As a general direction to move away from the majority of the clients that inhabit DP/WF, you MUST have your own website. Sure, you can try out your luck at Elance.. but I never had any luck there, I always got outbid by people who were willing to go lower than the minimum budget suggested. Point Being: If you don't want to work with penny chasers, then you need to have your own website. A lot of those higher paying clients have never even heard of this forum. From the perspective of business owners who I used to do website work for and write for locally, most of them just searched in Google or asked around when it came to having content done. Anyways, I'm looking for a theme but I'm not sure which one to go with. I'll be going with Wordpress of course because it's where I have the most positive results SEO wise. Here was a theme I was checking out: http://www.olevmedia.com/themes/preview/?item=metro It's responsive, all CSS and looks pretty solid. I'm going with a WP Blog because I'm going to start a general blog on Making Money Online and I'll be offering my services on the side of the website. I'll also have a referral link and section for those cheap clients who want "quality" at a cheap price as well Pretty much just a referral link to iWriter, but oh well, it's better to refer them to somewhere than try to educate them. What themes do you use or have you used? I'd prefer one that comes SEO ready such an efficient and optimized H1 and H2 tag. However I don't want something that looks horrid and god awfuly designed, AKA: Almost every website in the WF (seriously.. go look at some of the websites in their signatures.. they're just bad).
Good question. Sorry. Can't offer any suggestions. I built my own site using Dreamweaver and Photoshop. I like WP. It's a powerful CMS. It's just a lot of maintenance with frequent updates, plugins (if you use any), and finding a theme that doesn't have hidden data mining code or misc unwanted code. WP is also a magnet for script kiddies, so you really, really have to be diligent about updating and making sure your theme and plugins are secure. There's a few security measures to keep in mind as to reduce your chances of a script kiddie getting in and exploiting your site. I would strongly suggest that you purchase a theme from a reputable source versus going the free theme route and trying to modify it. Some free and paid themes are easy to modify, but others are a real PITA. However, you're taking the right approach asking for recommendations from people who actually use a particular theme. Some WP themes are absolutely amazing in esthetics and functionality.
Of course, but the majority of my plugins are pretty mainstream. My big gripe is these people who buy these "magic" plugins from places like the Warrior Forum WSO and then they wonder why their WF goes slow when they have all these outdated crap $7 plugins. *sigh* I hear you on the script kiddies, I've had a site hacked before but that was because my roommate's computer wasn't protected and he was uploading stuff to my site via FTP. They injected some nasty code into a PHP file and I contacted Host Gator to help me out. They found out what the problem was in a few minutes and fixed it. As for themes, usually I prefer to stay away from the themes that aren't on Themeforest or on Wordpress's main site with a high rating. It just amazed me that Metro is compeltely CSS without any server scripting functionality what so ever. I just have to find a theme that's easy for clients to navigate though, and not just myself. I can navigate the majority of sites relatively easy and I know what to look for... but I wish we could say the same about the majority of the older users on computers. That's the majority of my customer base too.