Currently, in today’s business world, social media networks have expanded to large and small businesses. There is also a calling for a small business to have a strong internet presence, but for those that don’t understand these aspects, it can be quite overwhelming for small business owners. As a small business owner you might not be aware of the latest web design and development technologies. We want to share some of the latest tips for your small business in Ann Arbor, Michigan or wherever your business may be. This will help to expand your understanding of new trends and web design advice.

Responsive Website-

As for web design and development, developers have found a new way to bring in people from the mobile marketplace. This is done by the use of responsiveness, responsiveness happens within the website giving a mobile user content based on the width of the browser their in. Making sure your website displays correct on every browser is very important, especially the mobile environment. With this your users will not have to zoom in and out to read your content, giving them ease of use. This trend is on a rise and can give you a advantage over your competition. Right now mobile and tablet users are on the increase, so don’t be left in the dust with your website!

Make Sure to Stand Out-

There are many websites being made everyday, is your website standing out? Making sure your website design builds a brand that matches your business and helps you stand out of the crowd is important. Businesses that want to stand out on the internet make vast efforts in how their website looks, it only makes sense, right? That is correct! You need to put the effort into your website to get the results you are looking for, design, layout, and navigation are critical to your online endeavors! If you are going to build a website, go in all the way! Don’t do a halfway job! Your design should be simple to comprehend no matter where or whom it is targeted at.

Social Media Friendly-

You must first understand that your website can benefit vastly with the social media networks (Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube). Think of social media as free advertising for your small business, is there anything better than that? Having a social media network profile can help with small business growth, but your small business also needs to have a main internet presence. This can be done with the use of WordPress, a content management system that keeps your website organized.

99% of the small business websites are currently using some source of social media network for communication with their customers. If you are a business owner have do not have some source of social media networking profile, you need to start thinking about it, as your small business can truly expand with such. Having the opportunity to communicate (in a professional manner) with your customers via a social profile the more likely a customer is to buy your product. Your customer is also more likely to come back to your main website and be a part of your business community.

Using a Innovative Web Design Company-

Small Businesses all over the world are now realizing and benefiting from the significance of having a well designed website. Your business should benefit from the advantages mentioned above as well. Vast expertise and experience in the technological field is essential to facilitating a small business development on the internet. Your small business must stand out from the pack companies out there and also have a good brand identity. If you are uncertain and do not know how to design or develop a great website for your small business then be certain to make contact with the experts at Valentino Web Design.

Please feel free to get in touch with us for any questions you may have.

Contact Us For FREE Logo Quote ]]> http://valentinowebdesign.com/team-warrior-logo/feed/ 0 http://valentinowebdesign.com/wordpress-under-attack-how-to-avoid-botnet/ http://valentinowebdesign.com/wordpress-under-attack-how-to-avoid-botnet/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:48:49 +0000 Chad Meyer http://valentinowebdesign.com/?p=2932 WordPress is currently under attack via Botnet and you need to make certain that your WordPress blog is secure! How is this happening you might be asking? Well, hackers create malicious software (malware) into a bot or Botnet, which bot is a shorter term for robot. When this happens, and your computer is affected, your computer can conduct tasks over the Internet and you can be totally irrelevant to the fact that they exist.

When such horrible events happen, you want to make sure that your WordPress blog accounts are not affected, as well as your computer. The best way is to prevent botnet attacks is to give an extra layer of defense. You can do this by taking extra security precautions listed below that can save all your hard work that went into your WordPress blog.

Does your company or you (personally) have a WordPress blog? If so, there are a list of aspects to consider to protect yourself from the headache of a hacker or botnet attack:

• Change your Admin Username: Can’t tell you how much this alone will help, change your Admin login Username!! The attackers pick the weak, and by weak I mean weakest Username and Password.
• Make your password difficult: It might be a pain for you to try and remember your password you made for security reasons (using $#@%^&* in it) but it’s well worth it in the end! A mix of characters can really create a top notch password that is very difficult for bots to discover. Take a look at what WordPress says: recommended by WordPress.
• Take advantage of 2-Factor Authentication on WordPress.com: Make sure to make a WordPress account, if you don’t have one register, it takes 2 minutes. After you have WordPress account you can take advantage of their 2-step authentication security measure. This gives extra security to your admin login process by making sure that you are not a bot.
• Protect your computer: I’ve seen a lot of help guides on this topic and there is not a bunch of them that state to protect yourself from the source of the problem! Make sure you have reliable anti-virus and malware software that will help protect you from such issues arising. If you have Windows, follow some of these helpful tips: How to better protect your PC from botnets and malware.
• Install a Security Plugin: Make sure you have a solid security plugin that will keep your WordPress blog safe from unwanted attacks. Wordfence is a great security plugin that can create a safe environment. Also, Better WP Security might help you out to keep out those extra intruders (If you are a beginner at WordPress CMS you need to be careful with this plugin, as selecting certain options can change aspects that can break your WordPress blog, so be VERY CAREFUL when using this plugin!). When you have understanding on how to use this plugin, you can change many things that can benefit your WordPress blog, such as, your admin area, you can have special login URL to access your admin login (be careful with this, don’t want to get locked out of your own WordPress blog!). This gives you a little more adding comfort knowing some attackers can’t even see your admin login area to attempt to login. See which one you like and use it, as it can help your WordPress blog stay secure.
• Secure Your Admin Login: *Note- if you have installed Better WP Security and have turned on the secure SSL (Secure Socket Layers) admin login, you don’t need this plugin. However, if you haven’t installed Better WP Security and don’t currently have your admin login area SSL (Secure Socket Layered), then you can use WordPress HTTPS (SSL). *Note- In order to use this plugin you first must make sure that you have SSL enabled on your website. Host Gator does a good job of explaining the process, if you’re not using Host Gator, make sure to ask your hosting company how to enable SSL for your domain. Some SSL’s cost annually, others monthly, Host Gator’s is FREE if purchase business package.

