Articles and Tips on Web Design and Website Strategy

If you’re looking for articles and information on website design and website strategy, you’re in the right place. Custom web design and strategic website planning is our core specialty at Bourn Creative.

When it comes to creating a successful website, there are a lot of marketing consultants and business coaches that write/talk about it … but we actually do it  day in and day out, every day in our business. We walk our talk and do what we teach, and gives us a perspective most people don’t have.

In the articles below, we share our first-hand knowledge from the web design front lines with you, answer your questions, and help you get the information you need to create a website that works when you’re not working.

7 Ways To Alienate Your Designer & Go From Client to Contract

How to Make Your Designer CrazyIn a perfect world, working with your designer would be a perfect partnership of creativity, communication, and collaboration — at least that is what designers strive for. But that’s not always the case…

A designer begins every project excited about what they will create and about bringing the client’s vision to life — they wouldn’t have accepted the project is they weren’t.

They are excited about solving problems, helping their clients succeed, and building a new relationship or strengthening an existing one. They value their client and look forward to becoming their long term creative partner.

You should know that designers have so much pride in their work and so much invested in their clients’ success, that they will often bend over backward, throw in extra work, and go above and beyond your contract just to make sure the final result is as good as it can possibly be. Mainly because the success of your project puts their reputation on the line.

But occasionally, a switch gets flipped, and the dynamics of the relationship change

Something happens, or several things happen, that cause a designer to shift the way they view a client and a project.

Get 8 tips you can use to alienate your designer

Want a Design Job? 9 Tips to Get Hired at a Creative Agency

How to Get a Design JobWhen I graduated with my degree in graphic design from Sacramento State University, California, finding the job I wanted was tough.

I worked mostly full-time through college for an amazingly talented woman with 3 children who owned an advertising agency she ran out of her home (Hint: Inspiration for starting Bourn Creative). By the time I graduated, I had completed four internships and several intern/student projects — yes, I’ve always been a driven, over-achiever.

Upon graduation I wanted to work at a big agency, I dreamed of working my way up the agency ladder to Creative Director — and I was willing to do the work to make it happen. Then reality hit. I began looking for a job in my last semester of college. I researched the creative companies in and around Sacramento, researched who was hiring, researched who their clients, were, what their mission, was, what they stood for and represented. I figured out who I wanted to work for and why … then I applied.

Get 9 Tips on how to get hired as a designer or developer at a creative agency

Making Decisions Based On Where You’ve Been vs. Where You Want To Go

Decision Making Mindset

The ability to make decisions in business is critical to your success — as long as you’re using the right frame of reference, and frame of mind for your decision-making.

For the sake of this article, I’ll assume that you are not a business owner satisfied with the status quo, but an entrepreneur striving to improve, evolve, and grow.

The Wrong Decision-Making Mindset

There is a popular phrase often tossed around by business coaches: “What you focus on expands.”

With that belief in mind, one surefire way to stay where you are and stunt your business growth is to focus on the past — what has happened before, what was true before, what worked before — and let it hold you back.

Focusing on where you’ve been will result is staying where you are.

The same is true for your decision-making mindset. To move your business forward, continue to grow, and achieve your goals, it is imperative that you stop making decisions based on where you have been.

Learn The Right Decision-Making Mindset For Success

Genesis SEO Settings Guide

WordPress Genesis SEO GuideAt Bourn Creative, we build our custom designed WordPress websites exclusively on the Genesis Framework by StudioPress.

The reasons behind our choice to develop our custom themes on the Genesis Framework are numerous, but a few we often highlight are that the Genesis Framework is very flexible/customizable, coded extremely well, and has been built with SEO as a priority (SEO — the art and science of being found online through organic search).

After all, a beautifully designed website means nothing if consumers and search engines can’t find you.

Genesis already has most SEO requirements built into the framework. As a result, a separate WordPress SEO plugin isn’t necessary, which means one less plugin to manage, and keep updated.

Get Our Genesis SEO Settings Guide & Instructions

Adding Google Authorship To Your WordPress Site

(AKA: Getting Your Photo To Show Up In The Google Search Results)

Google Search Results Page Showing Author Photo

Facial recognition is a powerful marketing tool and authors, business owners, and bloggers alike are taking advantage of it.

When searching Google, you have more than likely noticed that photos are now appearing next to some of the listed search results on the search engine results pages — and you may have even been influenced by those photos when deciding which link to click.

