This week we are going to talk about theme based websites.

What’s up Fish Fans! My name is Marcus. You’re watching Marketing Madness, the Blue Fish vlog!

In this video, I want to do something we don’t normally do. This video is just an outright sales pitch. There is still good information coming. But I wanted to take a moment to tell you about one of our offerings. We are really excited about this offering and what it means to small business owners. It is going to increase their exposure, improve their Search Engine Rankings, and most importantly give them time back in their already busy schedules.

A few years ago we realized that small business owners had a need for a website that was easy to update, but that performed well with search engines. At the time we were only offering custom websites. And custom websites can be out of reach for many small business owners. Because we are trying to solve a specific problem for a specific client we have a lot of hours in them and that makes the price go up.

For our custom sites, we start with a blank slate, figure out what a conversion looks like for your business, create blueprints for the site, called wireframes, that encourage that conversion, make the design reflect your branding, write code that is clean, and integrate a CMS that makes it easy for you to update content and saves you time.

But not all clients need that type of solution. But, unlike other agencies, we did not want to stick out clients in Wordpress as it is difficult to use and has some benefits that become detractors that work against you. For instance, plugins in Wordpress are really easy to install and add functionality that most people could not code on their own.

But every plugin that you install on the site inserts files and complex code to the front end of the site that adds bloat. This typically means that the site will not perform as well as it could if it were coded properly.

And systems like Wix and Squarespace have their own issues. Anytime you allow for the ease of customization that you get with these systems you lose a little in Search Engine Optimization. Most people think of SEO as some sort of dark art. The truth is that SEO starts with how the site is coded. It is easy. If the site has a lot of bad code and bloat then it is going to suffer when it comes to SEO. And we all know how important it is to rank on the first page for our target keywords.

We have always been fans of Craft CMS for our custom website clients. It is easy for our clients to use. It is secure. It is easy for us to provide site admins an excellent experience managing the content. It is fairly easy to keep updated. And while it does have a cost associated with it, the price is small when you consider the capabilities that it provides.

So we decided to build themes for Craft so that our theme-based sites have most of the same benefits as our custom sites. These sites give you a great amount of control over how your content is laid out. But they do so with clean code and without all of the bloat that the other systems have.

And instead of starting at $10,000, these sites start below $1000. And like I said in the beginning of this video, we are really excited about this offering and what it means to small business owners. It is going to increase their exposure, improve their rankings, and most importantly give them time back in their already busy schedules. So if you are interested in learning more just send me an email at marcus@bluefishds.com

Well, that’s a wrap for this week! I want to thank you for checking in. Make sure to hit that like button. And if you have any questions or comments leave them down below. If you want to talk about how Blue Fish can help you grow your business just send us a message and we’ll get the conversation started!