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What You Need To Know About AMP And Instant Articles

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Featured

Published

March 22, 2016

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While there have been many efforts to make the web faster, the mobile web is still pretty slow. This can be attributed to slow mobile networks or to websites that aren’t optimized for mobile. But ever since mobile web use surpassed desktop usage, companies have been working to build better, faster mobile web experiences. They’ve seen how a slow web page can affect their profits. For every second it takes their website to load, they lose a substantial percentage of visitors. In fact, according to Kissmetrics, “47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or […]

8 Ways To Increase Website Traffic Without Creating New Content

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Published

March 21, 2016

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One of the most common pieces of advice to increase website traffic is to “create great content on a regular basis”. Even I have said the same in the past. It makes sense. High-quality, relevant content is a key component in bringing visitors to your site and the reason why content marketing has been all the rage these past years. Plus, with its history as a blogging platform, WordPress is perfectly suited to build content-centered websites. However, content creation has its own set of challenges, the biggest of which: finding the time. In fact, in a 2015 survey lack of […]

Top 5 Sites To Hire Great WordPress Developers And Designers

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Beginners, Featured

Published

March 18, 2016

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I had just written the #1 resumes bestseller on Amazon and had hit over 40,000 Kindle downloads. All I had to do next was to build a website to help promote it. “That should be easy!” I thought. I was so wrong. When I created my first website, I overspent on my budget, couldn’t complete the project, and ultimately failed. I know firsthand some of the challenges faced when building a WordPress site. I’m here to share my lessons so that you don’t have to experience the challenges that I ran into. At the time, this was my first foray into […]

How Social Media Can Be Used To Launch A Developer’s Career

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Community, Featured

Published

March 16, 2016

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I went into writing this article with wide eyes. “I’m going to find a handful of devs who have started (or propelled) their careers through social media.” And sure, social media has been a helpful part of many developers’ marketing strategies. But what I found wasn’t so straightforward as a list of developers with great origin stories. In fact, I found many who didn’t find social media all that useful at all. The insights provided by the devs I spoke with are even more interesting than what I originally hoped to find. A “Big Picture” Discussion About Social Media The […]

Top Free Transactional Email Alternatives To Mandrill

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Published

March 15, 2016

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For a while, Mandrill has been popular among users, especially when it comes to sending transactional emails in bulk. Mandrill ensures timely delivery of your emails, as well as reduces the load on your own server, and does not require you to manage email from your infrastructure. However, recently Mandrill announced that it will soon discontinue its free tier plan, and after March 16, new users can only register via MailChimp, not Mandrill. Plus, by April 27, all existing users will be required to merge their Mandrill accounts with MailChimp. You can read more about this development here. MailChimp, the parent […]

The Globalization Of WordPress: WordCamp Europe, Global Translation Day, And More

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Community, Featured

Published

March 14, 2016

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WordCamp Europe announced last week that more than 2000 tickets have been sold, making it the largest WordCamp to date. The first 1700 tickets sold out in January, six months before the event, which forced organizers to expand the venue. Tickets are going fast — there are fewer than 100 tickets left. According to WP Tavern, “Based on the attendees confirmed so far, WordCamp Europe 2016 will have 58 countries represented, which is six more than the event had in 2014 and 2015. Including micro-sponsor tickets, the countries with the highest number of attendees include Germany (8%), Netherlands (8%), UK […]

How To Convince Clients Of The Benefits Of Using WordPress

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Beginners, Featured

Published

March 14, 2016

2 Comments

“Is WordPress right for my website?” Anyone building WordPress sites for clients likely has to deal with this question on a regular basis. As it turns out, client education is as much part of this business as installing plugins and writing CSS. For WordPress professionals, the platform is second nature and the benefits of using WordPress for building websites are completely obvious. However, we often forget that clients don’t possess that same knowledge. For some, that really isn’t a problem. All they want is a website and they don’t care about what’s running it. Others, however, do care and sometimes […]

Making The Most Of AMP For WordPress

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Featured, Plugins

Published

March 10, 2016

5 Comments

Before responsive web design and the ubiquity of high-speed mobile Internet, most websites built a special, mobile version of their site. A mobile version that stripped away most of the site’s fancy CSS and other functionality to provide a faster version. At the time, this was a necessary evil as a desktop site was never going to load or display properly on a tiny screen with a slow Internet connection. With the introduction of a fast Internet connection for mobile devices, responsive web design allowed websites to create one design that could work on any device. But, as websites have […]

People React To Emoji Reactions Plugin

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Featured, News, Security

Published

March 9, 2016

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On Sunday, Gary Pendergast announced his work to bring emoji reaction support to WordPress, and the community had some reactions of its own. As of now, you can download the emoji reaction plugin to allow users to respond to your posts with a smile or frown, rather than a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. The idea is much like the recent changes made to Facebook. Once the idea of making emojis part of core, the community had some strong opinions. Some were in favor and genuinely excited about the prospect of allowing emojis to be a part of everyday […]

9 Things WordPress Developers Wish Clients Knew About Building Websites

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Community, Featured

Published

March 9, 2016

1 Comment

We’ve all heard the client horror stories. You know, the ones that bring to mind a certain comic from The Oatmeal? Still, if you’re a client and unsure of what goes into the development process, coming to a place of understanding means viewing things from the developer’s perspective. To help out clients (and give devs some peace of mind), we’ve put together a list of nine things WordPress developers wish clients knew about the site design and development process. A look through this list ought to act as a bit of validation for devs and be highly informative for current or […]

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