QR codes are starting to become more and more popular as people adopt smartphones into their every day lives. QR codes are a lot like a bar codes that get scanned on your groceries at the grocery store. They’re a simple way to give your potential customers information about you and your business. You can use QR codes to embed company information, contact information (vcard), or a link to a website. You could use QR codes to pass along any information you can think of that might be useful for your clients.

Why should I use QR codes?

Using QR codes are an easy and effective way to reach your clients on their mobile devices. If you’re a small business owner you can use a QR code to store your contact information like a vcard, so when you meet someone new they don’t have to type all your contact info. They could just scan your QR code from your image folder and done, your information is stored in their contact list.

What if you’re a business with a store location? As your clients enter your store, you can provide them with extra discounts by scanning the QR code at the door or provide daily specials. How about software developers? You could post your new Android or iPhone app on your website and instead of giving a link to a new application you can create a QR code that takes them directly to your application for them to download.

Real estate agents? You could use them on properties you have listed. Post a QR code on the sign sitting in the front yard so if you run out of fliers a potential client can still learn about the property by scanning the code and being directed to a website. There are hundreds of ways to use QR codes to help drive business and INCREASE sales!

How do I get started using QR codes for my small business?

That’s simple. You can locate a QR code generator on the Internet that best fits your need or you can use Google’s QR Code generator by clicking here. This very simple, easy to use generator works great on most mobile devices. Finer Solution used the Google QR generator to create the featured image for this article and for the QR code on the Finer Solution Twitter Page.

Have you used QR codes for your business? We would love to hear from you on how you used this technology to promote your business. Take a few minutes to leave us a comment.

Choosing the right look and feel of your website tells your customers a lot about you and your company. Depending on what industry your company operates in will also determine the look and feel. If you’re in the medical industry you probably want a clean, easy to navigate theme. However, if you are in the real estate industry you may want your site to be photo heavy to showcase properties and ammenities. Spend some time searching your favorite WordPress theme website getting a good feel of the functionality of those themes. Finer Solutions has put together some questions you can ask yourself while viewing these sites.

1. How easy is it to navigate?
2. Where is that navigation, on the top of the page, on the left rail?
3. Is the website more image heavy or text heavy?

If you want to achieve high rankings within search engines for specific search terms or keywords, you will need a text heavy website.

Want to learn more about how you can launch a new website and start generating leads? Give us a call at (303) 736-9688. Let us show you how to launch a new website within about an hour.

WordPress Themes

Where can I get themes to use on my site? Listed below are a few trusted sites that sell WordPress themes for you to use. Take a few minutes and browse around for the right theme for you and your business.

ThemeForest – ThemeForest is an Envato Marketplace. At ThemeForest you can buy and sell HTML templates as well as themes for popular CMS products like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal with prices ranging from just $5 up to $40. Items are priced based on the complexity, quality and use of the file. The site is home to a bustling community of web designers and developers and is the largest marketplace of its kind.

Natty WP – We are developing professional wordpress themes and provide efficient support of our templates. Join the club and choose the membership that suits your needs. We are proud to invite you to the best wordpress themes club and provide you with the full access to all our themes, as well as tutorials, support and the community forum. Join us now!

Woo Themes – There is only one way to explain what a great team of developers at WooThemes. You’ll have to check out their about us page here.

Have a favorite WordPress theme that you would like to recommend? Take a minute to join the conversation and share it with us.

Did you know we have training videos to teach you how to setup your first e-mail campaign? Allow the Finer Solution Small Business Workspace to help you create and monitor your first initial contact with new clients. Additional videos on how to setup your first e-mail broadcast, website hosting and e-mail setup are also available in our support center.

Please take a few minutes to visit the the Finer Solution Support Center and check out all the ways Finer Solution can work for you!

Design Tip : When creating a desktop image to place in your Finer Solution Small business workspace, design the image around the screen resolution you will be working on most. Here at Finer Solution we designed our background image to fit on a 30″ monitor with a screen resolution of 2560×1600 pixels. You can download our example image here. (right-click > save as)

How do I find out what my screen resolution is?
Simple, use this great little tool from ScreenResolution.org, you can also follow these steps.

Windows Operating System
Right Click on your Desktop > Properties (windows 7 – “Screen Resolution”) … your done!

Machitosh Operating System
1. Click on the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your menu bar and select “System Preferences.”
2. Select “Displays.”
3. Check the box that says “Show displays in menu bar.” This will add a monitor icon to the right side of the menu bar.
4. Locate the monitor icon on the top right of your screen on the menu bar.
5. Click on the “Monitor” icon. This will bring up a menu with several options.
6. Select your desired screen resolution. OSX will change the display resolution on its own.
7. To quickly switch between resolutions, you can just select one, and OSX will change it immediately.
8. You can also access the “Display Preferences” screen from here without going through the “System Preferences” window.

Google Analytics is a free service provided by Google to help you and your business track your website information. It is easy to setup, easy to install and tracks all the information you need to improve your website functionality and rankings. Get started with Google Analytics by signing up here. Start tracking your site performance and visitors today.

Be sure to come back to the Finer Solution Blog as our next series will cover how to setup your first tracking campaign and installing the tracking code on your website. Part 1 of 8 or more

Do you use Google Analytics or do you use another software to track visitor information? We would love to hear what you use and some of the great features. Take a few minutes and let us know what you use.

