LIVE DEMO CLICK HERE

Recently we were approached by someone who was interested in mocking up a flavors.me site he had created.

He wanted to be able to use WordPress for his content management, and the Thesis theme for the rest of his site, blog, etc because of it’s clean code and search engine optimization friendly options.

We accepted this challenge and in return he has agreed to let us release to the public the first WordPress Flavors.me theme for Thesis.

Flavors.me allows you to create a ‘home page’ quickly and easily without needing to know anything about coding. While the Flavors.me options are extensive, our WordPress mockup is not quite as robust. Instead we have focused on one specific look with a few basic options.

FYI – You’ll need the Thesis Theme framework installed on your WordPress site in order to use this.

WordPress Flavors.me Options

• Custom Template Using Thesis Theme
• Full Screen Background Image Upload
• Specify Width For Content Area
• Specify Font Color Inside Custom Template
• Rounded Edges In Any Browser

We plan on continuing to add new functionality to this WordPress Flavors.me theme in the future, so stay tuned.

In the mean time, if you are ready to try it out for yourself, just enter your email below and you’ll receive instant access to download the WordPress Flavors.me custom files for Thesis.

Enjoy!

From time to time I give presentations to small business owners about the basics of a good website.

The more I do these, the more I realize just how important a business website starter pack is, so we are starting to compile something like that.

Seeing an entire group of business peoples eyes widen at the site of what I considered to be a simple website outline, let’s me know that there is a huge need for someone to break this information down, and deliver it in an easy to digest manner.

A step-by-step guide to to get business website online and working for you.

What Do You Need To Know?

A business website starter pack should include information about:

• Website Content
• Design and Layout Considerations
• Navigation
• Linking and Using Social Media
• Search Engine Optimization
• Analytics and Metrics
• And more…

With so many variables at play from blogging to social media to search engine optimization, I understand how difficult it can be to fully grasp everything required for a successful web presence. Not to mention where you should even begin.

Ready To Put The Pieces Of The Puzzle Together?

You will save tons of money by taking a little extra time to plan and research before beginning development of your website.

Even if you already have a website up and running, you may be missing some fundamental pieces of the web presence puzzle.

If you are interested in a complete business website start pack, enter your email into the form below and we will send you updates.

How To Install Google Anaytlics

Just seeing the word Analytics makes many people cringe, but it shouldn’t.

Everyone knows you need to receive, digest, and utilize data from your websites traffic, and there is a FREE solution from our good friends Google, the masters of traffic.

This article is going to show you how to install Google Analytics using WordPress and the Thesis Theme.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a tracking application that gives you an inside look at your websites traffic. Many people are just interested in how many ‘hits’ they are getting, and while Google Analytics does this, it also goes much father down the rabbit hole.

Want to know what keywords people are searching for when they find your site in the search engines? No problem.

Curious to find out which websites are sending you the most traffic? How about where the users are clicking on your page once they get to your site, or your pages that receive the most traffic?

This free application is easily installed on any website by adding a small piece of script to every one of your pages, which will allow Google to track the data for you.

Setting up Google Anaytlics on your website is actually quite easy, and if you are using the Thesis Theme for WordPress, it’s almost a no brainer.

Setting Up Google Analytics

Using one Google account gives you access to any of the applications and features they offer. So if you already have a Google account for your business, be it for Gmail, Places, Youtube, etc, you can use this same account to access Google Analytics.

If you do not have a Google account, do not fret, it is free and easy to get signed up.

Let’s start by visiting http://www.google.com/analytics.

From here you will need to log in with your current Google account, or go ahead and set up a new account(this is also a good time to set up a Gmail account to help streamline your login process).

Once logged in, click on the button that says “Access Analytics”. If you have never set up a site inside Analytics before, you will see a little box that says “Sign Up for Google Analytics”. Click Sign Up.

Enter in your website, typically we also use the website URL as the “Account Name”. Choose your territory and time zone, then click Continue.

You’ll need to enter in a first and last name on the next screen, and then verify that you have ready their ‘agreement’.

At this final screen, Analytics will give you the code that you’ll need to copy and paste to your website. Do not worry if you lose this, you can always go back and retreive your Google Anayltics code.

Install Google Analytics

This code that you’ve just received needs to be on every page of your website. If you are currently using any brand of content management system for your website, this part will be very easy.

