Tag: Web Hosting Pro

Are you interested in posting to Facebook from WordPress automatically? If so, read on. There are various good reasons for sending posts to Facebook automatically, and two of the main advantages of doing so is that it can boost your social media following and traffic levels. Facebook has more than a billion users, which means neglecting to tap into such a useful is unthinkable for anyone wishing to grow traffic levels and increase exposure.

To build up a strong following on Facebook, you need to take steps to engage with the community. There are many ways you can publish to the social media network automatically. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular ways you can do this.

Use IFTTT

IFTTT stands for ‘If This Then That’ and enables you to automate online accounts and define applets. Applets connect two online accounts, searching for triggers on one account and performing actions on the other account when they are found. To make IFTTT post automatically, you need to sign up for a new account. Once you have done this, click on your username and select ‘New Applet’. The IFFFT wizard will then be launched. You will be asked to choose a service, so look for WordPress by typing it into the search box. After this, you will be asked to connect your WP site. Click on the connect button and enter your WP site address and login details into the pop-up. You will then be able to select from various triggers, including opting for posts in certain categories to be published or simply posting all posts.

You will then need to pick the ‘that’ part of the applet, in which case will be Facebook, which you need to search for then select. You can either post to a personal Facebook account or your business or service’s Facebook Page. You will need to give Facebook permission in a pop-up. Click on ‘Create a Link Post’ and decide how you wish to post to appear on Facebook.

Use a WordPress Plugin

This process gives you extra control despite being slightly more challenging to set up. It enables you to publish posts in different categories and tags and allows you to custom post types. To get started, you can install the AccessPress Facebook Auto plugin. When this is activated, you will see a new item called ‘AccessPress Facebook Auto Post’ in the WP admin bar. Click on it to go to the settings page. Check the box by the ‘Auto Publish’ option so auto-posting can occur. You then need to enter the Facebook application ID and secret keys, which you can get from the Facebook Developers website.

Use the ‘Add a new app’ button and enter a display name for the app. You will also need to give your email address and pick a category. To continue, click the ‘Create App ID’ button. An app will then be created by Facebook. Click on the Dashboard link on the next screen to go to the dashboard and see your ID and secret keys (click on the show button for this). Copy and paste the keys to settings page of the plugin in WordPress.

Go back to the app dashboard page and click ‘Choose Platform’. You will then be able to select a website as your platform. After this, you will be redirected to a Facebook page explaining how the app can be used on sites with few code snippets. Go to the ‘Tell us about your website’ section and key in the URL of your WP site. Click next to save the URL and the setup process will be almost completed. Go the App Review page so you can make your app public. You can now use your Facebook app on your WP site. Go back to the settings page for the plugin, enter your app ID and secret keys before clicking ‘save settings’ and click the ‘Authorize’ button to link the plugin with your FB account.

You will then be sent to Facebook and will be asked for permission in a popup. Click ‘continue’ and tell Facebook who can see the posts the apps adds. Allow permissions to post. You’ll then be returned to the plugin settings page on your WP site. Add your FB account ID in plugin settings. After this you’ll be able to auto-publish posts that come under specific categories and tags. The Facebook Auto Post plug in will then be able to share your posts automatically on the social media network.

Adding Facebook comments your WordPress site

You may also wish to add Facebook comments to your WP site. There are many advantages to doing this. Using Facebook comments can boost your site’s visibility on the network, and users can even share comments they make with their Facebook friends to give you more exposure and traffic. We actually generate a lot of traffic to our site from FaceBook. People using Facebook to comment can’t benefit from the cloak of anonymity, which makes them less likely to post spammy comments on your site. One disadvantage is that some people may feel unhappy about commenting with their social media profiles because they prefer the sense of anonymity.

Acting as the admin of the Facebook add enables you to be notified when new comments are left. There will be a Facebook comment moderation tool in your plugin’s settings page, and you can add new moderators in the settings link. Many WordPress site owners have experienced significant benefits after allowing WordPress to post to Facebook automatically and enabling Facebook users to post onto their WP sites.

Why use WordPress?

The benefits of running a WordPress are numerous. WordPress is famously easy to use and you can manage your site from any internet-connected computer or device. WP sites are looked upon incredibly fondly by search engines and you don’t need to get help from web designers when you wish to update your site. You can expand your site as your business grows and enhance the functionality of your site via a plethora of plugins.

#1 User Experience

In 2017, Google announced that RankBrain is now considered to be one of the most important ranking factors. As the technology behind RankBrain continues to develop in 2018, it is going to become a lot more important as the year progresses. Essentially, RankBrain is an advanced system which will govern the way in which Google presents its search results.