We will continue a list of more security measures in the future on this page, but those are the most important as of right now. We hope this helps you in your future business and blogging ventures.

First off, you might be asking what is Google Authorship? Google Authorship is the newest way to identifying the author of a website. This supplies the authors picture right next to their content link in Google giving them total author ownership. Here is an example of what my Google Authorship looks like:

As you can see you can easily pick me out from some of the other websites listed, this is due to my Google Authorship picture. Google Authorship can really help your blog stand out from the huge blogger community.

Claim your Google Authorship

You can easily claim your Google Authorship when using WordPress with these simple steps that the AuthorSure website recommends to complete. The checklist of steps is on the right hand side of the AuthorSure page. It say’s “Your 6 Step Checklist”. Follow this checklist and you can have your Author picture show up in Google!

AuthorSure also walks you through how to setup the plugin and maintain your authorship within Google+. Having author ownership picture can really help you stand out from the other bloggers! As long as you are writing professional articles you can create a splash in the blogger world.

When the time comes for you to decide which option to choose from, how do you decide? We are here to help you make that big decision and give guidance on which option might be better for your time schedule and budget. There are advantages and disadvantages to both choices, but in the end, reading and getting a better understanding of this frequently asked question will give you an improved idea on how to choose which option will best suit your website needs.

So what does Website Development and Website Design mean:

Web Design- Is the theme part of the website. Web Designers main focus is with how a website looks and how the potential customers interact with it. Web Designers that know what they are doing can put together the theme design to produce a website that fits the clients business just right. Web Designers also recognize the usability of the website and how to craft a site that their customers want to navigate with ease of use.

Web Development- Is the back-end control and programmer of a website. The Web Developer also has a lot to do with the interactions on the web pages.  A Web Developer focal point is on how a website works and how the customers get things completed on it. High-quality Web Developers identify with programming and using scripts such as PHP. Web Developers understand how to keep a website running effectively as well.

*Note: A majority of the time Web Designers and Developers conduct both traits. Just as them to see if they are skilled with the particular trait or traits you are looking for.

What are the advantages and disadvantages?

One advantage of having your website built from scratch is that you can have it constructed just as you want it to look. It also permits you to have a website that is entirely unique. This can really help your website get the stand out power it needs to be diverse or unique. Most large web development companies believe that this is true. Contrary to that is you can still be unique with the use of Themes today and the best part is Themes are extremely user friendly. Themes today can have unlimited ways of being designed to fit your needs. We have worked with many companies with the use of themes. We have found that there are a small number of them who have a need that is so unique that we cannot design a site using a theme. There are templates for a huge variety of designs these days and some that can have unlimited designs, such as the Striking Theme and the U-Design Theme from Theme Forest.

What is a theme?

Theme Forest can give you examples of what a theme is. A theme can be installed on a Content Management System, such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. With the use of a theme you can benefit from the additional premium features the theme might include. For example, Striking Premium Corporate & Portfolio WP Theme, a list of premium features are such as:

• Cross Browser Compatible
• 16! Integrated Admin Panels
• 4 Different Sliders
• 2 Sliders Shortcoded!
• Unlimited Colors
• Background loader
• Over 600 Google fonts
• 100 Shoortcodes
• Video shortcode support
• 15 Custom Striking Widgets
• Unlimited Custom Sidebars. Header and SubFooter Widget Areas!
• Contact form
• Custom logo and Favicon
• Google Analytics & Google Map Integration
• 2 Custom Menus
• Custom CSS integrator
• Auto Upgrade

Disadvantages of having Developer Build Website from scratch

The main disadvantage of having a website built from scratch is that it will acquire a lot more time (for the developer), effort (for you and developer) and money (websites built from scratch are not cheap, they take many hours to develop, which will cost you more money in the end) than using a theme would. If you have a web developer build a website from scratch, be prepared to spend more money than if your were to have them design you a website using a theme. There is a lot of tedious coding to build a website. This takes months in time to develop and it will cost you more money. Also, the disadvantage of having web developer build your website from scratch is you will almost undoubtedly have more bugs than if you would of used a theme with Content Management System such as WordPress. Believe me, if you don’t have a responsible web developer that has great communication skills, it will be a nightmare! Bugs only mean that the web developer has to spend more time testing it and fixing problems, costing you more money.

Advantages and Disadvantages of using Theme

Using a theme offers some of the opposite issues. For the web designer, it will be much easier and faster to get your website setup. There will be fewer bugs that have to be dealt with. The only shortcoming with the use of a theme is that you will probably have to make some compromises when it comes to design. It all depends on what you want for design. Being that you can find a vast diversity of templates, there most certainly will be something appropriate for your website.

Conclusion

In the end, the choice about whether to have website built from scratch or the use of a Content Management that is themed is going to come down to your needs and your budget. Large companies with massive budgets will more often than not build their website from scratch. Reason being they want it exactly to their needs. A vast majority of smaller companies find that using a theme is a much more cost effective resolution. Plus, they get a website that is completely sufficient for their needs. If your a small business that requires an affordable website, a themed design with Content Management System (such as WordPress) is the way to go. If your a large company that wants everything on your website specific to fit your needs, having a website built from scratch is a better choice. If your selling merchandise on your website the use of themed website and Content Management System can benefit you immensely. The choice is up to you in the end, just make sure you understand the difference between a Web Developer and Web Designer, as you want to know if you are getting a website created from scratch or a website created with use of a theme.