Wordpress

A Beginners Guide for WordPress Web Design

WordPress powers around 34% of the internet. Not only is WordPress powering blogs, but many eCommerce sites are using WordPress as well.

If you’re thinking about starting your own website, you might be considering WordPress but are wondering how hard WordPress web design is. If you aren’t very technically inclined, it can seem daunting to design your own website but we can help. Continue reading this article and learn some simple tips for designing your website on WordPress.

Choose a Theme That Will Work for You

Depending on how good you are with technical matters, you might need to choose a pretty simple theme. WordPress themes are what make your website show up the way they do online. WordPress themes allow you to have certain functions and ways to showcase your content without coding it yourself.

There are literally thousands of themes available online. You will find some themes are paid themes and some are free. You’ll find themes that require a yearly subscription and other themes that you can buy with a one-time investment.

Depending on the type of site you want to make, you’ll find that certain themes work better for you than others. If you’re building a magazine-style website, there are themes that are specifically for this style of website. If you want to build a photography website, you’ll be able to find themes optimized for sharing your photography.

Keep a Tidy Sidebar

The sidebar of your WordPress site is seen on every page on most designs. The sidebar isn’t where you should put everything that you can think of. Recent posts, ads, promotions, about sections and many other sections could confuse or distract your readers.

Be purposeful when you put things into your sidebar. Whether you’re using managed hosting or cpanel hosting, you access your sidebar settings the same way. Go into your dashboard, go to appearance and click on widgets. When you are in the widgets section, you’ll be able to easily change what’s in your sidebar.

Make It Easy to Navigate Your Website

Nothing is more frustrating than going to a website where you can’t find what you’re looking for. Your website navigation should make sense when people come to find information.

Group related topics, create categories, and structure your menu section in a way where people can see your system and thought process. If you have a finance section on your website, you might add subsections like Debt Resolution, Savings, Investing, and anything else related that can be considered a subtopic.

User experience is an important part of web design. Focus on planning out your website navigation before you even create content and it will work much better for you.

Choose a Clean Permalink Structure

Permalink structure is your website link structure. For instance, if your website is yourwebsite.com, your permalink might be yourwebsite.com/post1 or yourwebsite.com/posttitle. You can choose what your permalink structure is in the settings section near the bottom of the dashboard sidebar.

Use Images to Drive Your Point Home

Images help your readers stay engaged. We all remember loving to read picture books and getting excited to see what was on the next page. Now as adults, images still help drive points home so we are able to understand the information.

Not only do images make your page look better and engage your readers but they can also help with search engine optimization (SEO). You have the ability to put “alt text” with the keyword when you upload it to your WordPress page or post for better SEO results.

You can use stock images or you can take your own images and use them on your site. Stock images are inexpensive these days or you can even find some online for free.

Select an Appealing Font

If you don’t want to look like every other website online and use the Arial font, you might want to look into other fonts. You are going to find that there are a lot of options available but you need to find fonts that go along with your brand’s look.

You don’t necessarily have to use a different font throughout your website but you might want to use a fancy font on your headers. While you want your website to be attractive to your visitors, you don’t want to visually overload them or make your website difficult for them to read.

There are even places where you can create your own font, download it and use it on your site to make it uniquely yours. This is a little bit of a pro-tip but it might be something you want to consider later down the road when you’re working on your branding.

Don’t Forget the Footer

While the footer might seem a little boring, it is prime real estate. People scroll to the bottom of your page to get an idea of how long the content is. Make sure you have important information there so they can see it and possibly decide to stay on your page longer.

Depending on the theme you choose for your website, you may even be able to pull images from your Instagram feed, show excerpts from your About page and more.

WordPress Web Design for the Win

Now that you know more about WordPress web design, a whole new world is open to you. Why not keep learning? We have many other articles on our site that can open up more worlds and exciting opportunities.

Browse our website, find your favorite section, drop a bookmark and come back soon for more great reads.

