Web Hosting Geeks' Blog » WordPress

WordPress Themes vs. Designing From Scratch vs. Portfolio Sites

Speider.Schneider — Wed, 02 May 2012 07:06:55 +0000

There is a debate about what is the best way to show one’s creative work to clients. Web designers, graphic designers, illustrators and photographers struggle with the question of what is best for ME? Throughout the painful quandary, there is the nagging anxiety of what other creatives will think of a person’s web site. The truth is, it shouldn’t matter what other creatives think of your site. It’s not a competition – it’s about reaching prospective clients and having the clear message about why they should hire YOU!

In art school and certainly in my professional career, I have been constantly reminded that it is the client as the end user. Please the client, make it easy for them to see the message and get it right away. When I worked in magazine publishing, the desire to use grunge fonts was compelling but, as driven by the choices of editors and marketing people, grunge was unreadable and although pleasing to designers, it was quite true that the average person would not like something hard to read and skip over that article or advertisement. It’s not easy to separate one’s creative desires with what is needed for marketing reality. Often creatives fight the advice or direction of marketing people’s suggestions – and yes, they can be power-plays and ego trips at times but often there is a vision that is more that of the average consumer/reader/user then it is of the creative vision of beautiful design.

Jim Carrey’s site is wild, wacky, high tech and really hard to navigate. Does he really need to be sold as a product?

It is of the utmost importance to learn, “what will sell my work to the client?” All the kudos in the world from your peers will not help your career or increase sales. Having your web site spotlighted on a design blog or magazine will not reach clients. The saying, “living well is the best revenge” is akin to what you must do with your site – please those who are NOT creative – the clients.

If you’ve ever posted a creative piece and asked fellow creatives what they thought, you’ll get as many different opinions as there are voices giving them. Ignore it all. What makes other creatives right? When a prospect contacts you and says, I saw the work on your web site and want to hire you, that is the mark of a successful web site.

Why WordPress Themes Have Become Popular

People find the familiar comfortable. Why are the best selling electronics similar in how their controls are engineered and laid out? Because the consumer wants something they already know how to use. Electronic and car manufacturers found this out a long time ago and that is why you know, almost by second nature, how to turn on your TV and start your car. You can do it with your eyes closed.

WordPress, just to get the technical jargon out of the way, is a free (although many themes are for sale, too – some are free but charge for support) and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system (CMS). It has numerous features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa.com Internet’s “top 1 million” websites. If you doubt the popularity, figures claim that as of August 2011, it powers 22% of all new websites and is currently the most popular CMS in use on the Internet.

WordPress has a rich plugin architecture, which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install. WordPress has a database of over 17,000 plugins with purposes ranging from SEO to adding widgets. It has native applications that make it mobile friendly as well as search engine-friendly with a clean permalink structure. You may have noticed that the popular design blogs all use WordPress.

Hundreds of WordPress themes are available and fairly easy to build with a little coding know-how. Many sites, being blog-centric opt for these themes.

Generally, WordPress themes are clean and well designed but it has, as mentioned, familiarity of use and is easy for designers, photographers, illustrators and web developers to use for personal sites. The ease of use as well as the ability to update information, new samples, link to Twitter and RSS feeds is very attractive to creatives who also use social media for marketing purposes.

Once you’ve plugged a WordPress theme into your hosting site, it’s easy and intuitive to change the preset widgets, headers and other elements.

All of this, of course, is why WordPress is also attractive to small businesses as it negates the need to hire a web designer (although professional design is still needed to arrange columns, widgets and to keep prancing glitter unicorn gifs off the web).

The Downside Of Themes and Templates?

There are only so many themes in the WordPress library, so you will share the same theme as a million other people. Most are simple enough that it won’t matter but some of the more unusual themes stand out and people will recognize that you have a pre-designed template. Only you can decide if it truly matters to you. The content on your site will differentiate your site from others; so don’t fret too much about using one of the more popular themes.

Despite the user-friendly nature of templates, some people just can’t manage the simple HTML to fill out fields and make them look good. As a creative, this will not inspire prospects to trust your abilities.

The Delicate Balance

The challenge in creating your own site from scratch is that you must have many strengths. You can be the greatest programmer but not very good at designing type. Like the best team environments at any art studio, the best teams play to the strengths of each team member. Put together a team of a designer, programmer, type designer, someone with a great color sense and you can have a web site that will grab attention. There are too many examples out there of really bad web sites created by people who have one or more strength but not all needed for an impressive site. Starting with a theme or template can inspire you and, most of all, give your prospects an easy to use avenue to view your design samples with links, your own words on the project (many prospects and art directors also want to hear/see the stages in developing a design and the thought process behind it) and sections to divide different types of work you can accomplish.

Another great thing about WordPress themes is that if one isn’t working for you, you can replace it with another and most of your content will automatically fall into place. Sometimes you just need to test a theme or two until you strike a cord with clients.

Only you, with some honest soul searching, can decide what is best for you. Think about how you feel about your own site. Do you have doubts? Are you REALLY proud of it and feel it’s your best work? Sometimes, you just need to use another avenue to show the work that you have created – the work of which you are really proud. As mentioned before, other creatives might turn up their noses at the use of a template – as they might do for a site you created from scratch, but in the long run, they don’t pay your bills and they don’t lie awake at night, worrying how you’ll be able to sell your work to the clients who help you pay those bills!

