If you're an advisor, who can't easily be found online*, prospects you've met and who are taking the next step by conducting online research might think you're not legitimate.  And putting what's in your brochure on your website isn't enough to convey credibility and trustworthiness either. Your site needs to be an effective marketing tool.  It needs to compel the prospect to call you, schedule a call, or join your newsletter to learn more about you. Is your website doing all that?  Are you getting at least 2-3 prospects from your site each week?  Making Your Website Trustable Have you ever visited a web site and been attacked by screaming pop-up ads, gotten lost in a clutter

Once you add a WordPress blog to your website, you’ll have the “guts” of the program.  But its appearance may not match your brand.   Next, you can change the photo and colors of the theme WordPress provides, or you can change the theme altogether, as most business owners do.   Inside the WordPress control panel or dashboard, you’ll find a large number of free theme templates or you can search online to locate free themes to download.   PLUS, you can purchase templates from reliable sources such as  Elegant, Thesis, or other companies Your web designer can do all this work and create a “branded” theme for you, too.   As I update my own website

©2013 123RF Stock Photos See if you identify with this scenario... You're reading an article, blog post, or website. You want to share a page with a friend, your colleagues, or your social networking sites. You look high and low, and can't, for the life of you, find your favorite share buttons. The usual collection of colorful tiles are not there, or you just can't find them. If you're like most people, you'll move on. You're very unlikely to open up your individual Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or email account, copy and paste the URL link, and then write a title or subject line. That's too much work and too many clicks. If you make it difficult

©2013 123RF Stock Photos Check the links on your website. If a link takes your reader OFF your website -- maybe to someone else's article on another site -- change the way that the link works. Ask your web master to code the link to open a new window or tab. In other words, add a target attribute before closing the HREF tag. The target attribute is written target="_blank" When a visitor clicks on an outbound link, a new window or tab will open. In the background your site will still be open, too. DON'T use this code to link between pages within your own website or blog or you'll really annoy the heck out of

©2013 123RF Stock Photos How annoying is it to go to a website, click a link and end up on an error page? Yeah, my website is guilty of this sometimes, too. I've done two things to fix this vexing problem:a) My web master set up a site map to appear instead of an error page. If a link is broken or has changed, my website visitors get my site map (a menu listing the main web pages on my sites) and information on finding what they're looking for. You can go directly to b) We use a no-cost link checker called Xenu to zip through all my websites and easily let it scour for broken