Author: bravokeyl

WooCommerce – excelling eCommerce : what is it ?

woo_commerce_logo
WooCommerce is a plugin that can be used to create eCommerce websites on WordPress websites. You could either use it to create an online store from the scratch, or use it to add a store front to your existing WordPress website. WooCommerce is very popular amongst WordPress users, with millions of downloads and this is not unconnected to the fact that WooCommerce has an advanced store management interface that can be used for digital products, as well as physical products.

Targeted Audience: Beginners

This guide would show you how you can set up your own WooCommerce website for free.

Get a Hosting Account:

This is for people who do not already own a WordPress website, and are building their WooCommerce website from the scratch. You would need a hosting account for your website, as well as a unique domain name. Bluehost , DreamHost , WPEngine are good hosting service providers to go with.

Recommened Host Providers

Install WordPress:

The next thing to do is to install WordPress on your website. Installing WordPress is as easy as clicking a button , you might heard of famous five minute installation , if not check this out.Most hosting service providers would have ‘one-click’ install buttons for WordPress so that you don’t have to learn how to write code to be able to install WordPress on your account by yourself.

Install the WooCommerce WordPress Plugin:

At this stage, you are ready to install WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress website. To do this, here are a few steps you should take to make the installation process easy.

You can easily download the WooCommerce plugin from your WordPress dashboard. Simply Log in to your WordPress site dashboard and click on the plugin button, go to Add New and the search for WooCommerce using the inbuilt search engine button. The Woocommerce Plugin should turn up immediately, with the title ‘WooCommerce-excelling ecommerce’ click on the install button and the plugin would be installed on your website immediately.

Activate the WooCommerce WordPress Plugin:

The next step is to activate your newly installed WooCommerce WordPress plugin so that you can now begin to customize it to your taste. To install, you should simply log back into your WordPress dashboard after installing WooCommerce. You would see a message prompt informing you that WooCommerce has been successfully installed. Underneath the message, you would see an activation button, click on Activate plugin to activate.

You would only need to log back into your account if you logged out after installing the Plugin. If you didn’t, you should simply click on the activation button immediately after downloading and installing the WooCommerce Plugin.

woocommerce

Set up Your Pages:

Before your WooCommerce plugin can start functioning properly on your WordPress website, you would need to create some pages but that is not something to stress yourself about because you can simply click on ‘install WooCommerce Pages’ and the Plugin would automatically create pages for your e-commerce website. But if you don’t like the default pages, you can customize it to your preferred style and taste.

General Settings:

There are a few settings you would need to customize before you start using WooCommerce. Click on the general settings button and then on each of the drop-down options to start customizing your website.

  • Location: The first thing you need to select is your location. Simply click on the drop-down button to select your location.
  • Currency: Next, you should choose the currency you want to have played on your website. The prices of your products can be displayed in dollars, pound sterling or any other preferred currency.
  • Allowed Location: If you would like to restrict your customers or audience to a specific location, this is where to set that up.
  • Digital Downloads: If you would be selling digital products, you can select options for handling the digital products like how buyers would gain access and download them.
  • Checkout and Accounts: This function allows you to choose between two individual checkout options for your customers. The first one allows customers to checkout as ‘guests’ meaning that they do not have to create accounts or register on your website to make purchases. You can uncheck this button if you would rather have your customers register on your website before they can check out.

You can also further customize your WooCommerce website and add other unique functions like forcing SSL on checkout, allowing users to register without making purchases and showing order comments section.

Catalog Settings:

This is where you should be able to select how your products would be displayed on your pages. Some of the options on this page include:

Show subcategories on category pages.

Show subcategories on the shop page.

Hide products when showing subcategories.

Redirect to cart after adding product.

Redirect to the product page on single matching search result.

You would also be able to set product data on this page depending on your preferences. For instance, you can enable the SKU field for products or the weight field and product dimension field. You can also decide whether you want to allow product reviews and ratings or not.

At the bottom of the catalog settings page, you would find the images setup options. This is where you would be able to set the dimensions of your product images, how many images you would like to show for each products and the image display style.

Page Setting:

This is where you can change or customize the default pages created for you automatically by the WooCommerce Plugin. You can also add new pages and set up your page permalink structure.