Some sites that have free themes for you to download.

http://www.wordpressthemeshock.com/free-wordpress-themes/

http://wordpressthemesgallery.org/

http://www.fabthemes.com/

http://www.wpskins.org/

Top 9 Ways to Optimize Your WordPress Server for Blazing Fast Speeds

Art — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:38:39 +0000

When it comes to content management and coding efficiency, WordPress tends to be one bad mother. Where other content management systems might chug and chortle, WordPress tends to serve up your content with a markedly improved efficiency that makes the folks over at Drupal shiver in their boots. However, just because WordPress is built from the ground-up to be faster does not mean it is optimized out of the box for your server: In fact, if you neglect to modify a few key parameters early in your blog or websites installation, you may find your content getting stuck in the pipes. This translates to longer load times, and if you’re especially neglectful, unhappy end-users. That’s a fate we’d very much like to help you avoid, so with that in mind, we’ve prepared a few of our top ways in which you can dramatically increase the speed of your already quick WordPress server.

To get the most out of our handwork, we suggest you simply work your way through the list, modifying your server as needed, and skipping the areas you’ve already completed. If you follow our directions to the letter, we promise you’ll emerge with a much faster system—Or your money back! So before you realize we’re doing this at no charge to you, let’s jump straight into the heart of the matter with:

1. Serve Your Static Media from a Cookie-Less Domain

About 80 to 90% of the time, your users are spending their time loading static content from your WordPress blog. This means that far more than the majority of the time a user is viewing your site, they’re waiting for items like images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. to load and present themselves on the screen. As such, you can optimize this content to arrive more quickly by telling WordPress to load it all from a cookie free domain. This eliminates a few precious micro-seconds of load time, which may not seem like much, but can really amount to a whopping time loss when added to other delaying issues.

Thankfully, it’s not hard to set up this kind of arrangement within WordPress. To do so, simply set these two constants within your wp-config.php file as so:

define(“WP_CONTENT_URL”, “http://static.yourdomain.com”);

define(“COOKIE_DOMAIN”, “www.yourdomain.com”);

After you’ve done that, just check to be sure you’ve marked “bloginfo( ‘template_directory’ )” to load your static content within your theme files. That’s it, allowing us to move onto point two!

2. Set-Up Cached Headers to Expire for Your Static Content

Serving up cached media is another great way to reduce load times. Thankfully, creating expiring headers for your static content is also fairly easy to do within WordPress, and can save you a lot of lag-based headaches. The best way to do so is to use the following code form the HTML 5 Boiler Plate. You can append it to your .htaccess file for immediate results. This, essentially, tells your server to expire headers at a future date, saving them in a cached format until that expiration date. So without further ado, here’s the code to get the job done!
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ExpiresActive on # Perhaps better to whitelist expires rules? Perhaps. ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month" # cache.appcache needs re-requests # in FF 3.6 (thx Remy ~Introducing HTML5) ExpiresByType text/cache-manifest "access plus 0 seconds" # Your document html ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 0 seconds" # Data ExpiresByType text/xml "access plus 0 seconds" ExpiresByType application/xml "access plus 0 seconds" ExpiresByType application/json "access plus 0 seconds" # RSS feed ExpiresByType application/rss+xml "access plus 1 hour" # Favicon (cannot be renamed) ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 week" # Media: images, video, audio ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/ogg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType audio/ogg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/mp4 "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/webm "access plus 1 month" # HTC files (css3pie) ExpiresByType text/x-component "access plus 1 month" # Webfonts ExpiresByType font/truetype "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType font/opentype "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/x-font-woff "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/vnd.ms-fontobject "access plus 1 month" # CSS and JavaScript ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 year" Header append Cache-Control "public"
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3. Optimize that Database!

Another great way to fix your server up to deliver your WordPress site with the most efficiency is to optimize your database. How does one do this? With mountains and mountains of code that take hours to append—We’re kidding! WordPress makes this unbelievably easy, thanks to a number of free plug-ins. You can search the plug-in database for server optimization, but some of our favorites are Yoast Optimize DB and WP DB Manager. Keep in mind too that most caching plug-ins also help with a lot of this, so you may find most of the workload being taken care of by your already extant caching softwares.

4. Use Cached Media As Much As Possible

On that note, creating cached .html files saves your server a mountain of database queries, and can easily be accomplished through any number of quality plug-ins. Essentially, these additions turn all those queries into static pages that load easy, saving your viewer from horrendous lag on the front-end. So what plug-ins do we recommend? Thanks for asking! Here are our favorites, though as with the database optimizers, there’s plenty more to be found in the plug-in database!

Our favorite caching utilities include: WP Super Cache, Hyper Cache, and W3 Total Cache. These generate .html files, but we also use DB Cache to cache the database queries themselves, saving even more time on the front-end.

5. Use a Content Delivery Network

We’re quite tremendous fans of the content delivery network. Everything about the technology gets us excited, and though we tend to evangelize the service to everyone we know, adding a CDN solution to your WordPress site is extremely easy, and can really save you a lot of load time. There are several freely available plug-ins that offer a fair amount of content distribution, but if you’re looking for a quality option, you really aren going to need to spend a little. However, we should mention the benefits of signing up for a CDN tend to far outweigh the cons, making the following services every bit as useful as they are expensive. If you’re hung-up on the price, though, we’ve also included a free option!

Our favorite content delivery providers are: Amazon S3, Max CDN, Media Temple CDN, and Free CDN.

