A year ago I was asked to revamp a website called Affinity Law. However, after this was done, the owner of the site, Mr Steve Stapleton, asked me to also use the design on another of his websites, namely Schools Commercial Gallery.

As the job progressed there were additional features requested/added & I was also asked to buy other domain names, with a view to building other sites. The initial job(s) was completed in a matter of days, as I was told that the time was of the essence & I was told by Mr Stapleton that he was very happy with the work I’d done & I was paid in full by cheque……..however, shortly before I was due to go away on my first holiday for years, the cheque was returned by my bank, stating that it had been stopped!!

Assuming this was a simple mistake, I contacted Mr Stapleton, who told me that this WAS a mix up, caused by the company changing banks; he would find out what had happened and get me paid asap. This was in April 2010 & I have still never been paid for the work I did!

During the course of the last year, I’ve asked Mr Stapleton to pay a number of times, but have always been told to ask again in a couple of months, as the company has no money!

So now a year has passed & still nothing has been paid – promised yes, but paid, no. As a result I have decided to take this case to the small claims court & see if a CCJ will at least prove my outstanding claim, should the company go into liquidation (assuming that’s what happens when a company owes money but has none!).

I’ve used Money Claim Online to start proceedings; which is Her Majesty’s Courts Service Internet based service for claimants and defendants! Assuming you have a Government Gateway account, it’s very easy to use & a claim notice has now been sent by the court. The cost of issuing a notice varies depending on the amount due, but hopefully this will break the stalemate in some way!!!!

What concerns me is that the Schools Commercial Gallery are supposedly involved with fundraising for schools! “We work with the Extended Schools Coordinators to maximise income generation and fundraising to support the development and sustainability of new events by identifying opportunities and working closely with the schools and the local business community”.

As an advocate of plain english, I have no idea what the above statement really means – it’s that business speak that sounds great, but is pretty vague in its meaning! All I know is that I have been promised payment for MY services a dozen times, but have yet to see a penny & it’s that sort of statement that I DO understand!

The one thing that I changed about my business after this episode, was to charge people 50% up front before I even start a project! I hate doing it, as I feel it infers that I can’t trust the client, but I can’t take the risk of spending weeks working on another project, only to not get paid again!

Hopefully an update to this post will be a happy one!!

Looking at the abundance of business websites powered by WordPress, it’s apparent that it has tremendous appeal to internet marketers. When you think about this, it doesn’t come as a surprise. This content management platform is free to use, easy to install and even easier to manipulate. You don’t need to be some kind of coding wiz to configure your site. More importantly there are thousands of plug-ins available. By using plugins, you can make your site do almost anything and look almost any way you choose. Downloading is done via the WordPress codex site, and you just follow the instructions within the Dashboard and you’ll be all set to go. Here are some of the WordPress Plug-ins that every internet marketer needs to have in his arsenal. Having a good income stream is important online, so have a peek at this Empire Formula web site.

The FD Feedburner plugin is something all online marketers will find extremely useful. So just imagine that you can have the benefits of Feedburner because this plugin makes your blog feed into a feed for Feedburner. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is how people follow your site without having to visit the actual pages every day. What happens is all your RSS subscribers will receive an alert when your content/blog is updated with new content. So it’s really convenient because it eliminates the need to check a bunch of sites for fresh content each day. The Feedburner Plug-in is good because Feedburner feeds are accessible by just about every feed reader on the internet.

A standard plugin for SEO is the All in One SEO Pack, and it’s highly recommended. Basically it helps your blog be properly configured for ‘on page’ SEO factors so you don’t have to mess with it. Whenever you make a post, or create a page with a post, it will optimize all the relevant on-page factors for you. You can use certain settings on specific pages to avoid getting slapped with a minus for dupe content.

So what you’ll do is for those pages, just make them noindex in the settings and no problem. All online marketers realize the importance of SEO for their success. Come see this innovative online money making method at this Empire Formula page.

The WP Greet Box Plug-in is a great way to personalize your site for your viewers. You’ll set it up so visitors hear a personal message/greeting from you if they arrive from certain sources. For example, if someone finds your website through Digg, a message will pop up that says something along the lines of “Welcome Digg user!” So depending on your marketing, you’ll customize the message to greet people from any website. It’s just a way to help make visitors feel appreciated for following a link to your site. Hopefully it will encourage your visitors to bookmark your site on your behalf. You’ll really ramp-up your marketing online if you take advantage of WordPress. This used to only be viewed as something ‘bloggers’ used, but online marketers don’t look at WordPress like that, anymore. WordPress can be used effectively by almost anyone. Internet marketers who have always avoided marketing with blogs are turning to them more and more. So it’s even easy for those who have never even thought about it before. You can customize your site for any use with plugins and WordPress.