Inventory Settings:

Stock Management is a really great feature to add to your WooCommerce website. It helps your customers to know when goods are out of stock so that they don’t bother ordering goods that are sold out. This is where you can adjust your inventory settings to decide on whether you would like to enable stock management or otherwise.

Tax Settings:

You can also adjust tax settings on your page to suit your local tax rules.

Shipping:

If you are selling downloadable products, you can turn this off completely but otherwise, you can decide to add a variety of shipping options for your customers to choose from, as well as display the costs of such shipping services.

Payment Gateway Setup: This is the most important part of your Woocommerce setup. It helps you determine how you would receive payment for your products. You can choose Paypal, which is the most popular gateways like eWay, Payleap, Sageleap, Sagepay, Stripe and Authorize.net. However, you would need to create accounts with these payment processors before you can use their payment gateway on your website.

At this stage, your WooCommerce installation and setup is complete and you are now ready to start using WooCommerce to sell your products and make money.

Pic Credits: Kickinknowledge

Exploring Jetpack : How it helps to boost functionality

Explaining Jetpack Plugin Features and How it Helps Boost Functionality

If you already have a WordPress website, or you are only just thinking of creating one, you must have come across the name ‘Jetpack’ at least once and you were probably wondering “Okay, what the heck is this about?” Don’t worry, i had the same feeling too when i created my first WordPress website. In fact, i didn’t install the Jetpack Plugin until several weeks and countless nagging by WordPress to install the Plugin. That was years ago when Jetpack wasn’t so popular. But now, every Website owner that uses WordPress CMS knows that one of the first few things to do when creating a WordPress website, is to install a Jetpack Plugin.

But what is Jetpack and why should you care about it?

Jetpack is a Plugin that allows you to enjoy the features of WordPress on your self-hosted website. Before Jetpack, people who created self-hosted websites and wished to enjoy the benefits of WordPress Content Management System had to install dozens of separate Plugins. This rendered the whole system a tad bit complicated for users.

But then, Jetpack came to the rescue. Instead of installing multiple plugins, you now only have to install Jetpack and you would have almost all the Plugins you need on for wordpress.com website.

In a nutshell, Jetpack allows you to install multiple Plugins with just one click and also allows you to update all your plugins the same way.

Jetpack was created by a company known as Automattic, the same people behind WordPress.com, Akismet and Vaultpress. It’s free to install Jetpack on your website, and it’s also completely free to use most of its features. However, there are some plugins and features on Jetpack that you might have to pay for in the future.

Who needs Jetpack Plugin?

As fancy as the Jetpack Plugin is, not every website owner needs to install the Jetpack Plugin. If you have your website/blog hosted on WordPress.com, then you don’t need the WordPress Plugin as WordPress Plugin is only for self-hosted websites.

Features of Jetpack Plugin

Jetpack has a lot of features and some of them include:

Website Protection:

Jetpack helps to protect your website from malicious log in attempts and all types of intrusions.

Single Sign on:

You can have multiple users on your WordPress account, and they can sign on with their WordPress.com accounts.

stats

Easy Site Statistics:

One of the most important features of the Jetpack Plugin is that you can get to monitor your website’s statistics. Jetpack features a Plugin that gives you clear and concise information about who has been visiting your website, and where your website traffic is coming from.

Multidevice Management:

Regardless of how many devices you use, you can login, post and manage your website using Jetpack. So, whether you want to do a quick post with your phone, or prefer to use your personal computer, Jetpack has got you covered.

JetpackCustomCSS

Improved Appearance:

With Jetpack, you can easily improve your website’s appearance and make it friendlier to visitors. Jetpack has Plugins that allow you to:

  • Add extra side bar widgets to your website.
  • Easily create a website icon using any image you prefer.
  • Customize your website’s CSS.
  • Determine which widgets you want to have on the main pages of your website and which ones to hide.

Multimedia:

Every website owner knows that content management has gone beyond just writing a couple of articles and posting them on your website. To increase customer engagement in your content marketing campaign, you now have to include things like site images, videos and several other multimedia content. Jetpack allows you to just that with plugins like:

  • Videopress: Allows you to host videos directly on your website without necessarily using a third party video host.
  • Embed Shortcodes: You can embed videos, slide-share and other similar contents from other websites with zero coding knowledge.
  • Photon: Loading images on your website has never been easier as you can now upload images directly from WordPress content delivery network, with this Plugin. You can also use other photo features like the Carousel and tiled galleries, which both allow you to arrange and display your images in a way that would be attractive and engaging for your website’s visitors.

