Learn about some cool features we have implemented for our customers fill out our quote form to see how we can help you and your small business with a WordPress website. From Custom thumbnails, ability to share with social networks, custom category images with “Spotlight”, easy to use SEO and SEO tuneup you’ll be as happy as our 500 other websites when you choose Solarblu

Ability to Post to Facebook and Twitter

With the social networking epidemic greatly upon us, customers need to be able to share their information, posts, pages and images easily with social networks. We have created the ability to use a custom thumbnail in Facebook sharing, as well as integrated with common plugins the ability for the website owner to be able to share with Facebook and Twitter.  While these things are not rocket science they become complicated for an end user. They become a thing “to-do” in a long list of things associated with creating content. Anything you can do as a developer to make the user’s life easier is why we became developers in the first place. At least for me. I always strive to find ways to make my clients experiences better. That is one thing you get when you have your WordPress website designed in Chicago, IL Good ole’ United States. Ingenuity.

Ability to Add Subscription based Video

One client needed to integrate three different systems to create a three tiered subscription service, E-commerce website. We used our talents to create a streamlined approach the client never dreamed of. From website homepage, to checkout, to login the approach was second to none. There were three different levels of video membership and if you upgraded your account you got to see all the videos on the previous level

Spotlight:Custom Categories and thumbnails

The ability to create posts for artists (or another topic of your choice), selected the featured image for that page and have it show up in a specific section of your WordPress website. While this sounds a little complicated we have it down to a science. We call it “spotlight”. We use it to show artists, portfolios, Video Tutorials and more. How you want or need to implement it is as easy as creating some new CSS for your specific website, creating a category, assigning some posts and featured images.

Easy to use SEO & SEO Tuneup

We use a plugin that allows our clients to change the title, keywords, and page description that is shown in the search engine on a per page or post basis. We use our SEO Tuneup to make sure our clients websites are “out of the box” SEO friendly. We like our clients learning new things and feel a sort of gratification when they post new articles to their website, when they come to use and tell us they understand more now than ever before, we have done our job. We do not create solutions to nickle and dime our customers we create solutions that can and want to actually use.

Lead Management through WordPress

Since 2003 we have worked with a variety of customers, business models and industries to increase lead management through their websites. We have set up Google Analytics, keyword tracking and SEO reporting to help these clients be successful with both their websites, and increase traffic for their selected keywords. Our Lead management captures contact information into WordPress and sends you an email everytime someone fills out your contact form. Our system has the ability to capture keywords, or if you need an actual CRM and mailing list integration we can do that for you too.

Custom Thumbnail for Facebook

One of our newest features is the ability to select what image you would like to use for your thumbnail when posting to Facebook or other social media. We have added custom thumbnail code as per the Facebook developer’s guide and integrated this with WordPress’ “featured Image”. Now you can select a featured image and it will be passed along to Facebook as per their requirements. No more hunting around or wondering “Where did that thumbnail come from.”

Most people who own a brick and mortar business want the ability to process orders online or E-commerce. Clients who have chosen WordPress will be happy to learn that you can also have e-commerce installed on your website. The WordPress e-commerce platform is great for small businesses who have limited stock, would like to take PayPal payments, And are in the United States. The e-commerce platform also allows for other types of payments you should see documentation, It allows for different types of shipping providers as well as different types of text settings. Customers have used the e-commerce platform for: Building materials, WordPress themes, video membership websites, photography studios, T-shirt companies, and more. When it comes to selling service related items you can also use the e-commerce store, this should help customers who are in the service industry in which they need to provide a one-time service for a client.

While e-commerce platform is not intricate enough for some clients, it can be expanded upon by PHP and Mysql developer. Like a WordPress theme, the e-commerce platform is just a starting point how you use it or what features you activate our up entirely up to you. One of the things I like about the e-commerce platform is that you can make users register for your website this gives you the ability to create a mailing list of clients that you can send further marketing too. E-commerce program also includes widgets that help you sell your products such as popular products, related items, newest products, and see what other people purchased. This system provides an easy to manage product image section that allows you to create the thumbnail, featured and product image for your e-commerce store, this allows you to use this in your widgets as well as in your posts. It also includes the ability to add images for categories. There are Icons in the text editor to help you enter a product into your posts or pages. This helps when creating marketing materials for your website as well as product information pages.

This platform also includes the easy ability to share your product with social media. If a customer likes what they say they can share with all their friends and get their opinions about that product on their social media network. Easily share your product with your social media users and spread the word about your newest product available in your e-commerce store.

Check out WP e-Commerce today and let us know if you need any assistance.

Are you looking for a WordPress Expert in Chicago who can help you out with some design over flow ? I have created over 600 WordPress themes. While they are not all pretty, or all have my name on them its still an accomplishment to be able to work on so many projects and keep your sanity. I like to create WordPress Themes like a machine, so if you have a PSD process for creating websites then we should work together to get it from there to WordPress.