6. Compress and Adjoin All Those JS and CSS Files Where Possible

Generally speaking, it’s a fantastic idea to compress both your JS and CSS files, as this reduces the overall size of your website, and allows for speedier load times at the end-user level. However, if you’re looking to take your optimization to a whole new level, we also strongly suggest you combine the two where possible. Combining multiple files into a single offering can greatly reduce the number of HTTP requests from your web server, saving your viewers precious seconds in load time. And—you guessed it—we do happen to have a number of plug-ins ready to help you out!

Our favorite JS compressors include Closure Compiler and Minify JavaScript. Our favorite CSS alternatives are Minify CSS and CSS Compressor. Alternatively, you can also use the wp minify plug-in to combine your JS and CSS files directly from WordPress.

7. Compress Your Image Files

On the subject of compression, it’s also a pretty fantastic idea to compress your images, too. This reduces the overall size of your website, and can knock off quite a few moments during your site’s load time. The plug-in we favor uses the API of the smush.it site to compress your images for optimized use. It’s a brilliant bit of coding, and we can’t speak highly enough of it. So without further ado, go ahead and snag WP Smush IT to increase the speed of your site. You can also use CSS Sprite to reduce the number of HTTP requests, if you’re feeling particularly gung-ho.

8. Compress Your Static Content into a gZip

One more compression tip, and then we promise we’ll stop. You see, just as it’s generally a good idea to compress your CSS, JS, and image files, so is it also a great idea to shrink down all of that extraneous static content we mentioned earlier. Just as most of your load time comes from grabbing this junk, so too can it be relieved by downsizing the overall cost of the HTTP request. Thankfully, there’s an incredibly simple way to do this within WordPress: And taking the time to add the following code snippet can dramatically reduce your wait times. So without any more babbling, here’s the code you’ll want to add to your .htaccess file. In case you were wondering, this is yet another bit of genius straight from the HTML5 Boiler Plate:
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# force deflate for mangled headers # developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/12/pushing-beyond-gzipping/ SetEnvIfNoCase ^(Accept-EncodXng|X-cept-Encoding|X{15}|~{15}|-{15})$ ^((gzip|deflate)\s*,?\s*)+|[X~-]{4,13}$ HAVE_Accept-Encoding RequestHeader append Accept-Encoding "gzip,deflate" env=HAVE_Accept-Encoding # HTML, TXT, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, XML, HTC: FilterDeclare COMPRESS FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/html FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/css FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/plain FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/xml FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/x-component FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/javascript FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/json FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/xml FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/xhtml+xml FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/rss+xml FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/atom+xml FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/vnd.ms-fontobject FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $image/svg+xml FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/x-font-ttf FilterProvider COMPRESS DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $font/opentype FilterChain COMPRESS FilterProtocol COMPRESS DEFLATE change=yes;byteranges=no # Legacy versions of Apache AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css application/json AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml application/xml text/x-component AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/atom+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml application/vnd.ms-fontobject application/x-font-ttf font/opentype
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9. Disable eTags

eTags are generally a great way to aide the development of cached content within WordPress. However, if you’ve shrunk down all of your media and are using expiration headers for the majority of your static content, having them enabled isn’t nearly as good of an idea. As such, you should turn all of them off by adding the following line of code to your aforementioned .htaccess file. It’s a single line:

File ETag none

and with all the other improvements we’ve made during the course of this article, it will tie the bow on your load time savings.

Top 4 Ways to Optimize WordPress for Search Engines

Art — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:14:46 +0000

We like WordPress for a lot of reasons: It’s easy to use, it manages our content in a way we never could on our own, and it also presents a pretty nice front, what with all those loose themes running around. We’re also tremendous fans of its ability to optimize our sites for search engines with little to no effort on our end. However, just because a few plug-ins can handle most of the load, does not mean we’re taking the most steps possible to fully maximize our Google-spotting potential. In fact, WordPress’ functionality in terms of SEO has only been scratched, if you’re still simply relying on the All In One SEO pack. There are plenty more steps (all of which are extremely simple) you can take to ensure your WordPress-powered website is noticed by such heavyweight search engines as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and DogPile.

Our best suggestion is that you review our methods below, and then work your hardest to integrate them into your daily workflow. It’s much harder to SEO an entire mountain of content once it has been created. It’s much easier, however, to create SEO-content from the get-go. With that fair warning in mind, may we now present our top ways to optimize your WordPress site for search engine notoriety.

1. Tell WordPress to Rearrange Itself

As much as we like WordPress, we have noticed it has one or two nasty habits. The most notable we’ve come across is its tendency to put the name of the website itself in front of the title of the blog post. This is problematic for a number of reasons, but we would simply like to mention right off the bat that there is a quick fix: So, in other words, don’t panic and bring your towel. But why is this such a big deal? Well, for starters – search engines use your titles to determine what the blog post is actually about. Typically, a search engine will only crawl (that means search and record) the first 50 to 64 characters of your title, too. With that in mind, having your blog name in front of your blog post title can cause some problems. You’ll want to reverse this, that way sites like Google get an accurate picture of your newly minted content, rather than a repeat of the blog’s name. A quick way to do this is to swap the title and name sequence within the All In One SEO pack. On another note, if you don’t have this plug-in yet, you should go ahead and snag it, as we’ll be referencing it often.

