Face it, the most important page of any website is it’s MAIN PAGE! Recognizing that fact, our WordPress based web/blogsites provide your an effective purposeful main page for both search engine optomization and visitor marketing. Even with a very popular blog page, about half your site’s first time visitors will site start at the main page.

Your website’s main page primary function is to act as your site’s table of contents. It should present your main businees activites to visitors allowing them to easily focus on what you offer and what they want. A site’s main page shouldn’t be a jumbled long stream of posts or a giant image splash page advertisement.

The problem of using the typical blog page of many multiple posts is that it does not provide a focus for your business. It is like having the front page of your news paper being just the multitude daily stock quotes or listing all the police reports. It is a lot of information but no focus, and if the information of interest at that moment to the visitor does not appear near the very top of your blog, they will probably just go on to the next website. That is why the front page of the newspaper is used to showcase its contents. And so should your website’s “front page”

As bad as blog page is for your main page, a typical splash page is even worse. It has almost no information and is almost useless for search marketing. Most splash pages lack keyword rich text. They have little text besides “skip intro”, “enter website” and sometimes “blog”. Plus splash pages often have redirects and use action script links. Most search engines will not include splash pages in their indexes because of the redirect and they will also do not follow and index action script links.

Our Kertesz web/blogsites for professional photographers and wedding professionals elegantly overcomes these limitations by including in it’s WordPress based template an easily managed well designed dedicated main page template.

The Kertesz main page template has 7 major elements:

• A large flash banner in the header to showcase your work. Each image in the Flash banner can include text descriptions and link into specfic related pages in your website.
• Dynamic navigation bars using search friendly links. These “navbars” are consistant on every page and provide the visitor an easy reference to your site’s information sections and different categories.
• A table listing and linking to your recent blog post items by their titles.
• Four showcase areas with images which allow you to be persuasive enough to sell your main products and services. With the showcase areas you can provide enough main page information about your most profitable offerings to both new site visitors and search engines to grow your business from the increased search engine ranking web/blogsites are known for. A good balance of graphic images is included to help communicate trust, credibility, and professionalism.
• Plus it is all easy to manage from within WordPress. Here’s a video that shows how simple it is.

This main page selective focus ability is why many web experts consider a web/blogsite Kertesz to be a step ahead in marketing for your business. And a major reason why you should chose Kertesz for your web/blogsite.

By now almost every one recognizes the value of a blog for its potential to overcome many Flash website search marketing weaknesses and just as importantly creating a “Web 2.0″ dialog with your clients and prospective customers.

I have written in my other blog about choosing a blog platform and why self-hosted Word Press has some major advantages, but this post has to with what a blog/site can do for you. Which is, IT STOPS THE LEAKS!

By leaks, I mean what other call the “bounce rate” from initial visitors to your blog on Blogspot or BigFolio or WordPress.com or LiveJournal or other blog system who then click through to your Bludomain or other type Gallery website? Isn’t this the reason you blog? To attract market awareness through the internet and have them see your work? But it is very difficult to get people to click to another website. Low bounce rates are a problem that internet marketers face every day.

Recently, I have a conversation with a very accomplished photographer who keeps track of her web stats. I asked her how many visitors she had to her Bludomain website from her BigFolio based blog (and she has a good long term blog with weekly postings). It totaled less than 50 … over six months!

But she is not alone. This is a common complaint from almost anyone who is trying to get visitors to click from one website URL to another. Last year I came across a clearly stated forum post in which a young woman explained why it has become so difficult to get website visitors to one website to click through to another website.

“My generation, the millenials, grew up with the blinking ads that claimed we were the 1,000,000th visitor and had won money. We grew up with simple, absurd games of “catch the fish!” or “punch the rabbit!” or “shave her legs!” that sent us away from the page we were viewing if clicked. We grew up viewing millions of pages of content with absurd animations attempting to draw our eyes to the ads.