I’m not interested in dealing with clients, I am interested in creating websites. It should be a simple request

Fill out the form below to submit your company for occasional WordPress Work. If you ever need help finishing a project give us a call first. We try to schedule projects in a timely fashion and to help manage client and partner expectations.

I’m probably not even suppose to talk about this one of the SEO companies might come and find me But in all seriousness, when you see this type of advertisement what do you think ?

These SEO companies are actively searching for someone to create social media accounts on different ip address, this translates to having a single person create multiple social media accounts and not for themselves. This is bloating results on Facebook as SEO companies have found a way to create a multitude of fake accounts. Creatively, programmaticly, or systematically, SEO companies are trying to sell this type of service to their clients.  You should only have friends of your company that are truly friends of your company.  Friends of friends, and people interested in your topic are both natural occurrences of these types of friendship. You should also use word of mouth, standard advertising, website design and more traditional marketing help get your name out there. and of course Contests! Hello

The point is if you have 2500 “new friends” for your company in less than a month and our not out there hitting the ground something should be amiss. If you are a company and you need new Facebook friends do not hire an SEO company to do your grassroots marketing. Find a more interactive, creative, acceptable approach.

This being said, potential customers have no idea that these numbers are being faked, and are not able to determine who really has fans and who does not. While you might think that this is not a “big deal” It most certainly is. People are putting trust in these types of popularity contests and it is being used to sell them more products, value their Facebook shares,  and sell more advertising on Facebook.

The only people who can stop these types of events from happening are the companies who hire people to work on their on-line marketing, you should pay attention to the services that you are purchasing and it should be itimized enough for you to know what you are paying for.  If you cannot get an itimized invoice for services then you should already be looking for a different company to work for.

I create itimized services for my customers and let them know what they are getting. I track hours and sometimes minutes of the work performed for some of my Web Design and Small Business Consulting. Happy Friday everyone!

If you are looking for a developer with experience with a variety of projects,Check out our Portfolio. I have createdover 600 WordPress websites for clients in different markets. I have createdwWordPress websites for jewelry companies, law firms, small businesses, photography studios, authors,deejays, chefs and more. Let me know more about your project and how I can help you achieve your vision.

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As a small business consultant since 1997, I thought it was time to give Lawfirms a website they can be proud about. Check out our Legal wordpress theme. We are limited this theme to only 10 clients so you should get it while you have the chance. If you are working on a WordPress website for a lawfirm client you should really check out the features behind the theme. These will make your life easier as well as a happy client. Our law firm website is designed to be beautiful, customizeable and still highly programmable. If you are working on coding for a client put your Dreamweaver away and pick a theme that runs on Ignition. The advanced WordPress contemplating system from Solarblu.com. Install our recommended plugins and your client is already off to a great website. This theme is tailored to impress upon the visitor a professional image, allowing you to update all the photographic elements. We have provided a backend access second to none that allows you to update your bullet points, and services. Does your lawfirm have a video they would like to include on their homepage ? Not a problem, simple replace our graphic section with your video. Easily add menu items to the footer, header and main menu.

You’ve spent months working with your employees, clients, vendors; graphic designers, web developers, SEO Strategist, Content Writers, and anyone else who wants to throw in their .02 cents about your website. You have quality controlled all the pages, checked all the links, images, posts, pages and fine-tuned the website to the way that works for you, your customers, vendors and employees. You’ve worked with contact forms, CRM systems, Analytics, traffic reports and more, you deserve a small break.

Have you installed any website visitor tracking for your website ? Most web hosting control panels have a free traffic report on the dashboard. Many web hosting companies offer different types of traffic tracking software such as Awstats or webalizer. Awstats is accessible through the control panel dashboard under logs when using cpanel hosting. If you have plesk hosting you can go to Tools->Traffic from the dashboard of your web hosting control panel.  You should see in about a month how your traffic is coming along for keywords that you have targeted as well as what search engine the traffic is coming from. It usually takes about 60 days to see where your website settles in the search engines. I would leave your website alone until you have the new data to support any modifications.

What type of reports do we run for our new websites? I don’t mind telling you what type of reports we use at Solarblu. I don’t mind letting you in on a few “trade secrets”. You should sign up for our newsletter to get insights that can help you keep track of what is going on behind the scenes of your website. If you have a WordPress website you can apply for our management package, this will give you the updates, plugins and monitoring you need to keep on eye on what is going on on a month to month basis. We run multiple types of reports, we can tell you what keywords are bringing in traffic for your website, we can update your website to use Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives you an in-depth look of traffic, mediums, countries, keywords, landing page data and more. We also keep track of clicks with Crazyegg.com. Read more about crazyegg. We also provide server data that is the most comprehensive look at traffic for your websites and includes the following information: bandwidth usage, hit by files types, pages; month to month traffic comparison, referral and search engine data and more.