2. Create Unique and Accurate Meta Tags

A case in point, we will again be using All In One SEO with this point, as well. The idea here is that the automatically created meta tags published by WordPress are typically not specific enough to warrant any interest from the larger search engines. Usually, these self-created tags are somewhat generic, and lack any kind of specificity sites like Google desire. With that in mind, the easiest way to correct the problem is to add meta tags yourself. How does one go about this? Well, the easiest method is through that handy plug-in we mentioned earlier. Using the keywords slot, you’re free to add as many meta tags as your heart desires. Just try to be specific, avoiding generic terms like “iPhone,” “Android,” or “Mac.”

3. Stick Around with Permalinks

When WordPress creates a new post, it typically does so with a URL that’s less-than desirable for search engine optimization. This is because, more often than not, WordPress attaches an incomprehensible string of numbers to each and every new piece of content, allowing URL crawlers no added access to what in the heck your post is about. However, this isn’t hard to change, and typically only requires a quick jaunt over to the WordPress admin panel.

Within this panel, look for the settings tab, and then “Permalinks.”

You’ll see a list of various URL methods, but the only one you want is called “Custom Structure.” Yes, you’re going to have to enter something here, but lucky for you, we’ve already written the appropriate string. Click this box, and then type: /%category%/%postname%

Now, every time you create a new post, it will be listed in the URL as http://sample.com/your-category/the-proper-post-name. This makes your post infinitely more readable to search engines, and can go a long way toward fully search engine optimizing your content.

4. Make Meaningful Connections

Another fantastic way to optimize your site for search engine use is to link related sites and content pieces within your article.

This means that words like “phone” should be linked to other articles about similar models, operating systems, etc. Your goal is to create a map within the blog post that directs the user—and search engines—to other content that’s closely related to your own. With that in mind, blindly adding links with no regard for what they mean will not help you at all. If you’ve written an article about how to cook a turkey, and you link it to an animal rights page, Google won’t get much out of it, and may even scrap your site in its ratings. There’s also a limit on how many links Google is willing to stand. If you attach a URL to every word in the post, most search engines will treat it like spam.

A great way to avoid this is to use a “Related Posts” plug-in. There are about a thousand in the WordPress plug-in library, so we won’t offer any specific suggestions. Just know that these create a separate box for these helpful links, alleviating the need to bugger up your viewers’ reading experience with bothersome links. Likewise, there are plenty of plug-ins out there that will automatically generate in-text links, should you decide you’d rather have plenty of those. Typically, they work quite well, but the only way to guarantee your optimization is to add these links yourself.

WordPress Website and WordPress Hosting

Art — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:29:23 +0000

If we had known WordPress was going to be as popular as it is now, we would have made sure to buy some stock back in the day, assuming the company was public. That being said, nothing is hotter than the content management software right now, especially for bloggers and news-based websites.

And why shouldn’t it be? WordPress makes it incredibly simple to manage, produce, and distribute content on the Internet through your site. And at the heart of things, that’s really what the Web is all about, right? Here are some stats about what people do on wordpress:

Philosophical pander aside, though, there are a few things you’ll want to really look for in a web host when you’re shopping for WordPress compliance. In fact, if you don’t snag just the right features, you may find your CMS blog in high water before the ink is even dry on your contract. With that in mind, here are a few of the top features you want in a web host with WordPress in mind, as well as a few quality places to find WordPress hosting, beginning with:

In-House WordPress Transfers. Often times, we see webmasters start a blog on the traditional WordPress site, only to suddenly find their content inundated with fans and adoring readers. If you’re in a similar boat, and are looking to make the swap to a truly dedicated domain and website, you’ll want to be sure of a few things. First and foremost, you’ll want to be sure your new web host can directly transfer your domain from WordPress, establishing it as a proprietary DNS. From there, you’ll also want to ensure they can port most (if not all) of your content. You worked hard to create it, so why should you have to leave it behind on that old, stuffy WordPress blog? If your new web host can’t help you with your baggage, it’s time to shop more.

Speed and Performance. On a similar note, if you’re swapping your old WordPress account for a dedicated number—or even if you’re just starting from scratch—you’ll want to find a web host that offers totally comprehensive performance and top-notch hardware. WordPress is a lightweight web application, but you’re still running an additional software engine over the server’s operating system. This requires processing power, and if you go with an anemic web host, you may find your blog is no better off with a dedicated location than with your original WordPress spot. And besides, signing to a web host is like buying a new car. If you have the money, why not spring for that souped-up model that packs a real punch? Get the most bang for your dollar and look for speed in a web host.

Easy Installation. Lastly, you’ll want to be sure your web host can provide an easy WordPress installation for your site. A good web host makes this a one or two click process, max. If your web host instead wants you to do a long string of complicated terminal commands that may jeopardize the entire system, it’s time to move elsewhere and cancel the contract.

That’s by no means a survival guide for WordPress shopping where web hosts are concerned, but instead of talking about finding a web host until the cows come home, we thought we might instead offer up a few of our choice suggestions. Beginning with:

InMotion Web Hosting

Customer Ratings & Reviews

As an industry leading web hosting provider, InMotion Hosting provides all of the features we mentioned above and more. With the company your WordPress installation takes only a click, thanks to the brilliantly inventive, server-side gem Fantastico. Furthermore, InMotion also boasts secure suPHP, the latest versions of both MySQL 5 and PHP 5, as well as free domain transfer. If you’re looking to port over your old WordPress account, like we talked about earlier, InMotion also makes it a smooth process, bringing along your old content and name without any additional hassle on your part. All in all, InMotion is a brilliant (and cheap, clocking in at $5.95 a month) option for your WordPress-based site.

Visit www.inmotionhosting.com or read our Inmotion Hosting review.

