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Wordpress

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What is a WordPress Theme?

The way your website looks is crucial. Everything needs to look good together, needs to work together properly, and needs to be easy for potential customers to read through. It’s important to have a basic style that’s consistent through all of your pages so your customers recognize they’re on your website and know where to find the information they need. This is where a WordPress Theme comes in handy.

what you need to know about wp themes

What is a WordPress Theme?

A WordPress theme is basically the view of your website. It’s a collection of templates and stylesheets that create the overall look of your website, ensuring every page looks the same to your customers. Themes can include different design elements, basic layouts, and other features. Some themes are designed to work well for just about anyone while others are geared towards a certain topic. Most themes can be modified to suit your individual needs but can be used as-is when you’re first getting started.

What to Consider When Choosing a WordPress Theme

 

When you’re choosing a theme for your website, make sure you look through your options and find one that’s going to work well for you. Beyond just thinking about how the theme looks, consider the following points anytime you’re shopping for a new theme.

  • Type of Website – Some themes are designed for specific purposes. For instance, some are designed just for photography bloggers. If you don’t have a photography blog, the theme isn’t designed for your business and might not work as well as other themes for your business.
  • Functions of Theme – Make sure the theme has everything your website might need, whether that’s certain functions already built in or the ability to use plugins.
  • Security of Theme – Always make sure you get a theme from a reputable source. Check reviews to see if others have had a good experience. Make sure the theme is updated frequently as well since this can include security patches to help keep your website secure.
  • Responsiveness – Today’s consumers use their smartphone when they’re shopping. Make sure any theme you choose is going to be responsive so your customers can visit your website on any device they want.

Most Popular WordPress Theme Marketplaces

 

WordPress Themes can be free or paid. When you’re ready to start shopping for a theme, you’ll want to visit one of the top marketplaces. This helps you ensure you’re getting a theme from a trustworthy source. Some of the top marketplaces today include the following.

  • Themeforest – Themeforest offers some of the top selling WordPress themes. Most themes are offered with a 6-month license and you can see the reviews, rating, and more before you decide to purchase the theme. All themes from this marketplace are thoroughly reviewed and tested before being available for purchase.
  • WordPress.org – WordPress has its own theme marketplace for free themes you can use. They do not offer some of the features paid themes might use, but all of them must adhere to the WordPress guidelines and follow official best practices to be available in this marketplace. Each theme goes through a review process before they can be offered.
  • Elegant Themes – One of the oldest marketplaces for WordPress themes, this marketplace offers premium themes they develop on their own. They have an easy to understand pricing model and their themes are designed for speed, performance, and compatibility.

Most Popular WordPress Themes Today

If you’re ready to start using a theme for your WordPress website, there are a few themes you’ll want to check out first. The following are some of the top themes available right now.

  • Divi – This is a theme that includes a drag-and-drop website builder that can be used to create just about any layout. Custom layouts can easily be saved so they can be reused. Available from Elegant Themes, this is one of the most popular WordPress themes available.
  • TheGem – Another multi-purpose theme, this includes more than 50 concepts to choose from as well as many different styles, demos and more to use. The entire theme was designed to meet very high standards, so it works well for a variety of different websites.
  • Avada – This theme has been a top selling theme for a number of years. It includes advanced options and allows you to create designs without having to know any code. It also includes many pre-built layouts, advanced header options, optimization for SEO, and more.

WordPress themes make your website look professional, help make sure every page looks the same and allows your customers to know what to expect from your website. Check out the top theme marketplaces or the top themes listed here to start using a WordPress theme today.

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What You Need to Know About WordPress Plugins

What is a WordPress PlugIn?
When you want to create a website for your business, WordPress might be the best option. Tons of businesses today use WordPress to create and maintain their website. While WordPress does provide a ton of features already, there is a lot more businesses can do with their website if they install WordPress plugins. They add more functionality to the website, can help turn the website into an e-commerce store, and can help you monitor your website’s performance.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

All websites are made up of pieces of code that work together to make the website look good and function well. Even website builders that allow you to drag and drop different components onto the website are made up of code, it’s just not necessary to know how to code to create these websites.

WordPress plugins are pieces of code that can be installed in WordPress to add to your website. They can make minor or major changes or can simply work behind the scenes to give you more information that can be used to improve your website or how your visitors experience your website.

With WordPress Plugins, you don't need programming skills to customize your site.
With WordPress Plugins, you don’t need programming skills to customize your site.

These plugins are intended to make it easier for you to customize your website and add any functions you need. It allows you to do a lot more with your website without needing to learn how to code to completely create your website from the ground up and enables you to add to your website easily. You won’t have to spend hours adding a small feature to your website when you can spend just a few minutes to install and set up a plugin that does what you want.

