Have you ever wanted to show off your online reviews on your website? If you are a small business, it’s a best practice for a few reasons:

1. It makes it easy for your customers to leave you an online review
2. It shows potential customers that you are transparent about your reviews and what your customers say about you
3. It gives potential customers that extra little bit of encouragement to come see you or call

We’ve created a WordPress Plugin that will look up your online reviews on Google, Yahoo, Yelp, Bing, Citysearch, and even your Foursquare checkins and create a nice badge that you can display anywhere on your site.

Watch the Video

This video shows you how to set it up, and how it works:

Here’s what the badge looks like:

Download the Plugin

You can download the free plugin here:
Online Reviews Plugin for WordPress

Try it out and let me know what you think!

Well it’s out. WordPress 3.0 is here and packed with a ton of exciting new features.

And I’m happy to say that our SmallBiz WordPress Theme works perfectly on it.

We’ve been testing all through the betas and the release candidates. We were even at WordCamp last month in San Francisco planning out which of the cool new features we can take advantage of in our SmallBiz theme.

New Feature Highlights

Some of my favorite WordPress 3.0 features are:

1. Run multiple blogs from one WordPress install. WordPress Mu is part of the core WordPress code now.
2. Customizable menus are now part of the core, instead of being dependent on themes
3. New default theme – Twenty Ten
4. Choose your username and password during the install, instead of the default admin userid. This makes for a more secure default installation since hackers won’t have a default admin userid to depend on
5. Custom background color is choose-able with a visual color picker
6. Custom post types allow you to make WordPress even more like a content management system. You can define different types of posts (video, audio, product, etc.) and have your theme display each differently

A Bumpy Ride

This is a huge release! In fact, there is so much in here that we ran into a lot of problems during testing. Thomas, (my lead developer) went through a lot of antacids on this one! In fact, we didn’t expect them to ship yet, because of the amount of changes in each RC.

You see, in addition to testing for compatibility, Thomas has been working hard to build in some killer new features based on WordPress 3.0. Stay tuned – we’ll be ready to ship within the next few days!

Watch the Video

Take a look at this tour of WordPress 3.0. I think you’ll like it!

What do you think – are you going to upgrade?

I‘ve been telling my blog readers that they shouldn’t try to run WordPress on a Microsoft Windows Server hosting account.

Why?

Because WordPress is based on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and many of my clients who have tried to run WordPress on Windows Server based hosting accounts have had tons of problems with permissions and configuration. You can’t get seo-friendly permalinks to work. Trouble with uploading images. It’s a mess.

I used to work at Microsoft on the Platform Evangelism Team, and I’ve been telling my friends there they should fix this on Windows Server and IIS (Microsoft’s web server – Internet Information Server.)

And Now for Something Completely Different

Well, now they have. And not only are they doing something about it, they’ve even created a whole blog all about it (and yes, it’s based on WordPress.) You can check it out here: http://wordpress.visitmix.com/

Microsoft is a “Bling Bling” (read: Top) sponsor of WordCamp SF this weekend too. They are serious. I’ll be interested to talk with Thomas Lewis, Grace Francisco and the Microsoft crew at the event!

Smart Business indeed.

Expand2Web is going to be at WordCamp SF (#wcsf) this weekend en-force. (Yeah, that’s right, all THREE of us )

We’d love to meet up with you, so if you’re going to be there ping me on Twitter at @doncampbell and we’ll grab a coffee and geek out over WP themes and plugins. Thomas, Randy and I will be there both days.

I hope to see you there!

By the way, we’ve been testing out SmallBiz Themes on the WordPress 3.0 beta builds and everything is running awesome. We’re looking forward to learning some new core WordPress 3.0 tech to tweak out our themes with this weekend…

Google Webmaster Tools is one of the most powerful free toolkits at your disposal for making sure Google can crawl your website properly.

In order to use Google Webmaster tools for your website, you need to verify it with Google to prove that you own the website.

There are two ways to do this:

1. Uploading a special file to your website
2. Adding a Meta Tag to your website.

With WordPress, it can be confusing how to do this. This video shows you how to verify your WordPress Website in Google Webmaster Tools using the Meta Tag method.

Once your site is verified, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to do all sorts of diagnostics on your site. For example:

• Submit an XML sitemap for your site (I use this WordPress Plugin to automatically update my XML sitemap)
• Discover any problems Google might have crawling your site
• Discover any duplicate content issues on your site
• See what keywords people are using to find you
• See what sites are linking to your website
• Check your Page Load Speed
• And a TON more.

Trust me, this is an indispensable tool and you’ll want to set it up for your website.

Please rate my video and leave me comments below!

Recently I met Jeff Howard from Catch Search Marketing, a local search marketing agency based in Bethesda, MD.

Jeff is a super nice and very talented guy who has created a lot of valuable content for small business owners.

At his website he’s got a series of Local Business Guides that are packed full of great content for the small business owner covering topics like:

• What Can Local SEO Do For You?
• When Should I Build a New Website?
• Measuring Website Traffic with Google Analytics
• A Visual Guide: What It Takes To Get Local Customers Through Search
• SEO Killers

In the When Should I Build A New Website Guide he features my SmallBiz WordPress Theme, which I’m very excited about. I appreciate the vote of confidence from an expert like Jeff!

Oh, and in addition to Catch Search Marketing, Jeff does the SEO for Adoptapet.com (I’m an animal lover so I think that is awesome!) and is also a contributing editor for Search Engine Guide. You can see all of Jeff Howard’s articles here.