HostGator

Customer Ratings & Reviews

Another industry veteran, HostGator offers even more features than InMotion, and at a lower price, to boot. Plans with the provider begin at only $3.96 a month, and come loaded with 100% WordPress compatibility, a one-click installation of the latest WordPress software, 99.9% up-time, and a full 45 day money back guarantee. Another feature unique to HostGator is its focus on unlimited features. With the provider, users can enjoy fully unlimited disc space and bandwidth, even at the lowest possible plan. And, of course, signing with the provider also earns you the latest versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP. Best of all, transferring your old WordPress site to the provider is easy-peasy using their ready made transfer service.

Visit www.hostgator.com or read our HostGator review.

WebHostingHub

Customer Ratings & Reviews

Last, though certainly not least, is WebHostingHub. The provider offers unparalleled support for the modern WordPress blogger, besting both HostGator and InMotion in our user review polls. First and foremost, those who choose to sign with the provider gain the full benefits of the latest software, including Apache, MySQL 5, and PHP5. And, of course, all of this technology comes ready loaded with a one-click WordPress installation that requires no additional effort on your part. Add to this about 1,000 unique and custom-made WordPress themes to choose from, as well as simple transfer of old WordPress materials, and you’re looking at a truly impressive offering. However, WebHostingHub is also notable for its unique dedication to hardware optimization. The provider has taken great pains to fully prepare its systems for WordPress, including a full PHP caching overhaul that maximizes available RAM, a reduction in overall I/O requests, and blazing fast base connectivity. All in all, if you’re looking for an incredible, simple, and efficient way to host your new WordPress site, there’s no better option than WebHostingHub.

Visit www.webhostinghub.com or read our WebHostingHub review.

Fastest WordPress Hosting in Town

Art — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 09:45:54 +0000

In case you were unaware, services like Google and Yahoo are built around the concept of search engine optimization—they are search engines, after all. The basic idea here is that you want your website to rank highly with all of the various search engines, as most viewers aren’t likely to scan through fifteen pages of links just to find your article. No, you want your media to appear right at the top, optimally at the number one spot. How is this accomplished? Through a variety of methods, Young Grasshopper, and if you’ll stick with us, we’ll go ahead and give you the wax-on-wax-off.

To begin with, we’re going to assume you’re using a WordPress based site. Why? Because if you aren’t, and your top priority is search engine optimization, you really should be. WordPress makes it quick, painless, and relatively cheap to SEO streamline your site. This is accomplished thorugh a variety of essential plug-ins which do such various tasks as change your URL codes, add meta-tags, create keyword line-ups for search engines to crawl, etc. It’s a brilliant way to go about maximizing your site’s potential, but if you’re looking to get the most out of your WordPress site, you should know it’s not all sunshine and chuckles. In fact, WordPress has one noticeable drawback, which we’ll be attending to with the rest of this article, so stay tuned!

Speed Demons in our Closets

You see, WordPress is what we in the business call a content management software. It takes all of the various articles, images, posts, etc. that you create, and displays it in a pre-set fashion that jives will with themes. This makes it blazingly fast and efficient to create new content, and all without having to write a single line of code. Obviously, this is a tremendous boon for the runoff the mill blogger, who would rather not learn a real skill like HTML coding.

However, there’s one downside to all this ease-of-creation stuff: WordPress is a real bandwidth hog. Sure, it makes it a breeze to add new media, but all of that coded forefront comes with a price tag. Typically, users will experience slightly more load time with a WordPress powered site than with a non-WordPress branded one. Why is this a problem? you might be asking. Usually, it’s not at all: We’re really talking a difference of perhaps half a second to maybe a full second. However, when it comes to search engine optimization, those bare few seconds could be all it takes to put your site in the tank. Don’t believe us? Consider this.

Search engines collect data using software “spiders.” These little critters are designed to do one thing, and do it well: Poll web pages and collect data about them. Typically, they accomplish this through peeping at site text, meta-tags, etc. to gather up a gist that can be used to create a ranking. However, speed is also very heavily considered in a site’s automatic rank. Spiders are busy little buggers, and if your site takes until Christmas to return the data they need, they’ll hike it up out of town and disappear. You heard us right: If your site is too slow, search engines are likely to skip it entirely, or at the very least, file it much further down the line than you’d like. You shouldn’t let this get you down, though. There are steps you can take to prevent this, especially if you’re using a WordPress-powered site—and they all begin with the hosting itself!

Top Hosting Providers for WordPress

To secure the best possible search engine ranking for your data, you’re going to need a good host. The hosting provider, after all, is the source of your bandwidth, disc space, and net presence. Without it, you’re sunk. If you’re looking for a speedy and efficient way to host your WordPress site, we’ve even got a few suggestions lined-up and ready to roll. Firstly, consider—

Web Hosting Hub

Customer Ratings & Reviews

We like these guys for a number of reasons. First and foremost, they’re a tremendous bang for your dollar, as all of their plans come with unlimited support for disk space, bandwidth, and websites. They also offer one of the best technical support services in the business, guaranteeing they’ll be able to solve any WordPress problems that may arise. On the subject of WordPress, they also offer such amenities as one-click transfer of existing WordPress data, a free domain name with a new WordPress plan, and a wealth of themes to choose from. All in all, they’re a solid option for the speed concerned WordPress blogger.

Visit www.webhostinghub.com or read our WebHostingHub review.

