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A web site is more than just an instrument for business. It’s an elemnt of your “brand” image, your storefront and an indicator of your professionalism. A good website is navigable, provides easy access to goods, services or information and effectively serves the purposes of its owner. Developing sites that meet these criteria is not easy. While there are thousands of freelance web developers available to choose from, few of them have the experience and skill needed to custom-build a site to fit specific needs.

Many business owners simply use price as a comparison point, which obviously favors freelancers. Those who are savvy enough to ask for a portfolio of multiple sites, however, often decide to go with a firm after doing so. It’s crucial to understand that the development of one or two sites is a poor signal for the ability to construct a site that is beneficial for your business.

The benefit of choosing a firm as opposed to a freelancer is basic. Firms typically have specialists who work on a specific part of your web site. The individual creating your layout isn’t likely to be the individual developing HTML or scripting. When specialists aspects of a project, those portions get more individualized attention.

Still, unless a web programming firm has a fluid production protocol between departments, delays can occur. Looking at an extensive portfolio won’t indicate the amount of time or cost overruns that occurredwhen developing a site. When collecting bids from Ultimately, firms can offer business owners more experience and greater attention to detail than most freelancers can. Your business is unlike any other and deserves a team of professionals devoted to making the most of your web site.

If you’re a web site designer/builder, experienced or raw beginner, and you haven’t used Wordpress to create a web site yet, then you’re overlooking one of the quickest, easiest, and cheapest ways to build a super looking web site.

If your perception of Wordpress is that it is for blogging and bloggers and not good for much of anything else, then man are you missing the boat.

Wordpress is extremely powerful, very versatile, highly customizable, unusually easy to install, and extremely low priced(as in free).

There are all kinds of free and custom themes for Wordpress available and you can quickly transform a plain looking site into a very professional looking site that rivals the work of many high priced professional web site designers.

Using a few of the hundreds and hundreds of plugins available for Wordpress, you can turn your Wordpress site into a sophisticated and highly automated web site that would make any geeky web site code writer jealous.

Besides the hundreds of free themes available for Wordpress there are also some highly specialized custom themes for Wordpress available that can have your Wordpress web site up and running and looking superb in just a couple of hours, and at a very low cost.

Specialized premium themes are available in areas such as music, news, photo sites, real estate, sports, sports teams, grunge, ecommerce, corporate, business, blogging, social, magazines, technology, and more. You can see demo sites and test drive themes of this type at custom Wordpress themes

Two of my very favorite providers of custom themes for Wordpress, the ones I selected to use on my own web site, are ITheme and Revolution.

Plugins are add-on components that you can quicky and easily install in Wordpress. A lot of them are free to download and install, and others are sold at prices that are usually very reasonable for the chores that they perform for your web site.

There are plugins that will do SEO chores on your web site. There are plugins that will auto backup your Wordpress database and email you the backup files. There are plugins that will install Adsense ads on your site.

There are plugins that will install a contact form on your site so you don’t need to show your email address to spammers.

There are plugins that will turn your Wordpress web site into a fully operational ecommerce site complete with shopping cart, payment processing, and product delivery.

There are plugins that will morph your Wordpress site into a membership site, with full member management, one-time and recurring payment processing, and member content management. I use a plugin called YourMember Wordpress plugin to handle the membership chores on one of my web sites, and I have been very pleased with the way it works, and the level of support I have received from the two guys that developed it. Information on this Wordpress membership site plugin is available at membership site plugin by YourMember

A new membership site management component just recently appeared on the scene that can drip feed your content to members of your web site, which means new members cannot access all of the content that old members have access to unless they remain a member and have the content drip fed to them each month. This is a feature that has been sorely needed in membership site management tools. This component is named DAP Wordpress membership site plugin, or Digital Access Pass, and you can learn about all of the features available at Digital Access Pass plugin for Wordpress.

All in all, Wordpress is a web site builders dream come true. It’s fast, easy, free, and works great. How can you beat a combination like that?

Check out the short video on How To Install Wordpress Using cPanel And Fantastico to find out for yourself just how easy it is to install Wordpress and have an instant web site, ready to customize to fit your needs.

Online businesses are the up and coming way of working from home. Moms love the idea of being able to stay at home with their children. Dad’s like the freedom it brings to their lives not having to go to work everyday for a meager income that barely pays the bills. The internet business was created for those who are ready for a change and for those who want to be in control of their future.
One problem with all of that. If you research the satistics, over 90% of people fail with thier first online venture. Some will try again, hoping this is the one, and some will just go back to their humdrum life and their nine to five job.

