Using WordPress as a CRM

Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) is a staple of successful businesses and has been for some time. In the early days of customer relationship management (the practice) businessmen and women used a simple rolodex (an analogue, desktop notecard binder with alphabetical place markers) to keep track of their contacts. Each entry usually consisted of a business card and a few notes on each person. This simple yet effective piece of old school hardware allowed those who used it to keep track of their growing business/social contacts and maintain little bits of useful information–such as their  last purchase, certain preferences, needs, Continue reading

What’s the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?

The question of whether to go with WordPress.org or WordPress.com is a common one, and has been covered before. I’ll try my best not to repeat what’s already out there on the topic. However, I will go over some neat-o features that you may not know about WordPress.com (if you’re very used to using WordPress.org, or even another blogging site, like Tumblr, for instance). To conclude, I’ll also explain what makes the WordPress.org software so special. WordPress.com: the side of blogging you never knew about WordPress.com is undoubtedly going to be a content-focused domain where bloggers (i.e., content creators) hang Continue reading

Optimize your WordPress Website

Cleaning Up Your WordPress Database To Optimize Your Website’s Performance Are you struggling with slow site loading times? Just a few extra seconds can make a big difference. For every additional second it takes your site to load, your page abandon rate rises. About half of your visitors will expect it to load in 2 seconds or less, according to KISSmetrics. If it doesn’t, they’re hitting that back button. Need an easy way to shave a few seconds off your load time? If your WordPress site’s been around for longer than a few months, cleaning up your database could boost Continue reading

The Evolution of WordPress Drag & Drop Systems

Way back when, we didn’t have these fancy drag and drop systems. If you wanted to move something from one side of the screen to another you had to go into FrontPage, Dreamweaver, or whatever you were using to create your website, and create a place for it to exist on the screen. Then you had to cut the content (text, image, etc.,) from its location and paste it into the new location. Then you had to resize everything until it looked the way you wanted. Every change affected everything else. There was no “just grab it with your mouse Continue reading

Straight Forward Guide to WordPress Slugs

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A Straight-Forward Guide To WordPress Slugs When using WordPress there are so many things one might choose to learn and master that some of the most basic elements of your site can be overlooked. Especially the parts that are a bit dry and not the least bit glamorous. Like this post’s topic: The Slug. What is a Slug? A WordPress slug is nothing more than a few words, which you choose, to describe a post, page, category, or tag within WordPress. These words then appear as part of the URL (or Permalink) directing visitors to that content. The title of this Continue reading

How to create your own Job Board with WordPress

What do sites like Job.ProBlogger, WP Hired, Monster, and Elance all have in common? They are all job board sites that have grown rather popular in their perspective niches. Back in the day, building and designing an online job board was very costly and immensely time-consuming. But nowadays, thanks to software like WordPress, creating a job board is much cheaper and easier to get up and running. How To Create a Job Board With WordPress As with many things in life, there is no single way to create a job board with WordPress. However, if I had to narrow it Continue reading

How To Create A WordPress Review Site Using Themes & Plugins

Writing reviews for books, movies, gadgets, and more has been a ubiquitous part of the blogging experience from the very beginning. After all, it’s only natural that in the course of thoroughly covering a blog topic that a blogger might want to introduce or evaluate a product for their readership. Add affiliate marketing to the equation and the rise of user reviews as a key determining factor in most people’s purchasing decisions and you’ve got the perfect conditions for a flourishing ecosystem of WordPress review sites. Which is exactly what we’ve seen over the last several years. As a result developers have Continue reading

How to use Categories and Tags in WordPress

You’ve written your post, and your mouse is hovering over the “Publish” button, but you can’t help but feel like you’ve forgotten something… Don’t worry, WordPress will remind you: “You must select a category before publishing a post.” And that reminds you, you should pick add a few tags as well. But when none of the categories seem to really fit your topic, and you’re not sure what tags to add without repeating yourself, what are you supposed to do? File it under “Miscellaneous”? That’s how many of us go about choosing our categories and tags: just creating them ad Continue reading

Which WordPress Hosting is Better? WordPress.org or WordPress.com?

WordPress.org or WordPress.com? If you’re new to WordPress, it’s a common question and often one that needs a little explanation since the two get confused. In this post we’ll compare the two and look at their pros and cons. We’ll explore: The differences between WordPress.org and WordPress.com Compare each of their: Costs Freedoms and limitations Maintenance and development How to decide between WordPress.org and WordPress.com What is WordPress.org? The WordPress.org website. WordPress is open source blogging/CMS software that powers 22 per cent of the web, including this one. The software is a community-driven project and WordPress.org is where you can Continue reading

How To Hide The Fact That Your Website Runs On WordPress

Security is always top concern when you’re running a website. But… sometimes all the hubbub over hacking seems a little over the top. All the scary stories about big businesses like eBay, Target, Adobe, Steam, and others who have suffered big data breaches can feel like fear-mongering. Surely hackers won’t go after your website when they have such big fish to fry? The data, unfortunately, tells us otherwise. Smaller websites are hacked just as frequently as big ones, with almost half of small businesses reporting being hacked, their resultant costs averaging $8,700. And those are only the businesses who are Continue reading

Automatic WordPress Updates: How To Turn Them On Or Off And Decide Which Is Right For You