WordPress 2.9 was released this week and comes with a bunch of cool new features.

Here are a few highlights:

My Favorite New Features in WordPress 2.9

• Built-in image editor: crop, update, flip and scale right from within WordPress
• Batch plugin updates: update your plugins all at once instead of one at a time. I use too many plugins so this will be a godsend for me!
• Easy video embeds: Just paste your YouTube URL into your post or page and it will automatically embed it!
• Custom image galleries across posts.
• rel=canonical support (good for SEO)

This great post at Technosailor has a comprehensive review of the new features in WordPress 2.9.

A Break… And A Fix!

We test every new WordPress release with our theme. This time we found that WordPress 2.9 breaks the nav menu on the SmallBiz theme.

So we quickly fixed that, and added in a few more cool features for good measure!

New Features in SmallBiz Theme v1.6

Here’s what’s new in the SmallBiz WordPress Website theme v1.6:

• Update for WordPress 2.9 compatibility: fix for the nav menu issue, updates to the TinyMCE editor defaults since this was also updated in WordPress 2.9
• More SEO Features: In addition to the local SEO goodness in the SmallBiz theme like business address on every page, areas served, and automatic hCard embedding, I’ve added the ability to override the HTML Title tag, Meta Description tag, and Meta Keywords tag for any page or post. You’ll see this in the Options panel for the home page, and in the new SEO Details box below the editor box on your pages and posts. This gives you total control over every page on your site without the All-in-One SEO Plugin!
• Fix for broken preview in Themes panel: There was a problem previewing the SmallBiz theme in the Appearances section, and that is now fixed.

Screen shot of new SEO Details Box

If you purchased my SmallBiz theme you’ve already got an email from me with the new version attached!

We just completed a few changes to the Expand2Web SmallBiz WordPress Theme that I think you will really like.

First, I thought it would be cool to be able to preview new header graphics that you upload in the SmallBiz Options panel.

Visual Header Image Chooser

So we added a preview feature where you can see a preview of all the headers you’ve uploaded and choose the one you want. I’ve also included a few new header images that you can use if you would like.

Rich Text Editing on Home Page

Second, we’ve added a rich text editor for the home page. Previously, you could edit the content on the default home page in the SmallBiz Options panel, but you had to do a little basic HTML formatting. Now you can just edit it like you were using Microsoft Word. You can still edit it in HTML if you want, of course.

Feature Box Toggle

Third, a lot of SmallBiz customers wanted control over the “Feature Box” at the bottom of the page. Now you can turn it on or off simply by checking a box in the SmallBiz Options panel.

Upgrading from previous versions

If you already have a version of the Expand2Web SmallBiz Theme installed, you can update to the new version by copying the theme files into your wp-content/themes/smallbiz/ directory over top of the existing files using your FTP program.

I hope you like these new features – we had fun making them!

Find out how to build WordPress Websites with the SmallBiz WordPress theme!

When building a WordPress Website for your business, one of the common things people want to do is to provide a home page that does not look like a blog. The Expand2Web SmallBiz theme automatically provides this for you – a page that tells visitors about your business and provides a clear call to action.

But what if you are using a different theme, or you are using the SmallBiz theme but want to completely customize the page? Or what if you want a home page that does not use the WordPress sidebars?

Well, WordPress custom page templates allow you to do this. I’ve shown how to do this in a previous post and video. But when you do this, all of your content for the page needs to be coded in HTML and included in the PHP file you create for your custom page template.

Wait, there is an even better way…

What if you want the customization that a custom page template provides, but you still want to use the WordPress visual editor to change the content on your page?

Here’s how you do it. You can create a custom page template, but inside the page template you need to include a few extra WordPress functions. This allows you create a page anywhere on your website and then edit the content of the page using the WordPress visual editor!

Here’s the code for the WordPress Custom Page Template

Here’s the code you use for the custom page template. Just copy this code and save it in a file called no-sidebar.php and put it in the /wp-content/themes/smallbiz directory.

<?php
/*
Template Name: No Sidebar
*/
?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<div style="width:850px !important;">

<?php the_content('
Read the rest of this page »</p>'); ?>
<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>

<p><?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
</div>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Once you’ve created this file, you can go into WordPress and create your Page, and select No Sidebar as the page template. You will get a page that has the layout and look and feel of your website, without the sidebar. And best of all you can edit the content using the visual editor in WordPress!

I will be including this custom page template by default in the next version of my SmallBiz WordPress Theme coming out in the next couple of weeks.

Note: If you are using a theme other than the SmallBiz theme, this code can still work. You might have to remove the two <div> elements at the end, however.

A *lot* of people have asked me how to add a video to the home page of their WordPress website using the Expand2Web SmallBiz WordPress theme.

The SmallBiz Theme comes with a static home page by default since many business owners want that instead of the traditional list of blog posts on the home page. And many have figured out how to edit the HTML of the home page to replace the image with a video.

But there is an easier way…

Here is an easier way do to it – just create a new “Page” in WordPress, embed the video (I used a YouTube video in the example) and then add some minor styling tweaks for margins and you are all set!

This video walks you through how to do it step-by-step. Even though I describe how to do this with the SmallBiz theme, this could work for any WordPress theme.

Try it out, and leave me your questions or feedback in the comments below!

Update:Here is the code snippet I use in the video:
<div style="float:left; margin-right:15px; margin-bottom:10px;">
YouTube embed code here
</div>

Need a website? The Expand2Web SmallBiz Theme is a complete small business website theme for WordPress. Click here to watch the video!