4 of the Best WordPress Maintenance Services You Should Be Using

The startling fact is that 34.5% of all websites use WordPress. WordPress is an open-source blog publishing and content management system based on PHP and MySQL. Its market share has grown year-on-year since 2011 and is not showing any signs of slowing down any time soon.

What makes WordPress so popular? To begin with, it is so easy to get started on WordPress. Everyone finds WordPress straightforward to adapt to their needs.

By everyone, we mean from personal bloggers, content writers, authors, and companies who need an e-commerce platform.

As your business — and your WordPress website — grows, you might find that you need WordPress maintenance services to up your game.

Your website needs to be fast, efficient, and performance-oriented for visitors to stay once they arrive. To keep your website SEO-friendly you have to do a certain amount of maintenance. Let’s face it, most of us would prefer to do other things.

In theory, you can do the maintenance yourself. Saying you should outsource so you can focus on your core business to stay ahead applies here too. Let’s look at what WordPress maintenance services entail, and review which ones you should be using.

What Are WordPress Maintenance Services?

WordPress maintenance covers all the back-office jobs that you probably neglect. Such as security, maintenance, theme quick fixes, plugin quick-fixes, speed optimization, and conversion optimization. 

Slightly more complex services would include a proactive core, theme and plugin updates, offsite backups, and regular security scans. Other items such as backing up your whole site or database in realtime or weekly malware scans might also appeal to you. 

There are many good WordPress maintenance services to choose from, so we’ve compiled a whistle-stop review of four of them:

WP Curve

With current active customers standing at around 1,000, WP Curve is one of the larger maintenance services companies whose robust support team provides international service.

They offer customers an unlimited number of small WordPress fixes around the clock and within 24 hours. The term “small job” covers any WordPress task that can be completed in 30 minutes or less. Small jobs include website backup, plugin configuration, and CSS tweaks.

Their scope of services is pretty clear on what their standard USD 79 a month subscription covers – and what it does not. For their professional package, which includes proactive maintenance. the monthly cost is USD 99. For that, your core, themes, and plugins are proactively updated and you get a security guarantee, monthly security scans, and regular backups.

WP Curve also has a VIP service which promises that their average response time will be cut in half (to a mere four hours). Each subscription is applicable to only one website. If you have more than one website, you will need to take out a subscription for each one.

WP Site Care

WP Site Care has a reputation for reliability. They back up your site in real-time and store your data security in the Amazon Cloud.

Security monitoring around the clock and proactive updates of your WordPress website are their strong suit. Proactive updates are one way to guarantee that there won’t be any compatibility issues. Subscribers can make an unlimited number of support requests to their US-based support staff. Subscribers can make an unlimited number of support requests, too.

Communicating with WP Site Care is done directly from your WordPress dashboard using their amazing Walkie Talkie tool, which is partly responsible for their ultra-fast one-hour response time. The cost for this service is USD 79 per month.

For USD 299 a month the WP Site Care will not only maintain your site, but they will also try to improve it. Improvements include speed optimization, refining your onsite SEO to boost traffics, and an extensive security audit. This plan also includes up to four development tasks per month, uptime monitoring, eCommerce support, and priority access to the support team. Well worth it, if you can afford it.

OnlySecureWP

OnlySecureWP focuses chiefly on security issues and splits its service offering into two types:

1. Individuals or business owners with a website; and
2. Agencies managing multiple websites.

Their WordPress maintenance covers al the usual things expected from other maintenance service providers, but their specialty is protection against hackers.  Their top-of.the range 24/7 plan. which include speaking to a live person for support if need be, is priced at USD 499 per year. So, good value, if you want to keep your site secure!

WP Maintainer

WP Maintainer keeps things simple. It only has one package available, so all their customers get the full range of services for USD 99 per month.

Their strong point is ensuring quality hosting providers. New customers can receive a website migration for free, allowing them to move their website across to a WP Maintainer-preferred host.

WP Maintainer handles all routine maintenance tasks, including all WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates, regular off-site website backups, and monthly malware monitoring.