Mobile Friendly Themes:

These days, almost everyone surfs the website with their mobile gadgets and you really cannot do without a mobile optimized website. Jetpack allows you to install mobile friendly themes on your website for fully optimized mobile viewing.

Increase Social Engagement:

Jetpack also has features that help to increase social engagement. For instance, your users can leave comments on your posts directly from their Facebook or twitter accounts. They can also share posts with their friends and subscribe to receive future posts.

Enhanced WordPress Posting:

Jetpack also enhances your posting experience on WordPress by allowing you use its features like posts by email, spelling and grammar (proofreading service) and other similar functions.

Automatic Backup:

You can also further protect your website with the Vaultpress Jetpack plugin which allows you to do automatic backups and secure your website.

Will Jetpack Bloat My Website and slow it down?

Jetpack is a really heavy file (imagine the size of about 40 plugins in one). Although the developers have done a good job at really stripping down the size. However, for a file that large, should you expect some bloating?

Now here’s the truth………….

Jetpack is a somewhat of a ‘good plugin, bad plugin’ even though the good outweighs the bad aspects. It could either supercharge your website or over bloat it, depending on how you use it. You can actually avoid Jetpack over bloat by configuring only modules that you really need. Of course, you can’t possibly need all the WordPress modules, as there would be a few of them that have no relevance to you.

The Beautiful Math Plugin for instance, allows you to post math formulas and equations on your website easily but how many bloggers really post mathematical formulas on their websites?

Jetpack, like every other plugin, is not perfect and could really use a bit of improvement but one thing is certain, Jetpack is a really valuable plugin that can enhance both the experience of website owners and web visitors and it is really recommended that every website owner installs this valuable plugin on their websites.

How to set up your own WordPress Multisite

Before 2010 when WordPress 3.0 was introduced, people who needed to create multiple WordPress websites had to do so using a separate version of WordPress known as the WordPress MultiUser (WPMU). But with WordPress 3.0 came the WordPress Multisite functionality.

Network

WordPress Multisite is simply a feature that allows you to create more than one WordPress website, using the same WordPress account.

Basically, you don’t need to create different WordPress accounts for all your websites; one WordPress account is enough to manage all your websites, no matter how many you decide to create. You can also share Plugins and Themes across all websites on the network, although you would need a separate media directory for each individual website.

WordPress Multisite is a must have feature for bloggers, business owners and internet marketers who constantly find themselves having to discuss several topics or set up different businesses. You don’t want to confuse your visitors by talking about health supplements on a website that’s in the technology niche or discussing real estate on a male grooming blog. Every website owner seeks to establish themselves as an authority in any chosen niche and marrying several niches into one website defeats this purpose. This is why most website owners prefer to create multiple websites across different niches.

However, managing multiple individual websites can be a bit cumbersome and this is why you would love the WordPress Multisite feature because it helps you put all your ‘eggs in a basket’ by having all your websites in one place so that you can easily manage them without stress.

Features of WordPress Multisite

  • Host multiple websites or blogs on one WordPress account.
  • Install WordPress across multiple websites with a single click.
  • Have a network of sub-domains on your WordPress websites.
  • Different users can create accounts or blogs on the same WordPress account.
  • Install WordPress Themes and Plugins to be used across different WordPress Sites.
  • Make changes to your website’s themes and Plugins with one single click.

Who Should Use WordPress Multisite?

WordPress Multisite is a really great feature but it’s not suitable for everyone.  There are a few reasons why you would want to use the WordPress Multisite feature:

  • You have multiple websites that use the same types of themes and Plugins. Using WordPress Multisite features would make it easier for you to install, update and manage all your Plugins across multiple websites instead of updating them one after the other, which would of course take a lot of time.
  • You have a business with multiple branches. WordPress Multisite would allow you create different websites for your branches that you can manage with a single WordPress account. Your staff can also have blogs or websites of their own with WordPress Multisite.
  • You need to create unique subsections on your website. For instance, you may integrate an online into your existing WordPress account, with a unique sub-domain.
  • You really want to avoid wasting time on individually managing all your different websites.