Before we get in to that, it is always a good rule of thumb to put any additional script like this as the last piece of content before your </body> HTML tag. This way, in the event that something is wrong with the script, your webpage will still load.

There is one current exception to this rule and it is none other than the Google Analytics script. Google recommends that you place this code just before your closing </head> HTML tag.

For those of you not using the Thesis Theme, this would mean that you need to manually add this script to your header file. For WordPress, you can do this by editing the header.php file.

If you are using the Thesis Theme, there is a much easier way. Log in to your dashboard and click on Thesis / Site Options. Expand the section for “Stat and Tracking Scripts”. Paste your code into that form feild and Save.

That’s it! You’ve just learned how to install Google Analytics tracking script.

You will begin seeing traffic information within 24 hours, but you’ll really need to wait about a month before you can really start getting in to the details.

Thanks for reading and please leave us a comment if you have any questions or suggestions of your own!

What does a good WordPress music theme need? Being a musician and web developer, I know what it takes.

Musicians all have very similar needs as far as the content that we want on our sites, the plugins we need to use, etc. We are here to help you get your WordPress Music Theme online so that you can start using it to keep in touch with and grow your fanbase.

With a new social media site popping up seemingly every day, and going away just as fast, it is important as it is with any small business, that you have a central location for your people to stay up to date.

This is why we highly recommend bands get their own website instead of only using a social network page.

Using your website as the central hub for all information about you as an artists will allow your fans to stay in touch even when things like Facebook and Twitter go away. Don’t think they will? Look at what happened to Myspace aka Ghost Town.

Here at Web Devils, we only build websites using the WordPress content management system as our platform, so naturally we’ve been building WordPress Music Themes.

Key Elements Of A Great WordPress Music Theme

• Music Player
• Email Signup Form
• Calendar Of Upcoming Shows
• Videos and Photos
• Contact Information
• Press
• Bio

Music Player

Music being your product, it is important that you make it very easy for your users to find and listen to it. All of the websites we build for musicians include a music player that works on a computer or a mobile device.

Email Signup Form

The number one way to stay in touch with your fan base is through email. After all the social media sites come and go, email will still be the best way to communicate directly to your fans.

Calendar Of Upcoming Shows

Once people are interested in you, they’ll want to know if and when they can see you. Wouldn’t you like a simple way to add upcoming gigs to your website from any computer anywhere?

Videos and Photos

After people become interested in your group, they’ll want to put a face to the music. Imagine this…you are on stage at your next performance, you tell everyone to raise their hands, and then you take a picture and immediately send it to your website, that then sends it to Twitter and Facebook with a link back to your site. All in an instant, your are engaging your fans in person and those that didn’t make it to the show.

Contact Information

As a promoter, if I learn of a new band, I will naturally want to go to their website to check them out. If they have no contact information listed it doesn’t matter if I liked them or not, they will not be hearing from me.

Press

A great way to build up your social proof is by showing off the good press that you get. Having a section of your website to list all of that makes it easy for those who want to know, to find it.

Bio

This is the least important part of my list, but it is always nice as a fan of music to be able to learn more about the artists we like.

Our WordPress Music Theme Portfolio

These are just a few of the sites we’ve put together, take a look.

While we are currently in the process of creating and releasing our own custom WordPress Music Theme that you will be able to download and install all on your own, we are not quite ready for it to launch just yet.

In the mean time, we are still offering our service at an EXTREMELY discounted rate for musicians.

This is my way of giving back to a community that I’ve been a part of for so long and will continue to be a part of for the rest of my life.

Merging my passion for web technology with my passion for music just feels right.

If you are ready to get your band page up and running and start driving traffic to it, we are ready to help you.

Contact us today using the simple form below and we’ll get in touch with you as soon as possible to begin development of your
WordPress Music Theme.

Recently I had the pleasure of writing a guest post for DIY Themes, aka the team behind the Thesis Theme Framework, aka the platform that Web Devils uses here and works with often for our customers.

You can read the article here: Beginner WordPress SEO (Part 2): 9 Ways to Optimize Blogs for Search Engines

This article draws attention to 9 of the fundamental steps that can be taken to increase your chances of ranking highly in the search engines. All of these methods are tried and true, as well as considered to be white hat SEO methods.

You can learn something from every article on that site. Want to get them in your email? Just Join their site it’s free.

The Free World Media website and the company is a great example of what can happen when ‘social’ gets offline and becomes something real. See if you can wrap your head around this…

I, Bret Phillips, met Sean Wood at Chris Guillebeau’s book signing here in Atlanta which was hosted by Judi Knight of New Tricks.