How Do Plugins Work and What Do They Do?

Most plugins are simple to use. You’ll choose the plugin you want to try, install the plugin, then configure the plugin to ensure it does exactly what you want it to do. Most plugins will have directions to help with the installation and so you can learn how to use it. These plugins can be used to improve the website or add functionality to the website. Plugins are available to help add social networking features to your website, create a forum your customers can use, or allow you to sell products through your website. They can also be used to make your website load faster, to track the performance of your website, or to help optimize your website so it ranks higher in the search engine results.

Potential Issues to be Aware Of

A good WordPress PlugIn will fit right into your site.

There’s a lot you can do with WordPress plugins, but it is important to be careful with which ones you’ll use. While you really can’t have too many plugins, start slow so you can learn what each one does and make sure it works properly for your website before adding more. Potential issues you could face include errors on your site because the plugin is not compatible with features of your website, security risks that could make it easier for hackers to access your website or issues with the speed of your website. Whenever you’re looking for a plugin to try, make sure it’s a widely used plugin and check to make sure it was updated recently. This may help you avoid trying a plugin that’s going to damage your website or cause security risks.

Most Popular Plugins Available Today

The right plugin for your website is one that allows you to add the functionality you need. Three of the most popular WordPress plugins today are WooCommerce, WordFence Security, and WP Super Cache. WooCommerce is used to turn a website into an e-commerce website so you can sell products online. WordFence Security adds a number of security features to protect your website. This plugin gives you protection against a number of different potential attacks. WP Super Cache gives you access to a number of options that can help you boost the speed of your website. Since website speed is crucial today, this one is a plugin you might want to try right away to make sure your website loads as fast as possible.

Your website can do a lot more with the right WordPress plugins. They’re easy to use, so you can try out a variety of different plugins and find out which ones are going to work best for you. Learn more about WordPress plugins and try one today to see how much it can improve your website.

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Preview: Elementor Visual Editor for WordPress

Elementor editor pane
Elementor editor pane

If you are doing WordPress for a while you may have seen Visual Composer and some other Visual Editors that replace WordPress‘ classic editor for post and pages. Some of the major WordPress Themes come with their own backend editor like Enfold or “The Arc” which was announces as a Visual Composer Killer. All the aforementioned editor replacements are paid premium plugins and usually have a flaw: they slow down the performance of your WordPress site.

Although they all add value for you as a website owner and speed up the time needed to design a beautiful site – they all harm your sites performance in the long run.

It was not surprising that I was quite interested when I heart of a new visual editor for WordPress – which is both faster and free(!): Elementor – the new kid on the block has been on the WordPress market for 1 year or so and has reached 600.000 downloads at WordPress org within a 12 months timeframe. Not bad.

So I gave it a try on my personal playground at http://www.wordpress-expert.info

The plugin installation files of Elementor consist of approx. 5 MB.Compared to js_composer this is just ¼ th of visual composers 20 Meg needed. After activating Elementor you might want to configure the settings of Elementor first. Like Visual Composer you can define where (post, pages, custom post types) you want to use Elementor and which user roles are allowed to use the Elementor Editor.

A new pages is created and designed as you would do it with Visual Composer: Click Page -> Add new. Set the underlying page template to fit your screen-design (with or without a sidebar)  and choose “Elementor” as the editor of choice.

What hit me right away was the performance of Elementor: Within very few seconds the canvas of Elementor came up and was ready to work with. Wow. This gous in line with the user rating of 4.9 (out of 5) on WordPress.org. Amazing.

On the left hand side approx. 25% of your canvas screen is reserved for the design elements of Elementor visual editor. The editor pane looks well organized and literally needs no manual (there is a help button in the center bottom area). Almost every function and all necessary elements can be found with 1 or 2 clicks.

Two small menus on the top left and right will open the settings of Elementor (left) and the design elements (top right) to be used on the canvas. Great stuff. Still impressed.

Elementor Visual Editor comes with 60 pre-defined Temapltes for your pages
Elementor Visual Editor comes with 60 pre-defined Temapltes for your pages

Elementor comes with a set of 60 pre-defined and ready to be used page templates. Each of them can be imported by a simple click. You might then customize a pre-defined layout which comes close to your design ideas. Not bad.

Bonus: You can save any layout you are working on as one of your personal templates within Elementor– and re-use it later on for more pages to come. Very handy.

Elementor Full Screen Canvas
Elementor Full Screen Canvas

The real work with Elementor doesn’t really feel like work. The cool thing about it: With the editing pane one the left and the preview on the right there’s no more need to toggle between editing and preview mode. It simply is the same. In addition Elementor Visual Editor comes with three viewing options for the page or post: One as it will be seen on desktop computers which is used for designing and is the default view, one view with 768 px is for tablet and a last one with 360 pixels emulates a smartphone. It looks a bit like the preview arrangement in Google Chrome.