When you enter a search term into Google, the search engine will display a list of results that closely match the keywords that you have entered. Let’s say for example, you entered a search term and there was a really great post in position 5 on the first page of the results. This piece of content covers everything you need to know. This will send positive signals to Google and so it will boost the rankings of this page. If you click on the website that is currently ranking number one and the content is really bad, you will leave the page after just a few seconds.

RankBrain will notice this and if enough people bounce from the page back to the SERP, Google will remove it from the #1 position. RankBrain focuses on two things; The amount of time someone spends on your page and the percentage of people who click on your results.

#2 In depth content

In the old world of SEO, Google would evaluate each web page to see how many times a specific keyword was mentioned. The Google spider would check that the keyword appeared in the title tag, URL, Image ALT tag, description and H1 tag. Although Google still looks at this, it is not as important as it once was. Instead of measuring content Google also focuses on the context.

Google focuses on showing web users the best possible result. The best pages will cover a topic in incredible detail which is focused, actionable and above all valuable to the reader. When you provide in depth content for web visitors, everything they need to know about a given topic is covered so they don’t have to look elsewhere.

But writing advanced in depth content that Google wants is not as easy as you may think. First, the content must be at least 2,000 words. This is just the right amount of words to cover everything and provide the right amount of detail that your web visitor needs. Rather than being focused on keywords, Google is now more focused on topics. Once you have completed your post, you should try to incorporate LSI keywords. These are key terms that are associated with the topic of the page. When Google crawls your page and picks up these keywords, it will realise that the page covers the topic in great detail.

There are lots of ways that you can find LSI keywords including LSI Graph, the ‘searches related to’ found at the bottom of the SERP and the Google Keyword Planner. If for example you were looking to explore LSI search terms that relate to web hosting, head over to LSI graph and enter this search term:

 

The term web hosting displays the following LSI keywords:

 

#3 Mobile Index

Google have recently announced that they are making the switch to a new ‘mobile first index’. This means that Google will consider the mobile version of your website as the ‘real’ version. This will be the case even if someone accesses your website from a desktop computer. The majority of searches are carried out on a mobile device and this is only going to increase as the year’s progress. Although it has not been released yet, it is important that your website is ready.

Here are our top tips for preparing your website:

Consistency – Make sure that your site is consistent across desktop and mobile devices. One of the main issues is hidden content. Hidden content displays as a ‘more’ label on a mobile device. Any content displayed below this tag will be ignored. Make sure that if you use these tags in your content they are removed so readers can see all of your content.

Responsive – If you haven’t already you need to move from m. to responsive

Usability – Make sure that your websites are user friendly for mobile users. If mobile users have trouble accessing your content, making a purchase or browsing pages, you need to make changes. There is a great little tool by Google called the Mobile Friendly Test. Just enter your URL and the tool will let you know whether it passes the mobile friendly test:

So there you have it. Three advanced SEO strategies that will keep your SEO on top form in 2018.

For your business or eCommerce store to succeed online you need to make sure that your website is feature packed! There are many small details that can make all the difference – both in terms of giving customers trust and also giving them extra functions that aid conversions and improve the overall user experience of your site. It makes your business stand apart from the other’s giving you a competitive edge.

Starting an online business is no walk in the park by any means. There’s such a massive list of things to figure out when you’re starting something from scratch. What makes this even more challenging is that you need to master a variety of skills to succeed online. It’s not as simple as throwing up a website and driving traffic to it. So whether you’re building the next big e-commerce store, promoting products through affiliate programs on your site or running any type of online business in general — there are certain features that will help you take things to the next level.

This infographic shows 25 features that are key to improving your online business from showcasing your contact information to ensuring that you have a great UX structure that’ll boost conversions and aid usability. Both of which are key in 2017! Building trust within your site by adding testimonials, contact information and social media profiles is a sure way of increasing conversion rates. You can increase conversions through design and also by choosing a reliable web hosting provider.

At UK Web Host Review we’ve tested only the best web hosting companies and have featured some fantastic options to find your next hosting company.

 

When you are setting up a website for your business, you want it to be the best that you can make it. Initially, you may think that a good website is one that looks attractive and yes this is a very important factor but there are other factors that you also need to prioritise. For example, the positioning of your content and various website features has a huge impact on the effectiveness of your website.

Creating a website that is easy to navigate around is critical from a user perspective, as if your website is confusing and over-crowded it is likely to make people leave your website. This is the biggest problem that you will have. You need to be able to drive people to your website through your marketing channels and then make your website so good that they don’t want to leave.

By developing content that is useful to your target audience, you will attract them to your site and they will be compelled to either sign up for a newsletter or call you to enquire about your products or services. How you want visitors to behave will vary on your type of business but if you want people to call you to arrange an appointment, for example, you would get better success rates if you position a strong call to action in a highly prominent position. This type of useful information is listed in this helpful infographic 25 features every online business must have in 2017.

