Tag Archives | Interface

Creating a Sticky Homepage in WordPress

Creating a Sticky Homepage in WordPress The process is relatively simple and is very effective when you want new visitors to your site to read an introduction to your site, but have more instant news updates appear as well. First, navigate to Posts > Add New and write the content you’d like to always be present on your homepage. Under Publish > Visibility (top right side) click Edit. Next, click the check box to ""Stick this post to the front page"". Publish your document, then navigate to Settings > Reading. The default setting for WordPress front page displays is ""your latest posts"" and this what you’ll need to be set to for your latest post content to appear on the homepage. Now that you’ve made a ""sticky homepage"" that particular post will always be at the top. Further customizations can be made under Reading Settings, such as the number of blog posts to show on the home page and whether to include the full text or a summary. In the case of our Site Sparker website, our blog posts are very short so we’ve chosen to post the full text. But if your blog entries are very long, then you should choose the Summary setting so that only a portion of your blog appears on the homepage. That will ensure visitors can scroll very quickly through all of your posts to find what they’re looking for. If this is at all confusing, you can find a video version of this tutorial at the link below, where it’s explained visually, inside the WP interface.

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Top WordPress Gallery Plug-In

Top WordPress Gallery Plug-In

WordPress is known for it’s wonderfully easy to use blogging platform that basically anyone can get the hang of within a day or two. In the past year or two thousands of developers have been developing WordPress plug-ins which is used to make your blogging a more unique experience. Some of the plug-ins is for the blog owner’s enjoyment and some are for the blogs reader’s enjoyment, either way they are very fun and helpful tools that everyone should utilize. One of the hardest things to do, and also one of the most time consuming things to do on WordPress is create a picture gallery so that it appears nicely with proper thumbnails. Many people have given making a WordPress gallery plug-in a shot but not many have made a plug-in that works properly and efficiently. The NextGEN Gallery plug-in for WordPress is absolutely the number on WordPress gallery plug-in currently and it has many great features.

One of the best features of the NextGEN gallery is the ability to be able to create thumbnails automatically without having to do them yourself. The plug-in also has some nice usable effects that you can utilize if you’d like and best of all it has an easy to use
admin interface. Adding picture galleries onto WordPress posts or pages has never been easier with the NextGEN gallery and also has never looked nicer. As WordPress blogs become more well designed and over more content it’s important that you keep yourself in this top league and by using this plug-in you’ll ensure you’re competing with the best pictures on the web. The thumbnails created look very nice for the readers and the interface to manage the pictures is better then any other. Thousands of people have already been integrating picture galleries into their blogs and it’s been helping them all out with boosts in traffic due to higher interactivity then other blogs. People like to see that you’ve spent time on your blog and not just thrown it together in minutes and although it only takes minutes to set-up each gallery it ensures a very attractive looking blog that people will want to visit often. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/

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There Are Many Shopping Cart Types Merchants Can Choose From

There Are Many Shopping Cart Types Merchants Can Choose From

There are several different types of shopping cart options for online business owners to choose from including merchant service shopping carts, hosted shopping carts, and fully integrated shopping carts.

Merchant service shopping carts can be managed through your administration area. They provide an interface to manage product catalogue, define your prices and to change the prices. You can use “Buy” links or buttons located near the product descriptions. These links and buttons when clicked on by the customer bring the customer to the merchant’s site where they enter the personal data and credit card number to complete their transaction. This financial information is obtained off your site thus allowing you to abstain from having to have a secure site. The fact that the customer is directed away from your site may make your customer uneasy. The redirect tells your customer that you are a small business, and they may not like being taken to another site where they may not be familiar with the company that will be solicitation their credit card number.

A hosted shopping car generally needs little or no programming and allows your customer to stay on your site for the financial part of the purchase experience. Hosted shopping carts are a good deal for both the small and medium sized online businesses that do at least $1,000 USD worth of business each month. The fact is that the customer will still be redirected to the hosting site but with interfaces being able to be configured to look just like your site they probably won’t know that they are being redirected. You keep your integrity and look just like the “big corporate guys” but with out the cost of being one. Some programming may be necessary to be able to set up the hosted shopping cart and you want the ability to keep your color scheme to stay the same as your website. In the hosted shopping cart you are able to use your payment gateway and merchant account so that the customer’s credit card statement will contain your company’s name, and not the name of the merchant service. The ability to have your company’s name on the statement is that it avoids charge backs that occur when the customer sees a different name from the one they are expecting.

The fully integrated shopping carts are the best choice for online business owners who can afford them. They have the ability to configure them with extended features that are not possible with the other two options such as allowing for discounts, certificates, ratings and comments from visitors, and the ability to define product categories and subcategories, to calculate shipping costs, and tax. Fully integrated shopping carts do require some good programming skills and can also be used with your own merchant account.

The shopping cart that you choose to use on your Website will help to determine how professional you appear to your customers. The more professional your site appears the more customers will be drawn to your site. The more customers you have, the more sales you will generate. Research all your shopping cart options carefully before deciding.

