Fast, Stylish & Professional: Resources for Your Small Business Website

offices

Over the weekend, I gave my parents’ law firm’s website a revamp. It’s the third iteration of their website that I’ve done for them over the last decade. One thing that has struck me over that time is how much the tools for creating a stylish and professional website have improved and become simpler and easier for just about anyone to do.

The first website I designed for them was built from scratch, with me creating the HTML and CSS in Dreamweaver. The next version was on WordPress with an upgraded theme. This latest iteration is still on WordPress, but with a couple of extra bells and whistles. With all of the awesome tools and resources out there, this upgrade took me only a few hours in the afternoon to set up. Since it’s now easier than ever to do-it-yourself, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite resources in case you’re thinking about setting up or upgrading your website.

The Hostest with the Mostest: Blue Host

At this point, I’ve built websites on GoDaddy, FatCow, Yahoo! Small Business, and other hosts, and I have to say that the one I’ve found most reliable and with the best service has to be Blue Host. Their back-end interface is extremely easy to use, with lots of good tools (such as setting up redirects, email forwarding, etc.). If you’re using WordPress, they have one-click set-up. Plus their customer service is great: quick turn-around on service tickets, good IM and phone service too.

Blue Host offers design services, migration services (to move your website from one hosting service onto their servers), and more; so if you don’t feel like you have the ability to do it yourself, check out their reasonably priced professional services.

Prefab Fabulousness: ThemeForest

A couple of years ago, comedian and web marketing guy Jordan Cooper turned me onto ThemeForest as a resource for professionally designed themes for WordPress and other platforms. It’s a great place to browse themes that include slick design features (e.g. Nivo sliders, light boxes), find responsive designs, and those that are ideal for specific industries like photography or e-commerce businesses—all with screen shots, live previws, ratings and reviews. It’s easy to use, extremely reasonably priced, and if you’re like me and run a few different sites, it’s got a good interface for keeping track of your licenses, API keys and such.

Plugins to Swear By

Everyone has their favorite plugins for WordPress, but here are a few of mine:

  • Yoast WordPress SEO – With a clear interface, this plugin helps you to check for your SEO score on pages and posts.
  • Akismet – Zap spam comments on your site with this great WordPress family plugin.
  • Alpine PhotoTile for Instagram – A good looking Instagram plugin, this one gives you lots of different layout and width options.

There you go! Those are just a few of my favorite resources; please feel free to share some of yours in the comments!