Use this infographic as a template to build your website and position your content as shown.

You will soon start to see that visitors are increasingly acting as you want them to do i.e. contacting you about your products or making an online purchase.

If you are looking for new ways to reach your target audience and start generating more sales, then have you thought about starting a blog? There are so many different marketing tools available right now but which ones should you be investing time and effort into? In 2017, 53% of marketers said that blog content creation was their top inbound marketing priority. So there are a lot of people out there that are seeing great results through the creation of blogs and intend to keep blogging for the foreseeable future.

Let’s look at some of the main reason you should start a blog today:

 

1. You can do it for free

You do not have to pay to set up a blog or a website to run your blog from because there are so many free blogging platforms available right now. Most of the major websites offer a free service, including WordPress so you could get a blog up and running without paying a penny. Whilst free blogging services are great for many people, if you are looking to generate business through your blog you may want to look at some of the premium blog hosting options but you can still get this for a relatively low amount.

 

2. More indexed pages = Rank higher in search engines

Every blog post is counted by the search engines as an indexed page and the more indexed pages you have, as a rule, the better your website will perform in the rankings. Of course, there are many other factors that play a part in this, so you cannot simply post blog after blog and hope that you will get to that top spot in the Google results. But having a regular, high-quality blog will certainly help your website to perform better organically.

 

3. Attract your target audience

In order for potential customers to find you, you must help them to find you by creating content that is useful and relevant to them. The best kind of blogs will help your target audience to solve problems and help them in some form. Offering expert advice is a guaranteed way to reach out to people looking for the type of services that you can provide. So for example, if you have a plumbing business, your blog could help people to solve common issues like a leaking tap, or some other kind of issue.

The people who are trying to fix a leaking tap will search for relevant information and your blog will be there in the results for them to use. If they are still struggling with the problem, they may decide it is easier to call the experts in and your contact details will be standing out for them at the top of your blog page.

4. Demonstrate expertise

That leads nicely to the other great benefits of creating a blog to help to solve a problem. If the blog reader manages to fix the issue themselves, they will follow your blogs or will remember you when they next have an issue. When you add value, people see you as a trusted source and there is a big likelihood that they will come to you with future business. So in this example, whilst writing a blog about fixing a leaking tap might not gain instant business, over the long-term you will build up larger numbers of followers and become a source of increasing authority. You can also write about niche specific topics like this site about scooters and hoverboards that might not become huge sites but could build loyal followings. Start generating some ideas and then decide on a focus point.

 

5. To generate money

Looking at blogging from a different perspective, rather than looking to attract customers for your business, you can make blogging your business. Or in other words, you can make money by creating blogs that are well followed. So many people have become successful bloggers or even vloggers and it is a great money making opportunity if you can find the right formula for success. Bloggers at the top of their game are making a 7 figure annual salary! You make money from ads that people pay to display on your website and the more followers you can attract, the more money you can make.

These are just five reasons to start a blog but there are many more benefits to creating and publishing high-quality blogs. In 2018 blogging will feature highly as a content marketing strategy, so our advice to you would be to look at the different blogging platforms that are available and see how easy they are to set up.

WordPress started out as a simple blogging platform and over time has almost become a full framework for applications. One thing that hasn’t evolved much with time is the text editor or the kitchen sink. Users have been resorting to plugins to add functionality and to give it some style. While WordPress 4.0 did dramatically improve the editor, there’s still plenty of room left for more customization and improvement.

Why Would You Customize The Editor?

One of the biggest problems with the editor is that you still have to click the preview button to get a feel of how your front end looks. When you add up the time spent switching between your previews and back to your editor to make additional content changes, you’d be surprised how much time is wasted. Basically, you’ll instantly receive the benefit of a true WYSIWYG editor when you customize the text editor to look and function like the front end of your site.

If you’re a reseller or build WordPress sites for people, then you know that a lot of your clients aren’t going to be technically capable of managing their own sites or changing content. This is when they end up calling you at 4AM to tell you that they accidentally removed something when they tried to edit their site.

This happens a lot…

Having a true WYSIWYG editor for your text editor will dramatically reduce all of these mishaps. Why doesn’t WordPress have a true front-end editor yet? No one knows but the promise of having one has been on the horizon for years and competitors such as Weebly and Squarespace have made their sites super user friendly by adding front-end editors. It may be because there’s a downside to the front-end editors in terms of functionality and content flow when creating content.

 

Not only that but most of the front-end editors that are offered by those competitors aren’t solid, have bugs, create disgusting code and don’t have things such as Meta boxes. So while you can try to use a plugin like Visual Composer, be warned that not only does it create messy code but they’re often buggy and unreliable. I can’t count the number of times I’ve clicked save and nothing happened or things were deleted for no reason.