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How Bloggers Benefit From Premium WordPress Themes1

How Bloggers Benefit From Premium WordPress Themes

WordPress has gained worldwide popularity since it started in 2003. Millions of people take advantage of this open-source, self-hosted blogging platform because it is free, very easy to use, and has a large community. With the growth of blogging came the demand for modern, appealing, and functional blog interface so that companies and individuals can attract more site visitors. That is why more and more people get Premium WordPress Themes.

Premium-designed WordPress themes are popular and increasing these days, with many design agencies and freelance web designers making various themes that suit different needs. Most premium themes are offered at low costs, while others are available for free.

A lot of web designers and design companies make a steady living out of creating WordPress themes, which are purchased for commercial sites and blogs. Sometimes, they earn more from creating custom themes for their clients. Even free premium WordPress themes are useful for designers because these themes help boost their search engine rankings and give them a good online standing. Both paid and free premium themes enable web designers to quickly create quality websites without spending much money.

Premium WordPress Themes do a lot of good for bloggers and site owners. First, premium themes provide WordPress users with a unique personality for their blogs or sites. If a blog stands out from the rest of the pack, it can keep its readers coming back and attract more readers. One will not get that advantage from free regular WordPress themes. A blog with a common theme or layout cannot make a good impression on its readers, as they may think there is nothing special or interesting about the blog. Instead, they will leave the blog and browse again to find more interesting blogs.

Moreover, bloggers do not need to hire web designers to create layouts for their blogs because they can easily get Premium WordPress Themes from the Internet. What’s more, bloggers can choose from a lot of themes available online. Bloggers can even view what they are going to get before purchasing a WordPress theme.

Premium themes are ideal for large online projects whose success is measured by the number of people who visit their blogs or sites. Many blogs for big corporations and online magazines invest in Premium WordPress Themes because these themes boost their credibility and help sustain the interest of their readers. Blogs that use premium themes fare better than others when it comes to product placement and promotion. With the help of premium themes, blogs carry the image that they offer their customers something different from others. This leads to more sales and more satisfied customers.

Some companies use premium-designed WordPress themes for their Content Management System (CMS). Nowadays, CMS is commonly used by online news, magazine, and sports sites.

Available in a wide variety of colors, designs, and formats, premium themes provide more value for money. Premium WordPress Themes are a small investment that can lead to big profits and numerous advantages for businesses and individuals who depend so much on their blogs for survival.

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Making Links WordPress Tutorial

Making Links WordPress Tutorial

To start off, you should first confirm that you’re using the best Permalinks setting for WordPress. Go to Settings > Permalinks, then click the Custom button and add the following code: /%postname%/ This will make nice URLs that are named after your documents instead of the default URL structure ""?p=123"" which is ugly and bad for search engines. The next concept to grasp is the parent-child relationship with pages.

A parent is a top-level page; it’s children, everything else below. Children are also known as sub-pages and they’re a handy way of organizing the content in your site, especially if your template has a drop down menu. Now, let’s say you’re linking from the homepage to a page several sub-pages deep.

First, go to the new page you’ve made and copy the URL which appears right under the page title. For example: WordPress-training/editing-content/adding-images/ Notice that I don’t have the domain name. It’s not necessary. Now, if I’m on the home page and I’m making a link to the Adding Images page, I just select my text, click the link icon and paste the link in. But what if I want to make a link from one page to another, in this case a link from this page: WordPress-training/editing-content/adding-images/ to this page:

WordPress-training/editing-content/adding-videos/ The correct link on the Adding Images page would look like this: ../adding-videos/ Notice the extra periods and forward slash? This is the bit of code that tells the system to go ""up"" one level to editing-content, then come back ""down"" to the page that exists at the same level. If this is at all confusing, you can find a video version of this tutorial at the link below, where it’s explained visually, inside the WP interface.

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Top Seven WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

Top Seven WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

Many bloggers are using WordPress and with good reason. It is the most popular blogging software in use today and one of the biggest reasons is the ability to add functionality through the use of plugins. Plugins can turn your run-of-the-mill blog into a high powered online tool capable of bringing traffic and profit to your site. Consider using the top WordPress plugins on your current WordPress blog or on a future blog. You won’t be disappointed. Happy Blogging.

7. Page Mash

This is a simple WordPress page management plugin. The Ajax interface allows you to drag-and-drop the pages into the order you like, modify the page structure by dragging a page to become a child or parent and toggle the page to be hidden from output. You can also see the id of the page which is often helpful for theme developers. If you have a WordPress site with more than just a handful of pages, PageMash is extremely helpful.

6. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engine by allowing you to fine tune things like your page title and meta tags. This plugin is extremely easy to use as it works great straight out of the box. If you are an advanced user, you can customize virtually everything. And if you are a developer, this plugin has an API so your themes can access and extend the functionality of the plugin.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Perhaps the most downloaded WordPress plugin, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin not only automatically creates a site map linking to all your pages and posts, it also notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com when you make changes to you site. If you want to include pages that are part of your site but not part of you WordPress managed content, you can do that to.