Integrated Preview for Tablets and Smartphones
Integrated Preview for Tablets and Smartphones

For designers this is extremely powerful as they can preview their results on all three devices in just one place. Really good job – guys. And I am still pretty much impressed.

After playing around with the Elementor designer for half an hour I could not find a flaw or error nor a bug. During that time I had created three test pages with Elementor. A first template imported from Elementor, a simple page just with small design elements and a last page with larger jpg images in it.

As usual I headed over to Pingdom and tested their speed after my caching plugin had the static page in its internal cache. All 3 pages loaded around a 0,7 to 1,0 seconds while being 1,0 to 1,6 MB in size. Again – pretty good job.

Elementor Speed: Around 0,7 to 1,0 sec loading time for 1,6 MB sized page
Elementor Speed: Around 0,7 to 1,0 sec loading time for 1,6 MB sized page

Elementor as a visual editor seems to be capable not just to replace Visual Composer due to its speed and amazing design concept. I assume there will be some enhancements over time too.

The best thing about Elementor sill is: It’s free and Opensource. Wow.

But I’ll probably be happy to pay 49 US-$ sooner or later (97 for 3 sites, 199 for unlimited number of websites) for Elementor Pro (https://elementor.com/pro/ ) to those amazing coders who brought Elementor to the WordPress Community.

Did I mention that Elementor has the potential to replace most visual editors for WordPress on the market? Stay tuned as we’ll publish more posts and reviews about Elementor here.

Did you already use Elementor? What are your experiences with this new plugin for WordPress? Leave a comment below.

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How to Find a Good WordPress Agency

It isn’t difficult to decide to select WordPress for your business website. About one-quarter of all businesses and organizations have chosen WordPress for their websites. The many advantages of a WordPress website have been tested and proven. The most difficult decision is selecting the best WordPress agency to turn your vision into a beautiful and productive reality.

A business website’s importance can’t be overestimated. The website represents your brand online. It will be the initial point of contact for potential customers, and they will form an initial, and perhaps permanent, opinion of the business based on the website’s appearance and functionality.

Define Your Goals

Simply saying you want a WordPress website would be like walking into a real estate agency and saying that you want a house. A lot more information is needed before it’s time to actually look at any properties. An experienced WordPress agency will need to understand your goals and how a website should help to achieve those goals. After all, if the website doesn’t fulfill its purpose, it has failed.

Some of the possible goals for a WordPress website could include:

  • seaIncreased organic traffic
  • A higher conversion ratio
  • An automated user management process
  • More information gathered from subscribers
  • Increased product sales
  • A more professional image for the brand and the business

Once the goals for the website have been clearly defined, they will guide the development of the structure of the website, the design of the landing pages, and other aspects of a successful, revenue-producing website.

There Must be a Clear Exchange of Ideas

You are the ultimate expert on your business. If the WordPress agency doesn’t listen, the website won’t satisfy the requirements of your business. The job of the developers is to turn your ideas into a fully functioning website.

The web developers and designers are experts in their business and a resource to be utilized. If they sit there nodding and taking notes but not contributing their own ideas, then they aren’t doing their job. An experienced designer will know of options that you’ve never considered and the best way to achieve your goal.

A Great WordPress Agency Will Have a Marketing Department

One of the problems that can arise when dealing with a freelance web designer instead of an agency is that freelancers tend to be technically proficient but are not marketers. If the agency doesn’t have marketing experience, the finished website may be beautiful but it won’t be designed to convert users into customers. Looking good won’t generate conversions. It takes the right layout, intuitive navigation, and calls to action. Many marketing factors, such as the target demographic, will greatly influence the website’s design.

The Agency Uses WordPress for Their Own Professional, Fully Functional Website

wordpress-website-hostingThis may seem obvious, but if the agency doesn’t use WordPress themselves, then you shouldn’t use the agency. If they don’t believe that WordPress is the best content manage
ment system for their own website, they lack credibility in recommending it for you. The agency’s website should be responsive and function seamlessly. Test the website on two or three devices of different sizes to see how it looks and functions. It should be state-of-the-art and optimized for the search engines.

Clients are Kept Informed About Their Projects

It’s very likely that a good agency is very busy and will not be able to start on your project tomorrow. However, they should be able to provide a reasonable time-frame for the website’s completion. When you’re at the agency, take a look around and see if it appears organized or as if your project would be lost in the chaos. Ask who would be your primary point of contact and if that person is the project manager. What is the established system for keeping clients informed about the state of their projects? What sort of decisions are clients involved in?

