites like the Audience Audit ste happen through amazing teamwork. [Read Stephanie's post on this project.]

The reviews are in and everyone loves this site, most importantly — Marketing Press has helped another company achieve success.

[WordPress Theme: Genesis Child Theme Streamline]

Share

Don’t make the mistake of calling Shadow’s site another Mommy blog. Fit Fabulous Mom is much more than that to her audience. It’s a place where mothers can find motivation and inspiration to make changes in their life through nutrition, wellness and general fashion tips.

“I am in love with my site!!! Thanks so much for everything. Marketing Press has been great to work with and you really understood my vision from the very start. Thank You!!!” – Shadow Asgari

Services Provided: WordPress Development / Graphic Design / SEO

After realizing the goals of this new site, Marketing Press wanted to make sure the color palette worked with both Shadow’s brand and resonated with her audience. The Studiopress Genesis theme we selected was ‘Fashionista’, which helped us start the project with 50% of the WordPress development complete. A custom post type was used for Fit Fab Mom’s video page to help the audience better view the posted videos.

The last piece of the WordPress design puzzle was to design a header that encompassed the brand’s identity. We worked with Melissa Balkon of Strong Design Studios and gave her the task of creating a number of simple headers, which signified Fit Fabulous Mom and that can be changed out periodically.

Unlike many other clients, Shadow is super passionate about publishing content. For Fit Fabulous Mom, we set up the SEO to support her general topics, which will allow her to start ranking better and better as more content is published. We don’t use this strategy with every client, but it works great when working with people who love publishing content.

The Results

Although, this site was just published recently,traffic has increased. We’ve seen tremendous growth in both total visits and unique visitors. Also, we’ve increased search visibility and show up on page one of Google for key search phrases.

Working of the new Fit Fabulous Mom site was a lot of fun. It has definitely been a testament to what a great collaborative team can achieve.

[WordPress Theme: Genesis Child Theme Fashionista]

Share

So, it should go without saying all tracks were inspired by a Mexican style of music, Mexico, Horse Racing or Derby Day itself. (I know, it’s sort of a weird combo, but were a WordPress design company, so the unexpected should be somewhat expected.

These tracks are all over the place and just a pleasure to listen to at a high volume. We hope you enjoy these songs as much as we do!

Marketing Press May First Friday Playlist

(Play it for yourself on Rdio - Don’t use Rdio? Signup Here Free.)

• The Race Is On – Grateful Dead
• Dead Flowers – Rolling Stones
• Unida Cantina – RCPM
• Hearts and Bones – Paul Simon
• All Again Or – Calexico
• Mexico – James Taylor
• I’ll Take You There – Staple Singers
• Up on Cripple Creek – The Band
• Mexican Radio – Wall of Voodoo
• Hang Fire – Rolling Stones

There they are — Enjoy, listent to the tracks, play them loud and feel free to share the playlist with others so they can enjoy. Celebrate responsibly and have some fun.

Share

This FREE tool is accurate by using data is compiled from Authority Labs, and it couldn’t be any easier to use. Simply plug in your desired keyword and your url and Where I Rank will return your Search Engine Results Page for Google and Bing.

“Where I rank gets you past the google personalized results that may skew your objectivity when gauging success.” – Chris Conrey, VUURR

If you’re like us, you always want to know that your site is meeting your objectives and SERP is a big part of the puzzle. Also, if you’re like us, you are always signed into your Google account,  which influences your search results. Google calls it personal search. Personal search is great for relevant search results, but not so great for marketers, web developers and SEO. [Here's a good article if you are interested in disabling Google's personal results]

“Quick, Objective rank tracking results delivered in less than time than you can search yourself” – Josh Ziering, VUURR

After following suggested WordPress SEO best practices, Where I Rank makes things easy for you to check a site’s search performance on the fly. Now, with confidence you will know exactly where your site ranks and take personal search results and cached information out of the mix. Yes, there are more sophisticated tools that many of us use, but when it comes to empowering the client to check their own progress — nothing beats Where I Rank.

For More Information on Where I Rank — Check Out VUURR’s Post.  We encourage you to test it, use it — we’re sure you will love it.

Share

Services Provided: WordPress Development / WordPress Maintenance

Kiss The Camera supplied Marketing Press with new graphic elements and a design stylesheet for the site refresh. We updated the fonts, header image, refreshed the WordPress navigation along with the color scheme and background images.

While refreshing the site, the Marketing Press WordPress Maintenance Team updated WordPress to the latest revision, all plugins and most installed BackupBuddy as a total backup solution.

The new site’s refresh is awesome, and compliments Kiss The Camera’s amazing wedding photography.

Share

As an overall element of your design, your color palette can strike a chord with your audience and enhance your brand’s traits. The right colors can have a huge positive impact on the project, while the wrong colors can have a negative impact.

Does your company have brand standards we need to adhere to? What’s the goal of your site? What emotion are you trying to convey? Theses are all relative questions when talking colors.

When we begin a WordPress project, right after we select a theme with a client, we decide on colors. The best tool we’ve discovered to create and share color palettes is called Colour Lovers.

Colour Lovers: Color Palette Tool

Colour Lovers is a free tool where you can design color palettes and share then easily with clients and collaborators alike. Simply, sign up and enter your information, take the quick tour (which is pretty helpful) and begin putting colors together for your project.

Not only can you design color palettes, but you can also design background patterns and other images needed to fulfill your WordPress site’s needs, plus browse trends that other designers are using in different verticals.