Additional Resources:
Home Based Business

It’s natural to assume WordPress is only for blogs and nothing else. While, in addition to your internet marketing site, you might have your own blog there is no reason that you cannot use WordPress for both types of sites. WordPress is a highly regarded CMS, or Content Management System, that is versatile and flexible. You can achieve a high degree of functionality with your site because of the myriad of plugins that are available. There are some plugins that are ideal for online marketers, and we wanted to review them for you. Decide right now that you are going to make it online and see this Empire Formula webpage.

There are several plugins you never want to operate without, and the Google XML Sitemap is one of them. This is quite possibly the most important plug-in that you can install into your WordPress site. This is a background type of tool, and it will help Google have a better idea of what your site is about which will help you. It’s important to help Google maintain an accurate account of your site, so you should create/build a new sitemap at a regular interval depending on how often you add content. Manual sitemap creation can become a bit tedious and require some time. But whenever you update your blog, the sitemap plugin will automatically update itself.

You probably can easily figure out what the Similar Posts plugin does. But what it actually does is put a link at the end of your posts to other posts on your site that are related. Ok, so it’s pretty obvious why this is a good idea; it will try to interest your visitors in other posts, etc. This serves very well to maintain interest in your site. You never want to do something to destroy their natural curiosity. When deciding on what affiliate marketing course to learn next you should check out this Empire Formula internet site.

For traffic generation and other purposes, the Landing Sites plugin will be especially helpful to you. If a visitor does not immediately click away from your site, they’ll do some reading and visit some links on your site. So what this plugin does is offer your visitors a choice of links to other content pages on your site. You want them to stay their forever, they won’t… be maybe much longer than they might have otherwise.

So whenever they read or visit a page they’ll see more of your site and hopefully will begin to like it. Of course this is something that’s highly desirable for anyone with a business website.

WordPress is just a solid and tremendously flexible content management system. Extremely versatile, it can be used for landing pages, squeeze pages, blogs – of course, video blogs, etc. As you know by now, it can be customized and its functions altered with plugins. As an internet marketer you need a website that is fully functional and easy for you to customize. With these great plug-ins, WordPress could be just the ticket!

Additional Resources:
Making Money On The Internet

FreshWebz Website Builder is a fully featured website building tool designed to let anyone create professional, multi-page websites. It features vibrant, professional designs and pre-built templates to speed your website development. It is both easy and powerful. There are plenty of pre-designed templates to choose from and it is completely free to use with your account. Some hosting companies limit the number of pages you can publish – not us! You can create as many pages as you like and update them as often as you like.

Key Features

• Over 200 Templates
• Easy to Use
• Get Online Fast
• No Technical Experience Needed
• Easy-to-Use
• One-Click Publishing
• Free With ALL hosting from Starter upwards

Website Builder Plus

For a small yearly fee of £19.99, you can upgrade to Website Builder Plus. Website Builder Plus uses the latest in web builder technology to create a dynamic and vibrant site with no technical expertise. Get the “custom” look that is usually reserved for sites that cost a fortune to create, by professional design agencies.

Create Personal Sites, Business Sites, Online Shops and More!

You can design and edit your site in real time and whether you want to open an online shop, advertise your business, share family photos or start a community forum, Website Builder Plus will allow you to do this without having to write any complicated code.

Create as Many Pages as You Like

Some hosting companies limit the number of pages you can publish – not us! You can create as many pages as you like and update them as often as you like.

Key Features

• 500+ Quality Templates
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While many website owners focus on obtaining external links, it’s easy to miss internal link building, which is still an effective way to boost rankings for other pages within your website and the the best part of Internal Linking is that you have complete control over the implementation!

To get the highest possible return for your SEO, follow these simple guidelines to ensure internal links are working to improve your rankings.

1. Optimise the anchor text
You should ensure your anchor text targets your core keyword for the page. This is a good tactic to use in site-wide footer links, or even in the navigation, provided what you put there still makes sense for your visitors.

2. Ensure all links are do-follow
Google ignores link value from any links marked as “nofollow”, so make sure that you haven’t marked internal links with the “nofollow” attribute.