InMotion Hosting

Customer Ratings & Reviews

These guys offer a similar bevy of features that we greatly appreciate, including a comparable amount of unlimited support for both bandwidth and disc space. They also offer a wealth of WordPress friendly features, including a similar one-click transfer and a solid mountain of support files to help get you up to speed on how to operate the CMS.

Visit www.inmotionhosting.com or read our Inmotion Hosting review.

HostGator

Customer Ratings & Reviews

If you haven’t heard of HostGator yet, we’re guessing you haven’t been in the business long. They’re legends in the field, and as such, the offer a near perfect storm of WordPress performance and features. With plans beginning under four dollars with an heap of benefits, they’re a tremendous value for anyone looking to quickly set-up and even more quickly manage a WordPress site.

Visit www.hostgator.com or read our HostGator review.

However, when it comes to WordPress, we really can’t recommend anyone higher than WebHostingHub WordPress Hosting. They’ve consistently ranked the highest in our user polls, and offer the most advanced level of WordPress support. This includes servers that run suPHP, which allows for speedier and more secure connections, PHP5, MySQL5, and PHP caching. All in all, they’re an unbelievably fast offering that’s guaranteed to up your website rankings!

WordPress vs. Blogger

Art — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:26:50 +0000

WordPress and Blogger are both popular websites on the Internet that are used by millions of people. These two websites both share something in common; they offer a platform and tools for people to create their very own blog sites. If you are a fan of blogging, not matter what you happen to be blogging about, these two websites would both be ideal for you. However, while both of these websites have a lot in common, they are also different in many ways which leads people to wonder which is better. Some people prefer WordPress and some people prefer Blogger Below is the table with the main features and we will discuss what each website has to offer.

Main Features of Blogger and WordPress

WordPress

WordPress is a free platform that allows users to enjoy all of their blogging needs. WordPress was first introduced in 2003 and has increasingly gained popularity over the years. Aside from gaining popularity, there have also been many updates to WordPress so that it is up to date with what users want to have. The creator ensures that the features of WordPress are user friendly and very helpful with people who use the site for their blog. Some of the many features that WordPress comes with include:

Various Themes
100% Free
Tons of Accessible Plugins

With various themes, you will be able to change the look and feel of your WordPress website as much as you want. Themes are a necessity because they catch the eyes of the viewers who are visiting your website. Not to mention, you will be able to find an abundance of free themes for your WordPress website. Having access to free themes can come in handy because it is a way to spice up your page and make it unique without having to spend money. While there are free themes available, some advanced themes and special design themes may cost money but it is entirely your choice as to whether or not you want to spend any money on your WordPress theme.

It is also good that using WordPress is free. You do not have to pay to sign up or create a WordPress account. It is nice to be able to start a blog website without having to spend any money in the process. If you want your website on WordPress to be hosted, you may have to pay for web hosting but you will never have to pay to create a WordPress account or to use the website and create your very own blog.

Being able to use different plugins can come in handy for your WordPress website too. There are all tops of plugins that do different things for the website. For example, there is a plugin that, if used properly, will make your website run faster. This is important because people visiting your page will be irritated by slow loading times. Having a fast running website is very important and these plugins can do that for you. There is an extensive list of plugins that are compatible with WordPress. You can easily search for these Plugins online to find out more information about what types of plugins will help your website and its productivity.

Blogger

Blogger, like WordPress, is perfect for all of your blogging needs. Blogger was created more than five years ago and Google bought the website by 2003. As you can tell, the website has been around for quite some time and within the several years of its existence, it has changed for the better, so that the users would enjoy all of the features that come along with using Blogger for their blogging wants and needs. Some of the best features of Blogger include:

100% Free
Simple Navigation System
Free Space for Pictures

Blogger is completely free which is great for people who do not want to put out any extra money to blog on the website. Because creating a blog on Blogger is free, anyone can use it, without worrying about charges or hidden fees. The web hosting for Blogger is also free which is an additional bonus. The URL of your blog will be the domain name you choose along with blogspot.com.

The simple navigation system on Blogger makes creating a blog simple and easy for just about anyone who uses the site. Having a simple navigation system will allow you to spend less time figuring the site out and more time putting your blog together. The navigation system is easy to follow which will help you avoid the frustration of trying to figure out how to use the website.

Having free space for pictures is also important. You will not have to pay a cent to post up a certain amount of pictures on your blog. Pictures can really spice up your blog by adding a personal look and feel and also making it look more professional. You definitely need pictures on your blog and Blogger allows you to upload these pictures from Picasa for free.

Here are some stats of search volume from Google Trends:

In conclusion, both of these websites are great to use for your blogging needs and it can be hard to pick just one. They are two of the best websites for creating and developing your very own blog. If you are not sure which one of the websites you would like to use, you might want to give them both a try as a temporary solution. Some people prefer Blogger over WordPress because it is completely free, including the web hosting, which you would have to pay for if you were to use WordPress. Some people prefer to use WordPress instead because of the large amount of themes that you will have to choose from.

Ultimately, it depends on your personal preference which will help you make the decision as to which website you want to use for your blogging needs. Both of these websites continue to increase in popularity as millions of Internet users from all over the world flock to these sites to create their very own blogs.

The 13 Best Free WordPress Plugins

Art — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:03:49 +0000

We covered recently the best plugins available for the webmaster who doesn’t mind spending a few bucks. Now it’s time to look at the best ones for webmasters who do.

