Tag Archives | Usability

How to Make a WordPress Website – Make a Brand New Website By the End of Today With These 4 Steps

How to Make a WordPress Website – Make a Brand New Website By the End of Today With These 4 Steps

Want to know how to make a website in just a few hours or less? WordPress is the answer. Here’s a basic 4 step process to that will help you make a website from scratch and be online by the end of today.

Step One) Buy a Domain and Cheap Hosting Plan- In order to make a website, you need these two things. There is no way around it. But the good news is, these are both cheap things to purchase. The hosting account will be the place where you place your website files. The domain name will be the name of the website.

Average Hosting Cost- Less than $10 per hour.

Average Domain Cost- Around $10.

Step Two) Install WordPress on the Domain- What? Install it on the domain? Don’t worry, this is as simple as clicking the WordPress button, then choosing the domain you want to put it on from a drop down list. Done.

Step Three) Customize The WordPress Site- Click on Appearance and choose from 1,000’s of Themes that will change the look and functionality of the website itself. Some themes are very customizable, whereas others are just “”plug and play””.

You can choose between thousands of Plugins as well, which help to further enhance the usability of the website. Some plugins will help you insert YouTube videos, or add star-ratings, or tables, or anything else under the sun you can think of.

Step Four) Publish the Site- All you have to do to put the website onto the web from here is click “”Publish””. Voila! You are on the web with a fully functional website.

The most important step is to find a quality hosting plan that will give you everything you need to make a WordPress website.

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Internet Marketing Tips – How to Reach Global Market With Your WordPress Website

Internet Marketing Tips – How to Reach Global Market With Your WordPress Website

Nowadays, we can see WordPress blog everywhere on the internet. People love it so much as it is not only easy to use, there are also tons of features that are available through plugins module. Setting up a basic website nowadays take merely minutes compare to days or weeks previously. The What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) interface make it easy for people who has no programming knowledge. Creating a website can be done simply by pointing and clicking.

WordPress was originally created as a weblog or blog platform. But now, it has grown so powerful that you can use it to create any type of website and use it as a Content Management System (CMS).

This platform is both free and priceless at the same time. Everyone agrees that it is one of the most powerful software that is easy to set up and simple for maintenance of a blog. There is no question that WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software platforms because it focuses on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

There are features for integrated link management; a search engine -friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; and support for tagging of posts and articles and many others.

In addition to that, automatic filters that provide for proper formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes ) are also included.

One of the advantage is that WordPress is an Open Source blog tool which offers a rich set of blog features as well as a large supporting community. If your business does not have a website yet, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. There is no better time to start with WordPress to establish your online presence today.

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WordPress plugins and some of the popular plugins

WordPress plugins and some of the popular plugins
There are a large number of plugins available for all WordPress users with the intention to enhance and improve their blogging experience. The number of plugins is increasing from day to day, but not all of the plugins are good for you as some may damage your WordPress installation or even harm your site. Some of the plugins that are worth trying out are:
1. Sideblog- this is a way to post short notes on the sidebar with options such as the number of entries to display, defining the sideblog categories and exclusion from RSS feeds. It is useful to post updates and sharing of links. Some of the options include cool themes, made the sidebars invisible from the search robots or adding feeds to the sideblog.
2. Secure and Accessible Contact Form- this is a plugin with a number of features such as extensive security with 16 individual abuse countermeasures, form an overview page to confirm the general configuration of the plugin, maximum accessibility and usability, option to use your own style sheet or extensive on board documentation library if you ever need any help.
3. Sociable- this plugin attaches a list of social bookmarking sites, which allows your visitors to bookmark and it is found at the end of your posts. It automatically add links to your favourite social bookmarking sites on your posts, RSS feeds and pages and you can choose from 99 different sites.
4. Gravatar 2 Plugin- this plugin allows the display Gravatar which is a globally recognized avatar of your commenters. This allows you to distinguish yourself from other users in an online community such as websites, forum or chat rooms. In WordPress, Gravatars are hosted on a single server by encrypting the user’s email address. You can have one avatar for each forum you visit.
5. Search Everything- this plugin allows you to search everything in the database as the default WordPress search engine does not search some pages such as static Pages or metadatas. There are options for you to choose, so you can choose what to search. Some of the options are to search every page, tag, category, comment, attachment, excerpt or non-password protected pages.
6. Admin Drop Down Menu- this is a very useful plugin as it saves you more time. Usually, you have to click a number of times to get from one page to another. With this plugin, just hovers the arrow of your mouse to the category that the page is located to save more time. Instead of going from one page to another before reaching the final destination, you can choose from the menu itself, which can inactivate a second menu from the first.
Do not be scared by the number of plugins available out there. The best thing to do is to do your research. Read blog posts, reviews or comments on the plugins which are widely available in the Internet. Choose those that will enhance your WordPress sites wisely.

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Improve Your Shopping Cart

Improve Your Shopping Cart

If you want visitors to your site to use your shopping cart you need to make improvements to the usability of the cart and to make the purchase process as simple and short as possible.

Did you know that the checkout process is where more sales are lost than any other time during the buying process? Check your analytics and see if you have a large number of individuals leaving your site before finishing the checkout process, if this is happening than you know that you definitely need to make improvements. In order to determine where you need to make shopping cart improvements you can ask someone who is not familiar with your website to go through the process and check out the usability of your shopping cart. Ask them to specifically comment on how accessible the shopping cart is, if it is easy to use, if they ran into problems were they able to find instructions on how to use the cart, and did they find the shipping and payments methods that they prefer to use?

Investigate how easy it is to navigate around finding products. Do you have a search feature and does it give accurate results?

If you belong to any business forums ask members to rate your site and their shopping experience.

Ask yourself how organized your site is, how secure do people feel making purchases and how user friendly is the shopping experience on your site?

Your shopping cart is one of the most important parts of your Website. Periodically evaluating the shopping cart from a user’s point of view can improve not only your shopping cart but improve your sales as well.

Look at your shopping cart objectively does it meet all of your needs as the administrator? Can you manage all of the product fulfillment, payment and shipping needs in a timely manner without mistakes? Evaluate the hosting, customer service and technical support of the company who’s shopping cart you are using. How happy are you with the features? When upgrades are available is there an additional fee or are upgrades free to existing customers?

Does your shopping cart blend in well with your Website? Do you receive the information you need about your customers and their sales? Does your shopping cart have the capability to have an affiliate program, produce a newsletter or evaluate the shopping experience of your customers?

Does your shopping cart grow with your business or have you outgrown the shopping cart?

What do reviewers say about the shopping cart you are using? Can you find customer reviews of the shopping cart and if so, are they favorable?

After evaluating your shopping cart is customer service responsive to your need to make improvements? Do they give you suggestions or upgrades?

Seeing how important your shopping cart is to the success of your online business spending time evaluating how well your present shopping cart is performing and finding out what your customers think about your shopping cart is important and should be done on a regular basis.

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