Top Benefits of Opting for WordPress Development

There’s no shortage of articles across the internet which supposedly tell you what to stand to gain from custom WordPress development.

This post isn’t like them. 

Instead of raving on about the ‘SEO benefits’ and ‘responsive design’ and ‘cross-platform compatibility’, which, let’s face it, are standards features you can get from thousands of good themes and plugins, this post will seek to come straight to the point.

What exactly do you as a business/agency owner stand to gain from bespoke WordPress solutions?

What “Custom WordPress Development” means:

To clear some notions; WordPress development usually includes one or both of the following:

• Custom Theme Development

Editing/rewriting the code of your existing theme or creating a custom theme from scratch

• Custom Plugin Development

Installing/implementing existing plugins (free or premium), editing the code in those plugins so for error-free performance, and creating a custom plugin from scratch

WordPress customization is for creating a website that you want, without errors and issues. That translates to remodeling the look, feel, and functionalities.

There are additional services your WordPress development company could provide. None of them would include “conversion rate optimization”, “competition assessment”, “better content” etc. Those are nothing but meaningless rehashing of your business goals which a development company will have nothing to do with anyway.

WordPress customization: A Metaphor

So instead of buying a suit from, say, Walmart, you are getting a ‘tailor-made’ suit created specifically for your ‘measurements’.

Here’s where it gets interesting: You are the one who has to create a strategy for online success; the development company only implements it on your website. Basically: The developers will lead the horse to water, but you’ll have to make it drink.

Benefit of WordPress Development:

You get exactly what you pay for; nothing more, nothing less.

Although WordPress can be customized with themes and plugins, a vast majority of them are created to appeal to a broad range of users for simple commercial viability. Let me give you an example:

Example: Suppose you want to integrate the live chat feature on your website, and for the same ends you find a plugin you like. You will then need to see if it has:

• Required features: Less means it’s not of use to you, More means it’s needlessly complicated
• Payment Plans that don’t put a strain on your pocket
• Team-player: Only after you have bought, installed, and run the plugin will you know if it’s even compatible with the rest of your site

You bypass all those considerations with a custom solution: Same functionality, components with those features that you specify and need, and it’s made to be compatible with your WordPress setup.

Scalability, performance, SEO-benefits, and everything else are just icing on the cake. You shouldn’t have to be reminded of those. WordPress packs these ‘features’, it’s only fair that your solutions pack these too without you having to ask for them.

Endnote

To adapt a website to your needs, not the other way around: Custom WordPress Development solves problems that are specific to you.

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Keeping up with the Community: WordPress 4.5 Beta 2

After a whole armada of patches released with WordPress 4.5 Beta 1 just last week, the team of developers working tirelessly on core has already come up with new patches and fixes.

In an attempt to ease the non-coders and beginners into our awesome community, here is a brief overview of major fixes and patches in the latest 4.5 Beta 2 release:

1. strip_meta() fatal error on resize in ImageMagick

There was a fatal error when users uploaded images and resized it via ImageMagick (RCIG plugin: aka, responsive images). This occurred due to incomplete meta stripping during resize.

The patch (33642) resolves this error by changing default quality from 90 to 82. Further patches added new thumbnail and image resize functions. The patch also removes all image profiles except ICC, ICM, and EXIF set as image property. 

2. “Horizontal Rule” in WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE)

New inline patterns are being added to core. The Horizontal Rule <hr> patch is for TinyMCE text editor in WordPress.

The purpose, for those unfamiliar with this HTML tag, is to create a line break that separates content. The Horizontal rule (<hr>) has been tested on iPhone, Mac, and Chrome and behaving well.

3. “Paste as Text” notice is now dismiss-able (TinyMCE)

Another patch added to 4.5 Beta 2 makes the oft annoying “Paste as Text” warning modal permanently dismiss-able after second time. This should improve editorial workflow.

The development on this feature is now closed. It is now set to be released with WordPress 4.5.

4. Selective Refresh support enabled in core themes

This customization feature gives users the ability to preview titles and taglines while a core theme (like Twenty Eleven) is in use.

Users can now shift + click to focus on control areas and test the PHP filters which will be applicable once you publish.

All said, there are a little over 100 changes and fixes that have been made within the week since last beta release.

Endnote

The version is still under development, so it’s not meant for live or production websites.

You can do your part as a budding WordPress developer by downloading the nightly builds, downloading the beta zip, testing it yourself, and suggesting (or maybe even making) improvements.

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Basic Security Tips for WordPress Beginners

 

Welcome to WordPress.

You are now a part of a sprawling community of WordPress users, developers, and geeks. And your website is one of 16 million others currently powered by WordPress.