Need more data ? Contact us today for a month-by-month traffic breakdown only from Solarblu.com

* The reports require our Management service, and Traffic Analysis Service.

Fill out the form below to Sign up for our newsletter. Get the newest information for Home Computer Users, Small Business Owners, webmasters, programmers and more. We have been providing technical support for Microsoft Products and home computers since 1997. We have been providing Web Hosting Support Since 2003. We have built over 500 WordPress websites. Follow the experts, learn where the best prices are for internet technology, real reviews, pointers for your WordPress blog and more.

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Migrating your website to WordPress.

Do you have an old website that you want to upgrade ? Do you have a website that is only a few HTML pages that you would like help moving to WordPress ? We can convert HTML websites to WordPress for you! Migrating to WordPress will help you want to add new content to your website again. Create content, blog posts, static pages, add video, share on social networks and more! Let us professionals take care of the heave lifting for you or we can create a brand new theme from scratch for you! You can even pick a WordPress Theme from our WordPress Themes Store.

Why you should move your website to WordPress ?

There are many benefits to moving your website to WordPress, one of them is being in charge of your website once again. I know a lot of small business owners who put a few pages of HTML content and would like a better way to update their website, and leverage new strategies and technologies. We have been working with WordPress from a designer, developer and hosting standpoint since its inception in 2003. We have helped many small business get their WordPress website up and running and optimized. Let our experience help you. We provide training, one-on-one sessions and management for customers who need a contractual programmer or WordPress Developer.

The right WordPress theme will give you the flexibility to customize your website as much as you need to. Our Themes will help you get the most from your WordPress Experience. We have created solutions from scratch to help businesses use their website for a profitable adventure. From Fraud prevention, credit card and paypal payments, to delivery of goods you will quickly see why we know more about running a business with WordPress than most other web design firms. If your ready to take your WordPress theme to the next level, we can create additional features for you to utilize as well as help you select the proper plugins to help you with your business processes.

Once your website is moved to WordPress you can add content, update HTML, add videos, images, google maps, custom menu items, custom headers and backgrounds and more. We constantly update our themes to offer clients the best WordPress Experience possible. We also want you to have the flexibility to make our WordPress themes your own. See a theme you like, or have one already and need new features, we can do that too.

Choose the Experts at Solarblu WordPress Hosting and PHP Development

We provide WordPress Hosting, Small business consulting, PHP Development and WordPress themes to our clients and have been since 2003. If you are are looking for affordable WordPress solutions, then you should give us a call and let us know what is on your mind or find us on Social media networks. We try to be available as much as possible.   Thank you for stopping by and let us know if you ever need help.

We offer Expert WordPress hosting and support. We have provided technical support for over 250,000 customers as well as created over 500 WordPress websites, our hosting comes with free themes, expert advice, Recommended plugins and an SEO tuneup to help you get started in the right direction. We have been creating, supporting, and hosting WordPress websites since 2003!

Located in Downtown Chicago since 2003.

Fast Setup and Configured for you!
Auto Installed WP 3.x
Small Business Experts
2,000 MB Disk Space (need more space, let us know)
50+ 1-click Recommended Plugins
Free WordPress Themes!
Free Domain Registration!

If you need a WordPress Hosting Account and are new to WordPress look no further. Our WordPress Hosting packages are created by actual WordPress Experts. We have created over 500 WordPress themes since 2003. We have been supporting WordPress web hosting clients since 2003! It’s been a long time and we are ready to get the party started for you.

WordPress is one of the easiest to use Content Management Systems. Once you get WordPress installed, pick the right plugins and select a template you still need some assistance figuring out how to use WordPress. Don’t let all that scare you. We have got you covered!

Auto Installation of WordPress 3.x
WordPress Core 3.x Installed for you, MySql and databases setup have you confused? We take care of that for you Once your order is placed we Install WordPress and its required database and log all these details in case you need them later.

Free WordPress Themes From Solarblu
We give you free WordPress themes that NO OTHER web hosting company can give you. They are developed by our talented WordPress Developers at Solarblu. Over 20+ themes to chose from and updated Weekly with new business themes.

Recommended Plugins Installed with your WordPress Installation
We have been putting together plugins for over 5 years that help make our clients a success. Social Media, Google Analytics, Post View Tracking, Duplicate Post, Contact Form and lead management and more over 50+ plugins if you need any more than that our talented staff will be more than happy to help you find the right plugin to help you get started.

WordPress Management Services
Still need help with your WordPress website? We offer WordPress management to those clients who need a little more assistance without the heavy price tag of a web master.