Warning: This is an advanced tutorial and beginner things like WordPress installation won’t be explained. You should have knowledge of how WordPress works and CSS before beginning.

Step 1 – A Fresh Install

Make sure you’re doing this on a brand new fresh install of WordPress, preferably a remote version on your own computer. It shouldn’t need to be said but don’t do this with someone’s website to test things out, do this on a test website, try out a free theme if you need to.

Step 2 – Understanding the Core

Once there’s same sample content via your fresh WordPress install and a fresh theme to look at, you have to understand how the core of WordPress works and the functions of the text editor to get the most out of it. TinyMCE is a great tool but it’s completely ignorant of anything going on outside the editor. There’s one core file that controls TinyMCE but thankfully for us, the creators have allowed us to load additional stylesheets into it.

While it’s great that ever since 3.0.0, you’ve been able to add stylesheets in a function called add_editor_style in includes/theme.php, we’re going to be looking at more efficient ways to call the function. The very first thing we need to do is look for a file called editor-style.css. Does this file exist already for your theme?

The editor should look for the file editor-style.css by default but we can check for this in the development console. It’s F12 for most browsers and on the right hand pane, we can easily see that it indeed is pulling style from editor-style.css. A quick re-cap so far:

• WordPress is powered by a powerful editor called TinyMCE but it lacks some core functionality that we’re going to be messing with
• TinyMCE while it does come with core styling allows for the overwriting of its styling with a native function in WordPress
• WordPress calls this function add_editor_style in includes/theme.php to allow people to do such a thing

Step 3 – Making Some Changes

Taking the steps above, if you’ve determined that there is an editor’s stylesheet in your theme’s folder, then you want to make sure you save a backup of this file and copy it. Call it something like custom-editor-style.css and place it in the exact same folder location. This is far more efficient than backing up the entire theme and database.

Next, we need for WordPress to actively search for that file rather than trying to find the default one. To do this, navigate to your theme’s folder and look for functions.php. We need to open this up and call add_editor_style to make sure that it’s going to use your new stylesheet rather than the old one.

Add the following code to the theme’s function.php and when you’re done, simply hit save. If you’re editing directly from a FTP client, make sure you re-upload the file.

// This is the code for adding a custom stylesheet to the WordPress post editor

function my_theme_add_editor_styles() {

  add_editor_style( 'custom-editor-style.css' );

}

 

add_action( 'admin_init', 'my_theme_add_editor_styles' );

Where custom-editor-style.css is, if you’ve named your new file something different, change it to that name. Next, we need to make sure that the editor is actually using the stylesheet and the default stylesheet isn’t overriding your new one. Simply look at the inspector to confirm this. Earlier we confirmed you’d need some CSS knowledge so you should have a few changes already made in that stylesheet to see if any of the changes have gone through.

Are the changes being tracked by the backend as well? Let’s do a quick test by changing the color of your headers. Find the following in your stylesheet or add it if it’s not there. By default, all of the headers should be listed.

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {color: red; font-size: 35px;}

You can make the color whatever hexcode or color you want and you change the font-size to whatever you want but this is for testing purposes at this point. Is everything working great so far? It should be but let’s test something else by adding a little splash of border to the images in TinyMCE.

For this, all we have to do is target the TinyMCE main styling ID which is by default, #tinymce. This is the ID that it automatically generates in the body, regardless of the WordPress version you’re using, as long as it has TinyMCE. When we generate a border for our images, we should see the results instantly. This is the last CSS example we’re going to do because the entire point of this is to make sure that we have complete control over the styling of TinyMCE.

To generate a border around all TinyMCE images, simply type in the following in the stylesheet we made:

#tinymce img {border: 5px solid blue;}

From this point on, you should be able to style everything the way you want it now that we’ve confirmed the style changes are taking effect. If you’re new to CSS or styling, there are plenty of guides online such as Codeacademy that’s 100% free and has great tutorials on styling and a lot more.

What about Sites That Don’t Have an Existing Editor Stylesheet?

If this is the case, which it usually isn’t, you can simply open up the custom-editor-style.css file and replace the contents of that file with this:

@import url(‘my-style.css’);

The first time you do this, don’t panic if things look broken. It will take some time going back and forth, making sure changes were saved, etc. The steps above should give you a nice base to work with and if you’re new to styling, it should give you some practice as well. One great file to look at is the basic styling sheet for the theme Twenty Sixteen. This is a nice starting point and can help you map out your styling strategy for customizing your own.

Conclusion

That’s simply it. With a couple of steps you can begin editing the default look and behavior of your editor to feel far more like a WYSIWYG editor and like the front-end. There’s so much more you can do with the editor as well, such as adding styling based on different post types or custom post types. For these advanced tutorials, we’d highly recommend consulting with the WordPress documentation before touching anything.