You already know about user-friendliness, the vast variety, and utter control you get to exercise over your WordPress website. But it’s not all fun and games until you learn how to keep it safe.

WordPress is as secure as you make it. So let’s harden your defenses against common attacks.

1. Back Ups

These are necessary for maintenance, security, and just general peace of mind.

A backup is your safety net in times when a) your website crashes, b) you lock yourself out, and c) you get hacked.

All you need to do is install a trustworthy backup plugin and use it to create scheduled backups of your website. Try one like Backup Buddy (premium, has good auto restore features), BackUpWordPress (free), WordPress Backup to Dropbox (mostly free, great for creating and storing site wide + database backups on cloud), and SaaS like VaultPress, UpdraftPlus, et al.

Tip: Create a backup schedule that coincides with your general maintenance schedule. Essentially, anytime you upgrade something on your website, your backup should save it. 

2. Download from Trusted sources only

Most WordPress websites are open to attack through theme and plugin vulnerabilities.

Make sure you download absolutely nothing from sources that reek of malicious activity: typically websites offering premium goods for free are major culprits. A few bucks saved now will come back to give you grief later.

Trusted sources like the official WordPress repositories (for themes and plugins) are safe, along with large marketplaces like Envato (ThemeForest and CodeCanyon), iThemes, StudioPress, etc.

Tip: Exercise the same caution before hiring a custom WordPress development services provider.

3. Strong Passwords and Admin username

It may sound harsh, but if you’re too lazy to change the default username and couldn’t be bothered to use a strong password, you deserve to get hacked. At this point you’re practically inviting attackers.

Long, strong passwords are your first line of defense against ‘standard’ brute force attacks. The length and complexity exponentially increases the time it would take to crack your password. Mix up random letters in upper and lower cases with numbers and characters.

Also change the default username (“admin”, are you kidding me?) to something less obvious.

Tip: Set up a new account and assign admin role to that, and delete the previous “admin” username account. It’s one of the simplest ways.

4. Security Plugins

Oh, now we’re talking.

Security plugins are your website’s personal anti-virus systems, in that they will whet your website and exterminate any malicious bits left behind by potential attackers. This is essential: WordFence (The best and largely free plugin with exhaustive features for site security, login, two factor authentication, etc.)

There are more options (like Login Lockdown, iThemes Security, etc.) but WordFence has enough features to do all their jobs on its own.

Tip: Feature packed plugins fulfill more requirements, and make it easy to keep your plugin-count under tight control. This is good for both security and performance.

5. Update Consistently

Most good Plugins and themes, and the WordPress core itself, roll out updates on a regular basis. Your job is to update to the latest version.

You may have noticed that within a few weeks of every major platform update (last one was 4.4 Clifford), you will get minor version release notices (last one was 4.4.2). These are fixes for security vulnerabilities.  Themes and plugins also keep pace with the updates for error-free performance and more tightly-knit security.

So update. Consistently.

Endnote

Once you have set up a routine for maintenance and security, you can progress to advanced tactics to harden WordPress by checking out even more security tips and this complete checklist.

It’s a war out there. Do your part by keeping your wits around you, and be safe.

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Everything You Need to Know While Picking a Responsive WordPress Theme

The rapid use of different mobile devices for browsing internet influences web designers and webmasters to create mobile-friendly websites. With the use of a responsive WordPress theme, you can design or optimize your business website for different mobile devices and viewports. These themes are cross-browser compatible and offers lots of customization options to improve the usability of your site.
 

However, with such an extensive range of options, it becomes quite challenging to make an intelligent decision on what to consider while picking a good responsive theme – free or premium.
 

To make your work simpler, we bring you some of the useful tips you need to consider while picking out the most suitable and powerful responsive theme for your site.

1. Decide what resolutions are supported and obviously how
 

If you are new into the web design world, let me tell you that responsive designs utilize Media Queries to reformat the design of a site when the screen resolution is under a particular number of pixels. For instance, a site’s design might restructure for the mobile device when it encounters the screen size is 480x or below.
 

You can make a use of Resizer tool in your browser to automatically put your PC browser window to test common device sizes. With this tool, you can test the desired responsive theme before making any final call.

2. Consider the content hierarchy
 

If your site’s content doesn’t fit at mobile screen sizes, then you can simply drop it out from your site. For instance, widgets and sidebars of a website are usually hidden at smaller screen sizes and they won’t appear on a scrollable page.
 

It might be okay for your purposes, but identifying what is hidden, and what is re-designed as your window size becomes smaller.
 

