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Alison Bowker - 07989 416 959
Webmistress WordPress Blog Fiesta, Bath 11 April 2012
It’s Blog Fiesta time!
Date: Wednesday 11 April 2012
Time: 7.15pm (for 7.30pm) – 9.30pm
Place: The Practice Rooms, 26 Upper Borough Walls, Bath. BA1 1RH
Cost: free
RSVP: numbers are limited so please reserve your place ASAP, by 4 April
Please email us to be kept informed &
to reserve your place.
We are delighted to announce our 2nd Webmistress WordPress Event to help you stay engaged with your website.
This time the subject is Blogging. Everyone is welcome, whether you’re already our client or this is the first time you’ve heard of The Webmistress.
You may have heard the B-word and wondered what on earth it means. Or perhaps you’ve had your website built by us and we’ve encouraged you to blog. Or maybe you’re excited at the prospect of keeping visitors to your site up-to-date with your latest news and can’t wait to get blogging.
At this evening event, we’ll be introducing the What, Why and How of Blogging with WordPress. We’ll give you some tips get you started. Our special guest is Bo Novak, one of our super-blogging clients.
It’s going to be a sociable evening of fun and learning with an opportunity to ask questions and mingle with others from the local holistic community.
We’d love to see you there!
Some words from our Special Guest, Bo Novak – Women’s Health Blogger
Having been an avid reader of many wonderful blogs (mainly in the areas of social commentary, politics, vegan food, animal rights, health and women’s issues), I ventured into blogging myself in July 2011. PMS Warrior was set up by the Webmistress using the WordPress Twenty Ten theme. It is a niche, blog-driven website raising awareness one aspect of women’s health – Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) – and how it is connected to diet and lifestyle.
I am a longtime member of the National Association for Premenstrual Syndrome (NAPS) and have overcome PMS myself using natural methods. Through the blog, I wanted to help dispel some of the myths surrounding it, collate the available evidence, communicate with sufferers and work through my own thoughts about it. The blog is a mainly vehicle for reputation building and for building a following for when I am due to complete my formal training in nutrition. I am also an active Tweeter as @PMS_Warrior, and I maintain a PMS Warrior Facebook page too (somewhat less enthusiastically).
PMS is very common, affecting around 30% of women to a significant degree and my blog has attracted links and mentions from thefworduk.org.uk and Dr Christian Jessen (the TV doctor), and I have guest blogged for Beautiful Heart, Raw Kitchen. I was also recently quoted on www.netdoctor.co.uk which has a very high level of traffic. In the last month, 2,585 people visited my site – even though the frequency of posts I have written has reduced of late. Eight months on, I’ve learned lots of lessons about how blogging ‘works’, and have big plans for the future development of my site.
Venue
The Practice Rooms
26 Upper Borough Walls
Bath
BA1 1RH
Parking: the nearest car park is Saw Close (BA1 1EY) and Cattle Market (BA1 5BD) both pay and display and free after 8pm.
Webmistress WordPress Party
We are holding a Webmistress WordPress Party to help you stay engaged with your website.
It’s going to be a social evening of fun and learning with an opportunity to mingle with other local therapists and practitioners. We’d love to see you there!
We are delighted to welcome special guests Imogen and Catherine from social-i, who will be there to answer your questions on social media.
Programme for the evening:
6.30pm – 7.30pm: Question and answer session
7.30pm – 9pm: Freestyle lessons & Social time. We’ll be making our rounds to help you make quick changes on your site and to answer your ‘HOW DO I?’ questions.
Date: Thursday 1st December 2011
Time: 6.30pm – 9pm
Place: Central Bar, Bath, 10 Upper Borough Walls, Bath BA1 1RG
No charge, we’ll provide the nibbles, please buy yourself a drink at the bar.
RSVP: by Friday 25th November + tell us your most burning question for The Webmistress
What to bring:
- your WordPress questions about your site
- Additions for your website on a memory stick (changes you’ve been wanting to make but don’t know how)
- Laptop, battery and power cord (if you don’t have a laptop, don’t worry, we’ll have spares)
- Friends who might be thinking about getting on line and who have questions
Look out for our next WordPress Party early next year which will be about Blogging!
We hope you’ll join us for the party and we look forward to hearing from you very soon.