While there are some plugins that do this for you, they need to be constantly updated, most of them are outdated, they slow down the site and plugins like Visual Composer as mentioned earlier are notorious for bugs, breaking your site, producing messy code and slowing down the site. The steps mentioned above are a great starting point for creating a truly customized editor. We’re still years away from a fully functional WYSIWYG TinyMCE that works flawlessly.

Many people make the mistake of not paying enough attention to UX (or user experience). They spend weeks and months curating what they perceive to be excellent content, create pages and pages of information without ever really thinking about the experience of the website user.

There are many different aspects that determine whether a user’s experience is a good one, but there are a few generic principles that anybody setting up a website should be aware of:

#1 Page loading
Users hate slow loading pages and if your website is taking longer than 3 seconds to load up then you are probably losing huge sections of your visitors at the very first hurdle. You can test your page loading speed through various tools like Pingdom.com and they will even highlight some improvements that you can make.

Sometimes it can be as simple as your choice of image and not having optimised it for web use. Or it might be that your web host isn’t providing a high enough level of performance and you need to review some other hosting options.

#2 Keep it simple
Sometimes people go that far with trying to impress users that they over complicate the website. Over-cluttering pages with content is not helpful and can be confusing for users. Having clear titles and navigation menus are important aspects of the UX and also bears a lot of influence on the search engine results.

#3 Call to Action
Having a strong, well-placed Call to Action not only helps boost your conversion rates, it also makes it really easy for your visitors to contact you in the best way available. It gives them the quick option of getting straight to your contact methods rather than needing to search around your website to find them.

#4 Responsive
People are accessing websites from a wide range of devices and screen sizes. What a desktop user sees does not always reflect the same experience as mobile users. Having a responsive website will ensure that mobile users will not be faced with an unfriendly looking version that is impossible to navigate around. Most new websites are built to be responsive and the fact that 55% of internet traffic is through mobile users makes this even more important.

 
#5 Readability
Large blocks of text are a user’s worst nightmare. It is no fun scrolling through unformatted text and your users will soon get bored of reading in this format. Try to reduce the amount of pages that are predominantly text – could a video be used instead to covey information?
Also, having short sentences will help to make the text easier to read and using formatting such as bullets and headings will also make the content more readable. Good use of paragraphs also makes it easier for the reader to take in the information.
 
#6 Carefully plan your ‘above the fold’ area
What sits within the above the fold section is really important for the UX. This is the first content that users will see and it will generally determine their opinions of the quality of your website straight away. They say first impressions count and with website design, this is definitely the case. So think about what you are putting into this area to ensure that it is going to impress the user.
You should use the space to give users a good idea of what your website is all about and what your key products and services are. The navigation menu should be clearly displayed in this area so that the user can easily move from page to page. Most developers would also recommend that your CTA goes into this area, as well as your business logo and any strapline that you have.

Believe it or not, there’s a lot of psychology behind the conversion rate of your website and influencing factors. One of those biggest factors aside from having a user friendly design is the colors of your website. A great design only takes you so far but if you have a poor color scheme, you could be bleeding potential customers.

Why do colors affect us so much? You may not even realize it but when you’re browsing a site, there’s three different factors to take into consideration when theorizing how color affects people so much.

First, there’s contrast. The contrast of two colors is simply the difference between them. In art, you use contrast so that you can focus your attention towards a specific element and this is the exact same thing in web design. You use two different colors not only to grab the viewers’ attention and focus on a particular element but it’s also useful for readability. For example, light font on a light background is poor design and contrast.

Complementation is the second factor in color theory. When you look at a color wheel, you might notice there’s two colors that seem to be the complete opposite of each other. Red certainly looks nothing like green but it’s the complementary color. These colors when they’re used together make a great theme and have been shown to increase your conversion ratings.

Finally, there’s vibrancy. In general, this is the mood that a color sets for the visitor. Different studies have shown that warmer colors such as red, yellow or orange have been known to energize people. However, cooler colors such as blue, purple and green have put people into a more relaxed state. Red is one color that’s known to make people alert and green is known to get people in the shopping mood.

Colors & Their Vibrancy

How over millions of years have we developed a mindset to react different to colors? No one truly knows because this isn’t something that we actively taught ourselves. Also, different cultures approach different colors differently as well. For the primary focus of this article, we’re going to focus on increasing your conversions with the western audience and what studies have shown.

When designing your theme or site, keep all of this in mind and think about the demographic you’re targeting. It could be the difference between a 10% bounce rate and a 60% bounce rate with a dramatic drop in conversions or clicks.

Red – This color is known to keep people alert and put people on edge. It’s the color of excitement and it’s also the color of passion. Numerous lingerie and adult online stories try to utilize red whenever possible, such as the front page of Victoria’s Secret showcasing red lingerie. Obviously there’s a lot of other factors as to why that company is successful but when you want someone to feel excited or passionate, this is your go to color.