3 Things We Have In Common

• WordPress
• Thesis Theme
• The Art Of Non Conformity

Sean and I got together shortly after that and found we have some similar ideas and interests with using the social web. Already managing several big new launches of their own, and as a way to see how our companies would work together, FWM decided to let us finish developing their site.

Their current website was already WordPress, and they had already decided to roll with the Thesis framework for its clean code and SEO features.

The graphics and wire frames were already complete, they just needed Web Devils to finish putting all the pieces together and make it work properly.

Working with Free World Media was about the easiest job we’ve ever had, working with other developers and designers is a very smooth process and is becoming more and more our target customer. Developers working with developers can speak the same lingo and save any time it would take to educate and explain in detail many of the decisions that need to be made throughout the life cycle of a project.

Thanks FWM!

For More Information

Free World Media
Chris Guillebeau’s The Art Of Non-Conformity
New Tricks

Facebook allows you to track ‘insights’ for your domain much like they track insights for your Facebook Pages.

This is not currently a replacement for something like Google Analytics, but will give you some good data about who is on liking or sharing your page.

Taken from this AllFacebook article Facebook Launches Insights For Your Domain, Facebook claims that insights for the domain are as follows

You can get detailed analytics about the demographics of your users and how users are sharing from your application with Insights. The Graph API provides programmatic access to all of this data so you can integrate Platform data into your own, custom analytics systems.

Facebook requests that you put a small piece of code into the HEAD of your ROOT webpage, aka the home page of your website.

This is really easy to do if you are using the Thesis Theme with WordPress. Now let’s go through a couple quick steps that will allow you to inject the required line of code.

1. Visit http://www.facebook.com/insights/
2. In the top right, click Insights For Your Domain
3. Choose your page from the drop down menu
4. Copy the code.
5. Paste that line of code into a custom Thesis function.

Open up your custom_functions.php file and insert this code.

function custom_fb_meta() {
if (is_front_page()) {
?>
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”YOUR UNIQUE ID” />
<?php
}
}

add_action(‘wp_head’,'custom_fb_meta’);

Save and upload your custom_functions.php file and refresh your home page. View the source to make sure it is there.

After you confirm the code is in your HEAD, do the following

1. Go back to http://facebook.com/insights
2. Click on Insights For Your Domain
3. In the popup window, type in your domain name
4. Choose your Page from the drop down menu
5. Click Check Domain.

Once you are done, refresh the page. If everything is successful, you should see a new listing for www.yourdomain.com at the top.

Hope this helps, Good luck!

Stealing Search Results

Have you heard? Google set up a sting operation to see if Bing was indeed stealing its search results, and sure enough, Google was able to find adequate proof that Bing has been “borrowing” their search results from Google. How were they doing this, you may ask? The New York Times does a good job of boiling it down:

“Google suspected that Microsoft was recording what Internet Explorer users typed into the Google search box and which search result they were clicking—and then using that information to adjust Bing’s results.”

With the blogosphere buzzing about the situation (as they are apt to do about anything related to Google and Microsoft, especially when they’re at odds with each other) the story has garnered enough attention to be featured on the Colbert Report—a show which Bing has been an open and deep-pocketed sponsor, having donated several thousand dollars to relief efforts in the Gulf of Mexico.

Google’s Webspam kingpin Matt Cutts has lends thoughtful insight into the whole debate, taking the time to mention his respect for the people at Microsoft, further adding that he doesn’t believe that Bing is not simply reposting Google’s search results. He does show several screenshots where Google’s and Bing’s search results match exactly for nonsensical phrases. To put it simply, Cutts posits that “clicks on Google are being incorporated in Bing’s rankings,” and he wants it to stop.

For its part, Bing has come out with a statement that is mixed in message, not exactly denying that Bing used Google’s search results as part of their formula, while at the same time obliquely accusing Google of “borrowing” some of their own ideas.

What does all this mean?

For most people, it’s difficult to cipher the significance of such an arcane debate between two tech giants. Let’s suffice it to say that if you focus your SEO efforts to rank high on Google, then you have a pretty good chance at ranking in a similar position on Bing. While this may change over time (certainly if Bing is forced to disregard completely search queries fed into Google, as Cutts wants), it does mean that the search engines use similar logic to serve up results.