Free plugins shouldn’t be looked at with so much of a suspicious eye. While there is definitely something to be said for the polished professionalism that comes from purchasable products, the world is filled with programming geniuses who enjoy adding something to the electronic world. One advantage these guys have is that what they think of is often clever, and may not have made it through a marketing meeting.

So let’s look at some of the best free WordPress Plugins:

1. Snazzy Archives

Snazzy, indeed. This plugin takes your blog post history and presents it in an impressive, attractive format. Snazzy scans your posts for images and YouTube videos, and lays thumbnails of them with the post summaries. The package contains a number of options so you can alter some of the layout parameters.

2. WP Comment Remix

This full-featured plugin adds a host of new options to your WordPress blog. Options for simple commenting include several different reply types, different ordering of comments and trackbacks, and comment tags. A number of widgets also let you track user data and perform administrative functions through side bars.

3. All in One SEO Pack

The description for this package simply says “Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines”. That belies just how much this free package does for your SEO efforts. It provides integration for WordPress E-commerce sites, for one. It has two levels of use, so novice users can just jump right in, and advanced users can do the fine-tuning that they need to. It optimizes your page titles and generates META tags automatically. If all of this isn’t enough, there is a purchasable Pro version that they claim is the most downloaded WordPress plugin.

4. Simple Pull Quote

This is a neat one that is good for those who heavily use their WordPress site for more serious article writing. Simple Pull Quote lets you take a certain quoted text and emphasize it in the form of a separate text box located within your main text field. It also includes multiple adjustable presentation options.

5. Theme Tester

Here’s a clever one. Theme Tester allows the webmaster to test out any new themes that they install, so it is visible only to administrators. Of course you’re not going to be doing this every week, but when the time comes around that you do want to change your theme, especially if you have a lot of readers, you aren’t going to want to show off to them a few hours’ worth of trial and error filled with broken images and links.

6. Categories by Tag Table

This plugin is also for writers, but of the more prolific variety. Falling squarely into the “Why didn’t anyone think of this before” category, it displays a graph that uses for one of its axis your post categories, and as the other the post tags. The table data itself is the number of posts that fall into each intersection.

7. Hit Sniffer Live Blog Analytics

Here’s another one that we’re surprised we haven’t seen more of for just about any platform. Instead of waiting until the end of the day, Hit Sniffer allows the user to perform real-time analysis of the traffic to their web site. In other words it lets you see what users are doing as they’re doing it. The screenshots we saw showed a dazzling array of different graphs and statistical pages. Hit Sniffer also gives you the ability to put a chat request pop-up window on your site, so users are presented the option to talk with you while they’re browsing.

8. Animal Captcha

Getting irritated by the robots that are able to keep up with the Captchas? You might want to install this plugin just for the personal gratification. It asks the user to identify different types of animals. The software comes with more than 100 default images. To further confuse the bots the images are put through random micro-transformations before being displayed and the user can upload their own. Besides, as they themselves point out, instead of looking at random ugly warped text, wouldn’t you rather be clicking on a smiling beagle?

9. Newsletter Professional

Almost forgotten in the rush of other more modern features is the need to sometimes contact your users via newsletter. Newsletter Professional lets you put together a newsletter distribution quickly and according to your specifications. Users can opt in via a sidebar widget, and you can use single or double opt-in mechanisms.

10. Broken Link Checker

The longer and more established your blog is, the less you’re going to want to do this by hand. This plugin will check the links on your blog, not only in your posts, but in comments and other sections, and notify you if they contain any broken links or missing images. This isn’t frivolous: too many broken links can be held against you by search engine crawlers.

11. SM Sticky Click Star

This is a plugin that you see used a lot but may not think of. Sticky Clicky gives you the ability to designate certain posts “Sticky” so that they always appear at the top of your blog. This is a lightweight plugin that is designed to work well with other WordPress themes.

12. EmbedPlus for WordPress

There are various plugins that allow you embed YouTube videos into your web site. There aren’t many that have some of the features that this one has. Its playback options include zoom, slow motion, scene making and skipping and instant reply. It also supports third-party annotations, and real-time social reactions.

13. CSV to Webpage Pearlbells

This plugin will save the right web site owner a lot of time and headache. It allows the webmaster to upload a CSV (Comma Separated Value) file onto your web site and have it displayed as a table. The file can be set to always upload from a specified location, and the plugin contains customizable style elements.

There you are! Thirteen really useful WordPress plugins: and like the software themselves, this list didn’t cost you a penny.

WordPress Plugins – Making the Most of the Your Site

Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:47:36 +0000

We recommend WebHostingHub as the best web hosting for your blog.

While we talk about the advantages of the different content management systems frequently, their strength is far more determined by how you use them. Each CMS has a world of plugins that programmers all over the world have created. Some of them are powerful enough to negate any problems inherent in your CMS of choice, and add functionality to it that you may have never considered.

This is the first in a series of articles that will go over some of the best plugins we found out there for the most popular contention management systems. We start today with the king of CMS’s, WordPress and WP Plugins. Note that we are going to be focusing on for-pay plugins in this article. Free plugins have their place, and we will cover those eventually as well. This is for the webmaster who is willing to shell out a little cash for the best.

1) Events Calendar Pro

This sleek calendar system gives the webmaster an easy-to-use interface with which they can create professional-looking calendar and event pages. Among the options available are the ability to integrate Google Maps into the event page, and using “Pretty URLs”. The calendar of events can be displayed in a number of attractive, easy-to-read formats.

