Jordan Smith Design

Tornasol Unico

Tornasol Unico is a event planning company based in Tabasco, Mexico. They needed a more convenient means of showing off their portfolio and allowing clients to contact them.

WordPress, although incredible right out of the box, does need some help if your going to do anything spectacular with it. Fortunately there are thousands of plugins waiting for you to mess around with them. Lots and lots of them you will never need, and a good amount of them are just useless, although entertaining. Once you get past these plugins, there are a whole lot of them that can really be quite useful.

What does every WordPress user need? Well one a Websitea, but aside from that a means to market themselves by utilizing both good SEO practices and social networking. Whether your a blogger by passion or profession, either way, this is how to get your ten cents around the internet.

SEO:

In reality there are many SEO plugins for WordPress, but there seem to be three real open source players:

WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO has a number of features allowing you to quickly edit meta data and taxonomy data. It also includes automatic XML sitemaps and robots.txt files, as well as .htaccess editors. As well it has many other helpful things like breadcrumb support, conical support, permalink help and focus keyword testing.

SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate includes a lot of features that can be fine tuned depending on your preference, it’s author continues support and promises new features in the future, but currently it includes:

• Title Tag rewriter
• Meta data editors
• Canonicalizer
• 404 monitoring
• File editors
• Slug optmization
• Competition research

And many more that I will not list here. This plugin certainly provides a large number of SEO options, the downside is that all the options may be a bit daunting at first for beginners.

Platinum SEO Pack

Platinum SEO has a long list of features as well, but seems to focus more on meta data and permalinks, and this is does great, however it does seem to leave quite a few features out. It does however include:

• 301 redirection for changed permalinks
• Cononical URLs
• Title optmization
• Meta tag generation
• Helps to avoid duplicate content
• Lets you override generated meta data
• Customer Taxonomies

As well as various other features, the good news is, what it lacks is made up with it’s flexibility to work with other plugins to fill in the gaps.

Social Networking

With social networking there are probably a billion different ways to go about this. However, the goal in the end is to further promote yourself quickly without having to update 50 different account on 20 different social networks while generating traffic from those social networks to your blog or website.

Honestly there are many plugins that do basically the same things, they add icons to your website which can be clicked and to your social network profile, or when clicked they become your “friend” or follow you or it shows all their friends that they “like you”. This can generate a lot of traffic now’a days with Facebook and Twitter and others reaching millions of people very quickly. The other way of integrating your social networking with your website is by publishing your activity on social networks to your website and/or publishing your activity on your website to social networks.

Plugins like:

• Social Links
• Social Slider
• Social Profiles
• Social Profilr

and many others can help you link your website with your social network profiles (obviously you should also link your social network profiles to your website). Some of them require widgetized areas in your themes, so be careful when choosing themes.

Other plugins like:

• leenk.me
• Socialite
• Network Publisher
• Social Discussions
• WordTwit
• Tweet This

These plugins can save you a lot of time trying to update all your different social networks and get the word around about your great new post. They can quickly help you to market yourself in many different social communities and let your internet identity grow significantly.

www.elbavalverde.com

She needed a profile that could be easily updated and edited, we implemented a content management system using Concrete5 which she now can regularly update with pictures and information.

www.westvillepub.com

I recently reworked their website, they wanted a website that was flexible and they could update quickly and easily.

They now have a content management system set up using Concrete5 which allows them to update basicly anything they want to without having to get to technical about it.

We recently integrated Twitter and Facebook to work with their website, they now can update Twitter with daily specials which updates both Facebook and Their website.