However, with the use of good responsive theme, you will easily handle your sidebars and also create flexible widget areas for your site. With content reformatted for smaller screens, you need to consider the content hierarchy to make sure that the order in which it arrives is suitable for how you propose to showcase your site rather then moving down the content on the scrolling page.
 

3. Know how menus are managed
 

The width of your navigation area can be affected by several items and the length of your navigation labels. In fact, it can affect the look of your navigation bar on different devices. If you can’t handle your navigation bar, then your nav might split in odd places on small mobile devices.
 

But you can choose the best responsive theme that uses the compelling navigation system. When the desktop version uses a traditional link bar, then this changes to a tappable menu while reformats for small screen devices.
 

You can also make a use of custom WordPress theme development at HireWPGeeks to ensure a more accessible and usable design for your site.

4. Advertisement on your website
 

Some of the ads serving systems do not optimize the ad content for different devices. And this creates conflicting issues with a responsive design. In fact, ads are dealt with JS tags and iFrames, and it can cause formatting issues badly.
 

If you want to serve ads, try to work out on a strategy of how you will either turn on/off advertisement at multiple sizes, or you can also provide alternative ads only for mobile visitors.

5. Video handling
 

Videos play a vital role in encouraging potential visitors towards your site. But it can create issues with the responsive design because of the nature of embedding. If you want to optimize the size of your videos for multiple devices, then you need to employ the special HTML markup correctly.
 

Note: if you don’t find a video in the theme’s demo, you can ask the author for any provisions made in your responsive theme to handle video content.

Conclusion
 

These are some of the useful tips that will help you create a mobile-friendly design for your website.

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How Switching your Website to WordPress can Benefits you

Undoubtedly, WordPress is the most promising software used for building and customizing company websites, service-based sites, professional and personal blogs and even e-commerce stores. This content management system has gained a lot of popularity because it’s advanced and user-friendly features including the extensive range of themes and plugins.
 

With the help of WordPress themes and plugins, you can customize the look and feel of your site according to your needs. And the best part of using WordPress is that you don’t need to a technical expert. Yes, you heard it right. You can edit your site, without getting your hands dirty in coding. And this is the main reason why businesses are switching their traditional sites with WordPress.
 

Here, in this post, we will discuss the five advantages of switching your site to WordPress.

1. WordPress is Manageable
 

It is super-easy to create, edit and delete the content on WordPress sites. WordPress also keeps their back-end upgraded so you don’t need to take stress on the part of a site’s safety and security.
You can install the plugins and themes into your sites without any technical knowledge and also tweak the design within a few clicks. In fact, you can easily update your installed themes to the newer coding standards just after creating a solid foundation.

2. WordPress is Accessible
 

This content management system allows you to add, edit and publish content on the site anywhere, anytime with an internet connection.
 

It means you access your site and upload the content even from your mobile devices. Isn’t it incredible!

3. Search Engine friendly
 

There is a false myth that WordPress is a search engine optimized content management system.
Of course, it is a search engine friendly tool, but still you need to optimize your site manually to get best possible results. And with the help of SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast, you can optimize the content of your site for search engines quickly and efficiently.
 

Note: WordPress offers a super-easy framework which makes it simple for Google to crawl your site on SERPs.

4. WordPress is fully Customizable
 

Customize or tweak the design of your WordPress site/blog with beautiful and fully responsive themes. WordPress offers myriads of free and paid themes that you can use to create a customized site. You can change the design, color, size and overall appearance of your site within a few clicks.
 

Well, you can also hire the WordPress customization expert that can help you in creating more advanced, more reliable and more professional website in a short time period.

5. Easy to learn CMS
 

Now you don’t need to be a technical expert for creating a professional looking WordPress website. You don’t even need to learn any programming languages like JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and HTML.
 

In fact, you can also watch tutorial videos on how to set up a first business site on WordPress? Or other related tutorials to gather some basic knowledge about this CMS.
 

With the guidance of video tutorials, you can create and develop anything from a business site to well-developed online store, without getting your hands dirty in codes.


Conclusion
 

WordPress as a content management system makes it simple to set up a fully-functional and intuitive website, without any coding. Plus, it offers countless benefits that you won’t find in any other CMS software. And that is the reason why people are converting their HTML sites into WordPress.

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Advantages Associated with Responsive WordPress Themes

From the today’s point of view, responsive web design is playing an indispensable role in the web designing sector. The growing usability of smartphones and tablets are imposing the website owners to optimize their conventional websites for different mobile devices and screen sizes.

However, designing a website for different devices and mobile platforms is not a cup of tea for non-technical users. It requires serious coding, time, money and in-depth web design technique. But with the introduction of Responsive WordPress themes, you can easily optimize your website in minutes.