You should n’t use WordPress Multisite if:

  • You have no intentions to create more than one blog or website now or in the future.
  • You want to create multiple websites that would have unique databases.
  • You want your websites to have separate IP addresses.
  • You are setting up websites for different clients with different hosting providers.
  • Your hosting plan does not support hosting of multisite or do not have the necessary server requirements.
  • You can’t edit the files on your server.

Benefits of Using WordPress Multisite

There are a lot of benefits that come with creating your multiple websites using the WordPress multi-site. Some of them include:

  • Single Administrator for multiple websites.
  • Design other sub-sections of your website in your unique way to distinguish it from your main website.
  • Reduce time spent on managing your websites.
  • One click install for WordPress over multiple websites.

Step By Step Guide For Creating a WordPress Multisite

Multisite is very easy to install. If you already have websites with WordPress installed, you can install WordPress Multisite on it. However, you would not be able to use the default permalink structure on your website because there would be a need for WordPress to add the correct names of your sub-domains.

You should also ensure that you backup your files before you install WordPress Multisite on your existing website so that if during installation, something goes wrong, you would be able to re-install the previous version with ease.

To install WordPress Multisite on a new website, here are the steps to take:

Check and Meet Up With All Requirements

  • First, you need a WordPress hosting account and a domain name. There are a lot of cheap hosting service providers that you can use including Bluehost, iPage, SiteGround and Inmotion. All these hosting providers are compatible with WordPress Multisite.
  • Next, you need to install WordPress and activate the WordPress Multisite Networking.

In your WordPress configuration file (wp-config.php), you would see a line that looks like this;

“/*That’s all, stop editing! Happy Blogging.*/”
You need to edit that line and add the following line just before it.
/*Multisite*/
Define (‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

Then save and upload the wp-config.php file to your server.

After this, your website would be able to support Multisite functions.

  • The next step is to set up your multisite network. To do this, you would need to deactivate all activated Plugins on your website and then in your WordPress dashboard, go to Tools-Network Setup to start your Multisite network configuration.
  • Choose whether you want to install Multisite on your subdomains or subdirectories.
  • You would see a prompt asking you to install Apache’s mod rewrite module, most hosting providers already have this installed so you can just skip this step.
  • Provide a title for your network and include the email address of the network administrator.
  • Click on the install button.

You would be redirected to the network install screen where you would see a bunch of texts provided. Simply copy each of the texts and paste them in your wp-config.php and .htaccess as specified then save the files.

Once this is done, you can now start adding new subdomains to your Network. To do this, log in to your WordPress Admin Account. You would see the WordPress Multisite Network menu, click on it to start customizing your sub-domains.

How to Create a Subdomain on Your Multisite Network

You can add sub-domains to your existing WordPress Multisite Network by going to your Cpanel dashboard. Click on the Domains Section and then the Subdomain section. Click on the Create a Subdomain.

  • In the subdomain field under the ‘Create a Subdomain’ field, enter *
  • Check the document root and ensure that it is pointing to the directory where your WordPress wp-config.php file is located.
  • Then click on the create button to add the subdomain.

You can create and manage new subdomains easily now. Simply go to your WordPress admin account and click on the sites button on your dashboard. You would see a ‘Create a New Site’ Button and a ‘Create a New User Button’. The former allows you to add new subdomains to your website, while the latter is used for adding new users to your Multisite Network.

You can also manage all the sites on your Multisite Network by clicking the Sites button in your Dashboard.

How to customize our site using custom css

Most of the times even though we have chosen right theme for site that suits our needs , we still need more or need a little bit of styling to be changed or little functionality to be changed.

In this article i  explain step by step procedure on how to change your site’s appearance (not functionality) using custom css.

There are two ways to add custom css:

Why Plugins or Child Themes , can’t i just add css in my theme’s style.css ?

Simple answer , No. Never do that, Please.

Many people i see in forums ask about how to change my header width and menu items color , background-color and so on when they know css that changes the parts they required , they simply put that in the style.css  of their theme which is a very bad habit why because if the theme is updated that file gets overridden by newer version and so they loose their changes so they have to add their changes again.

Using Custom CSS Plugins:

Okay , now i know i should not change any code in my theme style.css  then how and where to add code and which plugin to choose.

There are many plugins that helps you to add custom css. Most popular ones as of writing this article are Simple Custom CSS by John Regan and Jetpack’s Custom CSS module.

Just active either one of these , if you activated Jetpack’s Module you will see And extra menu item under Appearance which is Edit CSS.