This service has made it so easy for Marketing Press to get a game plan ahead of time before working on sites. Too many times we’ve heard of people who start developing and designing websites without consulting their client about a color palette. Going down this road could lead to many wasted hours, when all that was needed was an agreed upon color palette from the start.

Get your WordPress development off on the right start, give Colour Lovers a try and begin your project strong.

Share

Services Provided: WordPress Development / SEO

After meeting with Susan of Audience Audit and speaking with Flock Free, it was decided that the Genesis Child Theme Venture would be perfect for Flock Free’s new WordPress site. Venture met all the requirements needed, including a custom homepage tab solution where different images can be displayed with different brand messages. (See our previous post about configuring the Genesis Venture Child Theme.)

The main goals of the new WordPress developed site was to increase traffic and position Flock Free as the foremost expert in Bird Control. All imagery is bird related, and since Flock Free never intends to hurt birds, we were extremely careful to depict images of bird’s in their natural environment versus the potential damage birds can cause.

The Results

The new Flock Free site was a huge success. After reviewing analytics with our partners site visits increased by 78%, Pages per visit increased by 52%, bounce rate decreased by 21% and organic search traffic grew by an astounding 141%. Plus, Flock Free is on Page one of Google for key search phrases such as: “bird control solutions” and “commercial bird control”.

Great collaboration, great client — we wish them the best of luck in 2012.

[WordPress Theme: Genesis Child Theme Venture]

Share

Have you ever had one of those moments where you think everything on your site is lost? I don’t care if it a hosting error, human error or a freak accident where your heart skipped a beat and all your content is lost.

We’ve all been there and it’s not a good place to be. Enter Backup Buddy.

What makes Backup Buddy better than other plugins?

Simple: It’s the only WordPress backup solution that does all three things needed easily — Backup, Restore & Migration.

• WordPress Site Backup: Simply, backup your entire WordPress install. Widgets, themes, plugins, and SQL database – everything. Warning: Do not leave backups to your host. If you do, at some point you will be disappointed. When using BackupBuddy you can schedule backups and have them sent off-site or to your email.

• WordPress Site Restore: The restore function in BackupBuddy is very, very simple. Upload the importbuddy.php script and your backup file, and it restores WordPress. All of your themes, widgets, plugins, and more. It will even re-install WordPress for you.

• WordPress Site Migration: When you develop WordPress sites for clients you know it can be a pain to migrate the new site from a dev environment to live. BackupBuddy handles the site migration for you in a couple of easy steps. As far as I know, this is the only WordPress backup plugin to help with this task.

As with other plugins we recommend BackupBuddy is a paid plugin. The price ranges from $75 to $150 depending on the license. When you consider the alternative, the price is minimal compared to the potential cost of losing your whole site. The best WordPress plugins are paid plugins and BackupBuddy heads the list.

If you are looking for a total WordPress backup solution — this is the plugin for you.

Share

We understand keeping up on the lastest happenings of SEO and content construction best practices can be overwhelming. Google updates, especially Panda has sent people cringing and scared for their sites search rankings. The fact of the matter is yes, Google updated its algorithm with Panda and it keeps getting updated to penalize sites that are trying to cheat the system.

What no one has told you though, Google’s Panda update hurt 1.6% of all sites on the web. Do you think you’re in that percentage? Here’s a hint — you’d know if you were. So, carry on as you were. Develop strong content, optimize your site following best practices set for you and don’t let anything stop you.

Free WordPress Tools From Marketing Press

• Marketing Press’ Content Construction Worksheet: This worksheet was developed to help us better outline the content on we write for our sites, whether it be pages or posts. Google, Yahoo! and Bing love to index strong content and your audience comes to your site because you offer them content of value — so strong, strategic content is key. This tool will help you organize your thoughts, think about keywords, images and also your content broadcast strategy. Bonus: Here’s an article we wrote last June with more tips about developing strong content – check it out.  

• WordPress SEO Checklist: In speaking to SEOs who work with WordPress, we were able to come up with a clear concise checklist of simple SEO best practices for your WordPress site. By no means is this a high level definitive list of everything you need to do to get your site to P1 on Google, but it’s a great start. Follow these tips over and over (with each piece of content you publish) and you will see results.

[We have another great free SEO tool that is being developed as we speak, but it's not quite ready to be included in this article. As soon as the bugs are gone and it's ready for primetime, we will update this article.]

If you are looking for tools for hosting, themes and plugins, which are paid, we have a page setup for that also: mktgpress.com/wordpress-tools.

As always, we want to hear from you. If you have any other great WordPress tools WordPress users need to know about leave a comment and share.

Share

Here’s the background on this month’s playlist: We received a text from our friend Johnny Dudley about some suggestions for an acoustic set in the works. So, we figured this was a perfect opportunity for April’s Marketing Press First Friday Playlist.

There are no real rhyme or reason for the selections. Just some of our favorite songs that we’d really like and that would sound great in an acoustic set by Johnny.

Marketing Press April First Friday Playlist

(Play it for yourself on Rdio - Don’t use Rdio? Signup Here Free.)

• Tea In The Sahara – Police
• Hard Luck Woman – KISS
• Here Comes A Regular – ‘Mats
• Heartbreaker – Rolling Stones
• Ventura Highway – America
• Highwayman – The Highwaymen
• Police & Thieves – Clash
• Up The Junction – Squeeze
• She’s Gone – Hall & Oates
• Deacon Blues – Steely Dan
• Pink Houses – John Cougar
• Cripple Creek – The Band
• Fool To Cry – Rolling Stones
• Coma Girl – Joe Strummer

There they are — Enjoy, listent to the tracks, play them loud and feel free to share the playlist with others so they can enjoy. Until next time…

Share