Yellow – When you think about the color yellow, you probably visualize the summer time and a nice cool breeze. Yellow is warmth and also represents hospitality. This color can put people into a relaxed state of mind or give them a little more trustworthy feeling of the site they’re on.

Orange – As you may have guessed, orange is usually associated with Thanksgiving and Halloween. Orange is the color that represents the start of autumn and harvest. This is common tradition for the west as September through November is when Thanksgiving and Halloween occur. However, this color isn’t particularly known to affect one’s mood so much above the others.

Blue – There’s primarily two different mood factors here for blue. First, there’s the negative context of blue which means sadness or depression. It’s commonly used by pharmaceutical companies trying to sell anti-depressants and the sales numbers don’t lie, it works. However, in a positive context it means authority, power and trust. Believe it or not, a blue tie in an interview can give you an authority look. This is the same reason banks love to use blue on their logos.

Green – This color is one of the broadest colors out there that can be used for a wide variety of things. First, there’s the luck of the Irish, which is why you commonly see green themes everywhere during the month of March. Then, you have pro-environmental groups that use green as their main theme because it represents nature and environment. However, green can also be used by get rich quick sites or sites trying to get you to buy something because it embodies the traits of jealousy and envy.

You see some rich smug guy on a get rich quick page driving a nice car? There’s more than likely pictures of money with some hints of green on it. This is designed to make you jealous to bring you one step closer to clicking that purchase button. It’s not because rich people are obsessed with the color green.

White – This is the most common background color used on websites. It represents peace or purity and isn’t threatening in any manner. It’s also used for religion, weddings and hospitals.

Black – This is the most depressing color on the list as people commonly think of death and formality with this color. However, for web design purposes, if used correctly, it can be a color of force or control.

Brown – This is not an appealing color for your website and in most cases should be avoided but it represents the Earth and health. It’s known to be stable or dependable.

Pink – The stereotypical color that is thought to be every woman’s favorite. Why are western women so attracted to the color pink? The reason for this is because pink is known to represent fun, childhood and sweetness. It’s also thought to be the color of femininity.

Understanding It All and How to Use Different Colors

In order to effectively gauge what color scheme works best for your WordPress site, you need to understand the conversion funnel or at least have one mapped out. While the colors are being taken into consideration, there’s a specific process that happens when a user comes to your website. First, they have to become aware of the elements you want their attention drawn to – VPNGeeks is a good example of a site that has a clear and concise layout.

Second, they need to become interested in what you’re selling. Third, they need to have the desire to press forward with the decision. Finally, there’s the conversion.

Awareness – This is essentially the marketing of your website or your brand. A brand can exist on its own but your website won’t get customers or traffic simply by existing. People need to be aware that your site exists and you need to understand your target audience in order to attract customers.

Interest – Once your visitors have landed on your site, you now need to interest them. You need to act fast because the average user only spends a few seconds on a website before they close the tab, creating a bounce. A bounce is when someone visits your page and leaves it without visiting any other links on the page. This negatively impacts your SEO. This stage should focus on the color scheme, your headlines, your images and compelling copy content.

Desire – Anyone can build interest in a product, if they weren’t interested already but now you need to give them the tool to want what you’re selling. You need to conclude with a multitude of different things in order to build desire other than your product simply existing. You need testimonials, you need a great color scheme that represents the mood of your product and audience and you should give the customers options.

When you’re planning out a site, it’s a general rule of thumb to have 3 different colors selected that best represents your demographic, your brand and your product. Not only do you want your design to be visually impressive but using the guide above, you want something that will positively impact their mood based on what you’re selling. For example, selling wedding services with a primarily black theme will tank your conversions.

You also have to take colors into consideration when designing your call to action button. The call to action button is when people finally reach the desire stage and are ready to purchase. This is the button clicked when they’re ready to make a purchase. Studies have shown that red call to action buttons have been the most effective for most websites.

Before you even begin, what is the goal of your website? What do you hope to accomplish?

One Time Sales – Are you hoping to capture customers for a one time sale?

Email Opt In – Do you hope to capture emails so that you can send our promotional offers and newsletters?

Recurring Sales – Do you hope to acquire customers for a monthly or yearly service?

Affiliation – Are you affiliating for another website and sending visitors to another sales page?

Maximizing your WordPress conversion rate has very little to do with your personal preferences. You really have to step into the mindset of your customers and think about what they want to see and what kind of tone you’re setting when someone first sees the website.

Vim as you may already know is one of the most popular text editors around but what really stands it apart from the rest is that it is charityware. By that we mean that it is a type of software that supports charity whilst doing its standard job. As it is free open source software, the developers ask users to make a donation to charity instead of other types of payment.