JetpackCustomCSS

You just need to add  your code here right after comments.In the screenshot above you see i have added div.sharedaddy … right after comments or you can delete that commented code entirely.This module also has revisions each time you click Save Stylesheet a revision is saved. this module will store the last 25 revisions made to any theme. These revisions allow you to look back at the recent changes and revert to an earlier version if you need to.

If you are using Simple Custom CSS just after activating you see Custom CSS menu item under Appearance.

simplecustomcss

If you click on that new link you see like above but without any code added with just a comment saying  /* Enter Your Custom CSS Here */. 

You need to add your code here and click on Update CSS button.That’s it , you have now added css.

For these changes you need to know little bit of CSS , it’s not scary you can learn with in no time . If you don’t have time or if you are not into learning then you can find what you ask in support forums or i can help you with that , just hit me here

For example let me show tagline on mobile devices when i’m using Twenty Fifteen Theme , by default this theme does not show tagline on mobile devices.

.site-description {
     display: block;
 }

If i add this  after activating either of the plugins you chose..site’s tagline shows up on mobile devices also.

Choosing the right theme for your site

One of the most important decisions you would ever have to make for your WordPress website is the choice of a suitable theme. The theme you choose would determine the overall outlook of your website, and would also have a great role to play in determining visitor engagement on your website. Therefore, it is extremely important to choose a good theme for your WordPress website.

But for the sake of those who do not already know, let’s define what a WordPress theme is and what it’s supposed to do.

What is a WordPress Theme?

Think of WordPress theme as an architectural design.

When you want to build your home, you would have to decide on a number of aesthetic features like how you would want it to look, the colors, designs and functionality. That’s exactly what your WordPress theme does; it helps you choose the overall design of your website and how you want it to appear to your visitors. It would also help you choose other things like:

  • Page Layouts of your Website.
  • Location of Widgets.
  • Font Styling.
  • Colors of your Website.
  • How your blog posts would appear as well as other unique features.

There are paid and Unpaid WordPress Press themes that you can choose from. You can also design your own WordPress theme if that’s what you would prefer. Even though there are a lot of free WordPress themes, Premium (Paid) themes are more reliable as they come with better client support and documentation.

Features of a Good WordPress Theme

To choose a good WordPress theme, it is important to know what a good WordPress Theme should look like:

Detailed Documentation

To install and use your WordPress Theme perfectly, you would need detailed explanations and step by step tutorials. This is why the first thing you should be looking out for when you want to select a WordPress theme is the documentation. The theme must have a detailed tutorial that teaches you how to install, modify and customize the theme to suit your own unique needs.

SEO-Friendly

You also need a WordPress theme that makes it very easy for search engines to crawl your website. The more SEO-friendly your website is, the more visitors it would attract and the more revenue you would be able to generate.

Mobile Responsive

Hey! It’s 2015; mobile responsive websites are a must have now because if your website is not mobile friendly, you would be missing out on a number of visitors your website.

Theme Customizer

It’s also better to go for a theme that allows you to customize as much as possible, and manipulate some of the key elements like the fonts, backgrounds and logos.

Social Sharing Options

Social sharing is extremely important in the World Wide Web today as it helps your content to have a wider reach and audience. Therefore, choosing a WordPress website that allows for social sharing is not just an option but a necessity.

Automatic Upgrades

WordPress theme publishers are always introducing new versions and upgrades all the time and it might be really stressful if you have you have to manually update your WordPress themes all the time, hence the need to opt for a WordPress theme that allows for automatic updates.

Retina Display Compatible

Most Computer gadgets that are being released in recent times come with Retina and HD displays. If you choose a theme that is not compatible with these features, the images and visuals on your website would have poor quality and would not be sharp ad crisp when accessed using a gadget with the HD or Retina display.

Useful Add-ons

Good WordPress themes would also have other useful add-ons that you would need to enhance your experience and those of your website’s visitors.

Lightweight

You should avoid complex and heavy WordPress themes and settle for themes that are easy to use and understand and that would not slow your website down.

Solid Client Support

You don’t want to wait for months to have your support ticket attended to. You need to be sure that if you ever run into any challenges with your WordPress theme, you would be promptly attended to and have the problem fixed very fast.

Excellent Reviews

Lastly, you want a theme that is already tested and trusted, with lots of genuine, positive feedback.

