As a serious user of WordPress, one of the things you will do most often is run through its installation process. Whether it’s on your own site, a local development environment, or the live site of a client, the 5-minute WordPress install will be part of your daily life—like eating and breathing. Usually setting up a website with WordPress consists of the following steps: Download and unpack the latest version of WordPress Create a MySQL database and user with all necessary privileges Upload WordPress files via FTP Run the installation Done You can even skip part of the installation by […]
Best Practices for WordPress Theme Development
WordPress is slightly addictive. I always thought of it as a gateway drug into the world of web development. Maybe you started off just needing a simple website. You figured out how to install WordPress on your server, chose a theme that suited most of your needs, set up some widgets, maybe installed some plugins, and that was it for the beginning. Then came the day you really wanted something on your page but couldn’t find a plugin for it, and it wasn’t part of the theme options either. Or maybe someone told you about Firebug and showed you how to […]
The Best Web Analytics Tools for WordPress
“What gets measured, gets managed.” -Peter Drucker Imagine you wanted to visit a new restaurant on the opposite side of town. Although it’s in an area of the city you haven’t visited before, you understand its location from the map. Getting there should be completely doable with some trial and error, and maybe asking for the way once of twice. No biggie. Now imagine when you leave the house, somebody blindfolded you, spun you around a few times and then wished you good luck before sending you off to find said restaurant. You’re left groping blindly through the streets trying to […]
The Ultimate Guide to Updating Your WordPress Site
WordPress is constantly evolving. With the help of trusty developers and the constant feedback from the community, the platform is frequently updated. Besides new features, updates address security vulnerabilities, and generally improve the overall WordPress experience. Keeping your site updated with the newest version will give you the latest and greatest that WordPress has to offer. However, staying up to date can be tedious. Unforeseen hiccups, compatibility issues with plugins, and other unfortunate consequences are not unheard of. More than a few users have had their site break, experienced downtime, or lost data due to problems with the update process. Of […]
23 Must-Have Apps for Running a Website from Your Mobile Device
There’s no denying it: mobile devices are on the rise. Not only are more and more people using their devices to access websites, but phones and tablets are quickly becoming important tools for our careers. With the evolution of devices, we (as people) are becoming more mobile ourselves. Many internet entrepreneurs actually start out with the specific goal of being able to work from anywhere. In fact, this trend is increasingly more common for people across all careers. People simply do not want to be tethered to an office. The reason many of us opt for smart phones and tablets is because we don’t […]
How to Introduce Social Proof to Your Site
In 1968 two social psychologists made an experiment. They put various numbers of people, starting with one person and gradually working their way up to 30, on a street corner and had them look up at an empty sky for sixty seconds. The result of the experiment was that the bigger the crowd of skygazers, the more likely it was for passersby to stop and look up as well to find out what all the commotion was about. Placing a group of thirty upward-looking men on the corner caused more than 80% of pedestrians to stop and tilt their heads. […]
The Best Tools for A/B Split Testing in WordPress
It’s probably safe to say that everyone who runs a website wants it to convert better. Whether that means more email sign-ups, sales, donations, memberships, leads, downloads, or whatever it is you are trying to achieve with your presence on the web. But let’s be honest, do you really know what makes your visitors tick? Do you have any idea why some customers buy your product and others don’t? Why some decide to stay on your site and others are leaving right away? A website’s success—the customer’s decisions to buy or not, to stay or leave—depend on a variety of […]
4 Ways to Turn WordPress into a Multilingual Website
There are plenty of good reasons to offer your website in more than one language. Having a multilingual site can create opportunities to reach different clients and markets on a global scale. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t offer out-of-the box support for running a bi- or multilingual website. However, there are a number of plugins available to bridge this language barrier. Generally speaking, you can choose between 4 different ways to offer multilingual content on your WordPress site: One post per language—Each language version of an article is set up as its own post. These are then linked together, indicating that one is the […]
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