WordPress offers plenty of responsive themes that will help you create not only a beautiful web design for your site, but you can also make your site compatible with multiple devices such as desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Plus, these themes are packed with various advanced features such as valid and secure coding, cross-browser compatibility, SEO and

performance optimized, and multiple language support.

In this blog post, we will share some advantages of using responsive WordPress themes for your WordPress websites.

1. One Site version from multiple devices

The best thing about responsive themes is that they look amazing on different devices and screen sizes. It means you can see a website version on all smartphones and large desktop computers. A responsive theme reduces the work of building multiple site versions for different devices (such as desktop computers and smartphones).

So, it is better to use a fully-responsive theme for your website as it will optimize your content, images and other aspects for different devices and mobile platforms.

Well, you can also opt for WordPress theme customization services if you want a fully-fledged mobile-ready website for your business.

2. Increase traffic on your website

Around 40% of web traffic comes from mobile phones, and having a responsive theme means you are allowing mobile visitors to access your site from their mobile devices. Through this, you will increase your web traffic and convert them into potential customers.

With responsive themes, you can create and customize your website to make it more engaging and eye-catching. You can instantly construct beautiful and well-coded web pages that can attract both web customers and search engines such as Google and Bing.

3. Enhanced Brand Awareness
 

A design of a website represents you and your brand. So, it is important for you to build a website that can fulfill the needs of both the desktop viewers and mobile viewers. You can give your visitors the enhanced user-experience by integrating fully-functional responsive theme.

You can give your web customers the opportunity to access your website even from their mobile phone. And if you have an eshop, then allow them to buy products online right from their smartphones or iOS phones.

4. Boosts search engine ranking

Search engine optimization is the most advanced online marketing technique that promotes your online business/website among web audience across the world. Under this technique, your website is optimized with an objective to generate the higher ranking for search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

But if you have a responsive WordPress theme, then you can instantly increase your search engine ranking because half of the searches being down with the mobile devices by the mobile visitors– which shares a huge percentage in web traffic.

Conclusion

So, what are you waiting for? Pick out the best responsive theme from the pool and integrate in your site to reap all the above mentioned advantages.

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Are You Struggling To Manage Your HTML Site? Migrate To WordPress Now!

Earlier, before the invention of WordPress, a popular and flexible Content Management System, websites were developed by compiling static HTML pages together wherein they all had the similar layout, but different content.

But the traditional method of developing a website was not up to the mark. In fact, there were times when styles and scripts were coded with the HTML framework, and this gave way to issues such as slow loading of the site as millions and thousands of same code will be loaded for each and every page.

Therefore, most of the companies (who have HTML websites) are switching their sites to WordPress.
The popularity of WordPress is not hidden from us and through this blog post, we will find out the reasons why people should migrate their traditional HTML site to Wordpress.

1. Develop Websites without Any Coding

WordPress is the easy-to-use content management system that let web user (with least web development knowledge) to develop their own website. It means you can design and develop a website, without generating a single line of code. You can easily add posts and pages, update content; embed images and videos without any technical assistance. Isn’t it cool?

2. Open to Search Engines

WordPress is much better for SEO motive as you will find many SEO plugins for your site which will help you get higher rank in search engines like Google and Bing. And if we compare WordPress with static HTML websites, then you can discover that WordPress is packed with numerous SEO features and functions that will help you increase your online reputation.

WordPress also offers various SEO plugins that will allow you optimize your site for search engines.
Now get higher ranking in Google by developing a site over WordPress.

3. Cost-effective

WordPress allows you to post, publish and update a new content in a website with ease. You can do all the managing work by your own, without hiring any professional web designer and developer –this saves both time and money.

But if you want to convert your existing HTML site into WordPress, then you need to hire a reliable WordPress development company that can offer you HTML to WordPress conversion services at affordable price.

4. Safe and Secure

WordPress offers a strong community support that means hundreds of professional designers and developers develop the system from the documentation to the coding itself. So we can say that WordPress websites are secure enough. In fact, it regularly releases new versions that come with advanced security fixes.

Plus, it offers tons of security plugins that will protect your site from hackers and other malicious activities.

5. It Offers Great Flexibility

Want to integrate social media, or want to add contact forms, registration forms or any other functionality into your site, use WordPress plugins. WordPress offers millions of useful plugins that will help you extend the functionality of your site, without any coding.

To an addition, it also comes with tons of beautiful and attractive themes that will give a fresh, crisp and appealing look to your site. You can change the design of your site in few minutes.

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