2) All in One Shortcodes Plugin

Much of what you’ll want to do with your WordPress site might benefit from some simple stylistic addition. You may not want to pick up a book and spend a few hours learning the code necessary, though. This $20 plugin lets you do these easily. Buttons and text boxes of all different sizes and styles, image and text sliders (meaning content that rotates through a limited set every few seconds), embedded video, and social bookmarking are all available. It’s a veritable WordPress Swiss army knife.

3) Custom Widget Areas for WordPress

One of the most useful additions to a standard WordPress account is the ability to make customer sidebar sections, or widgets. This inexpensive package allows you to do just that. The webmaster is presented with an enormous variety of options for what to display where, and how. Widgets can be included in main body text, and all pages down to 404 error code pages can be customized.

4) uPricing – Pricing Table for WordPress

This one is a bit specialized, but the right user will really appreciate having it. This little package lets the user make a business-quality pricing table. Tables are often one of the first things a new HTML editor learns how to make. They soon learn thereafter how much worse a bad-looking table can make your web site appear.

5) Twitter Ultimate-WordPress Plugin

Finally, no article about improving your website would be complete without somehow working modern social networking into it. Of the available packages we looked at for the most popular social hangouts, Twitter Ultimate-WordPress Plugin seemed to provide the best functionality for the least cost ($8 as of this writing). It allows the user all sorts of controls over whose tweets are displayed when, and how often.

There are even more good plugins, and we’ll go into them when we later cover some of the free ones available for WordPress. For now, this should give the WordPress webmaster looking for some very nice enhancements to their site an excellent starting point.

Get Out of the PHP Memory Error Rut with WordPress

Dmitry — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 11:39:42 +0000

We’ve all been there: You drag yourself out of bed in the morning, crawl to your computer, and boot up the oh-so-familiar blog space. But instead of finding your lovingly crafted website, complete with self-made logos and beautiful banners, all you find is this error:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of ######## bytes exhausted (tried to allocate ## bytes) in /home/user/public_html/wp-includes/phpfile.php on line 80.

Before you start swearing at your monitor or worse—we’re thinking that stapler looks appropriately weighted for some hefty hucking—know that this issue is easily fixed, and doesn’t have to be the day-wrecker you feel it might be.

It’s worth noting that your exact error message may vary, but as long as it says something about your memory being more worn out than an obese man at a 10k, you’re golden: The issue has to do with available computing space, and you’re still reading the right tutorial.

The likely issue is that you’ve just installed a new plug-in or extension, and now WordPress is acting like an estranged lover. There are a couple of ways to correct the issue. The easiest is to disable any recently installed extensions and see if that corrects the problem. However, this is certainly less than desirable, as you likely want that new piece of code. With that in mind, you might try to expand the available memory space for your site. This can be accomplished in the following way:

Essentially, you’ll need to change the amount of memory available for PHP. This can be done in a number of ways, and it might be that there’s only one that works for your server. Always query your web host first—or if you’re feeling gung-ho, locate your php.ini file and do this to it!

Locate the following line:

memory_limit = 32M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume

Change “32M” to “64M,” and then cross your fingers. Some hosts limit the amount of memory you can delegate yourself to PHP, so if this doesn’t correct the issue, therein may lie your problem. If you can’t acquire access to php.ini, you might try adding the same line to the .htcaccess file in your WordPress main installation folder.

If none of those are possible, then you’re in a sticky boat, Pilgrim: Call up the tech-support you’re paying for and get them to do one of the things we just discussed.

Add-Ons That Will Save Your Web Hosting Business

Art — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:43:49 +0000

To quote my grandfather, “Things is heating up all over!” Yep, Pappy, this economic climate sure is a nasty one: Advertising spots are being put on a premium, stiff competition from small-time hosts is getting nasty, and more and more users are ditching traditional hosting for WordPress.

With such oppressive conditions, how on Earth are you to improve your web hosting business’ numbers? Well, it’s not time to bring out the End is Near signs just yet: Use the following add-ons to up-sell to your customers, increasing their productivity and improving your marketability while raking in revenue cash.

Video Conferencing:

Companies the world over are advancing video conferencing as a viable alternative to traditional travel. An over-the-Internet conference is cheap to free, whereas a plane ticket and a hotel room is anything but.

Video conferencing has grown in the workplace by 15% each year. Pretty soon, you won’t be able to walk ten feet in an office without finding someone on Skype. You should tailor your web hosting services to match. Include programs like Voxwire — which is our favorite video conferencing provider—in your standard features set. Voxwire makes it easy to collect revenue off your consumer’s streams, allowing both parties to win-out in the end. If Voxwire doesn’t sound like your thing, you can also try WebEx or GoToMeeting.

Search Engine Optimization:

If you aren’t on this one, then shame on you, Web Hoster Joe! Search engine optimization (or SEO) is one of the hottest topics around, and almost every web designer you meet will be worrying his head off about it. Thankfully, most SEO providers also include referral programs that will land cash in your pocket while making it easy for anxious consumers to streamline their sites.

All good web hosts should provide at least one recommended SEO service—some of the best offer three or four. Feel free to offer a basic program like the I Need Hits reseller brand, and if that just doesn’t quite cut it, look to create a partnership with a larger marketing firm. You never know what you’ll find until you start poking around, and even if you can find a freelancer willing to work for a flat fee, that will be just fine with your consumers.

Just remember that adding services for your consumers doesn’t have to be a painful (or expensive) process. By up-selling products to your users, you can earn cash via referrals, and strengthen your brand name, to boot.

Web Hosting Geeks' Blog » WordPress

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