With Web Devils WordPress SEO tools, you can learn how to configure your own web pages so that they rank highly on Google (and in turn Bing).

With WordPress being all the rage for building fast, secure, scalable websites, it is no wonder that over 25 million (and counting) people and business are using it.

So let’s say that you have built your website using the WordPress content management system and you can now easily update your content. How can you incorporate your main hub, your WordPress website, into your Social Media plan?

It’s real easy…Share your blog posts.

When you make a new blog post, you can and should link back to that post using Facebook, Twitter, or both. Doing this will almost immediately drive traffic to your site.

Any time that we share a new blog post here on the Web Devils site, we see a spike in traffic that day. People dig on new material, so give it to them.

Instead of just linking back to your blog post one time, it can be a good idea to re-post the same link several times during a week to increase your reach.

Not everyone checks in on their social media accounts at the same time, so varying the times when you post can be beneficial.

For example, let’s say you have a new blog post ready on Monday morning, your social media posting schedule for that post could look like this.

Monday: 9am

- “Check out this new blog post on my website – http://mysite.com/post1″

Wednesday: 12pm

- “Did you see my new blog post from Monday? – http://mysite.com/post1″

Friday: 4pm

- “In case you missed it, check out my new post – http://mysite.com/post1″

Doing this covers more digital ground. It is important to have a steady stream of regular updates in between those updates so that your followers will not just see the same link over and over. Mix it up and keep it real.

Trying to remember to repost your links to different social media sites at different times of the week can be a daunting task, especially if you are publishing more than once a week. So that you do not have to physically be at the computer updating your status all day, I want to recommend two FREE online applications that will make your life easier.

Postling and Hootsuite

Postling.com is a social media management tool that helps you monitor and interact with all the different pieces of your web presence. You can easily connect to Facebook and Twitter and then schedule your updates to go out. They also track review sites like Yelp, allow ‘tracking’ similar to Google Alerts, connect to your blog comments, and tons more.

Hootsuite.com is similar application without quite as many management features outside of the social networks that you connect with. What you do get however is a great visual review of the social media accounts that you are monitoring. This is good for when you are physically at the computer and would like to scan your mentions, messages, people you follow, etc. Hootsuite does allow scheduling and the interface is very easy to use.

We use both of these applications daily and recommend that our clients do as well.

Now go write a blog post, schedule it to go out a couple times during the week, and watch your traffic grow!

2010 has been an amazing year for us at Web Devils.. This time last year Web Devils as an online presence did not even exist even, though we were doing the same work already.

Once we decided to take this to the next level, there was no turning back and it has been a huge time.

Clients!

Over the course of this past year we have worked with some incredible small businesses all over the country. Some of the locals we worked with are the Atlanta Vietnamese Restaurant So Ba, the Atlanta Air Conditioning company Georgia Air Contractors, and one of the best photographers around Ella Rue Photography. There are too many more to list but we love you all just the same

Friends!

We have met and become great friends with some very talented people in this industry here in Atlanta. Judi Knight of New Tricks, Russell Fair of RF Web Studios, the Free World Media team, and the Epic Labs crew just to name a few.

WordPress!

We had our first ‘business trip’ all expenses paid to WordCamp in Savannah GA where we met and mingled with other WP enthusiast, core WP developers, and even Mr. Mullenweg himself. The WordPress community is filled with amazing, talented, and just all around nice people. Not only do they create one of the finest pieces of online software available, they also know how to throw a great party!

Meetups!

Here in Atlanta we attended and even presented at numerous industry Meetup.com meetups. The two we frequent the most are Atlanta WordPress and Atlanta Blogger meetups.

Web Devils 2011!

While 2010 has been a special one for us, 2011 is just around the corner and we plan on going big, not going home. Some things you should keep an eye out for are

• WordPress Search Engine Optimization online training course
• Guest posts from some industry champions
• New web design for Web Devils
• More helpful posts and “how to” videos from the Web Devils
• Some FREE WordPress Themes to help get you on your feet
• And of course, helping YOU get your small business online and growing

Honestly, the list goes on and on, but you get the idea.

Wrap Up!

This is our last post of 2010. We are taking the rest of the year off to spend time with our families and put the final touches on some of these exciting things coming for 2011.

Thank you all for being a part of our community. We look forward to another great year and would love to hear from you.

Hit us up on Twitter and stay in touch:

@bretwp
@theoknows

Let us know what your big plans are for next year and let’s make it happen!