Still, simple is the most difficult part of it. A simple theme should also carry their own identity. The following are two WordPress theme designed by Lucian E. Marin. They are simple and nice!

Andrea, most beautiful WordPress theme ever made, inspired by an incredible woman. See the Preview Page. Download Now!

The Journalist, or redefinition of minimalist, is a smart, sophisticated WordPress theme designed for professional journalists. See the Preview Page. Download Now!

Ask website owners around you, most of them do not even have a solid idea of the goal of their website. Make sure your goal is measurable. Number of online order or inquiry are good example of goal.

Ok, now if we have a goal, it would be much easier. If you have 100 visitors a month, and 10 out of them make an online order. That means, you have 10% conversion rate in that particular month. If you are revamping, you should have some figures in mind. Example, you might be looking at 1,000 visitors after the revamp and probably to increase the conversion rate to 20%.

If everything works (no shortcut, lot of hardwork for sure), you will be getting 200 orders a month. If each new sales generates RM10 revenue, that means your monthly revenue would be around RM2,000 a month.

See, it is never hard to estimate a budget. Just make sure you are clear about the purpose of revamp, in a MEASURABLE way!

(Using website to reduce your operation cost is another way to determine your budget, we will talk about this in my next post)

Question is, if you have limited time, which will you develop first? Backend or frontend?

The answer is, Front-end. Why?

WordPress theme designed to help businesses to upgrade their website to WordPress, than using the default theme.

Download Now

Yes, Blog is free! Free is not good - at least for businesses. That is why, blogging spread like fire among individual users than businesses. It has becoming a New Marketing way for most businesses. Old corporate managers do not want to miss this new marketing opportunity, ended up setting one official corporate website together with an official Blog.

It was never easy to tell my customers that Blog and corporate website are the same. Fancy design still remains as the top-most-wanted feature for most of my customer. It was designed as like to please just the corporate website owner than people visiting it. Or, it may be the idea of web developer to push for beautiful layout, which in most case, the same result can be delivered by a page simple as Google main page.

WordPress has done so well in keeping the design separated from the content. It works like the theme in you Nokia Phone. You can choose to change the look and feel of your screen without entering all your contact in your address book again. This sounds simple but challenge is everyone has to adapt to a single format (post title, post slug, categories) of content, yet work in any page!

We have changed the look and feel of our corporate website several times, without worrying about rebuilding the content. But, you will be surprised with number of corporate websites still built with both content and design combined and ready to have them built from scratch again in their next revamp.

Bloggers are paving the way for the change of corporate website. They take the risk of change, trying up how the new format of content definition should work. Bloggers do not have website in the past. Creating a Blog is not a revamp to them, but something new.

But, for a company with already spending so much in the past in their website, it is hard for them to make the change. They choose not to make immediate decision. They are still on the look-and-see state, but will eventually follow!

There are three things happening now,

1. Businesses are starting to understand the importance of the goal of creating a website. A goal must be measurable, it can be number of order, number of people downloading your location map, number of support email received, except branding :)

2. The platform of Blog, such as WordPress, after a long 5 years of development are now ready to prove that the technology is mature yet simple to user now.

3. All of us are no longer limiting to our own job of scope. My partner just login to our corporate website, edited one of a page posted months ago and approved some comments. In that 5 minutes works, he turned himself into editor, proof reader, comment moderator, etc. The rules changed. You are taking over works of airline booking agent because you know it can be done online, faster and cheaper.

Business will soon no longer need a web developer!

Are you a web developer?
Free WordPress theme for your business

Ammap is an interactive flash map creation software which works with Flash player 8 and other later versions. With the use of it, you could search the population of different countries, the location of your home, routes to your office or journey, and create your own distributor map.

It could help you to customize every detail of the map from sizes to disable features that you don’t need, like create multi-level structures, load icons or other custom movies or photos on top of your map, set start-up zoom level and position, export map as an image, and so much more. Its weigh only 35 kb so it would not occupied much of your pc’s space. What’s more, we could download and use it for free. It is really handy to use.

The look and feel of a site should be separated from its content. Imagine if you have to revamp your website, and everything you have done earlier will have to redo again. You lost your competitive high search ranking built over the years because of the filename change, and you are prepared to lose it again in your next revamp which will be taking place in future.

The introduction of WordPress Blog, not being just a world-best Blogging platform, but also smartly define how a website components should work with each other. A theme was used to defined the layout of the website, without any content but only placeholder.

Placeholders are then replaced with content pulling out from a database. This is not something new to Blog, but corporate website will soon be tapping on this.

The iPhone theme has a single column design with sidebar information presented below the posts. It was inspired by iPhone. Get it now!

How can you tell if you have just chosen another one-man-show company or a team?

1. Graphic designer talking to customers directly. Only project manager understand both the language of customer and designer. Designer should get less distraction.

2. Programming logics starts before the HTML interface ready. This jump over eventually sacrifice the user intuitiveness!

3. Designer turn your mock up into HTML version with what-you-see-is-what-you-get tools.. chances is that you never get what you want :)

To be fair, creating a website is really not an easy task, it is kind of design work plus technical skill to make everything fully integrated and right!

So, what is the cost of creating a website?

Criteria for selecting good web developer