So if you are a programmer looking for a great text editor, wouldn’t you like to know that you are helping a charity? It is certainly a good selling point for many. Aside from that, it is regarded as high quality text editing software and has even won a number of awards. Vim stands for Vi Improved (although originally Vi Imitation) to outline the improved features over Vi. It works across a range of operating systems, which many text editors struggle to do.

Vim was first released to the public back in 1991 and has been helping developers ever since. Bram Moolenaar first brought Vim into the programming world and wanted it to be used for good, as charityware.

Besides being for a very good cause, Vim is popular with programmers (some of our team at UK Web Host Review use it)

– It is free and offers lots of supporting resources from the community of users

– It can be used through a remote connection

– It is lightweight and portable

– You can use Vim plugins

– It can be used with many different languages e.g. HTML, CSS, Javascript and around 200 more!

So what is Vim doing for charity?

Moolenaar decided that he wanted to make a difference for children in Uganda and specifically children living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. Users of Vim are asked to

Donate to the International Child Care Fund, which passes the money onto Kibaale Children’s Centre in southern Uganda. The AIDS epidemic in Uganda is of great concern, with up to an estimated 30% of the population being infected by the virus. One of the terrible consequences of this means that there is a very large number of orphans who may not have access to everyday necessities like water and food.

The KCC supports the children in many ways, including the provision of much needed vaccinations and also education to help prevent the spreading of AIDS. They also work hard to ensure that children have access to schools and are provided with the right level of education to enable them to support themselves in the future.

In 2016 Uganda experienced a drought that made life even harder for those living there, with food and water supplies at a real low. Without the intervention of ICCF and similar organisations, the results of the drought would have been much worse. They have funded the building of water tanks at schools so that all children have access to water whenever they need it.

What Moolenaar has done is tried to show the world that that his product, Vim has made life much easier for programmers who are able to live a comfortable life. He has highlighted that across the world the simple things we take for granted are not readily available. A small donation can make a huge difference to children who have suffered from tragic circumstances and can help to support them to get a good education and job.

Vim is well regarded for its simplistic nature and the huge impact it has in helping programmers and web developers. Moolenaar is applying a similarly simplistic approach to give children the basic tools to a better life. In an interview he did with Binpress he notes his motivation for helping charity as coming from his own experience whilst he developed Vim. He had no job and asked for sponsorship to help him out, which led him to think about the role of sponsorship and how big an impact it can have.

It is safe to say Bram Moolenaar has made a huge impact on the world, both to programmers and to the children of Uganda. What a great guy and what a fantastic text editor!

WordPress maybe one of the simplest Content Management Systems to get started with, but when it comes time to start adding functionality to your site and getting things looking just the way you want them, be prepared to clear at least a few hours of your time.

Indeed, whilst WordPress’s instant installation is touted as a major selling points among web hosting companies who offer it, setting everything up to be just the way you want it (whilst keeping SEO in mind of course), takes much longer. 

 This is particularly true of the navigation menu, one of the most critical parts of your entire site. Yet as complicated as it may seem to setup your WordPress menus and incorporate them into your site, you’ll soon be on your way with this comprehensive how-to guide, where I’ll take you step by step from accessing your menu panel to putting those all-important links on your website.

About WordPress Menus

Menus in WordPress is the simple solution to offer a proper navigation to visitors. In most cases, it displays links to your content in the horizontal bar across the top of your site, and -depending on theme you’re using- can often be incorporated into secondary areas of your site, too.

WordPress introduced this feature in its third version, and since then it has been a valuable part of the CMS. By default, it isn’t setup, and thus requires some manual effort to get your menus set upand displaying on your site.

How to Setup Menus on WordPress Blogs

You need to first publish the elements or sections which you plan on keeping in the Menu. If you wish to keep only the Categories, then create those categories. The same applies to important pages like About Us, Privacy Policy, Contact Us, or even the Tags. Yes, showcasing Tags are allowed in WordPress Menus.

Step 1 

Once you’ve got all the pages set up and published, head over to the Menus option available under the Appearance section in the left-hand menu panel on your WordPress dashboard, and hit the link to open it.

Step 2 

Click on create a new menu link and give your menu a name so that you’ll always be able to access it easily.

Step 3 

Select the menu you just created (it will be selected by default if this is the only Menu available) and select the elements from left side section. Click ‘Add to Menu’ and watch as these elements are moved over to the right side section. This is how you insert elements into Menus.

Step 4 

You can put in Pages, individual Posts, or Categories, or even custom links (can be used to showcase Tags). Once all those elements are available on the right side area, you canto re-arrange them in any order you wish.

Step 5 

If you wish to keep a particular element or category as Child one, drag it slightly towards the right side and put it on its Parent one. It isn’t necessary for a category to be a Child one to make this thing work.