3. Use content based links where appropriate
Aside from the main navigation and footer links, linking to the main pages within the body text of your web page is another way to help rankings. Remember that it’s important to use your target keywords as anchor text, but make sure the actual text fits within the context of the sentence, so that the link doesn’t look out of place or seem irrelevant

4. Keep the total link numbers low
Make a note of the total number of links on any given page and try and keep this number as low as possible. This is because individual link “juice” is divided amongst ALL the links (external and internal) on the page, so the less links you have, the more value each link is going to pass on. Having hundreds of links on a page will dilute the effect of each link to almost nothing!

If you follow these simple guidelines, you should start to see some positive effect on the rankings for your keywords.

Google have given webmasters a strong indication that the speed of a website may become an organic ranking factor in 2010!

Here’s what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say on the issue:

“Historically we haven’t used it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience and so it’s fair to say if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus, or if you have an awfully slow site, maybe users don’t want that as much.”

Google already considers page load times as part of the AdWords quality score, so it’s a logical step for this to be included in organic listings too.

While it’s unlikely to have a huge impact on rankings (there are over 200 other factors) it would be worth preparing for its introduction ahead of time and get your site loading as fast as possible. Here are a couple of tools which can help you get started:

• Google’s Page Speed Tool – This is a firefox plugin from Google that enables you to see which areas of your site need improvement.
• WebPageTest.org – Another speed tool which provides optimization recommendations and other interesting stats.

I recently built the Cheap Event Tickets website & went through loads of free & paid for themes, which I could use on the site, but all of them had formatting problems and just didn’t look professional enough.

I then came across StudioPress ® Premium WordPress Themes which are professionally designed premium WordPress themes and look absolutely superb, but are also optimised for search engines by Joost de Valk, an SEO Specialist whom I’ve mentioned previously on my blog. He has also released 20+ WordPress plugins with close to 1 million downloads in total & lots of nice WordPress tutorials on his blog yoast.com.

The fact that the StudioPress themes are already Search Engine optimised, means half the job is done for you! With installation of the recommended plugins, provided your content is up to scratch, the site will work really well, as well as looking fantastic.

I’m so pleased with how Cheap Event Tickets has turned out & how easy the theme is to use, that I’m going to upgrade to the Pro Plus All-Theme Package, which allows me to use ALL of the themes, on as many sites as I want and also gives me access to any future themes that are released! I’m planning to use the themes to redesign Love Your Pets, to possibly re-develop the My Travel Extras blog & to finally get Web Travel Offers off the ground!! However, I could also use these themes to build sites for clients, so they’re real value for money too!

Some of the benefits of using the StudioPress ® Premium WordPress Themes are:

Search Engine Optimized

Google loves WordPress and most blogs do well in the search engines, but our Themes have been fully SEO’d by one of the leading SEO specialists, Joost de Valk. Our Themes will help your blog rank higher in the search engines and by following our Tutorials and recommendations you can achieve even greater search engine placement results.

Widget-Ready

If you are looking for ease-of-use, WordPress widgets are the way to go. Without having to know how to code, you can simply drag-n-drop to create the look you desire for your blog.

Theme Options Page

Our WordPress themes use a theme options page that allows you to easily customize the way your blog looks. Simply select from drop-down choices what categories you want to display or the number of posts to show and even what size you want your thumbnail images. You can also simply toggle between using a custom image or dynamic text for your header logo area.

Auto-sized Thumbnail Management

There are thousands of blogs and if you want yours to stand out, you must draw attention to your blog and articles. Nothing creates interest better than using images to draw attention where you want it, but image management can be a hassle. Not so in our Themes as we have integrated the use of the TimThumb PHP scrpit that dynamically resizes your images.

Ready for Advertising

Most of our themes are ready for advertising. All you need to do is insert your advertising code, like Google Adsense, Azoogle Ads, Clicksor, or any others, into the advertising widgets and start collecting your advertising revenue.

Comment Functionality

One method of holding your website visitor’s attention is through discussion of your articles. WordPress achieves this through the use of Comments and our themes use the latest features of WordPress including threaded comments and Gravatar integration.

Developed for Localization

A new feature for StudioPress themes is that they are being developed for localization. This means that you can now translate these themes into your own native language! Currently the Agent, Church, Education, Lifestyle and Streamline themes have this feature, but we will be updating all themes to include this as quickly as we can.

PSD Files Included

Another way to attract visitors to your blog is through the use of great-looking graphics, which the StudioPress themes have. Many members have a design-look in mind and to make it easier to change the graphics we provide the Photoshop Document (PSD) files of the graphic files we use.

Lifetime Support

Need help fixing a problem or making a minor modification to your theme? Let’s face it; technology doesn’t always work as smoothly as we all want. So, if you need help, our support is world-class and our team consists of over 20 moderators from all over the world, who provide solutions and help to our 12,000+ members, many of which help other members.

