Gravity Forms Gives Your WordPress Site Super Powers

Posted on May 16, 2012 Written by Leave a Comment

gravity forms superheroIf you have a WordPress site, you can give your site abilities you only dreamed of when you install the Gravity Forms Plugin. It is a premium plugin which means there is a fee involved. The personal level license starts at 39.00 and the developer license is 199.00. It is well worth it and if you are a developer, it is essential. Why do I love Gravity Forms? Let me count the ways:

  1. Gravity Forms is easy. You simply name the form and start dragging fields into it. You edit the title of the filed and add directions to filling out the filed if needed and you are good to go. Really, a cave man could do it.
  2. You can create simple contact forms with almost any form maker. The real beauty of Gravity Forms is the ability to make most any kind of form, such as a lead generation form or a product or service purchase form, which sends you the completed form responses in an e-mail and keeps it in the database. You can then export the form data into a csv file.
  3. Gravity Forms works with PayPal Pro or [Read more...]
Filed Under: WordPress Plugins

Less Scary Way to Move a WordPress Sites From One Place To Another

Posted on April 11, 2012 Written by Leave a Comment

Red Headed Lady with Fear of migrating her WordPress site.Once when I was first starting out I wanted to move one of my WordPress sites from one host to another. I called the hosting companies tech support and was told to copy the files into the new directory. I did that and it did not work. I was so green then I didn’t understand that it is not so easy when you are using a database program and the database has to come over too and be synced with those files. At least I still had a fully functioning site on the other host and finally got someone to help me migrate the site in the proper way. I still hate the process even though now I have a secret weapon I am going to share with you today.

Using Backup Buddy for WordPress Backups and Migrations

I never do extensive repairs or customizations to a live site.  Instead, I make a mirror site on a sub-directory of one of my hosting accounts, using it as a test site. This way, I can make the changes, see that they work and get approval from the client before moving the mirror site back to overwrite the original.

In some cases, creating the mirror site could take longer than actually [Read more...]

Filed Under: WordPress

How to Choose a WordPress Theme: Oh My! There Are So Many!

Posted on January 16, 2012 Written by Leave a Comment

I did this presentation at both  WordCamp Birmingham and WordCamp Atlanta. I have included the video and the slides below. What are your favorite ways to choose a theme?

View the Slideshow:

Oh My! There Are So Many!

View more presentations from New Tricks

 

Filed Under: Atlanta WordPress, WordPress Tutorials, WP Theme Customization Tagged: ,

Four Reasons Not To Use Go Daddy To Host Your WordPress Site

Posted on December 23, 2011 Written by Leave a Comment

Red Crcle with slash for No SignI had a questions come in today about why I do not recommend Go Daddy for my WordPress clients. Here is my response to the great question.

First let me say,  it doesn’t matter where you register your domains, so Go Daddy is fine for that,  but I have found several problems with using Go Daddy for hosting WordPress sites and ask new clients to change to bluhost when we are building or updating a WordPress Go Daddy site. When I have not insisted, sooner or later we end up moving it for performance reasons.  Here is my reason for not wanting to use Go Daddy.

First,  Go Daddy does not use the industry standard C-Panel interface so it is a pain in the neck to go in and work on the databases and so forth, if you need to. Whereas I am not really a back-end person, but I can go into the C-Panel in bluehost and change the memory allotment and add new databases, view and edit the files and such very easily.

Second, there are usually performance problems with intermittent periods of extreme slowness for their WordPress sites.  I have heard it has to do with their server set up being far from the databases and software so the calls to serve up the dynamic content takes longer. Then when you call and tell them you are having issues they will deny anything is wrong or suggest that you need a virtual private server. Most of my clients do not need anything other than economy hosting on bluehost and get great performance. Only Larger businesses and publishers with a great deal of traffic need to move up. When I move clients to bluehost all of their issues have resolved.

Third, I hate Go Daddy’s sexist advertising. Maybe they should spend more money on updating their equipment and less on Danica and the other Go Daddy Babes. [Read more...]

Filed Under: WordPress

15 Tips to Writing Blog Posts People Will Read.

Posted on November 16, 2011 Written by 1 Comment

woman-with-laptopLast week, I gave some tips to writing great headlines that will get people to open your e-mails or read your posts. This week, let’s talk about things you can do to get them engaged in what you are writing.

Before I launch into the tips, let me preface this with an important overarching caveat.

No amount of  good writing will overcome a poor website design.  You need a web design that, first of all, facilitates people finding your blog posts. Otherwise, only your mother is going to click the tiny little word, Blog, that is lost on a blah blah blah marketing speak site. Once you have a good site, make sure the style sheet is set up to give your posts a nice presentation. This will make it so much more rewarding to write. Now with that said, here are 15 tips to make you a better blogger:

1. Write posts that are interesting and informative and not just marketing speak. Show them how great you are, rather than telling them.

2. Use at least one image to draw people into the post.

3. Left align the first image with text wrapping, so that the first couple of lines of text to the right side of the image are shorter (about 250 – 300 pixels wide). It is easier for people to read shorter lines of text on the web, but once they are engaged they will keep reading the text with normal column width.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Website Content

Five Tried and True Methods For Headlines that Get People To Read Your Posts

Posted on November 7, 2011 Written by 1 Comment

Dice with Five SpotsDo you want people to read what you write? Of course you do.  Great headlines are a secret weapon.