New Classic WordPress package from The Webmistress
We are delighted to unveil our new Classic WordPress package
Classic is our new website package that combines the simplicity and affordability of the Quick site with the full functionality of our Custom site.
So if you’re starting out on the web and want to get a head start in search engine results and give your visitors a more interactive experience, call The Webmistress to book your Classic WordPress site.
The Classic website brings you: Continue reading
Choosing the right domain name
You’re excited about having your first website and you’ve called in The Webmistress to create a website for you. But what are you going to call it? How do you choose your domain name?
Your domain name is part of your brand so it’s worth giving it some thought. It’s like your name – one of the ways you announce yourself to prospective clients. As part of your verbal calling card it needs to glide smoothly off your tongue when you’re meeting potential clients. Let it stand proud, and be be easy to pronounce. A domain that you have to explain or spell and punctuate is going to be hard work. When you speak to potential clients about your work you will want to direct them to your website, so it’s important that your domain name sounds good when you say it and is memorable.
It’s great if your domain name reflects the service you’re offering and your location. It can be acts as a sound bite for your service e.g. massageinbath.com.
Alternatively you may be sufficiently well-known to use your own name as your brand.
It also plays a part in the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your site as the domain name is part of the Google search.
So it pays to choose a domain name that reflects your business and with whom your target market can identify. We can help you identify your target/niche market
Using keywords
- Choose a domain name that contains keywords that relate to your service and location: e.g. massageinbath.com
- This helps to get good rankings on Google. Google will show sites with the keyword in the domain name near the top of the results
- You may want to be even more specific with keywords that relate to your niche. You can then build your web site around these particular keywords in order to drive some free search engine traffic to your site: e.g. massageforbackpainbristol.com
Domain Extension
- .com, .co.uk, .org. Which one should you use?
- Simple: use the extension that matches your country. Unless you are an organisation then use .org.
- You can also buy the .com to match your domain and that way if someone types yourdomain.com they will still be directed to your site
- This also safeguards someone buying the .com which could result in confusion or your ‘competition’ having an almost identical domain name
Easy to spell and remember
- Choose something that is short (or as short as possible), easy for your visitors and clients to type – and to remember when they refer you
- This can work in your favour and you can get more keywords in your domain name
- Make sure there are no unhelpful words accidentally created in your list of keywords (e.g. keywordsuk.com = “keyworks suck” – not the message you want to be sending out there!)
Revamping lizwalton.org
Liz Walton already had a website for her therapies and training. She felt it was time for a change so she called The Webmistress.
If she wanted to make a change to her old website, she had to pay someone to do that for her and wait for that to happen. Money + Time. This can be frustrating.
So her criteria for her new site was:
‘I want to be able to input information on my site whenever I need to.’
WordPress sites are easy for you to update and we’ll show you how.
Yoga for people living with cancer
We are more than happy to announce that we’ve just finished a Quick package site for Katie White. She specialises in yoga for people living with cancer. This is for the person themselves, family members, friends and carers.
She offers classes at the Minerva Centre and Yoga Bodhi and one-to-one sessions in your home.
Katie tells me there are people saying no to Chemotherapy and other drugs and are taking a purely holistic approach to their cancer treatment…and beating it! How amazing is that?
Thanks for being a lovely client Katie! I really enjoyed creating your site with you and showing you around WordPress.
Video portrait on your website
We believe in the power of well-crafted video portrait on a website! We’ll be getting ours done as soon as we can by the lovely Alex Walker.
Alex, who has previously trained as a Reflexologist, is passionate about working with individuals to help them shine their light to a wide audience. She has made over 100 short films and helps with preparation for a photo or video shoot as well as offering tips on overcoming nerves and building confidence for presenting to camera.
Darien Pritchard, Dynamic Massage®
We are pleased to announce that we are in progress of redesigning Darien Pritchard’s website www.dynamicmassage.co.uk. Darien actually made his own current site and we are honoured to be taking it to the next level. He took my massage to the next level when I did his Hands Free training, so it’s wonderful to return the favour in another dimension.
We are in Phase 1 of the design process and Darien has made these comments about The Webmistress service so far:
“Unbelievably professional compared to what I’ve done. I’m really pleased, very impressed and gob-smacked that you are doing it for the price you are. You’re taking me to a level I had not imaged!”
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