WordPress & Theme Tutorials

Whether you are looking to get up to speed with your WordPress knowledge or ready to get your brand new StudioPress theme working, our tutorials will teach you what you need to know.

Approved Designers

Maybe you are a busy businessperson or don’t want to spend the time creating your website blog. We provide a list of talented, freelance WordPress designers/customizers that you can hire to provide you with the look you want. Many of the blogs in our Showcase were created by these creative people.

Well, it’s happened again! After having put in hours of work on a site, the client has changed their mind & sneakily built themselves a “do it yourself” site, using elements of my design in their “creation”.

This happened to me a while ago when I was building a HIPS site & has now happened with the escort agency I was building a site for. Despite putting in hours of work & even having the client visit me to discuss how to progress with the site, all of a sudden they had gone very quiet! Upon checking the domain that I was supposed to be working on, I found a very cheap and tacky looking site, developed using doyourownsite.co.uk, which costs £5.88 per month to use & the resulting site certainly looks worth no more than that!

The client did explain that she wasn’t educated & this would explain the spelling mistakes that proliferate the site. However, I suppose the sort of people who will be using the service won’t care too much about that, but the client was saying that she wanted the site to look professional, along the lines of www.vogueescorts.co.uk. However, the one she’s come up with looks total rubbish – I won’t put their domain here as I don’t want to give them any publicity!

I think I’ll have to start assuming that everyone will try to rip me off by default & charge people a deposit up front from now on, as I can’t afford this to keep happening…..I’ve spent the last month working on 4 sites & have not yet been paid by any of the clients – I know I will get paid by one of them, it looks like I won’t get paid anything by 1 and the other 2 are an unknown quantity. The only solution seems to be taking part payment up front to prevent this happening again. Interestingly enough, the two people that have done this have both been self-employed business women! Contentious I know, but is this because women tend to change their moinds more often?!!!

The escort agency client did mention to me that she pays no tax on her business, yet makes a shed load of money (the girls get £110 per hour, before any “extras” are negotiated), so I contacted the HMRC Tax Evasion hotline, with as many details as I could supply, as she’s made it quite clear I won’t be getting any money out of her for the work already done!

First rule of business these days seems to be “don’t trust anyone”!

It’s nearly been a month since I blogged on here, mainly due to the amount of web design work I am doing.

One project is for a home security company, www.guardedhomes.co.uk, offering ipCCTV, gates, railings, shutters, safe rooms & the like, another new(ish) recruitment firm, as well as 3 home page mock-ups for another well-established recruitment company, not to mention a local escort agency!!!! On top of that, I’ve had a few other enquiries & just never seem to have the time for blogging at the moment. When I actually get paid for some of this work will be interesting though O

I’ve not been able to do much work on Cashback Shopper, or My Travel Extras recently & absolutely NONE on Love Your Pets or UK Shopping Spree & really want to redesign My Travel Extras to be less cluttered & more Web 2.0, but will have to wait for a quiet spell I guess. Once I get paid, I want to promote my dating sites a bit more I recently bought a number of new domains, but guess they will also have to go on the back burner for now: cheapcarhirealicante.com, webtraveloffers.com, travelcheapinfo.com, cheapsmallbusinessbroadband.co.uk, scifigoodies.co.uk, findmegaydates.co.uk, findmelesbiandates.co.uk, plus I wanted to try to resurrect easylolly.com for some sort of financial site.

On top of this Ei42 have just launched in the US, so I’ve been link building for www.cashbackshoppers.biz, in the hope that I can get some more interest in this, but think this is going to need some articles and forum postings to get anywhere…..I did start writing to schools asking them to consider joining as a way to raise funds for their school, but haven’t had the time to carry on.

Maybe I have my fingers in too many pies & am spreading myself a bit too thin, but we’ll see.

I recently completed another affordable website design for a client, which you can see at www.tideservices.co.uk.

This was quite a straightforward job; although the original company role was the installation of roller shutters to shops & bakeries, they have branched out into many more fields over the last few years, but wanted all of this covered by a 5 page site!!

This was the only issue as far as designing the site was concerned…..the company performs about a dozen different functions – how to get that into a 5 page site. Luckily, I was able to separate the navigation into 2 sections on the homepage – Industrial doors & building maintenance down the side as the 2 main functions of the company & some sub headings horizontally across the page too, highlighting particular products!

Once all the information was collated from the client, the site made good headway & the client is very pleased….I can say this because he wants me to work on another site for him & has referred me to a relative who runs a wedding planning business!!

Always nice to be appreciated )