Getting YOUR Photo to Show Up

Adding your photo to Google’s search results can easily be accomplished in a few different ways with a WordPress site. In fact, the process is nearly identical using three of our favorite WordPress tools:

Learn How to get your photo to show up next to your pages and posts in the Google search results

3 Steps to Turn Your WordPress Site Into a Lead Generating Machine

Last week Brian and I both gave lightning talks at the Sacramento WordPress Meetup. Brian’s talk shared the 5 must have plugins we recommend for every WordPress website.

My talk covered how to turn your website visitors into clients and customers — more specifically I talked about website strategy and three steps you can take to turn your website into a lead generating machine.

How to Make Your Website a Lead Generating Machine:

Creating a complete small business website takes comprehensive strategic planning of the content and user flow, the user experience, the sales funnel, the design, the navigation menus, the page templates, and more. Usually my website strategy presentation is an hour long, but for the Sacramento WordPress meetup, I was limited to only 10 minutes!

These are the three website strategies I shared in my talk — the strategies I think are most important for a website owner to understand:

  • STRATEGY 1: Use the Know, Like, Trust, Conversion approach to naturally lead your visitors to take action
  • STRATEGY 2: Create multiple opportunities for visitors to find your key money content
  • STRATEGY 3: Eliminate all unnecessary distractions from your sales funnel and conversion pages

Now, let’s dive deeper into each of these three strategies:

Learn Three Website Strategies to Turn Visitors Into Clients & Customers

5 Must Have WordPress Plugins We Use On Every Site

At Bourn Creative we have a stable of various paid and free WordPress plugins that we regularly use on our clients’ sites, depending on needed website functionality.

Out of our collection of trusted WordPress plugins, there are five must have plugins that we use on pretty much every custom WordPress site we build — and this past week I shared these five plugins in a lighting talk I gave at the Sacramento WordPress Meetup.

WordPress Plugin #1: Akismet

Akismet WordPress Spam Blocking

Why We Recommend the Akismet WordPress Plugin:

  • Created, managed, and owned by Automattic
  • Save time with simple comment spam protection
  • Low monthly fee (still free for personal bloggers)
  • Download Akismet

Learn Our 5 Must Have WordPress Plugins

A Behind the Scenes Look at a WordPress Website Makeover

Today's Innovative Woman Magazine WordPress Website MakeoverRecently we launched a brand new custom WordPress website for Today’s Innovative Woman, and wanted to share some of the behind the scenes strategy for the site and insight into why we built it the way we did.

At Bourn Creative we view the primary role of design as problem solving. While the visual look and feel is important, it must first and foremost support the overall site strategy.

Today’s Innovative Woman is a magazine for women entrepreneurs and business owners with print distribution of more than 10,000, visibility at events around the country, and a strong online community.

While the original WordPress theme worked great when the magazine was first launched, Today’s Innovative Woman was was quickly outgrowing the site. With a booming community, growing subscriber base, and influx of guest writers and featured experts, not only did publisher Cathy Alessandra need a new custom WordPress site, but she needed a whole new online strategy!

Read More About The Redesign For Today’s Innovative Woman

WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” Released

WordPress 3.5 was just released and the biggest change that most WordPress website owners will notice is the dramatically changed media center. The media uploader has been completely rebuilt and now makes many tasks much simpler, including creating and managing new galleries.

Here’s a video overview from the WordPress.org blog highlighting 3.5:

wordpress-elvin-video

Learn More

3 Biggest Mistakes Business Owners Make When Setting Up Their Website

Startup Website MistakesWe’ve received the call for help from a desperate business owner time and time again — A business owner loses control of their website due to a soured relationship with their web developer or IT consultant, and now that things aren’t so friendly, the provider is holding the business owner’s website hostage.

Sometimes the business owner wants to move their hosting, or switch from an old HTML site to a new WordPress site — and they can’t because they technically don’t own their domain name.

Sometimes the business owner just wants to make a simple change to their website — and they can’t because they don’t have a content management system built into their site, and their provider has disappeared.

Sometimes the business owners needs to get access to the files on their website or in their hosting account — and they can’t because they don’t own their hosting and they don’t have access.

Don’t let this happen to you! Here are the three biggest mistakes these business owners made when setting up their website — and how you can avoid making the same ones:

Learn The 3 Biggest Website Mistakes You Need to Avoid