Examine Their Portfolio of Live Websites

An established WordPress agency should have an online portfolio of live websites. If you were the owner of one of those websites, would you be proud to have your brand displayed on every page? If you were a visitor, would you have a positive impression and linger or want to abandon the website? The average visitor decides in 10 seconds or less whether to stay or leave, so first impressions are critical.

Are the websites in the portfolio from different industries? A web designer who has successfully created websites for clients in different industries is more likely to be able to create the unique website you’re looking for. Also look for an agency that has worked with both local and national clients. The more different audiences that the designer is familiar with, the better the chance your website will produce for you.

Keeps Up With the Latest Design Trends

Does the web designer keep up with the latest trends and technologies? Customers don’t trust websites that appear outdated and stale. However, good judgment must be considered. Web design fads come and go. Everything on a website must have a purpose. Incorporating something into the website simply because it’s new is pointless. There needs to be a balance between proven and modern.

Continuing Support

Successful websites are not static. As the business grows, the website will need to keep up. Will the agency provide technical support and content management as needed? What additional services are provided, such as SEO services, keyword research, video production and social media marketing? Are you interested in a long-term relationship or will the website be a one-time project? Also consider how long the agency has been in business. An agency with a track record is much more likely to be there for you in the future.

It will take some work to find the best WordPress agency to build your new website, but it will definitely be worth the effort. The completed website will be a beautiful investment you’ll be proud of and will add to the bottom line.

 

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Tips on Choosing the Best Free WordPress Theme

 

Congratulations for your interest in WordPress! However, choosing the perfect theme from the thousands of Free WordPress Themes can quickly become overwhelming. Here are a few tips to aid in your choice for your best free WordPress theme:

Graphics Affect Conversions

Never forget that the whole point of the website is conversions, whether product sales, newsletter signups or leads. The chosen theme should include a few basic design elements with every aspect of the page carefully chosen.

  • Videos must tell a clear, relevant story
  • Flashy or distracting elements will annoy users and cost you money
  • Placement matters – people first look at images, followed by headlines and finally copy
  • Captions under images are read by 300% more readers than the body text itself
  • The left margin is critical for reading ease and should be unbroken

Choose a Theme that Supports Your Goals

Define the type of website you are building. The clearer your goals, the easier it will be to find the perfect theme. Don’t get sidetracked by a beautiful but inappropriate theme.

  • Compile a checklist of required features
  • Best practice for theme design generally separates functionality from design by using plugins. However, the theme design should include responsive design, a broad selection of page templates and retina display support
  • Ensure compatibility between the theme and plugins
  • Unless you’re a designer, choose a theme that only allows a few options for changes or use restraint if there are many change options to limit future problems

Simple is Better

The more complicated a theme is, the more can go wrong. Too many colors, animations and complexity will confuse the eye, causing visitors to abandon the site. Website navigation should be intuitive, clear and simple.

responsive-for-mobile-userResponsiveness to Mobile

The number of mobile users surpassed desktop users in 2014 and has continued to increase. The chosen theme must be responsive. In fact, responsiveness is so important that it has become an website ranking factor.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Effective SEO techniques can raise your website’s ranking with Google and the other search engines. If your website doesn’t appear on page 1 of the search engine results page for your most important keywords, it will result in a lot of lost traffic and conversions. One of the reasons that WordPress is such a great CMS (content management system) is the large number of very good SEO plugins.

Design and User Experience

page-speed

Providing a good user experience is crucial. Unhappy visitors will abandon a website in 10 seconds or less. All of the above elements and the following contribute to a good user experience.

  • The website theme should be suited to the target demographics (age, gender, income, location, operating system, browser etc.)
  • The webdesign is appealing to the target audience (professional, fun, sophisticated etc.)
  • Each video, image and some Free WordPress Themes increase page loading time, decreasing user experience and conversions – choose wisely
  • Thoroughly test the website and theme

Two Examples of The Best Free WordPress Themes

  • You are looking for a WordPress Theme for your small business? If it should appear creative as well as elegant and should be used as compact one page website, Zerif Lite may be the best Theme for you. The design is responsive, integrates with WooCommerce, has a theme options panel and is easy to use.
  • ColorMag resembles many magazine and news websites, possessing a clean, attractive look in primary colors. It has responsive design, colorful buttons, boxed and wide layout options, a featured slider, 6 social icons, a custom menu and several custom widgets and widget areas

Don’t rush your theme choice as changing to a new theme later could be problematic. Instead, take the time upfront to narrow your choice to a few themes and then make a final selection. You’ll love your completed WordPress website.