Stop Making the 6 Biggest SEO Mistakes

January is a time to make resolutions, and then promptly fail to follow them. That said, it’s also a time to for new beginnings, a chance to correct the mistakes of the past.

Within search engine optimization (SEO) there are plenty of mistakes that people make that they need to stop making. So if you do any of the following, it’s time to stop, especially if you want a new beginning for your SEO in 2011.

1. Home is Not Where the Traffic is

Sure, it’s your home page, but that doesn’t mean that you want it to rank for the word “home.” Unless you’re a real estate company or a homebuilder, it makes no sense to call your home page “Home” — and even then you’d want to expand that out with other terms that cover your business.

Your home page should be targeted to the primary terms that you’re trying to rank for. For example, if you’re a plumber, your home page title should target your plumbing services in your locality.

2. Moving the Staging Robots.txt to the Production Site

This issue happens more often than it should. If done correctly, your staging server’s robots.txt should block all spiders from crawling the site.

This article continues at Search Engine Watch website, learn what the other 4 biggest mistakes are.

This article is a great reminder how the little things can add up and hinder your websites organic search results. As we read though this article we felt that something was missing, how many people know what a robots.txt file is. Robots text files are ways to keep the search engines from indexing areas of your site, think of this file as a road map for the search engines to follow. GOOGLE, we want you to index this section of our website but not that area. Learn how to create a Robots.txt file

What tips and tricks can you provide to help improve organic SEO? Take a moment to register with Finer Solution and let us know what your thoughts are, we would love to hear from you.

Check this out!

Tynt Insight (TYNT.com) is a free service offering the ability to give you credit for any copy & paste action made on your website. What does that even mean? Tynt is very small JavaScript is primarily used in the form of client-side JavaScript, implemented as part of a web browser in order to provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites. However, its use in applications outside web pages—for example in PDF-documents, site-specific browsers and desktop widgets—is also significant. JavaScript that you place on your website. Everytime someone copies content from your website, Tynt’s javascript adds your website name and URL to your site to make sure you get credit. Go ahead an copy a little bit of this post and paste it into a word document, email, or anyplace that accepts text and see how it works.

Who is Tynt?

Tynt Multimedia is measuring the way consumers interact with content they find on Websites and is focused on improving engagement and user retention for Publishers. The company’s platform is driving new revenue opportunities by increasing traffic, increasing onsite user engagement, providing new methods of content discovery, offering new option for ad delivery and providing unique insights into user engagement.

What tips & tricks do you have for blogging? Do you have a service you use to help promote your blog? Let us know in the comments section below.

WordPress explains a plugin as, “A Plugin is a group of php functions that can extend the functionality present in a standard WordPress weblog. These functions may all be defined in one php file, or maybe spread among more than one file. Usually, a plugin is a php file that can be uploaded to the “wp-content/plugins” directory on your webserver, where you have installed WordPress. Once you have uploaded the plugin file, you should be able to “turn it on” or Enable it from the “Plugins” page in the administration interface of your weblog. The WordPress source code contains hooks that can be used by plugins.”

Listed below are just a few of the plug-in’s we use at Finer Solution CRM. These few plug-ins are a must have for any wordpress website.

Akismet – Akismet comes with WordPress ready for you to activate under the plug-ins tab in your WordPress admin. Sign up for an activation code at Akismet.com. Akismet is a hosted web service that saves you time by automatically detecting comment and trackback spam. Akismet filters out your comment and track-back spam for you, so you can focus on more important things.
http://akismet.com/

All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).


All in One SEO Pack

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.


Google XML Sitemaps

Page Links To – This plugin allows you to make a WordPress page or post link to a URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress page or post URL. It also will redirect people who go to the old (or “normal”) URL to the new one you’ve chosen (301 Moved Permanently redirects are standard, but you can choose a 302 Moved Temporarily redirect if you wish).


Page Links T

Twitter Widget Pro – A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username, #hashtag, and link parsing. It supports displaying profiles images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened (about 5 hours ago, etc). Requires PHP5.


Twitter Widget Pro

Contact Form by Finer Solution – We know, our contact form is not a widget for WordPress but everyone needs a contact form on their website and when you build your work space with Finer Solution there is nothing easier then setting up a new form and connecting your website with your FREE Finer Solution CRM account. You and your business can create 100% customizable forms for you to use on your site as a contact form or even an online questionnaire. There is no limit on how you can use the Finer Solution Form Builder
Website Manager in Finer Solution.

We would love to hear from you, do you have a few plug-ins that you have used and would recommend? Join in on the conversation and give us a link to the plug-ins you would recommend.

[button link="/create-your-workspace/"]Create your free workspace[/button]

What is WordPress?

“WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.”

With Finer Solution’s easy installation of WordPress, your business can start managing and uploading content to your new website in a matter of minutes. This quote is taken from the WordPress.org website.
“The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 25 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.”

We are very excited about the launch of the new website along with the official release of the Finer Solution Small Business Workspace. For the past 8-10 months Finer Solution Small Business Workspace has been in a closed BETA test program and we are getting ready to launch all of the applications live. When Finer Solution officially launches in early 2011 the 100% web-based software will be FREE to signup. When you sign up you and your business will be able to take advantage of the Customer Rolodex, Email Marketing Center, Website Manager, Company Calendar, Website Form Builder and a few other applications.

Be sure to sign up today and receive our email notifying you of the official release.

You can also find us on: