Did You Know?

Launched in 2002, LinkedIn has evolved into a community of motivated business professionals ready to connect and network. Leveraging itself as the largest professional media marketing network in the world, LinkedIn now has more than 430 million members in 200 countries.

Sometimes you may want to tweak the Header and Footer areas of a WordPress theme, without having to go into the actual files to edit. This can easily be accomplished by using a Plugin.

While most WordPress themes do come with Admin panels for customizing headers, footers, and other areas of a page, you may find a Plugin is easier for you to use on a regular basis – especially if you’re adding snippets of information you want to change on a regular basis.

Why optimize images before placing on your website?

• Reduce overall download time.

• Increases the viewer’s experience.

• Images will become SEO friendly.

Most often, the largest files on a webpage(s) are going to be images. Large files impact download speed, which usually translates to the site being assigned a Ding by the search engines. Ranking will drop. High quality images in most cases can make or break the sale of an online product or service. People often leave sites when they have to wait for images to download.

Everyone has their own method of compressing and optimizing their images. Most often a graphics program is used, then images are uploaded to your WordPress site.

Testimonial Plugins simplify the process for adding customer feedback to your WordPress website.

Reviews from people who have first hand experience with your business go a long way in building trust and credibility to future customers/clients.

If you configure a Testimonial plugin so site visitors can enter reviews first-hand, be sure to monitor and respond. Promptly responding to reviews creates dialog with your current customers/clients, and increases the odds of a prospective customer to make a purchase.

Show off your client comments and positive feedback about your services / products on all of your website pages, don’t hide them away on one isolated page. If a site visitor is viewing a product/service page, and is not sure whether to buy from you or not – if they see several Testimonials/Reviews by verified purchasers – they’ll feel more secure in placing an order.

Here are a few Testimonial plugin options to experiment with.

If you have a website in WordPress, an ad management Plugin can be helpful in several different ways.

An ad management plugin will basically accept any html coding, so you may want to use an ad plugin for other purposes than third party advertising. Think of how you might use an ad plugin in areas of your site where you’d like to feature something special:

• Highlight upcoming Announcements, Events or Sales.
• As a rotation with graphics/photos and links, to direct site visitors to other parts of the site you want noticed, or new pages repeat site visitors may not know about.

If you want to display affiliate links, sell ad space, accept sponsored posts, or place unique coding as it applies to your website - here are a few ad plugin options to experiment with.

Learn how to create tables with columns using TablePress, a straight forward, simple plugin that allows you to create and edit tables and columns for addition to pages and posts.

Great customer service and support is important to the success of any business website. The faster and easier it is for potential buyers to get answers about your product or service, the more likely they are to buy from you. Happy customers translate into a solid online reputation for you and your company. We will cover several good WordPress Plugin options to assist with your onsite customer support solution.

Keeping abreast of how your website is performing is important. Google Analytics is a great tool you can use to analyze page views, returning visits, etc. Several methods are available for connecting Google Analytics to your site code.

If your website framework is in HTML, the Google Analytics code can be generated within Google Analytics and placed manually into each website page you want to track. If your website is utilizing a WordPress theme, most of them come with built-in support allowing you to generate the tracking code, and paste into the dedicated area of the theme or plugin. Once the tracking code is inserted into the correct area you will be able to view visitor activity on your website. 

It’s interesting how Color is a factor in successful Branding, Recognition and Customer Sales.

What do the colors on your website tell visitors about You, and your products/services? Have you ever placed a Poll on your site and asked people if they like and enjoy your website colors? Have you ever encouraged your site visitors to send you their Comments and Opinions of your website color scheme?

Probably Not. Even though you may really like the colors on your website – maybe others don’t. Maybe they don’t stick around long enough to know what your site really offers, because the colors are a big turn-off to them.

Wordpress sites are more often susceptible to a security breach because they require a user name and password to enter the Administration area. Straight HTML coded websites experience other methods for hackers to take over their site. If your website utilizes a managed hosting solution, plugins update and perform security updates for the operating system on a regular basis.

Digital security is probably one of the most important aspects of running a website. As a business, your website is capable of collecting massive amounts of information. Some of this information is crucial and very sensitive.

A breach in your security can bring about countless hours of headaches and migraines. If the damage is severe enough, you might even end up dealing with lawsuits. Nothing is more important than a secure website.

WordPress is one of the most used open source website creation tools out there. Although being open source means we get a ton of plug-ins and modifications created by all sorts of genius minds across the world, it can also mean increased vulnerability. This is exactly why observing some common security measurements can take you a long way when it comes to creating a secure website. Let’s take a look at what you can do to bulletproof your WordPress website.