You can buy additional developer time in the event of compatibility issues with updates, at the rate of USD 99/hour. Customer support is important, especially when you need it the most!

Decisions, Decisions

Your choice of who you contract to do your WordPress maintenance services will depend entirely on whether you are an individual who wants to free up time for creative content writing, or whether you are a large e-commerce platform who cannot afford any downtime at all.

Your choice is based on how much you can afford, and what the perceived risks are to your business if you do not have someone doing your WordPress maintenance for you.

We recommend that you look at the maintenance service providers we have reviewed above and see which one suits your business the most. Imagine what you can do with that extra free time, knowing that someone competent is focusing on the issues that help keep your business running smoothly.

For related articles on digital marketing and what amazing potential your website actually does have, why don’t you visit our dedicated digital marketing page and settle down to a good read?

Learning WordPress: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners

If you’re making a website, WordPress is the way to go.

WordPress is one of the best free website builders in the world. There’s a pretty good chance that about half of the websites that you visit were built using WordPress. Why is that, you might ask?

Well, because learning WordPress is really easy. You don’t need to have any coding background whatsoever to set up a professional looking and functional website. When you log on, it might look a little daunting, but after a short trial and error period, you’ll be dragging and dropping fun elements into your new site.

In this post, we’re going to give you a sort of beginner’s guide to using WordPress. When you’re done reading this, you’ll have all of the tools to get started with making your site. As with anything, you’ll become more proficient with WordPress as you practice, but let’s start out with the basics.

The Beginner’s Guide to Learning WordPress

Why do so many people and businesses use WordPress? Yes, it’s easy to learn, but WordPress users are offered incredible flexibility and state of the art functionality for their web pages. There are now side industries based around WordPress care and upkeep, as roughly 1.1 million WordPress domains go up every six months.

The customizability is staggering, but for now, we’re going to assume that you know nothing about page building and start from the very beginning. Fear not, however, it won’t take long to get you off the ground.

Web Hosting

In a sense, web hosting is like a storage container for your website. It provides a server for all of the contents and data of your website to live in, leaving you to focus on putting your great content out into the world.

Choosing a web host can be a little daunting on the surface, but it’s actually pretty easy. When you’re choosing your host, there are a few things you should keep in mind, however.

Since you’re operating a content management website on WordPress, you’re going to need a lot of storage to keep your images and archives. It’s also important that your page is fast. SEO is partly dependent on page speed, so if you want to appear higher on search rankings, you should make sure that your host is fast.

Installation

Once you’ve got your web host chosen, you’re ready to install WordPress. Some web hosting sites will take care of this for you, but in the event that they don’t, we’ve got you covered.

All that you need to do is go to your cPanel and search for the WordPress installer. It’s a one-click installer, so all you have to do is find it, click it, and you’ll be good to go. It’s extremely unlikely that you’d ever have to manually install WordPress, but there are plenty of guides online showing you how to do that, as well.

Themes

One of the beautiful things about WordPress is its simplicity. When you start it up for the first time, a default theme will be loaded on to your site. Assuming that you want to use something a little more “you”, then you can change it up. 

There are hundreds of free themes available directly on WordPress, but if you don’t see anything you like, you can purchase something from a third party. We have a hard time believing that you won’t find something that you’ll love on WordPress, though. 

Our advice would be to keep it fairly simple, especially with your first WordPress site. It’s easy to get wrapped up in complicated themes and putting tons of add-ons on your site, but it’s going to slow you down and make the website building aspect of it harder on you in the long run. 

Again, SEO is affected by what you put on your site. You’re going to slow the page speed down when you fill it with huge image files, regardless of the web hosting package that you paid for. Choose a simple theme and move on to your plugins.

Plugins

WordPress is one of the leaders in site building because you can add pretty well anything that you want on to your page. The plugins are probably the most fun and interesting part of building a WordPress site.

You can build forms, add forums, and add quick landing pages with plugins. There’ll be some plugins automatically added to your page when you first hop on WordPress, but you can get rid of them and add your own.

