Month: August 2011

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Growing your blog audience

So back in March I casually announced I had started a new blog “Creative in Chicago” which follows my decorating adventures as I turn my ever so brown 1970’s Chicago house, into a light airy home. While this blog has nothing what so ever to do with my web design business  it’s very rewarding to see the practices  I preach to all my blogging clients actually working.

how to grow your blog readers

So what is it I preach?

Post Regularly
For a new blog I recommend posting everyday if possible and a minimum of 3 times a week.

Have meaningful well thought out keyword rich post titles
Search engines will like this

Offer different ways to subscribe to your blog
Everyone likes to read blogs in a different way so the more ways you can provide your content  the better. Signing up with a web feed management like Feedburner offers your readers great options and can also be configured to offer email subscriptions.

Allow comments
Comments can be configured so they are moderated and given the thumbs up before being published to your site. Write blog posts which  encourage dialogue between you and your readers and be sure to answer any questions they pose. It can also be useful to visit your commenter’s blogs and leave a message thanking them for visiting.

Write Comments
Commenting on other relevant blogs is a great way to promote your blog but be careful that your comments do not come across as spam.

Take part in other bloggers “parties”
Link parties are very popular with certain blogger groups, particularly those who write about something that can be photographed, think home decorator,  crafter’s, artists,  gardeners, cooks.

The host of a link party will offer the opportunity to promote a post from your site , quite often for nothing in return. The parties run for a predetermined time and generally result in a very high quality selection of projects as the host has complete control over what appears and any spam is weeded out.

Link parties really deserve a complete blog post and I will write that another day!

Promote
Take every opportunity to promote and link to your  blog. Include it in your social media profiles, participate in forums, tweet about it, start a Facebook fan page.

All of this takes time and effort but really does pay off. My Creative in Chicago blog has gone from zero to nearly 7000 visits per month in just four short months.

blog stats

©:2011 Chicago web designer

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WordPress training for new web site clients

Many of the websites we have created in the last year of so have been built on the WordPress platform. WordPress is more than a great blogging platform it is also a very powerful content management system (CMS) and for those clients who wish to maintain their site themselves it is a good option.

Once we complete a WordPress site we don’t just turn it over to the client and let then figure stuff out for themselves, we provide an interactive training session. Here is what we generally cover.

  • How to login
  • The anatomy of the WordPress dashboard
  • Writing a new blog post
  • Adding and assigning blog categories
  • SEO techniques for blog posts
  • Dealing with comments, approving, editing and trashing
  • Adding links
  • Uploading photos
  • Uploading documents
  • Viewing and editing website pages
  • Adding new pages

While this is not a comprehensive list of the all the things capable from WordPress,  it is the perfect collection of  “need to know how’s”  for clients who want to edit and update the content of their sites.

©: 2011 Chicago Web Designer

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New website for Lincolnshire Academy of Dance

Launched this week is a completely redesigned web site for the Lincolnshire Academy of Dance.

dance studio web site

The academy is about to move into a fabulous, brand new, custom built space and owner Brenda Didier also wanted to start things fresh with a new web site as well.

The site showcases a wealth of professionally taken photographs which capture the commitment of the students and the teaching ethics of the dance school,  they taken center stage in the the look and feel of the site. The content from the original site was reorganized into a more logical architecture and a clean and simple navigational tool allows users to easy move around the site.

For ease of client management the site has been built on the WordPress platform.

We have already heard very positive feedback on the site!

©: 2011 Chicago Web Designer