Last week, I talked about what a great application WordPress is for the solo professional or small business owner. It’s easier than ever before to create a professional web site with just WordPress and a few handy tools. (Of course if you really want a site that knocks their socks off, it would be money well spent to hire a web designer to create a professional design and pull all the pieces together for you!)

Whether you roll up your sleeves and do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you, you should think about employing at least these five plugins to help drive traffic to your site, to add functionality to your site or to otherwise enhance it so that the visitor’s experience is the best. If visitors to your site don’t like what they see, or if the information they seek is not easily attainable (read: no more than two mouse clicks away), they won’t stay. And what’s worse, they won’t return.

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We have just set up a new domain to house our various free and for pay blog themes:

www.myblogthemes.com

There you’ll find links to themes for WordPress (over two dozen themes!), Blogger, Movable Type (in production), sNews (in production) and TextPattern (in production). There are download links for each blog theme and you are always free to contact us to suggest a new theme, to report any theme or web site misbehavior or to ask for help with using our themes.

The only thing we require from you in exchange for providing these free themes is that you keep the attribution links intact. We think this is a small request; we hope you do, too!

Dear Web Design Clients, Prospective Clients, Friends and Colleagues:

Pixelita Designs has just signed the online petition NO!SPEC Crusade.
We personally agree with what this petition says, and we think you might agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider signing it yourself.

There are many reasons that spec work hurts not just the designer professional but the client as well. Most of those reasons have been well articulated on the No!Spec web site. Suffice it to say that we will not do spec work. Why? We think you, our client, are worth more than that. And we know we are. If you want further reading on this topic, download the AIGA manifesto on speculative work (Adobe Acrobat file).