Who we are ?
Solarblu has been hosting small business WordPress Websites for its clients since 2008. We love our clients and have been in the hosting industry since 2003. The founder of Solarblu has been a WordPress Developer and has helped run multiple web hosting companies since 2003. All of our Support is located in Chicago and our servers are located in Houston,TX.

No other web hosting company can offer you the support, expertise and product lineup we are offering. No other web hosting company has been in the business since WordPress was created, and develops WordPress themes on a daily basis. Let our expertise save you some time.

Get Started With Solarblu WordPress Hosting

Still not convinced, call me and ask me any questions you have about WordPress. We have livechat, video tutorials and WordPress Eperts to help you get started.

First I would like to extend my thanks to the lunarpages.com technical support team that helped us with a recent email migration. Out of the many migrations I have performed over the last 10 years this has been the smoothest migration of Exchange to Cpanel Email I have every had. The team at lunarpages.com was both responsive, and knowledgeable.

One of the first things a new IT department must review is finances. Most network Administrators know the answers to your questions but it takes an expert to look at all the moving parts and determine what is right for your client on a case-by-case basis. One of the biggest overheads is going to be your internet connectivity, email, and hosting solutions. (If you have onsite servers then your situation will be different than the one described in this article.) When it comes to breaking down where are domains registered, are you paying the correct responsible party? Where are domains hosted, are they hosted in the most efficient and manageable manner? Where is email actually hosted, and is it the best solution for your client ? Today we are going to cover the email portion of this puzzle.

If you have a house of employees that all use MAC computers but they are connecting to an Exchange server and paying a hefty invoice on a quarterly basis this is a good problem to fix first. It takes proper planning, determination, organization and expertise to execute migrating accounts from an Exchange server to Cpanel hosted email without interruption, loss of email and minimum downtime. Your first step would be to determine when the billing is happening, and is this going to be a cost affective solution. In this case our client was billed on a quarterly basis and were not utilizing Exchange features because they didn’t have Microsoft products tied to the exchange servers. We moved the clients to IMAP on the Cpanel server which allows us to still perform backups of email accounts and Webmail access.

Step 1 – Contact Your hosting company and tell them you need to setup “Split domains” for your email. This will allow you to migrate clients on a per mailbox basis without interrupting other users, and without having to pull the switch on the entire company, and you wont have to mess with MX records if they handle all the traffic and DNS requests for MX records. In this case, Lunarpages.com does have this type of setup and their team can expertly help you out. At this point you should verify that your hosting account has enough room to handle storing all the new email. Lunarpages offers unlimited diskspace.

Step 2 – Backup the current email for the client in case something goes wrong. Read Additional Devices Section.

Step 3 – Setup the new account on the server.

Step 4 – Setup the new IMAP account on the client computer. Using outlook, Entourage, Mail or other email programs you can create a secondary email account that is independent of the first. In most cases, migrating email is as simple as selecting all the emails in the first account and drag and dropping them into the new email box. This stores the messages on your computer in a new directory. These will later be copied to the new email server.

Step 5 – Send the email address to the hosting company to add the list of email address to be handled by the cpanel server, this will go in the file they created for split domains. When they verify that this is done. REMOVE THE EXCHANGE ACCOUNT. All new mail will go to the cpanel server.

Step 6 – Send a test message from your administrative account to the new server and verify the cpanel account has received this message by using the clients webmail access. http://www.Domain.com/webmail if you are using cpanel.

Step 7- Remove the exchange account from the clients computer. This may take some time, be patient or you will corrupt local folders for email.

Step 8 – Restart mail program. Now you will see your new email box, hit send and receive and make sure that your settings are correct. You should see existing mail being populated in webmail on the server. These emails are being pushed from your computer to the server using IMAP Synchronization. (Isn’t that neat ? ) This synchronization process can take a long time depending on the number of emails and attachments. All new email is being received at the server level but will not make it to the desktop until the synchronization process is completed. BE PATIENT.

Step 9 – Once synchronization is completed use the host computer to verify settings, verify ports, send test emails and you should be on your way to being done.

Additional Devices

At step 5 you need to remove Exchange access for additional devices, such as phones, additional computers using this email account, IPAD’s and so on.  After step 7 you can add the new settings to the device and verify settings and send test emails. It is important that these devices remain disconnected permanently or OFF, until the synchronization process is completed. Professionally I turn these devices off at step 1. This will help you synchronize backups properly.

Step 10 – Contact the hosting company and tell them you have removed the Excahnge services and that you need your bill adjusted accordingly. How much money did you save ? How hard was this process ? Leave comments. We hope this article and business document helped you save money and keep from pulling your hair out. thanks for stopping by.

Warning

We guarantee nothing, use this article at your own risk. But we have been working on email accounts, cpanel, webmail, and databases since 1997.