These early, poorly-planned, poorly-designed marketing schemes destroyed web marketing. They established early habits in consumers that are not easily broken. …

I’m just a college student, but I’m also a designer who has interned at a couple of marketing agencies. Whenever I’m confronted with creating a design for a web advertisement, I feel lost because I know there’s nothing I can do to break the long-established habits of internet users. “

A hybrid web/blogsite easily resolves this difficulty. Visitors attracted by your blog posts search page rank can stay on your site! They do not need to click off to another website to see your work. Your entire internet ,marketing presence is in ONE PLACE! You branding is stronger because it is all your URL! How well does The leak is fixed, the system is improved. How much better is a web/blogsite? One of the few to share actual stats is noted wedding and boudoir photographer Christine Tremoulet of Houston TX. She related that from December 2007 when her Flash website traffic was just 800 visitors and she created her own web/blogsite featuring both her Flash gallery. By June 2008, visitor count to her web/blogsite grew to 5,000, a 600% increase in just six months.

That is the value of stopping the leaks with the synergistic power of a WordPress based hybrid web/blogsite like Kertesz. As professionals, we need to keep all the web traffic we can on our site and let them see our work.

New client users of Kertesz for WordPress. I will update with site links when they are ready to go live!

My appreciation to:

Ed Holtzman - FL

Courtney Matevey - IL

Kerry Garrison - CA

Savvy Planners - NJ

ps - Here is what Ed wrote me as he got started personalizing his Kertesz web/blog site  :)  Thanks Ed!

Outstanding!

You rock!

This thing rocks!

I’m so loving this and I’ve barely got started.

I just wanted to let everyone know that Kertesz is fully compatible with WordPress 2.7. All new installs are done in 2.7.

For current 2.6.x based clients, shortly after 2.7.1 is released I will be glad to help you upgrade from 2.6.x

Additionally, I am working on upgrading Kertesz to take full advantage of the best new features of WP 2.7.  Specifically threaded comments (great for post discussions) and better image caption.  This upgrade should be done in January and will be available to all our clients.

Thanks again for your support and please, let me know if you have any questions

Just wanted to say thank you to our newest clients. Please let me know if I can help as you personalize your site. I look forward to seeing them go live.

Kathie Seeley - TX

Cathy Erickson - WI

Paul Maynard - CO

Sarah Boyce - TN

Grace Chyun - CA

Gayle Kenney - ON

Jarda Byrch - CA

Nashville based marketing agency provides a unique, affordable solution proven to increase the search engine marketing effectiveness for wedding photography and other clients using Flash based websites.

PRLog (Press Release) – Dec 15, 2008 – A great many professional photographers over the last few years have adopted Flash based websites and have unfortunately found that their search ranking became a problem.

Low search rank is a well known issue with Flash websites, so The Agency at Think began work to develop a solution for their wedding photography and other clients using Flash based websites.

“The problem is not so much with Flash, but that we were expecting it to do something that it can’t do”, said Mr. Fuller lead developer. “And our clients could not afford to wait months for a modest search marketing improvement; with today’s economic environment they needed it now.” Read more

We are really excited about the new features offered by WordPress 2.7. and are working to extend these features into the Kertesz site template.

On the evening of December 10th, WP 2.7.0 was released. WP 2.7.0 is a major step forward in WP, but as Mark Jaquith one of the significant WP authors writes “That’s not to say that it’s perfect. Some part of us wants to hoard this release away until we can polish it to complete perfection.” There are already a number of bugs that WP is tracking for the 2.7.1 release.

At The Agency we will support 2.7 and its new features, but ask that you wait to upgrade your site until we have had a chance to assess that all elements of your blogsite work or that we have had a chance to make supporting changes. There are a number of code elements and plugins that require testing and possible changes with this brand new release. And as we have learned with any major software upgrade, it is simpler for the end user to wait until the patches are released in 2.7.1 or 2.7.2..

So please be patient while we test and possibly rewrite pieces of Kertesz to take advantage of 2.7, and the 2.7.0 version of WP gets fully evaluated in general release. In the meantime your website will continue to fully operate has it did when installed.