How to Choose a WordPress Theme

There are a number of factors to consider when you want to choose the most suitable WordPress Theme for you. Some of them include:

  • Pricing: Like I mentioned earlier, there are free and paid WordPress Themes and the truth is that with WordPress Themes, price often indicates good quality. Although there are some Paid WordPress Themes that have free versions, the functionalities are usually limited ad you would most likely be required to upgrade to a paid version to enjoy some of its features.

As for free WordPress Themes, a good number of them are poorly coded but you would find a lot of free WordPress themes that are great to choose from.

If you need to create a unique website, don’t go for free WordPress Themes as there are usually Thousands of Websites using the same Plugin but if you just need to create a simple blog or website, you can go for free WordPress Themes.

  • Weight: This is another extremely important factor to consider because some WordPress Themes have too many unnecessary features and bloat codes in them, which would only end up slowing down your website and increasing the load time.
  • Design: Your Website theme is supposed to make your website look more beautiful and appealing to users. Therefore, you should also consider the design output when choosing your WordPress Theme.
  • Mobile Responsiveness: This is not an option because doing otherwise would cost you a lot of potential visitors. Therefore, when searching for the perfect WordPress Theme to use, make sure it says ‘Mobile Responsive’
  • SEO Ready: You should also search for the term ‘SEO Ready’ or ‘SEO Optimized’ in order to be sure you are choosing an SEO friendly WordPress Theme.
  • Customization: Choose a WordPress Plugin that allows you to Customize easily from your WordPress Dashboard.
  • Security: The security of your website is very important, in order to avoid compromise of your website’s security, you should go for a WordPress Theme with strong security features.

With all of these in mind, you would be able to select the best WordPress Themes without much bloat codes.

Best WordPress SEO plugins Yoast vs All in one SEO

The WordPress platform is the single most effective way of sharing content across the internet. With blogging and article writing being the most popular way to communicate with your consumer, you can count on WordPress to help you generate organic traffic to your site even with little to no experience. In this article we will outline some most used SEO plugins that will help enhance your site’s search.

If you’re searching for a way to drive traffic to your site, it is important to understand SEO and how to optimize your WordPress blog. There are hundreds of SEO plug ins to download right from within the dashboard that will help augment your website for maximum performance across all search engines.

Even though, WordPress out of the box offers basic SEO functionality, SEO plug ins are a great tool to help boost your rankings and conversion rates all as a result of each plug ins unique features and options.

Most SEO plug ins focus on identifying important keywords and sentence structures that will help effect the search engines algorithms to better match up your article with other relevant content across the internet.

By using the right SEO plug ins you can extend the functionality of your WordPress Site and its SEO to get a better return on your reader base.

When conducting SEO it is important to know some of these basic tips. When creating an article on WordPress remember that to get the best out of your WordPress site, you’re going to want to pay attention to the keywords you implement into your post.

You’re going to want to have a focus keyword that will appear at least 2-3 times throughout your article that relates back to your articles title. Also, it is important to have a description for your article that focuses on your keywords but is short and precise. To long of a description or title will effect the way your article is indexed and can give your article poor visibility.

Two of the most popular plug ins within the WordPress panel are All in One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast. With millions of downloads between each plugin, it would be safe to say that these SEO plugins make a great addition to your WordPress experience.

All In One SEO pack plugin works best to boost your websites SERP. It has a 4.4 out of 5 stars with a positive rating and review section outlining the benefits of this effective SEO program. Its great for beginner and advanced users and starts working right out of the box after install. Here is a list of some the features you can expect from All In One SEO Pack:

All In One SEO Pack Features

  • All In One SEO pack offers XML sitemap support that submits your sites content to Google and Bing search engines helping improve your SEO
  • The only plug in that offers an extensive SEO integration specifically for WordPress sites that run ecommerce
  •  Generates meta tags automatically
  •  Identifies and highlights duplicate content within the body of your post
  • Supports Google Analytics and metrics

If you’re looking for a SEO plugin that helps boost your posts by magnifying your content then SEO by Yoast is the way to go. The Yoast plugin helps you to write better content with its built in content analysis functions.