It’s super simple. Go to “plugins” on the sidebar, then select “add new” From there, you’ll be shown all of the available plugins, with the most popular sitting at the top. Find what you want, click “install,” wait for it to load and then click “activate.” From there, you can configure each plugin to do what you want.

Pages & Posting

Once you’ve got your themes, plugins, and menus set up, you can begin creating pages and posts. The difference between the two is at the heart of understanding WordPress and will keep your site concise and nice to use/look at.

Pages are usually set up at the beginning of your WordPress experience and kind of left alone. You use them to add to your menus and build on certain areas of your website, ie. your homepage, contact page, about us page, etc. Many people create new pages every time they want to post something, but that would be incorrect.

Go to “pages” in the sidebar, then “add new” to start on a new page. Your theme will most likely provide you with page building tools, but you can customize it however you like.

With posts, you’re posting your ongoing content, giving it a tag to categorize it, and putting it out into the world. To create a post, you simply click “posts” in the sidebar and “add new.” The post screen will come up and you start typing, add whatever media you want when you’re done, then give it a category.

You’re Ready to Make Your Site

Learning WordPress comes with practice. Your first site probably won’t be amazing, but as you get more comfortable with the WordPress platform, you’ll be able to make more streamlined and nice looking pages.

We’ve given you enough here to get a good start on your first website, so come up with a great domain name and get creating. We can’t wait to see what informative and creative content you’ve got up your sleeve.

Power Up Your WordPress Site: 5 Optimization Steps You Can’t Ignore

40% of people won’t visit a website if it takes longer than three seconds to finish loading. When you’re running a website, you can’t afford to lose that much traffic.

If you find that your website is sluggish, there are many ways to solve that issue. Here are five optimization steps you should take to improve your WordPress site’s performance: 

1. Get Rid of Unnecessary Plugins

Plugins help you run your site, but some can affect your site’s speed. Don’t worry if you think you have too many plugins installed–the amount you have barely affect your site’s speed. It’s the type of plugins you have that can slow your site down. 

You should always read the reviews and information about each plugin before you install them. Poorly made plugins with low stars and bad reviews will likely end up bogging down your site. If you find any of these plugins installed on your WordPress, it’s time to remove them. 

Don’t forget to ensure that your plugins are all updated for the most recent WordPress version so you can have the fastest speeds available. 

2. Get a Faster Theme

When learning how to optimize a website, you can’t skip over the importance of a fast theme. Large themes with tons of customization options might seem ideal, but they end up making your browser load at a snail’s pace. 

You don’t have to spend tons of money to get a fast theme. Using a free theme like WordPress’ Optimizer Theme, or choosing one of our speedy themes can make your website run much better. 

3. Use Caching

Having a lot of content on your WordPress page can make your website load slow. In order to fix this problem, install a WordPress performance plugin like W3 Total Cache. 

This type of plugin maintains your pages as static HTML files. In other words, it’ll shrink files sizes, which makes your site faster. 

4. Shrink Images

You know the importance of a link building strategy for SEO, but have you ever thought about how the size of your images affects your rank? Larger images result in slower load times. Make sure that your images are between 500-600 pixels for the best speeds. 

It can also be helpful to use lazy loading–no, it doesn’t mean that images will load even slower. It just means that your images will only load when it becomes visible to the user. Instead of your website taking the time to load all the images at once, it will be able to load faster upon opening. 

5. Use a Reliable Host

You can’t expect your website to load quickly if your web host has a mediocre server. Your WordPress performance can be affected by your host depending on how speedy their services are. A good host will have reliably fast load times that won’t leave your visitors waiting. 

Applying These Optimization Steps

By following these optimization steps, your visitors won’t be stuck staring at a loading screen. Better yet, you won’t have to worry about your website slowing down when encountering a large amount of traffic or when you decide to upload more pictures. 

If you find that your web host is just too slow, check out the reliable hosting services that we can provide for your WordPress site.