One of the fundamentals of running a WordPress website is knowing how and when to update the core files, plugins, and themes that comprise it. In the past updating WordPress, while still relatively easy, had a bit more guesswork than it does today. Since WordPress 3.7 was released automatic updates for minor and security releases have become standard. It is also now possible to receive major or core updates without the site admin doing anything. This of course takes the guess work out updating WordPress for many users; an undeniable benefit. However, auto updates for WordPress are not the right solution for Continue reading

ManageWP Dashboard

An In-Depth Overview Of The ManageWP Dashboard It is no secret that setting up and managing a blog is time-consuming. But what if you could spend less time managing your WordPress site and more time on the important stuff? Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, actually, there is a tool that can help you do just that. Just what is that tool? Why, ManageWP, of course! Just What Is ManageWP? To put it plainly, ManageWP is a Dashboard Manager. But you’re probably wondering,  “what the heck is that supposed to mean”? Well, it’s actually exactly what it sounds Continue reading

Get the most of shortcodes in WordPress

Shortcodes… Get the most of shortcodes in WordPress Chances are that if you’ve been using WordPress for a while then you’ve heard of something called a shortcode. Ok, that might be an understatement. If you’ve been using WordPress for a month then chances are you’ve already been using shortcodes left and right. It’s become common practice for shortcodes to be included as major selling points in themes on sites like Envato (among others). Any time a plugin does something requiring a complex function, they tend to offer a shortcode that drastically simplifies the process. So like I said, you’re undoubtedly Continue reading

How to integrate Facebook login and comments with WordPress

How To Integrate Facebook Login And Facebook Comments With WordPress Welcome to the first of two posts I’ll be writing on social integration with WordPress. This first post will focus on WordPress and Facebook integration while next week’s post will focus on WordPress and Twitter integration. There is a lot to be gained by creating a closer relationship between your WordPress install and Facebook. Most obviously, when you make it easier for someone to connect with your site through a platform they’re already using, you’re encouraging more community engagement–whether that happens in the form of new user sign-ups, comments, or shares. Continue reading

Twitter Integration with WordPress

How To Integrate Twitter With WordPress Welcome to the second of my two-week mini-series on social integration with WordPress. Last week I covered how to integrate Facebook with WordPress. This week I’ll be focusing on integrating Twitter with WordPress. In my previous post I focused on two things: 1) Facebook comments; and 2) Social login/registration with Facebook. In today’s post I’ll show you how to do those same things (or in the case of commenting, a close approximation) with Twitter, but overall we’re going to cover a broader range of tools, plugins, and use cases than we did with Facebook. That’s because the Continue reading

Getting Started With WordPress

WordPress is one of the most valuable tools for getting your small business online. Those little 5-page package deals are a thing of the past. Especially when you can have unlimited pages, plugins, and customization right at your fingertips with the WordPress interface. However, if you don’t know what you’re looking at, it’s easy to get lost, thinking it’s just another technical way to create a website. We want to make the process simple for you. We know you don’t always have time to sit there an learn something that we’ve studied inside and out, even to make the simplest Continue reading

How to White Label the WordPress dashboard

How To White Label The WordPress Dashboard When it comes to customizing the WordPress experience just about every possibility has seemingly been explored. A perfect example of this is the wide variety of ways in which anyone can white label the WordPress software itself. Which, for those unfamiliar with the term, means replacing the WordPress branding elements with any brand you choose. This is a particularly helpful practice for anyone who uses WordPress to create websites for clients. It allows them to replace the standard WordPress branding elements with either their own or their client’s. As well as helpful elements Continue reading

How to Add Lazy Loading to WordPress

Lazy Loading is a front-end development trick which delays the loading of content below the fold of a page until just before a user scrolls to it. You can think of it as the opposite of image preloading. It ensures that resources, especially those that carry more weight (images, videos, scripts), are only loaded when they have to be. Lazy loading can be used in a variety of different ways. You can chose to sprinkle the technique on and delay the loading of a single resource, like images, or you can implement it full-scale for your entire site with infinite scroll. Continue reading

Understanding WordPress Heirarchy

In WordPress, pages are stitched together from different template files. Each template file represents another part of the page, and together they make up all of the content of your individual pages, pulled from the WordPress admin. However, which template file is actually selected is based on a fairly robust hierarchy, with a naming convention at it’s root. In this hierarchy, a default template is replaced by template files that are more specific. But this is probably best demonstrated by an example. Suppose a user visits the page “https://yoursite.com/author/paige”. First, WordPress will search for the template labeled author-paige.php. If that file doesn’t Continue reading

WordPress Videos – Embed YouTube Videos

YouTube is an incredibly powerful tool. It handles storing, encoding, compressing and playing videos so you don’t have to worry about compatibility across an ever-increasing number of browsers and devices. Adding YouTube videos to WordPress is fairly simple because of oEmbed support added in version 2.9. There are also plugins out there that can help you customize the look of your YouTube videos, organize them into galleries, and get the most out of media streaming on your site. In this article we’ll go over how to embed YouTube videos with WordPress out of the box, then move on to more Continue reading

Why Choose WordPress over Weebly

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WordPress vs Weebly: Customization Meets Drag-and-Drop We have many choices in today’s world of publishing platforms. Most platforms attempt to offer a wide variety of publishing features to meet many needs including websites, blogging, and eCommerce. WordPress is a popular choice for all three of these needs. But another choice is Weebly. Let’s take a look at what’s involved in getting both platforms off the ground, turn them into a blog, a website, and add eCommerce. We’ll discover their basic features as well as pros and cons along the way. WordPress WordPress is a publishing platform that allows you to Continue reading