It can easily pin point and identify errors within your post, identify focus keywords and recommend configuring better sentences for better reader visibility. With over 1 million downloads and a 4.5 out of 5 stars, the SEO by Yoast plugin is the best way to attract new readers.
SEO by Yoast Features

  • It has better seo optimized Social Integration options
  • Automatically generates XML sitemaps
  • Built in content analysis function
  • Provides Snippet Preview to see what your title would look like in Google
  • Robots.txt and .htaccess are editable within the plugin
  • Permalink clean up
  • Available in 26 languages

Yoast also offers several extensions which are worthy to have if you are an advanced WP user.

When using these  SEO plugins you will be able to soon see a significant difference in your sites traffic and word press performance. In order to take advantage of all the features of these SEO plugins, it is important to remember to follow each requirement of the plug ins built in fields. These SEO plugins will help you to not only have a better optimized site but it will also help you become a better blogger as well.

PC: All in SEO Pack plugin page

Exploring title_tag theme feature

It’s close to a month since WordPress 4.1 released , it’s packed with several new awesome features like

Here in this post we are going to explore the new theme feature “title_tag“.We can easily add support for title_tag using.

function spi_setup() {
 add_theme_support( 'title-tag' );
}
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'spi_setup' );

This theme feature is available since WordPress 4.1 . To enable support  in existing themes, use

if ( ! function_exists( '_wp_render_title_tag' ) ) :
 function spi_render_title() {
?>
<title><?php wp_title( '|', true, 'right' ); ?></title>
<?php
 }
 add_action( 'wp_head', 'spi_render_title' );
endif;

By adding support for tilte_tag , we are saying that our themes don’t add titles on their own and WordPress should not worry about duplication of titles, which means we being theme authors are not going to add  <title>….</title> in our document head.

Anyway you can still use wp_title filter to modify the output to meet your taste it’s your choice.You can ask what’s the using of this as  it is just adding title tag which we were doing earlier.

Well, the benefits of using something like this is basically standardization & reliability.This is the first step in adding a more robust means of generating and outputting the title tag.

Right now, the theme could be doing just about anything to create the document title. We have been trying, for a very long time, to enforce a simpler approach where themes should only include the results of a wp_title() call in the title. By adding a core supported approach for this, a theme can more easily ensure that they are using the same method to create the document title as everybody else.

This standard approach allows a plugin to then be able to reliably modify the document title and know that it will work in any theme using the same standard approach. The benefits are therefore long term, for compatibility all around. By taking it out of the hands of the theme, all the other code can more easily support the standard and allow for more compatible code.

Under the Hood :

Core trac : #18548

Files changed:

  • default-filters.php
  • general-template.php
  • theme.php

A new action (_wp_render_title_tag) is hooked to wp_head which runs first i.e, before wp_enqueue_scripts.

Peliyn – Restaurant/Cafe WordPress Theme

Responsive WordPress Theme

Peliyn is a beautiful and multipurpose template. It is ideal for your business: restaurant, salon, hotel. Quality execution and attention to detail, coupled with clean code and thoughtful design.

This theme integrates with Contact Form 7 and Mail Chimp for WordPress for booking and subscription forms.

It has nice animations & effects and comes with two custom post types Dishes and Testimonials where you can easily set different labels for menu items and give review (1-5 star) easily.

Live Preview

Admin Collapse Sub Pages is now translation ready

we know how much important to support our users all around the world whose native language is not English.

In WCSF-2014 , this was also a strong point mentioned by Matt , Co-Founder of WordPress.

So we now made our plugin Admin Collapse Sub Pages Translation ready.All you need to do just load your language.

We need you for translating the plugin, plugin now packed with US,UK English,Telugu,Serbian Language.You can help us by providing translation strings to the following words.

1) Expand All

2) Collapse All

Special Thanks:

We thank Borisa Djuraskovic for his contribution to translate this plugin in Serbian Language.

Unsplash: Stock Photos to Media Library Made Easy

You might have heard of this site Unsplash if you are either designer looking for ideas or a developer who wants to showcase their projects or a blogger who wants to use free photos for their blog posts.

Well now Unsplash WP makes easy to WP users to use their photos with just one click,no need to leave the admin dashboard, it brings photos to media library.Since Unsplash photo licensing allows you the freedom to copy, modify, distribute and use the photos without permission, you can use the images in your commercial endeavors, designs, blog posts, or anywhere on your site.

After installing the plugin you get a new Add Unsplash button beside Add Media button.Well, why are you waiting you then if you have read this much, go and try it once and you love it.

Try now Unsplash