There is a better way to work from home and make huge profits. We have a team of Top Mentors to help even the newest beginner, or those who think they are absolute dummies when it comes to internet. We are experts in this field, and we are there for you each step of the way.
Online mentoring is the best way to make your business succesful the first time around. The training they offer is extremely valueble, and is offered for free in our exclusive group.
If you are interested in gaining that freedom from your job and your finances, this is the right place and the right time.
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Have you had this experience before? –> You receive an e-mail from an Internet marketing “guru” endorsing a new product. You then click through to the website which displays the sales copy — and you buy (or don’t buy) the product based on the strength of the endorsement — not necessarily on how well the copy is written.

Sound familiar?

This model of doing business has been used successfully, both online and offline. Endorsements by “big name” personalities — or people we at least admire or respect — influence our frame of mind so much that we tend to look favorably on whatever it is they’re endorsing. And sometimes this “star struck” response makes us perceive the sales copy favorably as well, no matter how cheesy it might be.

This got me thinking about how well a piece of sales copy would perform if it were to stand alone — without someone’s endorsement preceding the website visit. Could this be the reason why Internet marketing “gurus” boast off-the-charts sales figures — because they have an army of joint venture partners endorsing their product — something most of us “average Joes” will never have? More importantly, has this “old boy” network given rise to the proliferation of sub-standard web copywriting because of the complacency that the copy is given the “halo” of credibility by endorsements?

Indeed, when you look closely at the caliber of web copywriting that many of the top marketers utilise, it insults the intelligence of people and often elicits the reaction, “Do people really buy this crap? Whom do they think they’re fooling?”

Between 2005 to 2008, I believe there’s been a progressive decline in the effectiveness of the salesletter. So much so that in late 2007, Michel Fortin published a 51-page report titled “The Death of the Salesletter” which talks about the downhill weakening in the effectiveness of the typical “Dear Friend” web copy as far as selling on the Internet is concerned.

In the report, the author admits that most of the other top Internet marketers like John Reese predict the eventual demise of “ugly websites” (long-scrolling formulaic sales copy with the usual glaring fonts, the laundry list of overvalued bonuses, the endless P.S.’s, etc.). These are sites that Armand Morin calls “cartoonish” websites. Many other Internet marketing leaders like Mike Filsaime also agree that the cookie-cutter website copy is falling out of favor.

Michel calls for a move toward writing more editorial-like sales copy that gives more content; turning the sales process into an experience; eliminating overused copywriting tactics that no longer work — and ultimately producing copy that’s stronger, pithier and more to the point.

Recently, I found a website that features compelling web copy that I think ought to be the new standard for writing copy for the Internet population. It’s written in the editorial style and it’s a refreshing departure from the hackneyed, “snake oil salesman,” Slick Willie kind of sales pitching. It gives a lot of compelling information before “going for the kill” and it made me feel like I was reading an informative article about a topic of interest to me, instead of being sold to.

It employs an elegant, soft sell approach that, nevertheless, packs a powerful punch — and best of all, it respects, not insults, the intelligence of the reader. In my opinion, this is compelling web copy that we should all emulate. The copy still utilised a long-scrolling webpage, but I found it a highly intriguing and entertaining read. I didn’t read every word on the webpage, of course (who does nowadays?) but I found myself buying the $39.95 eBook on my very first visit — something I rarely do.

Considering that I was a cold prospect who arrived at the website after clicking on a Google search result, and I didn’t arrive there via the endorsement of a colleague or “guru” — and on top of all that, I’m definitely not one who’s easily “sold” — this speaks volumes about the power of this piece of sales copy.

Granted, I happen to be the exact target audience of the eBook being sold on the website (titled “The One-Minute Cure: The Secret to Healing Virtually All Diseases”), I still think there’s a lot of magic going on in this editorial style of web copywriting.

It would be immensely valuable for marketers to deconstruct the sales copy to discover the elements that make people want to buy. Better still, if we can find out who wrote this brilliant sales copy, we can pick his or her brain to see if we can learn the hidden psychology behind this kind of copy.

If we, marketers, learn the inner workings of this editorial style of web copywriting, we could all make a bloody killing in them thar Internet hills!

If this trend towards editorial style copywriting were to become the norm, I can’t help but wonder what will become of those fill-in-the-blanks template-based copywriting programs that produce cookie-cutter pieces of sales copy that look like everyone else’s.