4. WP Super Cache

If you have a popular WordPress website you should seriously consider running WordPress Super Cache to improve the performance of your website. If you are not caching your pages, then every time a visitor comes to your site, WordPress has to pull together various pieces of information out of a database to put your page together. If you have a high traffic site, this is can really become a problem. WP Super Cache will store a copy of each of the pages on your website so that after the page has been assembled from the database once, WordPress can rest and just keep serving the static html copy of the page. This might be a bit techie, but the idea is you can dramatically speed up your site and reduce the load on your server by using WP Super Cache. If for no other reason, use this plugin so you don’t have to panic when your friend says, “”I just Dugg your site.””

3. NextGEN Image Gallery

If you want to display a photo gallery, show a series of product images, or just publish a slide show from your most recent vacation, the NextGEN image gallery is the plugin for you. NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Among the many features, NextGEN Gallery includes a thumbnail generator, sortable albums, and a water mark function.

2. cformsII Form Plugin

If your looking for a free form management plugin, cformsII is an extremely powerful plugin for setting up contact forms on your WordPress site. You don’t need to know any PHP or write any code. You can visually build forms in the WordPress admin panel. Then, navigate to the page or post where you want to use the form and there is a button in the WYSIWYG editor that you click and up pops a list of forms that you have made. Simply click on the one you want and your form is inserted into your page. Update your page and you the form is live. You can specify required fields, default values, and there are plenty of styles to make your form blend in perfectly with your site.

1. Gravity Forms

If you want the best forms plugin WordPress has to offer, you need Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is an amazing plugin for managing online forms. Some of the incredibly useful features include conditional form fields which means you can show or hide a field or entire sections of the form based on a value selected in another field. You can pre-populate form fields using querystring, shortcode, function or hooks.You can even schedule when forms are available by assigning a start date and end date for when your form is live on your site. Supposed you want to run a contest where the first 50 people that fill out the form win a prize. Gravity Forms lets you set a limit on the number of entries a form can receive. Pretty much anything you ever wanted a form to do, Gravity Forms can do it.

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How Bloggers Benefit From Premium WordPress Themes

How Bloggers Benefit From Premium WordPress Themes

WordPress has gained worldwide popularity since it started in 2003. Millions of people take advantage of this open-source, self-hosted blogging platform because it is free, very easy to use, and has a large community. With the growth of blogging came the demand for modern, appealing, and functional blog interface so that companies and individuals can attract more site visitors. That is why more and more people get Premium WordPress Themes.

Premium-designed WordPress themes are popular and increasing these days, with many design agencies and freelance web designers making various themes that suit different needs. Most premium themes are offered at low costs, while others are available for free.

A lot of web designers and design companies make a steady living out of creating WordPress themes, which are purchased for commercial sites and blogs. Sometimes, they earn more from creating custom themes for their clients. Even free premium WordPress themes are useful for designers because these themes help boost their search engine rankings and give them a good online standing. Both paid and free premium themes enable web designers to quickly create quality websites without spending much money.

Premium WordPress Themes do a lot of good for bloggers and site owners. First, premium themes provide WordPress users with a unique personality for their blogs or sites. If a blog stands out from the rest of the pack, it can keep its readers coming back and attract more readers. One will not get that advantage from free regular WordPress themes. A blog with a common theme or layout cannot make a good impression on its readers, as they may think there is nothing special or interesting about the blog. Instead, they will leave the blog and browse again to find more interesting blogs.

Moreover, bloggers do not need to hire web designers to create layouts for their blogs because they can easily get Premium WordPress Themes from the Internet. What’s more, bloggers can choose from a lot of themes available online. Bloggers can even view what they are going to get before purchasing a WordPress theme.

Premium themes are ideal for large online projects whose success is measured by the number of people who visit their blogs or sites. Many blogs for big corporations and online magazines invest in Premium WordPress Themes because these themes boost their credibility and help sustain the interest of their readers. Blogs that use premium themes fare better than others when it comes to product placement and promotion. With the help of premium themes, blogs carry the image that they offer their customers something different from others. This leads to more sales and more satisfied customers.

Some companies use premium-designed WordPress themes for their Content Management System (CMS). Nowadays, CMS is commonly used by online news, magazine, and sports sites.

Available in a wide variety of colors, designs, and formats, premium themes provide more value for money. Premium WordPress Themes are a small investment that can lead to big profits and numerous advantages for businesses and individuals who depend so much on their blogs for survival.

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lynda.com Tutorial | WordPress: Creating Custom Widgets and Plugins—Exploring WordPress plugins

Watch the entire course at www.lynda.com In WordPress: Creating Custom Widgets and Plugins, Drew Falkman teaches PHP developers how to create custom functionality for WordPress 2.0 through 3.0 using widgets and plugins. This course starts by installing and setting up WordPress 3.0 on both Mac and Windows, then provides an in-depth look at tasks related to these WordPress add-ons: installing and administering, building and customizing, creating editable options and database tables, working with posts and pages, and utilizing jQuery and AJAX. There are also tutorials dedicated to promoting a widget or plugin, adding security, and localizing the interface.

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