Step 6 

Once you’re happy with the arrangement, select the Location as per the Theme and click on Save Menu button.

In future, when you think of making a change in the Menu, or re-arrange the elements, you can come at the same place, select the Menu, make changes, and hit the Save Menu button to make those changes publicly visible.

Also, if theme allows showcasing menus on different parts, like primary area, secondary area, or footer area, then all you need to do is, create a dedicated menu, and select the position of it.

This sure wasn’t quick but I hope it was easy enough for you to remember in future.

What if Theme doesn’t support Menus?

Many outdated themes don’t come with support for Menus, and if you happen to use one of them, then there is still a way to make things look friendly. You sure can’t display a properly functioning menu on the top area or even the footer one, but you can do that in the widget section.

If the theme supports a sidebar, then you need to create a Menu by following the aforementioned steps and save it. Then, move to the Widgets section and using the Custom Menu widget, you can showcase those Menu elements in the sidebar.

In the worst case, if the Sidebar isn’t supported, then its high time to look for a modern theme.

Key things to remember

As mentioned numerous times in this guide, Menus are among the primary elements which increase the user experience and the usability of your website. It helps the visitor to wonder around your blog through its structure and reach other pages and sections. But, it doesn’t mean that you need to put everything in the Menus section.

To make it simple and straight, I usually keep Categories and few more important pages on the Menus like About, Team, Privacy & Disclaimer, Contact Us. If there are Child categories, then I arrange them under their particular Parent one, in order to achieve more user friendliness.

Always keep the primary Menu on the top, maybe below the logo or completely at the top. If possible, keep it sticky so that it scrolls down and user has access to it everywhere.

Finally, there is a trend of keeping the Logo within the primary menu. This helps in saving some space in the top area, and thus more content is visible in above the fold area. You can also opt for this layout for obtaining higher user experience points.

Final words

By now, you’ve hopefully got a fully functional menu up and running on your website by following the simple steps above. If not, do let me know in the comments section below if I’ve missed anything out that you were hoping to see covered.

Are there other aspects of building a WordPress website that you’d like me to cover in future How-To Guides? Again, drop me a note and let me know.

Until then, thanks for reading, and best of luck with your new website!

When it comes time to showcase your skills or product/service on your WordPress site through video, you will need to use a plugin designed to support your video media or content. Lucky for you, there are quite a few options available to get your videos uploaded and display a glowing video gallery.

Let’s have look at some of the awesome plugins offered by the talented people at WordPress to help you do this:

First up – Envira Gallery

Envira is by far the best WordPress video gallery plugin and is super easy to install on your site. This plugin allows you to create and compile a video gallery at the touch of a button and comes equipped with easy to use drop and drag widgets that help get the job done. This plugin allows you to create galleries form Youtube, Vimeo, Wistia and self-hosted WordPress videos.

 

YouTube Simple Gallery

The name is a giveaway if you are wondering how difficult it is to use this plugin. This amazing plugin automatically uses custom post types to add, organize and even categorize your videos with the click of a button. The YouTube Simple Gallery short code is used to create a listed video gallery which can be edited and formatted to change the overall appearance of the video gallery list.

YouTube Showcase

This is another easy to use plugin which offers some of the same features as the Simple Gallery. The main difference of this plugin is the overall beauty of the gallery layout and there are also additional drop and drag widgets available to make the process easier. This WordPress Video Gallery Plug boasts all of the same functionality as the Simple Gallery but looks much better from a design point of view.

WordPress Video Gallery

If HD is your thing then this plugin is a must. WordPress Video Gallery offers High Definition video play and the skins are highly customisable. This plugin also offers you the option of seeing what your videos will look like and all of the features can be changed before going live with your gallery. This plugin is a must for large video files that must be seen in HD.

Workbox Video from Vimeo & YouTube

This plugin works on a much more basic level in comparison to other video gallery plugins and is compatible with Vimeo, YouTube, and Wista. This plugin uses a simple user interface to add URL’s of the videos that you want to use and will create your gallery based on these videos. This plugin also lets you create multiple galleries with different sets of videos so you can create different subject based video galleries.

WPG Cool Gallery

WPG Cool Gallery is a simple to use plugin that allows you to upload and display videos into an easily navigated frame and gives your viewers the option of seeing your gallery all on one page or individually through a pop-up window. This plugin works with YouTube and Vimeo to display a fully responsive galley.

Ultimate Video Gallery

This easy to use plugin benefits from the ability to create endless galleries to upload and uses short code to create and manage the video gallery. This plugin uses a very simple design interface to load the videos straight from the source and all of the features are customisable if you wish.

Any of these options would make an amazing addition to your WordPress site and these galleries are sure to showcase your skills or media in a mind-blowing way and can be done quickly and easily.