Fess up. Have you ever been in line at the grocery store when a National Enquirer headline was so compelling that you bought it so you could read the article? Are those techniques smarmy? Well kind of but they are ever so effective and have been working for decades.

Five tried and true methods to write headlines that have a better chance at getting people to read your posts:

1)  _________Ways to _____________

  • 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
  • 4 Ways to Know If You are Going to Live To One-Hundred
  • 300 Ways to Make Some Extra Cash in A Hurry

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Website Content

Avoid Hacks and Other Scary Problems With Basic WordPress House Keeping

Posted on September 5, 2011 Written by 2 Comments
dog with mop in mouth

via Zazzle.com

I hope you had a relaxing Labor Day weekend with friends and family.  I was worried that my weekend might have a lot more emphasis on the labor part than the relaxing part. Recently, a plugin called Tim Thumb, built into a lot of WordPress themes to help with dynamic image resizing,  was found to have a security flaw causing WordPress sites that included it, to be hacked.

Last week, I spent several days tracking down my client’s sites that incorporated the TimThumb plugin and repairing the problem.  I had a scare Friday late afternoon when several of these sites were running extremely slow which had me worried that they had been hacked.After several hours Friday evening, I discovered that none of these sites had been hacked and it was another plugin, Twitter Tools, that was slowing these sites down to a crawl. When I deleted Twitter Tools, all was well. What I had worried was going to take me all weekend to fix was resolved just like that. Poof. And I lived happily ever after. And so you don’t have to worry,  here are some tips to help you keep your site safe and secure. [Read more...]

Filed Under: WordPress

30 WordPress Plugins You Can Count On

Posted on August 17, 2011 Written by 4 Comments

A sign of a 30 demonstrating the topic 30 WordPress Plugins you can count on.

I have been using WordPress for about five years now. I remember the days when you had to upload plugins through FTP. Thankfully for the newcomers it is easier now but the amount of plugins is rather overwhelming. I was doing a presentation  for my WordPress Meetup in Atlanta and decided to make a list of all of my  tried and true plugins. For the most part these are easy to install, configure and utilize to extend the functionality of your WordPress site.

  1. Aksimet -Best comment and trackback spam prevention ever. Free for personal bloggers and starts at 60 per year for businesses making over 500.00.
  2. WordPress.com Stats -Loads right in your dashboard for easy monitoring of your pageviews, tells you which posts and pages are the most popular, where your site traffic is coming from, and what links people click when they leave your site.
  3. All in One SEO – I have been using All in One SEO to rewrite my site page and blog post titles and descriptions from the start. This plugin allows you to use more reader friendly titles on your site but use a Title and description more search engine friendly behind the scenes. It also lets you configure it so that the search engines just index your content once and not all of the other forms of it that are possible with such things as category and author archives. Get it and Google it for more information on the many configuration choices.
  4. Scribe -This is a premium plugin that costs about 30.00 per month. It will teach you to write optimized posts. Write your post for your readers, fill out All in One SEO and then run it through Scribe for a grade on how the search engines would see your entry. It then tells you how to fix a low score. The Catholic schoolgirl in me can’t stand not to get 100 on a test!
  5. W3 Total Cache - This plugin is used by all the pros to make their sites load faster by caching every aspect of your site. This is great for readers and also a factor in ranking.
  6. Gravity Forms - This is a honey of a plugin and worth the money. It is 39.00 for a single site, 99.00 for three sites and 199.00 for a developers license good for unlimited sites. You can create forms in a breeze, even complex and interactive forms. It is very user friendly and there are addons for other programs like Paypal, Freshbooks, and MailChimp. [Read more...]
Filed Under: WordPress Plugins

First Things First: Set Up Your Pretty Permalinks on Your WordPress Sites

Posted on June 19, 2011 Written by Leave a Comment

If you are just starting out please heed this advice and change your Permalink settings before you write your first post! If you have a good number of posts and are getting traffic, don’t change anything without getting advice from someone in the know.

Every post and page on your WordPress site has its own address and can be linked too as well as come up as a separate search result. When title a post for your blog readers,  WordPress creates a permalink for it which becomes the permanent address of that post on the web. It creates it by adding a unique identifier to your url. It creates it in lower case and dashes, no spaces. [Read more...]

Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials Tagged:

How to Use Thesis Theme to Customize Your Website

Posted on April 20, 2011 Written by Leave a Comment

In this post, I am going to walk you through making some of the customizations that we used to create the Isvari Yoga site with Thesis Theme for WordPress. So here we go…

  1. First you will have to purchase Thesis from DIYthemes. It is available for 87.00 for a single site and 164.00 for a developers license. There is a thirty day money back guarantee if you really can’t use it.
  2. Download the Thesis theme from DIYthemes site to your desktop and unzip the folders.
  3. Using an FTP program like Filezilla, you will need to upload the theme to your WordPress installation. You put it in the “Theme” folder that is you will find located in the “wp-contents” folder for your site.
  4. While in your FTP program, you have once important thing to do in order to take advantage of all the controls that Thesis offers. Since this is a new installation of Thesis, you need to change the name of your custom-sample folder to custom. (If you have been using Thesis and Upgrade you would not do this step or you would overwrite your customizations).
  5. Now you are ready to Login to your WordPress site and Go to the dashboard to Appearance . Under Appearance, you will find, “Themes” and Thesis should be one of the choices on the page and you can activate Thesis now. [Read more...]
Filed Under: WP Theme Customization
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